I recently moved into my own apartment for the very first time. While this has its advantages like privacy and the ability to dedicate an entire mini-fridge to cheese, I ultimately hate it because of envelopes. I want to steal envelopes from my parents’ desk or split the cost with flat mates. I don’t want to buy a box of them, basically because I hate having a box of 49 envelopes sitting in my closet.
All four years in college I lived with roommates. After college, I spent a lot of time at my parents’ house. Here and there, I located myself in South Carolina, Seattle, and Cambodia, but mostly I stayed home because I had a nice room on the other side of the house with free cable and a weird girlfriend who didn’t seem to mind. Now, I am faced with all sorts of problems like bills and rent with only my name on them. Then there is laundry – I imagine it will be much harder to sneak a load in with someone else than it used to be. You see, I now share the laundry room with roughly 30 other strangers, 8 Mexican children, and two rodents. Most of the adults look like they wouldn’t take kindly to finding someone else’s workout socks in their washer, and one looks like he might take a little too kindly.
Another problem is that I have no roommates to complain to about the “little quirks” of my living space. I have to broadcast them over the internet instead. For instance, the cooling system has one lone dead spot in the entire apartment where it doesn’t reach – the area where my head hits the pillow in my bedroom. This means I wake up in the morning with my head sweating from the heat and my body sweating from the night chills. I hate mixing types of sweat.
And even though the apartment is quite spacious by lower-class standards, I still feel like it’s crowded. After all, I even have wrestling space, but for some reason, I feel like I will soon be overwhelmed by crap. I always fancied myself the kind of person to simplify (excluding CD’s and DVD’s, of course). Yet the life work of Walden or Thoreau or any of those naturalists (if I’m even getting their philosophy straight) never seems applicable in real life. What am I supposed to do with all my Xena action figures, collection of universal power adapters, and box of 49 envelopes? Throw them away?! I don’t think so. At least in this solitary crowded existence, I can make my computer wallpaper a pornographic picture without the fear of getting grounded at age 28. That makes up for a lot.