Thursday! January 31, 2008

As we all know, Thursday is my favorite day of the week. I love it.  I’d love this particular Thursday a little more if I could kill off this cold completely, but I’ll settle for finishing my weekly paper a day early and the joyous news of not having to go to work tomorrow.  This means I can spend my Friday sleeping in, finishing my accounting midterm and taking care of some bidness. Like getting my car inspected so I can legally drive it. That’d be a good idea.

And making a hair/waxing appointment. My eyebrows are starting to take on lives of their own.

Ok, now on to what I brought you here to talk about. Envy. The green-eyed monster. Jealously. If I had to categorize myself by one deadly sin, Envy would win hands down. I have always been envious of other people, my friends, my enemies, strangers, animals….I have a problem. I know it’s not a good thing (obviously Envy isn’t a virtue), but I can’t help it and I can’t seem to let it go. Case in point-I am currently very jealous of an individual who is carrying out a plan I considered earlier in the year. Joining a service organization that I (who is by no means a leader in community service) actually researched extensively and almost applied to. Why didn’t I? My schedule was not condusive to actually attend the training sessions. Now, of course, I’m graduating a semester early so that’s no longer an issue, but I’m already on the track to further grad school. So, why am I jealous? I’ll tell you why. And then I’ll cower in the corner because I know how big of a loser I am. I’m jealous because I feel like I had ownership over that plan of action. If anyone from my university is allowed to do that it should be me.  I thought of it first. They stole my idea! Yep. It sounds like the plea of a whiny fifth grader to me too.

Sigh. It just adds to the feeling of ennui regarding my life in general that I’ve been experiencing lately. I keep wondering about my reasons for doing the things I do. What they’re really based on. I think of all the experiences that are open to me as a college grad and my appetite for the novel is huge. I’m so afraid of getting stuck, of not having anything interesting to show after 10 years. I dread high school reunions where my friends shows pictures of their adventures in Europe or their year spent in Kenya and I tell tales of my collected degrees and the great book I just finished…

Right now the only thing I know is that I really don’t know who or what I want to be, what I want to show for myself, what my calling is, where my passion lies, what color my damn parachute is, but I hope it finds me. Sooner rather than later.

I wonder if everything I do/ I do instead/ of something I want to do more/ the question fills my head/I know there’s no grand plan here/this is just the way it goes/but when everything else seems unclear/at least I know/ I do it for the joy it brings/cuz I’m a joyful girl. -Joyful Girl, Ani Difranco

Shaba Listen To This… January 31, 2008

I realized today that I have yet to write anything about one of the main men in my life, my super-dooper roomie.

Zach and I have lived together since 2005 and a better platonic roommate situation there never was. It’s actually an interesting story if you have the time, so get your comfy pants on, I’ll wait.

Ready? Ok. So remember Sazza from a few posts ago? Well she and Zach dated for a long time when we were all in high school. I made friends with Sazza and naturally had to run into Zach occasionally by doing so.  We were always friendly but never really friends. He was just Sazza’s boyfriend in my mind. Even though we ran with the same crowd and had many mutual friends and classes, we never really became friends. Probably because we’re both slow to cultivate good friendships and relatively quiet.  Then one night at a sleepover at Sazza’s everyone else fell asleep at some ungodly early hour of the evening and Zach and I found ourselves in the middle of a conversation that lasted for about 3 hours. BFF now, right? Wrong.

That seemed to be a fluke occurence and we sorta devolved back to our old mutually indifferent semi-friendship. Then we went to college. I stayed around ( my school is an hour from our hometown) and he went far away but came back often to visit Sazza as she finished her senior year in high school. Enter the internet. That first semester was hard on both of us. Because of our shared inability to be outgoing socialite types we found ourselves communicating a lot on AOL. Zach really didn’t like his school and eventually decided to change schools, change majors, and transfer to my university. At this time I was living alone (no roomates because I didn’t know anyone yet and I wasn’t dorming) so I offered Zach a room in the house I was occupying. He moved in. Our not-really-friends relationship stayed as it was for a little while, but soon our 3 hour conversations caught up with us. And I’m not sure when or how it happened but he became my best friend.

We took classes together, we took spontaneous road trips together, we took ourselves on many a’ drunken (and sober) nighttime walks around our city. We decorated sidewalks in chalk, we picnicked in the rival school’s court yard, we discovered religious Grotto’s. We painted the walls of our house at 1:00am on a whim. We lost the cat during a huge flood, and found her again, safe and wet under the neighbor’s car. We knew our weekly television line up and savored WifeSwap and the 700 Club for the hilarity they provided. We shared shopping carts and methods on how to break into the house when we forgot a key.  We had a serious problem with buying more tea and soup then any british grandma could possible pack away.

And I could go on, but it would make for a very long post. And I’m sure I’ll go into it at a later date. Anyway, there was a period of time were we stopped living together. We had a fire at the house we shared and for the next school year we were both displaced, I split my time between my boyfriend’s apartment and a place I like to call “Grammaland” (yes, living with my grandmother was like living on another planet) and he found a few different apartments he bounced around in.

This past fall we were able to be roommates again, and things are pretty much back to normal. We’re both doing different things now, having graduated already and on different tracks on the railway of life, but it’s nice to have my best friend sharing my apartment once again.
I know this has been a rose-colored post thus far, and I’m not about to say that living with Zach isn’t wonderful, but nothing is wonderful all the time. Like, say, coming home to a lot less juice or pad thai then you expected. Or noting that once again the garbage did not go out on garbage day. Or hearing him press snooze every five minutes for TWO hours before finally shutting off his alarm.

But living with a guy, and especially Zach, has it’s good points. If something isn’t clean, it’s not a big deal. I never have to ask him to stop borrowing my clothes or my makeup. The only PMS I ever have to deal with is my own. And I can always ask him to put things in terms of the male gender for me….”Do guys really [insert stereotype here]“.  Plus Zach is probably the most un-stereotypical guy ever.

This is a guy who would not only watch Gilmore Girls and Sex in the City with me (along with the aforementioned Wife Swap) but would be upset if he missed it! He even taped Gilmore Girls for me when I had the night class from hell. When Grey’s Anatomy aired on Sundays he’d drive to my workplace and sit there with me while we watched it, just us, sitting in our coats in the hospital waiting area.  We play Ani Difranco “remember the lyrics” via cell phone and he’s beaten me. More than once.

And recently, he’s been introducing me to new music by way of YouTube videos left up on my computer with  the words “Shaba listen to this” typed in the search bar. The one left up for me today?  Yael Naim’s New Soul.

But, alas, I fear that I may once again be Zach-less. He has an interview tomorrow for a job I know would be perfect for him, and it happens to be in Portland. So I think I’ll be losing him to the west coast, but they’ll be a gaining a very cool (and single, ladies he’s a catch! I’ll set you up!) guy.

So that, in a very large nutshell, is my roomie. And look at that, just in time for WifeSwap is on…