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…