Sharkitcons and Seagulls

[ljplicease]

Last night I was chatting with Amber on AIM, and we were talking about her roommate with whom she apparently gets along smashingly. This is a truly foreign concept for me. I didn't get along with any of my roommates:

• Room Mate I was a frat rat. There really isn't much more to say. Fortunately I scared him away in a mere semester.
  
  
• Room Mate II used to go down to the dorm office and rent the TV so that he could watch cartoons all afternoon instead of going to class. Needless to say, that was his last semester at the U of A.
  
  
• Eric is the only roommate I had that I can actually remember his name, because he is the only one that I ever got along with well enough to actually call him by his name. Here is a photograph of him:

  Eric and family

Seriously, he looks like a Sharkticon. It has been pointed out that one of the major contributors to the happy fact that we got along with each other was that he was never around. He never actually slept in the room, preferring instead to stay with his girlfriend, go figure. He would come in, check his e-mail and look at some Internet porn and leave.

• Room Mate IV (a. k. a. "Lysol Boy") was the worst roommate ever. Tyler can attest to the Lysol fumigations. He also felt the need to keep the air conditioner set to the low sixties, even in the dead of winter. He was badly obsessive compulsive - which I have nothing against so long as it doesn't make my life miserable, but it did. I'd post his picture on heynewboyfriend, but sorry ladies, he's taken.
  
  
• Room Mate V was actually not such a bad bloke. He was a frat rat wannabe, which is actually better than being a frat rat. The best thing about RM5 is that I could easily intimidate him, and for the most part I didn't need to.

Today I decided to go into the city for some good old fashion street photography. I hadn't done it in a while, and I hadn't done it in black and white for even longer. I went in armed with nothing more than my 50/1.2 and 24/2.8 and four rolls of film. Zoom lenses are for wimps. I started out by going to Strands to check out the photo books. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they had made some enhancements to the premises. The photo section was much expanded, and actually pretty clean.

Then I went out, cameras blazing. Actually, it was kinda hard to get started. I hadn't done it for so long. Once I did get started though, I had a good time, and spent all but one roll of Tri-X. At one point I was photographing seagulls, which along with the word "Sharkitcon" starts with the letter S. Guess which letter sponsored Sesame Street today? The important thing is that it was fun.

Comments

[onehundredways.livejournal.com]

i'm considering taking in a roommate/renter this summer to help with the mortgage and other household expenses. which would be totally terrifying (i've never had a roommate aside from that husband thing i did briefly, and i'm a painfully private person) except that this roommate would be hijinks_ensue who is pretty much the same person as i am. and we're both hermits, so i can see us locked away in our rooms having AIM conversations with each other instead of yelling across the hall.

i miss two things about living in poughkeepsie. one, aimless drives through the hudson valley. i'd drive for hours, alone. two, easy access to the city. how many times did i take the train into grand central just to hang out, walk around, take pictures, and ride the subway (again, alone) with no real agenda? now it's 400 miles away. bah.

[plicease]

Given the small amount of what I know about you two, it seems like you and Theresa will do all right living together, if that is what happens. It’s a funny image thinking of you two AIMing off to each other in silent house punctuated only by laughter (you both have a great sense of humor).

My misery with regard to roommates was mostly self imposed stupidity. It has a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t look for roommates with whom I could get along with. I really should have tried to keep Eric as a roommate (and I probably could have) because he was actually a pretty nice guy, aside from the fact that he was hardly ever around. I never broached the subject of becoming roommates with Tyler, because I thought that if we lived together then we might become unfriends – I had just had this falling out with my best friend from high school and that negative experience led to a very fatalistic attitude about my friends and people in general. This was all unfortunate, because that year with Lysol Boy really was hell.

New York is a great place for photography. For so many reasons. Not only is it an industry of sorts there, but it is also such an interesting subject. I much prefer to photograph it alone because if I have people with me they aren’t going to want to stop and wait for those pictures which require patience. The subway is such a great way to get around, and can also be a good subject at times.

here is my book about roommates

[hijinks-ensue.livejournal.com]

i got really lucky my freshman year of college and got put in a "triple" (which was actually the size of a friend's single right now) with only one roommate. by second semester, people had figured out that there were lots of open rooms, and complaints about their roommates were the way to get them. so, i sat there, thinking about how to get my roommate out, because i wanted to keep the triple for myself. eventually she did it on her own, and i've always wondered what she told the residential life people about me to get out... we never fought, because the extent of our conversations was, "hi" or "goodnight."

i had a very interesting roommate experience in my very first apartment. there were four of us: two girls i barely knew (the u of a transfers), a girl from my studio, and me. our whole arrangement was really last minute and random -- very few people knew for sure they'd be out of the dorms the next year, so there weren't very many choices.

anyway, i ended up being pretty decent friends with the arizona girls, and the three of us ended up absolutely hating the fourth girl after putting up with her obsessive compulsive kitchen bleaching (but refusal to clean our bathroom!), holier than thou jesus freak attitude, early morning/late night practice sessions, general bitchiness, and finally a bout of depression and anorexia (which we futily attempted to help with).

it's a good thing we're not discussing this in person because you wouldn't be able to shut me up. it was a rough year, and we all had other big personal issues to deal with in addition to hers. anyway, i was turned off to roommates after that, and lived alone for a year. i lived with a pretty good friend of mine last summer, and it worked out well, so i was considering a roommate before i got this apt. on my own, but that fell through, which i am now extremely thankful for, as i now know the guy somewhat better and think i would have murdered him in his sleep by now, which onehundredways can attest to (hi, longest sentence ever!).

so yeah, roommates are scary, but i think if you can make it through the really bad ones (like karen or lysol boy), you can pretty much live with anyone, which is a good trait to have :-)