Roommate Roulette

If I wanted to flood my email inbox with dozens of desperate messages from strangers, I would have posted photoshoped pictures of myself in a swimsuit on OKCupid.  But I wanted hundreds of desperate messages from strangers so I posted pictures of a less-than-$2,000/month SoMa apartment on Craigslist. 

"I saw your post and I am very interested because I am also a 23 year-old queer lady."  

I never said I was gay.  Not that I'm not but -- was there something I wrote that gave that distinct impression?

"In response to your question of whether I would eat a sandwich out of the trash or throw away an entire pizza, I would say eat the sandwich."  

We have ourselves a candidate!  

"...but only because I'm gluten intolerant and it's more likely the bread is gluten-free than the pizza crust."  

Nevermind.  Next.  

"The apartment looks great!  But I've heard that area of town is sketch.  Do you feel safe there?"

"Dear responder, I have never felt unsafe there.  There is only one homeless man that lives in our alley and he will help you park your car (for a tip) and fight off the other homeless people.  When are you available for an interview?"

No reply.

I attempted to preemptively filter the replies by stating emphatically in the post that germaphobes NEED NOT APPLY.  Then I screened the responses for answers to certain character-revealing questions in the listing, including 1.  Would you rather eat a sandwich from the trash or throw away a pizza? and 2. What object will you bring to the underground human colony in the post-zombie apocalypse?   Those initial filters got me down to nineteen candidates.  My werewolf-like evolution into an asshole happened in the process of getting those nineteen down to a top eight.  Everything started out very tolerant and pluralistic ("They all seem like perfectly nice and upstanding people!").   Within a few hours I was nixing names from the list on the basis of minor grammatical errors, lack of enthusiasm for zombies, lack of enthusiasm for sandwiches, and unfascinating professions ("Mobile tech startup?  Boring. Next.").  

I created a matrix spreadsheet with each responder's name, photo (sneakily screen-shot snapped during the Skype interviews), job, and Rating.  The Rating was calculated using a highly complex algorithm which added the decible volume of their voice to the number of sarcastic phrases used during the interview multiplied by their perceived level of weirdness and/or foreignness.  The higher the Rating the better.  Now that I've weeded out the mousy grad students and personality-less Gap employees, I've reached a conundrum.  The conundrum is forcing me to choose what kind of decision-maker I want to be.  Shall I preference A) a likeminded person who I will easily get along with or B) someone who might drive me crazy but push me to understand people and the world in a new way?

A tangential psychoanalysis to explain this predicament: 

As a member of the Privileged Middle Class, I have a complex. Growing up without ever needing anything often inspires in a person a romantic desire to struggle.   When you have a house and braces and an education and a debit card and everyone around you (at least, the people with whom you socialize) also grew up with a house and braces and tax-paying parents, it is extremely difficult to feel special.  Within this homogeneous flock, a few sheep strive to be the most rich or the most pretty or the most intelligent.  They say to the world, "Yes, I have been given all the glitter in life therefore I will shine with all my might to be the brightest of the stars!"  But the rest of the herd must distinguish themselves by becoming heroes of the hurdles they make themselves.  Thus was born: the hipster. 

Every path that we trod is too well-trodden and everyone knows that good character is not built on well-trodden paths and neither are interesting blogs!  So we seek out the weeds where we can find them.  We take stances against non-local produce and inhumane poultry.  We bike in the rain (with hooded windbreakers, but still).  We travel to Third World countries and take non-paid internships.  We refuse to be roommates with someone from a similar background.  We bite the very hand that fed our cozy childhoods: consumerism.  Thrift stores and dive bars for life!  No thank you luxury vehicles!  Go home brand names!  We have no time for you.  We have causes to fight for and battles to wage against the evils of the world.  We will not be caught dead making The Easy Decision under any circumstances because easy decisions are for sheep.  And we are special. 

I have a constant fear of comfort.  No human that has known suffering would ever feel conflicted about having a relaxed and well-paying job.  I lose sleep just imagining that one day I might have a relaxed and well-paying job.  Then who will I be?  Just another member of the working class!  Just a straight-toothed, tax-paying, debit card-wielding, iPhone-owning, car-diving nobody.  My friends and my mom tell me that of course I will never be just another starlet who settles for the picket fence American Dream.  But no starlet ever thinks he'll wind up in Unremarkableland.  Yet so many do.  It is a slippery slope.  It starts with with the new puffy jacket.  Everyone should have at least one non-used piece of clothing, right?  Then you're working a desk job.  Next thing you know you only want to be roommates with young foodies who like to journal and play bananagrams.  Before you know it, you're living in a bubble of Democrats in H&M jeans and you're terrified to eat gluten or quit your job because you've forgotten was discomfort feels like.  

Alas, the blessed are cursed with angst and indecision.  The fate of my existential well-being really all comes down to how I pick my roommate...

View from the 33rd Floor

The dark flurries whistling around the thirty-third story balcony felt at once exhilarating and empty, whirring soulless voices singing an eerie chorus.  My silhouette reflected on the silver windows of the Telus building directly in front of the sky scraping condominium where mine was the only light lit at two o'clock in the morning.  In a city of millions, no one saw me.  To the right, glowing yellow beads of traffic rolled steadily through the twinkling maze of Toronto skyline.  To the left, a giant space needle--the ones constructed for the sake of being an icon--blinked hundreds of bright purple eyes, an alien mothership in the snowy fog. 

Between the front door to the apartment and the billowing balcony curtains on the opposite side of the room, there lay a trail of unwinding on the floor: two black high-heeled boots, followed by a knit hat tangled up in a knit scarf, then a down jacket, a pair of pants, a blue sticker from those supermarket plastic boxes of prepackaged food, one paper chopstick sleeve.  The trail was punctuated by its creator, standing at the wide open glass door shoveling sushi into her mouth.  Frosty gusts swept over me.  I had spent a the previous week fretting about the cold, worrying about how I would cope with temperatures 40 degrees lower than my California fish bowl.  I had forgotten about the rush.  I had forgotten about the sensation of actually feeling air enter inside of you--not just a passive environment to be inhaled but a living and burning and writhing thing, at once exhilarating and empty. 

I wondered if the hockey players and young executives and semi-celebrity tenants of this building suspected that I wasn't one of them when they passed me in the hall or stood next to me on the elevator.  Why should they?  I carried grocery bags of Greek yogurt and coconut water just like them.  I had white earbuds dangling from my pocket just like them.  I wore the same straight-forward don't-talk-to-me stare.  I took strides like I was going somewhere and pushed the button for floor number 33 like I'd done it a million times.  It felt like they knew.  What they definitely didn't know was that the only reason I was there was because I was too cheap to stay at the hotel where I was working for the weekend (Air BnB is a wonderful thing).  

The door handle made a tiny metallic zzz when I waved the round black key in front of it.  I unwrapped and unloaded the layers of the day across the room with each step as if I'd done something important that merited absolute indulgence and abandon.  Do people aspire to this lifestyle?  I couldn't sleep that night for the hopeless spaciousness of the bed that was not meant for one.  The wood-floor studio was odorless but it made me want to smell like mint and alcoholic perfume and sex and money.  It made me want to listen to modern jazz music and drink expensive liquor.  I couldn't even put my finger on why, exactly.  It was just a room, really, with some designer floor lamps and a square bathroom sink.  But it wasn't a hotel--people lived there.  People my age.  I lived there.  For a few days, this was my apartment, this was my life: eating sushi in my underwear 400 feet above the ground at 2:00 A.M.   It was at once exhilarating and empty.