Roomates, or why a women-in-prison movie is on the TV By Todd Foltz
After graduating from college and landing my first professional job, I swore I would never have a roommate again. I was tired of living with people whose ideas on cleanliness dated back to the stone age. Not only did they refuse to do dishes (when they bothered to even use silverware), but they kept forgetting to raise their shoulders when they walked. So their knuckles always left furrows in the carpet.
But four years later I find myself with a roommate again. And he's proved that roommates aren't all bad. Nonetheless, while this one, who looks like the car salesman from "Fargo" and talks like Elton John, has three college degrees hung on his walls and doesn't drag his knuckles, he still has quirks that could drive Mother Teresa to get liquored up and buy an assault rifle.
The two of us may be the only men in the world who have a running disagreement on how to leave the toilet seat. That would be me and my roommate, not me and Mother Teresa. Being a woman, of course, Mother Teresa probably knows that the only way to leave the toilet seat is down. And not just the seat, either. That goes for the lid, too.
Know why? Every time you flush your toilet, tiny droplets spray into the air to land all over the bathroom. Including on your toothbrush. And this isn't the toilet water whose $45 purchase gets you a free, $2 tote bag at a fine department store near you, either. Nope. This is nasty, icky, gross, yucky water. That's why you're flushing it down the toilet. This water is so icky, you don't even want it in your toilet, much less floating around in the air you breathe.
So why on earth would someone not close the lid on the toilet? At my house, we have two bathrooms. The main bathroom is mine, and the one in the master bedroom is my roommate's. But he never uses his except at night. The rest of the time he uses mine! And even though I always have the lid down, and even though he always has to lift the lid to use the toilet, he never, ever puts it back down.
It's gotten so bad that as soon as he leaves the bathroom, I run into it and slam the lid down. Does he notice? NO! He even pretends not to hear my stomping or the whiplash crack of plastic slapping porcelain. We had three lady friends over recently --one of whom he was trying to impress--and he still couldn't remember even to leave the seat down for them.
He got thrown out at first, incidentally.
I've tried to handle this toilet seat thing maturely. But all my sulking and grimacing has been for naught. I guess I'll have to actually talk to him about it.
But the man is inhuman! Every good Trivial Pursuit player knows that the answer to the question "How many times does the average person go to the bathroom per day" is six times. Not my roommate. That's how often he goes per hour. The man keeps four quarts of water in the fridge constantly, and often launches into harangues about how everyone should drink 12 quarts of water per day, just like him.
At times I wonder if he's not a camel preparing to leave an oasis for a long journey. But then I remember. Camels store their water in their humps, not in my toilet with the stupid lid up.
And speaking of seats, the man refuses to wear his seatbelt. Maybe it's because they didn't have seatbelts in cars when he first started driving. My car has automatic shoulder belts, and every time he rides with me he does this duck and twist to avoid the harness. It's like riding with a frat boy who's trying to dance like a rapper. He will, at least, compromise by wearing the manual lap belt but only if I remind him. Every time I pull away from the curb I have to say "Lap belt!" And then he grins like a 10-year-old caught with a Playboy and puts it on.
But he's a 40-year-old professional, for crying out loud! Not that he wants anyone to know how old he is. When people ask, he says guess, and they guess 32, based on the fact that he's in great shape. And he smiles, until I say, "Yeah, in dog years."
And not only is my roommate the most urinating man on the face of the planet, he's also one of the cheapest. He's the kind of guy who only grocery shops when he knows he'll be able to scam enough free samples to give himself a whole meal. Recently he spent 10 minutes trying to decide which was cheaper, a two-pack of name-brand paper towels for $1.59 or two single off-brand rolls for 79 cents each.
One of the weirder things about my roommate is his penchant for accents. Unfortunately, some of his best friends are British, so much of his speech is peppered with English phrases. And after he's talked to one on the phone or had more than half a beer he lapses into a British accent for about every other sentence. He's not unlike all your friends who've memorized the dialogue from the Monty Python movies and regale you with snippets with as much persistence (and competence) as the black knight in "The Search for the Holy Grail."
But it's not just the Brits who affect my roommate's speech. He watched "Wyatt Earp" the other day and spoke with Val Kilmer's drawl for two days afterward. I thought I was going to have to shoot him.
But basically, I've learned that roommates can be handy to have around. And not all of them wake up one morning and decide to earn tuition money by starting a ferret farm on the back porch, as did one of my roommates in college. Thankfully, we talked him into just keeping two ferrets as pets and earning tuition money by doing something respectable, like selling drugs.
My new roomie is quite conscientious, both about noise and cleanliness. And he's a great cook. Now if I could just potty train him, life would be blissful. I've started keeping a rolled up newspaper close at hand.
It could work.
Todd Foltz is so neat, he spit shines his shower shoes.