Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Fire roasted

I wish there was a larger context to this, and maybe there will be in the next few days and I'm jumping the gun, but its just too funny for me to not post right away.

I walked into the living room about five minutes ago with Samil enjoying a nice bowl of tortilla chips and salsa. I was bringing some stuff to the sink to clean - accumulated tea cups and my breakfast dish from this morning. Samil started telling me how disappointed he was with his salsa. I respond with a generic grunt, and he continues on. "I really wish I had bought some fire roasted salsa. Have you ever heard of fire roasted salsa?"

I confirm that I have, in fact, heard of fire roasted salsa to him, and then I notice the salsa on the counter. "Hey Samil, that's funny, did you buy the same agave salsa that I bought yesterday?" I turn to look over to Samil, who is giving me his best deer in headlights impression. "Um..." He gets up and looks at the salsa. "Oh shit, this...." shuffling through the cupboard "here's my salsa. Oh damn its warm."

"But I DID buy the fire roasted salsa."

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Devil, Details

Normally, I think I make my decisions on a person's character based on the little things they do or don't do.

In Samil's case, I can't decide whether I'm deciding he has shit for brains because he can't remember to unlock the bathroom door or because he locks the door for no reason. See, I have a separate door going to the bathroom. It has a lock on the inside so nobody walks in on someone doing their business. which is fine, or would be fine, if the person doing their business also remembered to unlock it afterward. No, its not a big hassle because I can walk around to the to the other door (hence, 'little things') but if I have to hear Samil every morning (sometimes awoken to the prettiest of bathroom sounds) of take care of his stuff because a bathroom door leads to my bedroom, I should be able to use said bathroom door.

This is why I think Samil has a terrible case of CRS (Can't Remember Shit, if you've forgotten). Samil also needs to realize that when we have longer heart to hearts, I remember what he says, because when a nerve is touched in a conversation between us and others, he tends to go off in really awkward tangents. For example, Samil has been looking for a steady relationship I think for a good long while. He hasn't had many, so I think not finding someone to settle down with is a point of anxiety for him. This is all fine; I do want him to be happy. I just don't want him to weird out my friends in the process.

My friend John was in one night and we were talking about his long relationship with his girlfriend and his longer commitment to not being in long relationships (funny how long relationships seem to just happen when you're not looking). This caused Samil to go off on how you don't need to settle down early, and its not a big deal because John is young, and he still has time to find someone, and one day he'll find a girl to settle down with and start a family, and lots of people start relationships later on in their lives, and there's no reason to commit yourself to a person if you're not interested in committing yourself, and you really shouldn't worry at all. Not that John was ever worrying, of course.

I also find it incredibly sad but very much not a big deal when Samil gives me the look of an accomplished 5 year old who drew a picture on a place mat. Normally he gives these looks when it has to do with him getting some sexual contact or drugs. This leads me to imagine that said place mat is of a park with people flying kites, and the sky is purple and the people are orange and the grass is blue.

Good example, he tells me he was fooling around with a girl for a few weekends. [cue 5yr old smile] Then the girl dumped him when he said they should being a relationship and she said no. [cut 5yr smile]. Another example "I went over my cousin's house" [smile] "and we got so high. Like really really high." [end smile] I don't really remember much else that we did."

I'm also not sure if I should count this as a big thing, but all of the dishes still aren't put away in the kitchen. He's unpacked about half the box, but still. How lazy can you be to not finish putting a box away after 3 weeks? I mean, they are small things. Who really needs forks, and knives. Little stuff, I say. Good thing I'm not home enough to cook.

Monday, October 19, 2009

If you can't stand the heat...

Samil just yelled to me, mid-shower, "Do you know the Yankees score?" Because, even though he knows I could not care less about baseball, I might be keeping up to date while he's away from his laptop.

Also, I now have Internet. Oddly, the FIOS guy we had come to fix everything rocked. He also thought we were just starting out in college, so he refused a tip and gave us about 50 bucks worth of stuff on the d/l. Unfortunately, I've been working way too much to put the Internet to good use.

It got cold here pretty fast in New Jersey, and our apartment was fairly cold. In case I wasn't aware of this, Samil made sure to mention it almost non-stop when I saw him. "I'm cold. I don't want to be cold. It's cold." Shocker: he decided to put on an extra blanket one night and wasn't cold. Still, the Cold theme persisted.

I'm not saying it wasn't cold, but when we moved in the old tenants told us their heating bills were through the roof, so personally, I'd rather throw on a sweatshirt than turn my apartment into Little Bahamas.

Still, its pretty absurd when my friend Steve stops by and tells us he looked up our house's worth on his company's Real Estate software. After giving us a number lower than we all expected, Samil's response was "It's probably because the house is so drafty."

This all came to its epic conclusion this weekend, when I get a call from Samil in the morning while at the bank. He was telling me that he turned the heat on the night before prior to leaving for a party. "When I came home there was no heat." I was aware both that there was no heat, since I was home asleep, and that he came home, because it sounded like he fell through the front door into the door into the living room, waking me up. "Okay," I tell him. "Well, I'm going to call the landlord." This seems somewhat reasonable as an isolated case. While responding to him vaguely I'm trying to add up the number of times we've called the landlord for silly little things in the last month and wonder if maybe we can figure this one out on our own. Eventually I say something to that effect, which he goes "I'm cold. I'm so cold I don't want to hang out here. I'm not even going to hang out here tonight because of this, or tomorrow."

This is where I become confused, not just because of the conversation but because the ATM was asking me funny questions. "You're not going to be home?" "No, its COLD!" "Then why do you want the heat on?" This question seems simple enough to me. I don't know, call me crazy. "because its cold." Oh, right.

An hour later or so I get a call from our landlord where she asks me to let the plumber in to look at the heat. "I'm not home." "You're not? Well, someone needs to be home." "Well, I'm at work. Where is Samil?" "I don't know. He's not answering his phone." Great. I don't get any calls back, and come home to a heated apartment.

Now it begins: the epic war of me trying to keep us from going broke from heating bills by lowering the thermostat and keeping doors shut. Wish me luck.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

AYFKM?

I'm moved in. By "I'm moved in" I mean that I set up the living room, bathroom, and my bedroom. I don't mean that the kitchen is unpacked, because really, I think Samil can handle unpacking a few appliances and figure out where to put the forks, considering I moved the TV, couches, end tables, shower mat, lamps, etc. around and made the rooms livable. Two nights ago he asked if I'd be around this weekend to set up the kitchen with him. I told him that he could handle setting things up alone, since I wasn't going to be home at all during the weekend and I did set up the living room and bathroom pretty easily on my own. He agreed. More on this yesterday...

Samil also took off work yesterday to take care of getting his parking pass and wait for the FIOS guy to get us set up with Internet at 1pm. Around 11:30am I get a call from the technician (since I set up the appointment because my credit is still comfortably in the three digits), and I tell him I'll pass my room mates number on to him. I call Samil to see where he's at. He says he's at the gym, so I told him I'd text him the guy's number so they can work the arrangement out right then and there without me mediating.

...


...

At 1pm he texts me going "Yo, you never sent me the number." Twice, the same text, but one without any punctuation or capitalization. I can only assume he thought I didn't respond to poor grammar, seeing that he's an English teacher. He also calls and leaves a voicemail to the same effect. I was in class until 1:10 and was really concerned why my phone was freaking out as I was finishing class. So I get the messages and call him and ask "why didn't you tell me this an hour and a half ago?" to which he responded "you wanted me to to call him right away?" "I did tell the guy you'd would." "oh." My coworker overheard both of these conversations and immediately gave me the look of AYFKM?, aka Are You Fucking Kidding Me? Turns out Samil does not know how to use his phone and couldn't accept text messages when I messaged him. He has since gotten help from a coworker to resolve this, but I should mention there is a reason they call the things Smart Phones, and its not because they make you smarter.

The next crisis is that the technician is not answering Samil's calls. So I call and he picks up, slightly pissed off that no one got in touch with him, but he says he'll be right over. Yay Internet!

Now, two nights ago when Samil and I discussed the kitchen situation, we also talked about what I hoped the FIOS guy would do: 1) run an ethernet line to my computer 2) run an ethernet line to my XBox. I understood if this wasn't going to be possible. Happily, when I got home Samil was able to report that the FIOS guy did everything Samil asked him to do and that we had Internet. Yay Internet!

Except, neither of those were done. For some reason, FIOS guy ran a cable wire to the XBox, which makes absolutely no sense, and didn't put anything in my bedroom. Yay... wait.

In short, Samil goofily sitting on the floor of the office, high with heavy pot fumes filling the room pissed me off more than a little bit since his happy report was entirely wrong. He was also very surprised that neither were done, despite him sitting around watching the entire process. I left, choosing to hang out at the library instead of flip out on him, and told him to call them and fix the situation.

I come home two hours later to find him sleeping and having not called the company. He said his phone died so he took a nap. Great. A while later he gets a hold of the company and is shocked that they are giving him a hard time about coming back out to fix things. Meanwhile, I spent this escapade beating up Gotham's worst, who are all somehow on the Joker's payroll. Where's that guy get his money, seriously.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that the kitchen was all still in boxes. Realize that we moved in 6 days ago. One of these boxes also happened to now be dripping wet at the bottom. Realize that Samil has been sitting at home all day doing nothing. So I brought this up with him, to which he said "oh, I didn't know that was my responsibility." This is the point where I gave him the AYFKM? look and just walked away to work out.

As of today I still have no Internet, I happened to miss an epic Flyers game (Home Opener + the captain, Mike Richards getting a Hat Trick + 11 total goals + Overtime + Winning), and I'm beginning to think I can trust my middle school students more than Samil.