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.

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.

DJLSGDHJLSHGFKDJLSGDL:AFSDJKLGSDHJK

I'm going to kill Samil. But I'll get to that later.

Yesterday morning Samil realized he had to iron clothes before work. He found this to be "such a drag." Welcome to the real world, buddy. Now, if you're planning on ironing clothes, with a hot iron, you might not want to plant yourself just around a corner of a hallway, kneeling on the floor, using one of those tiny ironing boards. Because I won't see you until its almost too late. And then I might knock you over. And you're holding a hot iron. Luckily, despite my being exhausted and all, I managed to see him at the last second and avoid catastrophe.

Samil was not so lucky a little later on when he burned his clothes. He didn't burn them so bad that they looked like an ironed shirt in a cartoon, with a big black iron outline on the back. Just a little nick down at the bottom of a pant leg. Still, this was clearly not his fault. He was, after all using one of those "high tech looking irons" that apparently, because of their high tech looks, are clothes-burning proof. Even if you turn the iron to the high setting. And even if you don't put any water in the high tech water reservoir. (this is totally irrelevant, but Samil also couldn't work the high tech automatic electricity cord winder upper, which also tells me he's going to have trouble using my high tech vacuum.) What's most bothersome to me is that he expresses these problems in a way that implies that its my fault because its my stuff. You see, its all my stuff because I lived in an apartment before and bought all the things one has in an apartment.

Later on yesterday I had my after school program while Samil came home and met out landlord to pick up keys for the permanent apartment we'll be staying in (right above this one). When he left the place with the landlord, he for no reason locked the door knob. The door knob is busted up and has no functioning key. The only way into this apartment is through that door. So last night when I went to start moving stuff in, I found myself locked out of my own new apartment, holding a box of books, confused why I couldn't open the door when the new key was working just fine.

So Samil has me call our landlord because he's too busy munching on Chinese food. He also informs me to ensure she doesn't know it was his fault. After going back and forth with the landlord to just explain "yes, the key works, but no the door doesn't open," she got really confused until she remembered the busted lock on the door and said "oh, yes, there is another lock but nobody has ever used that lock and we've never had a key for it, ever." The second ever made me die inside a little. Somehow, our landlord did have a very clear memory of Samil NOT locking the door, or a vivid memory of something that didn't happen. Still, good for him, I guess. "Okay, well, I'm in South Jersey, and I can't get back until tomorrow some time. I don't know what to tell you."

After getting off the phone, I told Samil the news. "That sucks. Man, why would you not have a key for the lock?' This was when I almost killed Samil. Some of us have schedules, and we stick to them. Some of also, I think at least, take ownership of mistakes and things we do wrong.

But I won't kill him, because right after this happened, Samil sprinted to the kitchen because Chinese food was too hot. That was pretty funny, wimp.

Too Much Information, or Not Eating Crap

For the last two weeks, Samil has been really concerned about being healthful. I think he got on this kick after talking to one of his friends, Toast (who I have been told is someone who I should not trust, just because of his name, but of all the people in the circle Samil and I met in, he is possibly the most trustworthy). Toast was talking to him about a lot of the things in Omnivore's Dilemma, and Samil thought I would be a good expert on these matters, since I previously worked at an evil national food chain selling only good foods.



The problem though, is that on issues like this there is a ton of information going around, and its not very well catalogued or filtered. I blame the Internet, since without the Internet people would only have access to information placed in context and organized to give a broad understanding. Instead, Samil can just wander around the information looking for Good Information, even if said Information is totally unrelated to what he is concerned with.



On top of that, Samil is plagued with a pretty massive case of indecision and confusion, so this massive influx of Good Information re: eating well is not exactly healthy for him. So Samil is stuck trying to balance the Local Food issue with the Organic issue with the Whole Ingredients issue with guides for Raw Food diets. If you haven't spent time thinking about each one individually, it can be overwhelming. That doesn't ease the pain for me when he asks questions like "But its not healthy to eat raw foods if like, you get the food from California, right?"



The scenario plays out something like this: Samil is looking for foods with a small number of ingredients, all from natural sources, but is looking on highly processed, full of artificial additives that we call the Internet to identify these foods. So before he even has a chance to eat well, his mind is so polluted with high fructose corn syrup type information, leaving him so confused about what to do that he ends up just eating a falafel for dinner.



Also, call me Debbie Downer, but I'm not totally convinced that we will be able to travel from New Jersey to California in two hours or less any time soon. This literally shocked Samil. Samil is now on the record as believing wholeheartedly that we will in just a few short years develop such a strong Artificially Intelligent machine that all of our energy problems will be solved without us having to lift a finger. They'll also solve a bunch of other things too, he said. I didn't pry.

How is this related, you ask? Well, he became very concerned at one point with the problem of defining Local Food. The problem defining it, to him, was not whether one should be looking at regional America maps or restricting their foods to some place they could drive in a day (this is an interesting issue to me, which I would have loved to discuss with him for a while - the Local Food movement is just as much about carbon foot prints and developing a more stable regional economy as it is eating fresh nutrient rich foods. Unfortunately we never got to have the discussion). The problem, of course, is when we have super rapid transportation, what will be the cutoff for earning the Happy Sticker signifying that a food is local?


Personally, though, I find his assumption of free gigantic amounts of power to be very convenient, which really plays into his personality. Of course scientists (or said robots) are going to figure out how to make a super duper fast train. Why? They're going to do it because Samil wants his nectarines, and he wants them in his fridge 3 days after they were picked, so its going to happen. Of course Human Resources should be available to him whenever he feels like showing up, regardless of whatever other responsibilities they may have during the course of the day (and no matter how clearly they post this on District's website) His thought process normally goes from "what would I like to happen" to "this should happen because" or if not possible "that's dumb because." This thought process occurs in all sorts of places, from super duper fast trains to how his boss should behave. I wouldn't even be surprised if I saw him arguing with some nutrition expert telling him that 'no, its not healthy to eat a box of Newman's Own cookies, because the cookies were made naturally. Its just more convenient inside his head.

Belly Rubbing Goodness

Samil just talked to me for a half hour on getting a Ph. D in English Education, with twenty five of those minutes spend looking in our window and watching himself rub his belly while rambling. This might be some sort of pre-party ritual for him as he just left to go to a party, a pajama party actually. That shouldn't surprise you, I guess, since you aren't here in the apartment. If you were here in the apartment, you'd say "that's weird, I could have sworn Samil was wearing jeans when he left." You, dear readers, would not have been mistaken because Samil did decide to wear jeans to a pajama party. He was, and I quote "not going to spend [his] Friday, after wearing dress pants all week, wearing anything but jeans."

Also, this conversation was unique this week because it didn't involve Samil figuratively or literally cornering me to talk. Twice this week we had extended conversations where I had no possible escape from. I wish I could tell you what we talked about in the first one, but to be honest, I spent the entire conversation going "yeah?" "oh" and "interesting" while I read a magazine on my exercise bike. This conversation went on for exactly 14 minutes because I was timing my workout and it ended when I got off the bike and went into the shower. Have you ever talked to someone for 14 minutes where the person didn't respond with more than a word at a time?

The second conversation was a pretty diverse one, but generally centered around Samil trying to rearrange the world to make things easier for him. For example, he thinks we need to rewrite the Constitution because he finds Delaware annoying and they shouldn't have so many members of Congress. Ditto all those big states out West. They're in his way. Also, he wants our President to essentially give up on the health care fight and not pass any legislation and try this again in two years. For some reason he thinks this is a good idea - I tried to figure out why so I could tell all of you, but all I got was some stammering and teeth sucking.

Also, Samil wants to legalize pot. This is not surprising. He wants to legalize pot for two reasons: 1) it would generate tax revenue for social programs and 2) it will get him laid. To his credit, I do think I learned in algebra II that:

Samil + Marijuana + Public Places + Hot Ladies = Samil + Hot Ladies + Apartment - Clothes

(If you simplify that equation, it looks like this:

Marijuana + Public Places = Apartment - Clothes

In other words, getting high in public is the same as being naked in your apartment, which I find hysterical for some reason)

This may become a recurring theme, but yesterday when I got home from work, Samil was sitting on the couch reading Vanity Fair (aside, I didn't know people actually bought and read Vanity Fair - I thought it was the sort of magazine that people just talked about without reading. who knew) with the two rolling chairs in the living room facing him. On one chair was his container of soy milk, and the other a cereal box, as if he had been having a round table discussion with his breakfast foods.

I'll show YOU a WRIT

Its been a while, and I apologize. I’ve actually been working on this post for a bit but haven’t had a computer to upload it with, so its just been getting long and longer and longer.

Some of the things that amuse me most about living with Samil are his idiosyncrasies that I can’t figure out how he learned, ever. Like, when I came home on Labor Day, he was sitting on our droopy* couch, with a bowl of cereal at his feet, two different types of cereal boxes arranged like the top left corner of a picture frame around the bowl, and some soy milk over to the right of the bowl, but not neatly placed, at least compared to the boxes. It looked like he hadn’t gotten off the couch in a week, and he was just staring at the wall when I walked in. I don’t know.

I am pleased to announce that our trash has been taken out. Though, it did take Samil three tries to figure out that the trash bag goes in the can, not next to the can and that a shopping bag was not big enough for a medium sized trash can. After reminding him a few times, he finally put a bag in the can, though instead of using the trash bag sitting on the counter, he used a small shopping bag. So, by the time I went to throw any more trash in there, it had already fallen deep into the dark emptiness of the trash can, invisible with the Chinese food boxes and banana peels covering it on top. I calmly explained to him that this didn’t work after he told me about what he did, and so he eventually found the trash bag and dumped everything into it…. And then left it next to the trash can. Still, I think we can proudly stamp Mission Accomplished on this saga.

Later he told me we needed bigger trash cans, because it only takes a day to fill these up. This was no where near clear, since we hadn’t taken the trash out for a week and the bag he just put stuff in was clearly not filled. I understood his point, but I still don’t understand where he got a day from. Maybe he was thinking of the shopping bags getting filled in a day. I don’t know.

He also volunteered to get trash bags since that was the last one we had. He called me from the grocery store yesterday and said “what size bag do we need?” I was engrossed in a challenge in Arkham Asylum, so I just aid “Thirteen.” He asked me if I meant inches.

Remind me to tell him that if he’s walking through my room at night, to not leave his door open if he turns the light on. It’s a little distracting for me to sleep when a light is suddenly shining on my face.

Additionally, I have had a friend visiting for the last week. Lenore is one of my closest friends, and I’ve known her since High School. She now lives out in the Midwest, though so we’ve been hanging out a fair amount since she’s only in the area every three months or so. Before starting these (semi-)regular accounts, she was able to hear all the exciting things Samil would do. So this meeting between the two of them was pretty exciting, for me at least.

The first time she came over, we ran into Samil as we were heading out to an awesome local restaurant that serves local food. I showed her the place before we left, though, and she described his bedroom as someone who looks like they live in a shelter. Its true. I’ll get a picture of it ASAP, but he’s sleeping on the mattress part of our couch and all of his clothes are overflowing from his suitcases on the floor. He has nothing else. Personally, I’m hoping he has a lady friend over at some point soon to show off his place. Because nothing says swoon like sleeping on a stained bed thing and your underwear laying all over the floor.

*(Quick aside, our couch is almost unsittable… in fact Lenore ran for the chair when she saw how low it was and didn’t give me a chance to even clear it off.)

We went back to my place after dinner for beers, where Samil was patiently waiting to interface. The three of us ended up talking four about five hours. Actually, I think there were a few half hours where I didn’t say a single word and Samil kept talking, requiring Lenore to say SOMETHING.

The conversation revolved around really mundane small talk topics, namely god and politics. I should also mention that Lenore spends her free time blaming the Patriarchy and studying earning a Masters in Divinity, focusing on law, while Samil read a few books about God in middle school, smokes a lot of pot, and can become extremely distracted if he walks past a picture of a celebrity.

The two of them talked back and forth about why Lenore was an atheist and Samil was an agnostic. Samil kept trying to emphasize that there was a chance that there could be a god, and one shouldn’t ignore that. In my mind, I thought that logic was about as good at saying ‘there’s a chance a bear could fly if you throw him out of an airplane,” but I tried to keep my mouth shut. Lenore was just making the point that if you’re a reasonable person, you can be open minded if presented with new information, and that its lame to be a fence sitter. She was really polite though, which only gave Samil more reason to continue trying to hammer his point home.

With regards to the politics, Lenore really kept her mouth shut as Samil continued to put his foot in his mouth. To try and explain through an example, Samil is the type of person who told me that Maggie Gyllenhall is a good actress because 1) she is a WOMAN (say that in a really excited "boy do I wish I could get with her" voice) and 2) she was apparently really good in a role where she had to flirt with her boss, but he never actually saw that movie. In other words, he doesn’t go around hitting women, but he generally has a conception about what a woman should be to be ‘correct’ that generally involves them being objects around him. Not exactly something that meshes well with someone who views all men as brought up to be rapists to one degree or another. So Samil kept talking about how he has a very particular view of what is attractive, and how lots of women will overly PC about his humor concerning women and traditional roles. Being insensitively funny, clearly, is proof you actually care. The way these conversations would go is that he’d say something, she would nicely say “I don’t think so” and Samil would repeat what he said two or three times, eventually moving on to something else that Lenore didn’t agree with.

Truthfully, I thought the night went pretty OK. Samil didn’t do anything really amazingly dumb, I thought. When I talked to Lenore the next day, she just said, “he’s weird, and awkward, and I didn’t want to keep talking to him.” Oops. I guess I’m a little desensitized (now, I only find talking to Samil awkward when, say, he’s standing just inside my door looking right at me, trying to tell me what he thinks about Eddie Murphy being the Riddler in an upcoming Batman movie while I am clearly trying to change into pajamas). Samil also proved able to top himself in Lenore’s next encounter with him.

This was when, at the end of the conversation, Samil animatedly jumped up and imagined himself yelling at some snotty law student “I’ll show YOU a WRIT!” and then proceed to pummel him with face and body shots, using his imagined Black Belt worth of Martial Arts Skillz. The context of this was Lenore talking about law students that hide books from each other, and Samil imagining himself dropping all other responsibilities in his life to track these people down and catch them in the act. Not doing his job was a pretty consistent theme for the evening, as he started the night talking about how he was going to quit his job (again – music to a roommates ears in the first month of a twelve month lease), move to Chicago, live on a couch, join Second City, and become famous. I politely told him that not everyone becomes famous after joining Second City, and he modestly said “But this is me we’re talking about.”

Some more house cleaning… We still haven’t set up our stove. I don’t have a lighter, which we need to take care of it. He does, and has for the last two days not been able to figure this out. The first day he couldn’t find the manual for it, which was fair, except it only took me thirty seconds to find it and clip it to the fridge. Not so fair the second day when he couldn’t find it and didn’t notice the gigantic manual that appeared on the fridge. I wonder if it’ll be done tonight. I would kind of like to make dinner in this apartment, but I’ve been getting home at 7pm or later every night, and it takes two hours to do, and I am normally hungry before 9pm.

I’m going to be out of the house this weekend, so few things to update on then, and hopefully I’ll have a computer to use the following week. See you around.

To get this out of the way...

I imagine anyone reading this right now is about to say... "If this guy is such a terrible room mate, why would you move in with him?" That's a very fair question. Honestly, part of the reason I'm living with Samil is for the Lolz. Also, him and I have a fair number of shared interests and do get along pretty well.

That, however, does not excuse the fact that 3 days in, he hasn't set up a single thing or unpacked a single box of stuff we use communally. I mean, really... we have no forks right now that are accessible without digging in a box also containing all of our plates and larger utensils. Nor does it forgive the fact that even though I told him three times, he still threw trash in a trash can without a bag in it, when I had a shopping bag of trashing going right next to it. I don't care if we get along, I'm still not going to pick out his trash for him.

On an unrelated note, I wonder, exactly, how many of you would love to hear your brand new room mate say to you "Oh man, if I got laid off, duuuuude, that would be great. I'd gladly fall on my light saber just like Obi Wan if they told me I was getting RIF'd." (RIF=Reduction in Force, ie laid off because the school is reducing the number of teaching positions) I mean, I know I wasn't thinking about anything like 'how would you pay rent?' Nope.

We're still without Internet, so I'm not going to give him the full introduction and life story here, but I also wanted to mention that I would not be surprised if this space also starts dealing heavily in education matters. We're teachers. We talk about teaching. We're both very opinionated and I'm becoming more and more informed on my views. I may periodically call him an idiot when I talk about education matters, but I use 'idiot' as a term of endearment. Just ask my students.