#i plan all sorts of batshit stuff and then three months later im like ok girl we are not actually going to run away to a foreign country

[swordfaery]

a fun thing about me is that when i was like 17 i very seriously was planning on flying to america to marry someone so they could get more college money, researched flights and everything n then like i didnt for a variety of reasons mostly bcos i didnt have any money but like i didnt think of this as a particularly insane thing to do i mean i didnt fly to america to get married i just planned it for six months anyway i mentioned this in passing to a girl who has told me that she seriously considers suicide but would be so embarassed if she failed and other various things about her mental health and she acts like this is more insane than anything shes ever heard in her entire life and that there is something seriously wrong with me and like

[meggannn]

LOL YOUR ROOMMATE?? I can't stop laughing omg

god did i ever share the full story of what happened with my housemate last year? i think i bitched about her a little bit but here’s the full write-up of my six months with that housemate. unedited and probably full of errors and discrepancies sorry cause im going off entirely from memory

i’ve now moved out of this apartment, but i was there for a year with three other girls. two of them i got along with fine, and we introduced ourselves to each other before we moved in because that’s common courtesy to see if we get along right? but basically before any of us could talk or interview candidates for the last spot in the apartment, this girl, i’m making up a name and calling her emily, this random girl named emily basically came in and signed on for the spot on the lease without talking to any of us. uh, okay? so we eventually all get in a group chat and talk and introduce ourselves and plan to move in. day one:  emily moved in before me and i moved in a few hours later. i walk in and see the kitchen and she’s already covered the fridge with magnets and pictures and paper clippings featuring…. herself. like, a few of them had her friends, but most of the pictures were of her. basically. am i crazy or is that fucking weird? so from the get-go she just seemed……. if not privileged (which i also knew she was later), then definitely some sort of weird type of entitled but i couldn’t tell if it was maybe just cultural differences? (she was russian but had grown up in the states. idk)

anyway. she had this boyfriend who would come over occasionally, it was no problem since we didn’t talk and just waved hi to each other occasionally. but from the first week she and another housemate who lived on the far end of the apartment were both having trouble sleeping because someone else on the floor was blaring their tv loudly all hours of the night in the room next door. after several weeks of not being able to sleep through the night, they’d pretty much had enough and managed to track down whose apartment it was, and it turned out to be this elderly black woman’s apartment. i don’t really know if the woman understood why they were so upset because i think she might have been going slightly senile as well, so i think maybe the tv, or the volume, was something she wasn’t entirely aware she was doing? but the other housemate, i’ll call her veronica (who is more chill but was still upset) understood that this was probably not a fight they wanted to pick. veronica noticed that the elderly woman had a middle-aged male visitor, who looked like family, come visit the woman a few times a week and take care of her/take out the trash etc, so veronica decided to wait until she saw the visitor again to talk to him about lowering the volume or turning the tv off, or maybe getting his relative headphones or something. but emily, like….. kept pushing it every single night. every single night for the first month or so she’d stomp across the floor and rap on the door loud enough to wake up the entire floor (the walls were thin and it wasn’t a big building). and most of the time the woman didn’t respond, but there was one notable time someone else got fed up enough to wake up at 2am and yell at emily (deservedly so) for waking up the whole hall. all of which i heard very clearly because my room was next to the main door to out apt.

things escalated when i overheard emily talking to her friend on the phone about the situation and then she mentioned that in retaliation, she went over in the middle of the night and put vaseline on the woman’s door handle. i was kind of stunned and disgusted that a grown ass adult (she’s at least a few years older than me, i’d guess late 20′s/early 30′s?) would do something like that???? but anyway a few nights later iirc, once again in the middle of the night, i was woken up by a shouting match down the hall because apparently the male relative had come back to check in on who he said was his mother, and HE WAS PISSED, UNDERSTANDABLY SO, AT FINDING MY ROOMMATE IN THE MIDDLE OF PUTTING VASELINE ON THE FLOOR CREVICE UNDER THE DOOR. LIKE. THAT’S NOT JUST PETTY BUT REAL FUCKING DANGEROUS TO DO TO AN ELDERLY WOMAN. he basically shouted at her and she kept talking about how she can’t sleep for months because of the noise, and whatever, but she stomped back to our apartment and they had this argument loudly at the door (remember, my room was right next to the front door). i listened to it for a couple minutes wondering if she would like, acknowledge what she did was wrong? and it became clear that she was so focused on the noise she wasn’t listening to this dude, so i came out and i tried to be a voice of reason. the guy was understandably really pissed that she would do something like that and i apologized for her and said she was wrong to do that (she had stomped off back to her room meanwhile) and he seemed grateful to talk to someone who wasn’t batshit crazy in the meantime so he mentioned that he had grown up in this building all his life before moving out so it hurt to see someone treat his mother this way who had lived here for 50 years or something. and after that i was just thinking like, jesus, this is so not the kind of fight you want to have with a family like this as a white woman in a gentrified apartment complex. like at some point you need to realize this is not your fucking place and if you must settle things, do it civilly or just dip out entirely.

i think emily eventually apologized and he accepted and they found out that the tv wasn’t even coming from the woman’s room at all, but from someone on the floor above who THEY also had had problems with for months.

veronica was away on a trip i think during this climax, but before, while it was still escalating, i was talking with veronica and veronica mentioned she and emily had bitched about the noise to each other often, but veronica said she drew the line when emily basically started making her complaints race-themed ever since she found out the elderly woman was black. etc the complaints turned from “it’s too loud” to “this neighborhood is so ghetto” and “that’s what black ppl are like” and stuff like that. veronica wasn’t cool with that, so she planned on handling any other complaints herself directly so she could resolve things like a normal person, but ever since veronica mentioned that i knew emily was a pos

emily also complained about people partying/drinking on the street outside till ~11pm, which imo isn’t too unreasonable, like normal people do, and basically being too loud or whatever. on some level i get it cause she had to go to sleep early to go to work early, but also at some point i was just wondering how she functioned as a human being in the real world

ANYWAY THE STORY I TELL AT PARTIES IS THIS ONE, THE ONE IN WHICH SHE LEAVES (i will try to keep this as short as possible while still giving you all the details you need to understand just how fucking weird it was):

in early november, emily group messaged everyone asking if her boyfriend could come live with us. to her credit she said she wouldn’t do it unless everyone was ok, and she waited to hear back from all of us. i was out of town at the time but i remember being really put off by this idea and i was going to say no, when i noticed that my two other housemates had ALREADY said yes in the chat. just like that. i was stunned. what? like, no follow-up questions or “we dont even really know him” or “how is this gonna work”? were they fucking insane?

i messaged her privately saying i really wasn’t comfortable with it, for xyz reasons. among those being 1) rent, because nowhere did she offer to split the rent five ways instead of four (they were basically going to split her room between them, which, no). 2) fridge/living space, which was small enough with four people to one apartment as it is, and 3) just overall “i dont fucking know him” atmosphere. she messaged back saying she understood, and i got to asking why this was so important to her to do now, because she mentioned she wanted to do it “asap” if we’d said yes.

and this is where my “no” turned into “hell fucking no.” she told me this:

in response to my question of if she’d want to put him on the lease, she said no, she wouldn’t want her boyfriend on the lease in case “something happens so she could just tell him to leave” (raising my question: what, exactly, do you expect to happen? maybe the landlord, who lives in the building, finding out someone’s living here illegally? bc THAT WOULD DO IT FOR ME)

she was marrying him in december which is why she wanted it to happen “soon” so they wouldnt be living apart. i asked why she couldnt just wait until the lease was up to do all this, to which she said:

her boyfriend’s green card (he was russian) had expired so he was now paying month to month and that’s when i realized, oh. bitch he’s using you for a green card marriage and you’re trying to inconvenience all of us instead of owning your life like an adult, or something

at some point during the conversation she like tried to bribe me with a couple hundred extra dollars per month “to cover the cost of the extra utlities/wifi/inconvenience,” which i politely declined. this was when i said basically “look i never got the sense you particularly liked living here (massive understatement) and i think that it’d work out best if you moved out, which you’re clearly already planning to do”

and she did start looking immediately. at some point while she was looking i overheard her talking to veronica mentioning that he was a huge fan of putin and she’d asked him to like, politely, stop?, lmao because she didn’t like his entire yknow politics, and he basically said “i’m sorry, i can’t betray my personal/national identity, i just really believe in putin” or whatever the fuck and i thought to myself, this bitch is marrying him anyway for some godforsaken reason

i don’t know why i hoped that she would be any more considerate moving out than when she moved in, but somehow i was still surprised when the sublet she picked out was someone she never introduced us to or mentioned before, she literally just said “hey here’s your new housemate and when she’s moving in” and dropped us a phone number and facebook page.

one last thing: while emily was moving out, veronica mentioned to me that she was really pleased i stood up to her because she felt massively uncomfortable with the situation too. i asked why she didn’t say something, and she said she talked to emily privately airing out her problems, and emily had managed to talk her into accepting that sort-of bribe privately off message, and emily told her ‘just say yes’ in the chat, so she did and was kind of kicking herself for it after. (our other housemate was off doing fuck knows what at this point; she was gone for weeks on end leaving us to take care of her guinea pigs for her with little to no warning.)

but then, veronica says, the big thing that astounds her is that this wasn’t even the same boyfriend who she’d had when she’d moved in. six months had passed by this point. SHE HAD BEEN DATING GREEN CARD GUY FOR LIKE, THREE MONTHS WHEN SHE DROPPED THIS ON US

and then she moved to fucking harlem, one of the yknow most diverse neighborhoods in the city known particularly for its black heritage, so i guess have fun honey

(her replacement somehow turned out to be just as bad as she was, so you can imagine why i was eager for my lease to end in may)