Monday, March 21, 2011

The Roommate Question

In the span of time The Roommate slept this morning, I have:
1. Woken up
2. Fed cats, made coffee, cleaned the litter box, packed up my weekend bag and gotten ready to leave the house.
3. Gotten back to the dorm, restarted my computer, fed my fish, located and posted the song of the day.
4. Gone to breakfast, listened to half a Car Talk while eating breakfast, returned to the dorm.
5. Studied for my English Literature In Transition exam.
6. Run 10 miles at an easy pace.
7. Taken a shower.
8. Eaten lunch (previously procured so as to have more study time).
9. Left for my ELT exam at 1:30pm (I'm posting this half an hour in advance but I very much doubt she'll move before then)

I feel it should be noted that I'm not a particularly industrious person. In fact, there are a lot of things that need doing that I have not done as of yet. Like, clean my room. Make things to sell on Etsy.

When I say, "My Roommate is always sleeping," I really mean, "My Roommate is ALWAYS SLEEPING." I try to make as little noise as possible before noon, but after a while I have to make a choice between living and allowing her to keep sleeping. I had to borrow a pair of old school headphones from The Librarian because I was wearing earbuds so often my ears started hurting.

So The Roommate Question, like The Woman Question of post-Victorian England, is actually a complex, multi-faceted series of questions, perhaps without answers, encompassing things such as, "When does she go to class? When does she eat? What does she eat? When does she go to the bathroom?" I've never seen her shower, but the room doesn't smell, so she must be showering. She apparently hasn't failed out of classes, but when does she have time to study, with all the sleeping that she has to get done? She goes to sleep around the same time as me - 10 or 11. Sometimes when I get in bed, she goes to sleep so immediately afterwards that I know she's been waiting for me to turn off the light.

In many regards, she's an ideal Roommate. We're not friends; we've had a total of 4 conversations and I can relate all of them to you, word for word. (One of them goes like this: "It's raining." "Oh. Well, I'll need an umbrella, then." "Yup." "Thanks." "Yup.") She doesn't care where I go, what I'm doing, or whether or not I'm home for dinner. She doesn't know my parents and she doesn't know my girlfriend and she doesn't care to find out. I similarly do not care about her business, save for the one Question, and at this point it's more of a scientific curiosity than anything.

I simply do not understand how a person can sleep so much.

-

In other news, in about an hour I'm going to be writing a master of an essay about the relationship between Everard Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn in George Gissing's The Odd Women. I'm calling it "In Defense of Everard Barfoot" at the challenge of the professor, and I'm going to try and prove that Everard actually does fall in love with Rhoda.

The Odd Women is a nice little novel about the New Woman. I'd recommend it but not to the extent of suggesting you abandon your current reading material to pick it up. It starts out plodding and didactic and it really takes you a while to get invested in the characters; when you're reading for pleasure you shouldn't have to struggle for more than ten or fifteen pages.

One day I'll read for pleasure, and it will be glorious.



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