Our rent went up, so V is moving out, and into a less expensive abode with my sister… Which is traumatizing on its own. Looking for a new roommate to fill her spot has already proven to be somewhat of a challenge. Saying we have unrealistic expectations in a roommate is probably something I wouldn’t admit. But our expectations are quite high.
Living in a desirable beach town, in an uncharacteristically large house for the area, and having perfect, sweet, fun, pretty, smart roommates, has created a situation where we are weeding through loads and loads of emails. We realized pretty quickly that we couldn’t keep up with responding to them all, and even more importantly, we had to choose carefully who we agreed to actually meet in person, otherwise we’d have weirdos in and out of our house for days straight.
Tay asked V to be part of the process, because she felt like I wouldn’t like anyone at all. So V would be a mediator. Tay wrote the first Craigslist ad. She made us sound like lovely, clean girls who do nice things and are kind and loving to all. It was a great, well written ad, but it caused us to get a lot of emails with people describing their “healthy lifestyles.”
As we’re all sitting on the couch reading through emails, Tay says, “What is with this HEALTHY LIFESTYLE everyone is talking about??”
“Maybe you made us sound too healthy. You were talking about hiking and working out and I don’t do any of those things.”
“Yeah but I also said we like happy hour and day drinking.”
“You didn’t harp on that enough.”
“These people won’t eat pizza with us on Sundays. That’s a problem.”
Tay had an original list of 32 potential normal sounding people. The three of us sat on the couch social media stalking one after the other, crossing them off as we went.
“Too skinny.”
Next….
“Too ugly.”
Next….
“Too much beard.”
Next…
“She takes too many pictures of food.”
Next….
We ended up with a winning four, and invited them to come see the place. We found ourselves warning them of what they’d be getting into.
“People show up and have parties here some Saturdays… people sleep on our couches… we’re loud every Friday and Saturday….and sometimes Thursdays, and Sundays… The dog is pretty annoying… V will basically still be living here because she will miss us when she moves out…. Court walks around naked if she works from home some days…”
We scared people away. But we felt it was only fair. That way they wouldn’t move in based on our “lovely” persona and then hate us. At this point, I decided to re-write the ad.
I added some flavor and some spice. I instructed potential roommates to bring us wine. And I put every sort of “warning” in black and white, in a charming tone.
Bingo. The slew of emails that came after that were from fun, creative, friendly people who offered to bring us wine, play with the puppy, watch the Bachelor with us, and jump in for driveway hangman and beer pong sessions.
We had our first visitor from the new batch of potentials come to see the place last night. It was Thursday night so we forewent happy hour out, and just opened some wine at home, hung out and waited for the guy, who didn’t arrive til 9:30pm. We considered this sacrifice. Carissa was over, and so was another girlfriend, Danielle. This dude walks into a house of 5 slightly buzzed girls, some with purple teeth (ok that was me), and was probably somewhat afraid to be eaten alive. We give the tour of the house, Danielle leaves to go home, and Carissa and V sit outside while Tay and I interview the crap out of him.
He stayed for SO long, that we had to offer him beer (he drank two), and he is now well versed on how badly Tay’s farts smell, which of our friends would probably try to jump in his bed, and how much I don’t shut up after a couple of glasses of wine. Although I warned V to not be weird and quiz him on his athletic abilities, I jumped right in for her to decide if he’d be a candidate for our softball team, and basically gave him a verbal tryout.
What’s funny is that he’s still interested in the place. We figured if he could handle that… he’d survive with us just fine.
We have four more girls coming this evening. We don’t have high hopes for the first because she’s way too pretty and skinny and none of her clothes would fit us.
…to be continued.
Until next time.
xoxo
Gossip Girl
breathe in, laugh out 