It's Good to Have Roommates

I live with four other girls, in a house (a cute little brick house! with a black fridge and a black oven!) near where I go to school. We have a backyard that is full of unintended and untended grass, four frighteningly large anthills, two bikes and sometimes a cat. Our neighbors to the south and west are very old people who we assume have been living here since the dawn of time, and our neighbors to the east appear to be a houseful of college boys. They have two cute black puppies (we play with the puppies through the fence and I am tempted to feed them bacon), and a clothesline that once had about ten pairs of jeans on it and nothing else. I wish I had taken a picture. All we know about the neighbors to the north, who are across the alley, is that they have two dogs that freak out whenever we take our trash out to the giant trash barrel in the alleyway. The neighborhood isn't the best, but we really have it good here. I've written about some of my roommates previously, and tried to think up witty names for them and failed. I will try again tonight.

The Desirable One: I think I'll stick with that name for her, because it is pretty fitting, and because any other names I think of for her end up sounding disparaging when I really don't mean them to be. No, she's not ditzy and blonde. She's great and hard working and quite smart. In fact, I'm pretty sure everybody in our house is quite smart. She helps me try to sort out my feelings (she and Io are both very verbal and into talking things out, a thing that until I moved in I had never really considered doing) and sometimes gives me hints on how to flirt. She is also great because she and I share a room, and when she studies she often just sits there and watches the chinchillas watching her.

Hunca Munca: she isn't a bad mouse at all, but I expect that she would like the way the name sounds. She is probably the roommate with the most personality, as evidenced by the night when she found out she passed the Bar and pretended to get drunk by swigging sparkling cider from the bottle. We have pictures to prove it. She's also quite the hard worker, even though she creates time to say and do the most hilarious and outrageous things. Her fiance, whom I will call Tom Thumb for convenience, is very quiet but if you catch him at the right moment he is also quite funny. I almost wish they weren't getting married, so I could have her as a roommate for longer.

Io: no, she is not one of the moons of Jupiter. She is, however, a lot like me, both in personal history and personal opinions. This is one of the reasons I like her, although she sometimes confuses me because she's much more opinionated and sensitive of those around her than I am. We generally get along very well, which is funny because when I was considering moving in, she was the one part of the household that I wanted to avoid. That first impression of her was soon dispelled, and I'm so glad that I got to know how great she is. She also gives great massages.

Roommate X: she is the one who is very often not here, but somewhere with her boyfriend. She misses a lot of the goings-on in the house, but then again, she's having tons of fun with her boyfriend. It's really kind of a toss-up. She does have the parental hook-ups, though: they're the ones who signed the lease for the house, and when some old lady they knew died, they got her recliners and sent them along to us, as well as some old lady jewelry and scarves and even two pretty pairs of white gloves. I feel a little guilty for being happy that somebody died.