I firmly believe there are two types of people in the world: bedroom people and living room people. Bedroom people tend to spend the majority of their free time in their bedroom and living room people tend to spend the majority of their free time in the living room. Living with roommates might nudge a living room person to assume the guise of a bedroom person, but, given time, the living room person will mosey down the hall, back into the living room, where they truly feel comfortable.
I am a living room person. It does not matter if I am living at home with my parents, living with three roommates, or living alone, I hang out in the living room. It is not because I have a bubbly personality. I am not staking out the living room so I can talk to anybody who walks through, like it is some French salon. I am not waiting for an audience of roommates. I do not have a lot to talk about, at if I do have a lot to talk about, it is probably about said roommates (I have a theory that the reason there are so many people FaceTiming on the street is because the only thing they have to talk about are their roommates and they cannot very well gossip in their apartment). The reason I am a living room person is because I prefer to be vertical instead of horizontal when watching TV. Laying on a bed watching TV is a luxury reserved for hotel rooms and serious bouts of the flu. If I want to lay down and watch TV, it has to be with my head propped up on the arm of a sofa and my neck at an angle only Picasso could appreciate. I also have a particular discomfort with going to bed after I have been laying on top of the covers. When I peel back the covers and get in, the warm patch created by my own body makes my skin crawl. Suffice to say, the bedroom is not my clubhouse.
Most of my past roommates have been bedroom people. I do not know if this is some latent trauma from being angsty teenagers who locked themselves in their bedrooms and scrolled through emo Tumblrs, ignoring their parents’ calls for dinner. Or if they were lucky enough to have a TV in their bedroom growing up and were never forced to make the tough decision between coming to the communal TV area or missing Thursday Night Comedy on NBC. Or simply if my presence is revolting to them. Whatever the reason may be, they always seem content with their choice to hang in their bedroom, and I always feel comfortable with my choice to hang in the living room.
This was until my last roommate. We will call her Ubel (because I googled “names that mean crazy” and this was the closest I could get -- Ubel means evil, which is equally applicable). I contend Ubel was a bedroom person with an “if I am not using it, no one can” complex. She had lived in the apartment with a different roommate before I moved in. The living and dining room were, therefore, furnished with her furniture. There was a couch, an armchair, a coffee table, two standing shelves, a TV stand (but no TV), a dining table, and four dining chairs. The couch was extremely comfortable. Soft and well cushioned, great, breathable fabric, the kind that you can sit on for hours without starting to feel hot or itchy. I could not ask for better as a living room person. I proceeded to purchase a TV for the living room, with permission, and we hung out together in the living room a couple of times before Ubel returned to her steady state as a bedroom person.
Ubel did not appear to be crazy when I first moved in, as is the case with most Ubel people. She was a little bit of a control freak, but that does not always translate to crazy. An example: we tried to keep the sink clear of dishes to avoid cockroaches. I always washed my dishes immediately, which was a big adjustment for me because I am the type of person who usually lets a plate I used to eat dry toast soak for three days. One day I left a glass of water in the sink because I was running late, and I received a text from Ubel saying “I thought we agreed not to leave dishes in the sink?” I wanted to respond “It is a glass of water. Water is native to the sink. Just think of it as an extension of the sink.” This text should have tipped me off to her true mental state. But the moment I realized something was off was when she asked me to start buying my own toilet paper. We have all lived with people who use more or less toilet paper than us, and we have all made a mental note of their toilet paper consumption. It takes a special person to verbalize these mental notes in order to save approximately two dollars a month in toilet paper related expenses. I do not know her situation, so I should not judge. Money might have been tight in her Gucci bag.
These were merely the warning shots for her ultimate goal: to exile me from the living room. I think Ubel realized that despite her best efforts to make me uncomfortable in the bathroom and the kitchen, she could not fully extricate me from either without making life miserable for herself. A backed up, hangry person is a nightmare to be around. However, from the perspective of a bedroom person, the living room was not a necessary domain. This is where she would put in her best efforts to exercise her “if I am not using it, no one can” complex.
It started with an affront to the tiny bit of design aesthetic I was trying to introduce to what could only be described as her “words of encouragement” decor. I collect matchbooks from various bars and restaurants. My favorites include one from an NYC institution, JG Melon, which features a photo of a honeydew, and one from a no longer with us Los Feliz dive bar, Good Luck Bar, which is covered in drawings of Chinese lanterns. My unfavorites include one from Westville, a New York “farm-to-table” restaurant chain, which is white and says “Westville” on it in green (I have since used the matches from this matchbook and thrown the book away, enforcing the social contract that if you are not beautiful, you have to be useful). I decided I would place these matchbooks on the tray that was on the living room coffee table. The tray had a mirrored base, and this was my attempt at a charming, mid-century modern, fifth-season-of-Mad-Men-Don Draper/Megan Calvet-apartment vibe. Each matchbook was placed with purpose but intended to present the image that it had been casually tossed on the table after my lover had lit my cigarette, cupping his hands to protect the flame from the gusts caused by the whiplash between my reality and this fantasy (1) I am not a smoker and 2) having a lover is a way of life reserved for someone much more laid back than me, a bedroom person, perhaps). I would find that every time my roommate made her five minute, bi-weekly visit to the living room, the matchbooks were shoved into the sliver of space between the edge of the tray and a knick knack she had found with some platitute about friendship scrawled across it. Did she not understand that the matchbooks were not for utility, but to be observed? Had she not yet found the decorative plaque that taught the lesson “form over function?” For someone whose central pieces of decor proclaimed kindness and acceptance, this behavior seemed out of line.
It then progressed from shoving things out of sight to throwing them in the trash. I would sometimes leave things on the dining table. As a bedroom person, Ubel ate in her bedroom. Her bedroom was not within eyeshot of the dining room table. But she had a sixth sense. She could intuit, within about thirty seconds, when I had placed anything on the dining room table. It was magic. I would leave the living room, come back a few minutes later, and anything I had placed on the table was gone. It was as if she had to keep the table clear because Architectural Digest might come by at any moment to shoot a TJ Maxx advertorial called “Maxximizing Your Interior Design: Taking the ‘Persevere’ poster from ‘High School Computer Lab’ to ‘Chic Bachelorette Pad’.” Receipts, napkins (I am a napkin hoarder), plastic bags from my takeout, all into the trash. Not only was it annoying, but throwing a plastic bag (also referred to as MY LUNCH BOX for the rest of the week) into the trash was just irresponsible given the state of the environment. Unlike my subtle matchbook practice that I was too embarrassed to confront Ubel about, here I had sufficient grounds to push back. I needed that Bed, Bath and Beyond receipt for the humidifier I had no intention of returning. So I asked her what happened to it. She said she did not know, nary a shadow of guilt on her face. Needless to say, my comment did not stop her run as the best bus boy this side of the Mississippi.
I grew accustomed to the pangs of anger in my chest when she messed with my matchbooks or threw my paper and plastic products in the garbage, but then she did something unmistakably and unforgivably offensive: she bought a slip cover for the couch. This would not seem strange under normal circumstances but, here, she was flipping me the bird. Why this was offensive comes down to two factors: 1) she had a dog and 2) the cover’s material. The dog had lived in the apartment longer than me and had been allowed on the couch, sans cover. The cover came into the picture when I, a human who does not walk around on the streets of NYC barefoot, who bathes more frequently than a dog, and whose bare, unwiped ass is not coming in contact with the couch, entered the picture. The cover was a polyester, faux suede. You could sit on it for two minutes before it felt like your skin was simultaneously on fire and slick with enough sweat to extinguish said fire. This fabric had no business being anywhere except at the finish line of a marathon. Once we have mined all of the Earth’s aluminum, this fabric is the perfect substitute for a foil blanket. This was an attack. She had made it clear she did not want me on the couch and she had ensured I would not sit on it comfortably ever again. It was a strong move, almost enough to drive a person never to watch TV again.
If I was a bedroom person, it probably would have worked. But that was the thing Ubel did not understand. In a bedroom person’s mind, comfort is the number one priority. This is why they dwell in the bedroom. In the bedroom, you have complete control over your surrounds; comfort is a given. Nothing and no one enters the room unless you want it or them there. You can put your receipts wherever you want. You can choose every fabric present. You can hang a piece of shiplap painted blue that says “Here’s to the nights that turned into days with friends that turned into family.” That was the world Ubel lived in. A perfect little bubble. A living room person, on the other hand, lives in the puddle that forms when the bubble bursts. A living room person has had to contend with sofas eight inches too short for a good nap, siblings that take up multiple seats and force you to sit on the floor, and having to watch some British detective show on PBS instead of Thursday Night Comedy on NBC because you did not get to the TV fast enough. I did not need comfort. I just needed bedsheets that were cool to the touch when it was time to sleep. So I stayed in the living room to spite Ubel. And in case that defiance was too subtle for Ubel to detect, I did what any living room person does when they crave the same level of control as a bedroom person: I turned up the volume of the TV to a point that made both of us uncomfortable.