Warning: I feel time-capsule-y

I was planning to write about my random hygiene-related musings in this blog entry (every Tuesday and Thursday, have you noticed the pattern yet?) but I have decided to give it up for a better, more conversational, topic. If anyone feels cheated by this change, I have included my bathroom musings down at the bottom of this entry.

My new, debatably more interesting subject is the joy and whimsy of a first apartment. This topic is not wholly arbitrary; I spent time over the weekend helping or rather, watching other people help, my sister move into her first apartment. She had all of the signs of first apartment glee. She didn’t seem to mind lifting or cleaning and her knickknacks were arranged long before the furniture was assembled. After hours of exposure to this, my live-in friend and I (two jaded apartment dwellers with too many books to view moving as anything less than torture) both felt compelled to reminisce about our first apartments. We talked about it all the way home and on Monday at work when I overheard a customer giving a familiar Davis address I nearly jumped out of my skin.

As the man backed away from the counter folding his receipt, I rushed forward to take his place.

“I used to live there,” I burst out, already cataloging the stories that I could tell, if politely prompted, about my years there and the Hong Kongese restaurant across the street. My exclamation met with little reaction and no inquiries so I attempted to throttle back my sense of cosmic rendezvous.

“I mean,” I clarified with no small amount of effort. “I used to live in that guy’s complex.”

Bad roommate experiences aside, I think everyone – even content roomies who just signed another year’s lease in the soul-suck suburbs – is a little nostalgic for their first apartment. My live-in companion grew misty-eyed talking about his; he discussed drinking 6-packs of snooty beer while watching French films and I cringed, thinking of our daily fare of orange juice and sitcoms.

I think that it is that possibility, the possibility of chugging 6-packs and watching your own weird shit, which makes your first apartment so glorious. When I talk about my first apartment in this context I skip three years of in-room roommates and get right to the nitty-gritty. (Because having a roommate is a perpetual state of compromise or involuntary socializing – a special state that you never realize that you are in until you have left it forevermore.) When I had my first single-room, indifferent-roommate apartment I didn’t drink 6-packs of beer; I ate egg sandwiches at my computer every night. I rented period pieces from the video rental place; I read novels with my feet propped up on the walls for hours at a time.

There is nothing that keeps me from having an egg sandwich (dripping the delicious crumbs into my keyboard tray or into the novel that I keep pushing open with my elbow) but it wouldn’t be the same. There is something special about having only yourself to please; that’s why I love having an evening to myself to read novels and eat cheese whiz, though I would classify myself as mildly codependent.

I remember the acute joy that I got from tidying my room when I knew that I was going to have someone over. I would straighten my bookshelf, set my rented DVDs neatly on the desk (most impressive DVD faced outward, of course), and leave a few tea cups lying around to show how hard I’d been working. The whole thing seems amazingly time-capsule-y at this (admittedly reflective and melodramatic) moment.

PROMISED THOUGHTS WHILE BRUSHING MY TEETH:

- I wish I was coordinated enough to apply deodorant while brushing my teeth;

- I wish that my hair didn’t fall so often into the range of my toothpaste spit; and

- I really enjoy it when I have lots of bathroom supplies stockpiled under my sink. Extra razors make me feel so prepared.