Check This Out!

My roommate, the creative composer, fabulous (classical) guitarist, amazing editor, fantastic chef, among other things, has added a new incredible skill to his repertoire: Flash designer/programmer.

Check out his website at www.grantdamron.com to see all but the cooking skills. And if you need someone to write some music, play the guitar, edit sound, or design/program in Flash, please get in touch.

Quadruple Fives

Tonight, Grant and his brother were playing backgammon while I researched Ayurvedic stuff on the internet. His brother was completely smoking him and had about one roll left before the game was over. On Grant's next turn he yelled out "quadruple fives!" His brother responded, "if you get it, you win." So Grant took his brother's dice, shook all four together in his hands, and lo and behold... he actually rolled quadruple fives. Someone please comment on the probability of that happening and don't forget to factor in that he called it.

I wonder what else he knows...

Pitta Kapha

My roommate has spent a considerable amount of time in Nepal and a considerable amount of time dreaming he is in India (he's traveled there too, but not as intensely as the Nepal time). That brings with it certain knowledge and interest. One, of course is Bollywood, which I will not get into now. The other is the Ayurveda.

There are three body types or Doshas in the Ayurveda: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. Everyone is a combination of all three, but most people will have a pretty clear front runner. Many will also be in the middle of two, though that's not discussed in the websites I've visited tonight. It's in the book.

You can take a quiz here. I've looked at a few online and this one seems to be the most flexible and therefore most telling. It's kind of fun just for the novelty, but it's also really interesting to see the ancient wisdom and how that works. I thought about trying to change my diet and lifestyle to be more congruent with what I "should" be eating according to my body type, but haven't been able to change quite that much yet. Maybe that will be my next habit (or habit breaking).

Curiouser and Curiouser

The woman I live with is a piece of work.

When I decided to live with her, people said "Chrystina, if there's anyone who can live with someone so different, it's you." Which I took with a fairly large grain of salt because I knew I was getting myself into some crazy shit. As it turns out, Lady X has managed to find someone perhaps even better suited to it than I am to live with her. When I told Lady X that I was leaving, she found my replacement in a day and he moved in the next day (to the guest room). Luckily, we get along and we'll now be singing together in a choir. More on that later...

Here are some clips from my life in the last two months:

• She's lived here for over 30 years--and you can tell. I don't know how many roommates she's had, but I've heard of at least 10 of them. However, the doormen tell me that no one really lives here for more than 3-4 months. I'm not setting any records with 2 months. She apparently kicked a guy out after a month because he opened the door and he was stark naked.
  

• She smoked for 40 years--up to as many as 5 packs a day. And the yellow ceiling in the kitchen can attest to that.

• I know you're wondering if there are any cats involved. I can thankfully tell you no on that one. However, if there had been a cat, that might have been the straw that broke this camel's back before I got into it. Oh well. Live and learn. Write blog posts.

• She likes to teach Asians. The reasons she lists are: They worship the ground the teacher walks on. They work themselves to the bone. And I think they "like me because I'm short". (So.... smart, hard working people like short teachers. Right.)

• She's constantly dropping the names of people who were famous in her world, but are entirely unknown to me. The only one I've ever recognized from her stories of her fancy friends is Aaron Copland--and he was admittedly just an acquaintance.

• She gets psychotically angry and sullen when I don't put my keys in the tray by the door.

• Once, when I mentioned something about if I change my Boston cell phone number, she corrected me with "when". I then made the mistake of explaining that I might not change it and she went ballistic telling me that I was "cutting off half the world" by not changing it.
  

• One time, I was walking in the door and I said hello, mentioned something about the paper she was reading, and then my phone rang. Since it was the girl who I am now going to live with and I didn't want to miss it, I excused myself and took the call in the other room. Then, graciously, I went back to talk to Lady X. By that point she was enraged that I had ignored her to take a call. I let her know that the call was important and I didn't mean to be so rude. She was not convinced and acted like I was the world's biggest bitch for taking a phone call. She topped it off with "so she's more important than me?"
  

• She refuses to call my new neighborhood anything other than in the Lower East Side when it's squarely in the East Village because she thinks I'll take it as an insult. She also constantly reminds me how very far away it is from the subway--it's 0.25 mi from the subway, which is .05 mi longer than her walk to the express stop.

• Lately, she's been clearing out her summer wardrobe to make room for the next season. With that task, she's decided to give away several shirts and other clothes. Since, strangely, we wear approximately the same shirt size, she's given me several of them. I knew better than to just say no, but as it turns out, I actually like them, and she loves it when I wear them. They're funny, but I kind of like funny.
  

• She (even though she was mad about the keys and such) just came over to offer me a box for the move.
  

And then she's nice. It's just so weird. She really is a nice person, but I don't think she's been treated very nicely all her life. She's a little out there and definitely had eccentric parents, so who knows which is the chicken or the egg, but she's more than I can handle and I'm glad to be out of it as of next Monday.

Vegetarian Who Doesn't Eat Vegetables

My mom used to call me names when I was in highschool because I apparently didn't eat vegetables--and I called myself a vegetarian (but still managed to stay away from meat). Well, I am living with a variation on a theme. My 55-year-old Bronx-born, Italian Catholic, 5-foot-tall roommate (soon to be former roommate), is the English as a Second Language teacher who doesn't like foreigners.

It doesn't matter how often I tell her that it's offensive to me that she makes such blanket statements about what she perceives as a well-defined ethnic group (generally the HiPANics--she likes to draw out the middle syllable in a way only a native New Yorker can). It doesn't matter that I remind her from time to time that she lives with a Mexican. In fact, she corrected me and told me that my family was actually from Spain. Um, well, yeah...kinda like your family is from Italy. None of this matters. She doesn't stop.

And just today, she's telling me about her friend's class of "Nasty Rusky's" that think ESL is their conversation hour and they don't want to learn English Grammar.

When you can keep her off the subject of people from other cultures (not often), she really is a fine person. A little talkative, and completely self-absorbed, but generally ok. However, on the topic of people she thinks she doesn't like, she can be downright nasty.

Baby Seals

Today, my (55-year-old) roommate, we'll call her Lady X, told me that her uncle (when he was 7) once managed to take a baby seal out of the Bronx Zoo, bring it home, and stick it in the bathtub without anyone noticing or at least doing anything about it until the police came to knock on the door during dinner. Only in New York. (At that time (approx the 1930s) the Bronx was, as Lady X puts it, rural.)