The Odd Couple

By Mink

Well, I have been sharing my thoughts and mental illnesses on this blog for over a year now but for some reason I have yet to really write about my current living partner. Benito and I are going on 18 months now (which I believe is generally accepted as the absolute cut-off for any prohibition for flatulence-in-public between couples). Like a true married couple we eat dinner to Scrubs re-runs, wear matching green "going out t-shirts," and ask each other if we look obese in certain articles of clothing. He even makes me waffles on Sunday mornings! (a real keeper, I know).

More importantly we are about as opposite as Michael Richards and Martin Luther King. (Editor's Tangent: I was watching a Seinfeld re-run the other day and was very worried that Kramer's real life tirade would taint my enjoyment. But to my surprise, the experience went better than expected. I kind of likened it to a hypothetical scenario where I would walk in on a female guest sitting on the toilet at a dinner party hosted by my parents. Upon her return to the table, it would certainly be awkward but then at a certain point I would probably realize that this person is friends with my parents and that I would thus be required to block out the unfortunate imagery and act as if nothing happened. I would then resume socializing with this lady and maybe even laugh at her jokes. Similarly, about 5 minutes into Seinfeld, the characters and I were cool and I was enjoying all the jokes to the fullest. In sitcom world, Kramer is pals with Jerry, George and Elaine and for that I must pretend like nothing happened in the real world.)

Ok that was a long digression. The point is Benito and I are the Odd Couple. He folds his clothes neatly; I use my bathroom floor as a hamper. He has a daily workout regimen; I have a daily Entenmanns eating regimen. He is handy and is known in the D.C. area for his satisfying wall-jobs (he builds dry-walls for people's apartments); I am not handy and make immature sexual jokes about wall-jobs.

The point is that while we generally get along great, my roommate is shall we say Type A and I am shall we say somewhere around Type T (on the lesser known A-Z scale). I will illustrate this with the recent incident of the missing apples:

I rarely purchase apples but for some reason one Sunday night I decided to act healthy and purchase a few for the upcoming work week. Unbeknownst to me, Benito made a similar decision the day before, although there was a glaring difference in the grade and quality of our respective apple selections. Whereas I picked out some standard yellow/green-bruised-dirt covered granny apples from Shoppers, the Type-A roommate spent his Saturday night at Wegman's where he carefully hand-selected some shinny-red-Grade-A candies of nature.

On Monday morning, I went to grab some food for my lunch and decided to take the whole batch of my apples to leave in my office fridge. Being my absent-minded self, I obviously had no recollection of the color of the apples, whichI had purchased less than 8 hours before. I grabbed a bag of 5 red apples, thought nothing of it, and headed to work. At lunch, I excitedly washed an apple off and ate it after finishing my standard cheese sandwich. I then offered some of the remaining ones to several co-workers. Fortunately, only one person took me up on the offer. So I was down to 3 shiny-red-roommate-apples.

Fast forward to Tuesday morning. I woke up about an hour after my roommate and headed to the bathroom for the morning pee. With my contacts not yet in my eyes, I glanced over at the mirror and noticed the following message on 2 post-it-notes:

Matter of Life and Death.......I think you took my apples. Please return, I don't want your yellow shitty apples. I want my red ones for tomorrow. They're from Wegman's. Thanks,

Hate,
Benji


My bad, my bad. Ben is now vacationing out of the country and I am home alone with only some deformed yellow "shitty" apples to keep me company.