Next Two Years in This Room

I haven't lived in the same room for more than a year since high school. Before college, my little brother and I shared a room in our basement. We called it the cave because it has no windows. I could sleep forever there, but not like death. Like, unless someone wakes me up I will not wake up because I have no concept of time in that dark little box. But since then I've been passed around, from dorm room to breezeway to master bedroom to the shoebox I lived in this past year. It wasn't really a shoebox; we just called it that because when I was reading my roommates would throw dress shoes at me and yell, "I want to see my face in the toe when you're finished!" They love to kid. But usually they weren't kidding.

I just moved into my new house in Ft. Worth. Did you know Ft. Worth is one big subdivision? This may or may not be true but all I've seen of the city so far has been a tollway and these five alternating house plans. My fraternity BYX owns one of these houses; it's the big kind. Along with all the normal stuff there's a tea room, an office with five desks, and a war room covered with whiteboards. Next year I'll be working from the house. I chose the middle upstairs room because it had the shortest commute to my desk.

I'm in meetings all day with the staff who run the fraternity. As a college student, I only saw these men when something went wrong. Whenever our chapter went off the reservation - and that happened every time we went to Oklahoma - they would come for a chat. I think most chapters associate the staff with these bad things, with friction or rules or that homeless man who lived under my bed. I told my parents about him but they said I was imagining things. Did I imagine our cat into the microwave? No - I put her there, because the man under my bed told me to do so.

These guys are funny. I haven't really gauged everyone's humor yet, so I haven't said anything racist more than twice, but they're funny. And they're my roommates. Before this weekend I hadn't seen the house or meet the guys I would live with. That's like seeing a movie before the preview, or signing up for a potluck roommate your freshman year and ending up with Thomas Tyler Bennett. We didn't talk much after he stole my nail clippers in November, but when I moved out in the spring I found them under my bed and had to write TTB an apology letter.

I'm only here for a few more days, but I'm settling in. I already hate the dog, and I feel like that means I have a place in the house. I'm the resident dog hater. My roommates said they needed another one because the last one just moved out.