Despertar

stylish and hip

Speaking of deodorant, my brother and I were bored in the car last week, so we started playing the Questions Game. On my turn, I asked him to estimate how many times, in his entire post-adolescent life, he has forgotten to put on deodorant before leaving the house.

"I'm not answering that," he said. "That's stupid."

I took it back, agreeing that it was a stupid question, and we sat in silence for about five minutes.

After five minutes, Chad broke the silence. "Two," he said, without looking at me. "Two times."

"Me too," I said.

As it turned out, we both remembered the exact times in vivid detail, right down to what we were wearing, how miserable we were and what tremendous steps we took to avoid shaming ourselves on those days. We agreed that there can't be any feeling more paranoid and anxious than going through an entire day knowing you aren't wearing deodorant.

*

My new roommate is a boy. It's the first time I've ever lived with a boy. He's technically a man, but he looks like a boy. His face looks like a cross between Fogell from Superbad and a Gelfling, he's at least three inches shorter than I am and he's small enough to wear tapered, stonewashed jeans that he has to have owned since the early nineties.

That said, he is chivalrous and gentlemanly, which is nice. This arrangement is a far cry from the increasingly bitchy one I had going with my girl roommate, who is gone for the semester. Here are the chief differences between living with a girl and living with a boy, from what I have gleaned over the past week (realizing, of course, that these aren't universal differences, actually just differences between living with this guy and living with all the girls I've lived with since college):

1. It's never my turn to take out the garbage. When he first moved in, I took him on a quick tour of the building, including the dumpster, which, as luck would have it, is at the furthest possible point from my end-of-the-hallway apartment. I was nervous and being overly chatty, so I included that detail in the tour: "Yeah, this is the dumpster. As you can see, it's as far away from our apartment as you can possibly get without actually leaving the building." Which he noted, obviously, because ever since then he has kindly taken out the trash every single day, without being asked, and has declined my two offers to do it myself once or twice.

2. I don't have to worry about anyone's dirty dishes but my own. Valerie and I, who can both be kind of slobs, went through every possible dish system we could think of in hopes of landing on one that yielded a clean kitchen at least some of the time. We tried alternating months, alternating weeks, switching duties so that one person washed and one person dried, switching duties on alternating months, switching duties on alternating weeks and silently, passive-aggressively ignoring the dishes till we ran out of clean ones and got into fights about them. When we moved into this new apartment, which has a dishwasher, we thought it would be easier, but it wasn't, because there was still the problem of which of us would load the dishwasher and which would put the clean dishes away. Finally, we came up with what we called The System, which worked as follows: Each person was responsible for immediately handling her own dishes after using them to the greatest extent possible. In addition, each month was assigned to one of us as a catchall month. That is, if it was my month, and Val used a plate but didn't have time to load it into the dishwasher, or if the dishwasher was full and she didn't have time to run it or unload it, she could leave it in the sink free of guilt and I would take care of it. Also, if it was my month, I was responsible for running and unloading the dishwasher, so that the former situation occurred as infrequently as possible. Needless to say, The System was full of holes and never worked, and we ended up with a dirty kitchen all the time. This new roommate doesn't seem to eat, so he doesn't generate any dishes, and the only ones I have to do are the ones I dirty. Which results in my using, like, half as many dishes as I ordinarily would, because I am much more acutely aware of how many I'm going to have to wash later.

3. I can close my door if I don't feel like talking and not worry that I'm hurting someone's feelings. I don't think it even occurs to guys that they should give a shit if some roommate doesn't want to debrief her whole day every single day. With Val, I had to literally pretend to be asleep if I reeeeally didn't feel like talking, or, more often, listening.

4. The bills get paid on time, and I don't have to threaten murder to get reimbursed for half. But maybe that's just the difference between living with Val/living with any other, financially responsible, person.

*

The walls are really thin in this apartment. When Val was here, and dating, I routinely heard her faking orgasms. Even when she was in her own bedroom and I was in mine, and both our doors were closed. One time, I happened to be standing in the kitchen making dinner, which is adjacent to her bedroom, when she was hosting some guy in there, and I heard every word of her conversation with the guy about how she hoped he was better in bed than the last guy she had dated. (I asked her later whether she could ever hear me, and she said no, she never hears anything after she takes her nightly sleeping pill. Fabulous.)

My new roommate, who is gay, has a boyfriend who lives in a suburb about twenty minutes away. He came over to help with move-in stuff, and he's spent about three nights here since then.

The second time he came over, they had sex in the bedroom. The third time he came over, they did it in my roommate's bathroom. I know these things because I happened to be home both times, and, with the walls as thin as they are, blah blah blah, you get it. This was my first more-or-less firsthand experience with sex between two men, not counting chance encounters with gay porn, and I had a meta sort of moment surrounding it, standing in the kitchen thinking about it, and thinking about the fact that I was thinking about it, and wondering whether I was violating my own principles by thinking about it, because actively thinking about it would suggest it was somehow more noteworthy than my former roommate's heterosexual sex, which I went out of my way to ignore. I don't care who anyone has sex with, so why was I wasting mental energy on it?

My brain quieted when I realized it wasn't because I especially cared, but rather because I was just sort of assimilating these new sensory experiences, adding them to my existing file of Things I Know. Here's someThing new I Know: Sex between two men, for reasons outside the obvious, is fundamentally different than sex between a man and a woman, or two women.

Here are the chief differences between boy/boy sex and boy/girl sex, as I have gleaned from my very limited experience comparing the two:

1. It sounds different. I never would have guessed how significantly this changes the experience for the accidental voyeur. Men don't make a lot of noise during sex, generally (except, apparently, when there are two of them)--obnoxious orgasmic hollering tends to be the responsibility of the penetratee--so girl/girl sex sounds like girl/boy sex, pretty much. Boy/boy sex does not! Who would have known? And please, I don't want to give the impression that I was standing around actively voyeuristically listening, or anything--I wasn't. Just like with Val, as soon as they crescendoed into an audible range, I hightailed it into my bedroom, closed the door and turned up the TV as high as it would go without deafening me. But those first few noises were a solid basis for comparison.

2. It smells different, which, don't worry, I'm not going to go there. But my roommate, I had already discovered, wears Versace Blue Jeans, which I recognized immediately because it happens to be my favorite fragrance on a guy. I smell it on him every time we pass each other in the hallway, and sometimes it lingers in his bathroom after he leaves. His boyfriend wears Guess Man, which I didn't recognize, but learned by asking yesterday. After the first time they had sex, I was talking to my roommate in the foyer, and I realized, offhandedly, that he smelled like both Versace Blue Jeans and Guess Man. Which seems obvious and, again, not worth noting. Like, duh. But what I've noticed is that, when I wear a girl fragrance and Justin wears a boy fragrance, and our fragrances interact, we each come away smelling blank. They cancel each other out, or something, his musks and my fruits. My roommate, on the other hand, smelled doubly masculine. Like two different people standing side by side.

*

The boyfriend said, "Which, mine? Oh, it's Guess Man. It's so old, though, you can't even get it at the Guess store, anymore. You have to get it at, like, CVS."

My roommate chimed in, "Yeah, same thing with mine. After Versace released the new one, they don't even market this one anymore."

The boyfriend laughed. "So I guess the economy is telling us it's time to change colognes."

I said, "I like how they smell together." Meaning, not in a boundary-overstepping sex-meaning kind of way, just, the smells we were collectively smelling sitting around in the living room.

My roommate and his boyfriend exchanged a look and said, I swear to God in unison, "So do we."

"You could bottle that and sell it at CVS," I said. They laughed, thank God. "And you could call it...um..."

"J and J's Sign of the TImes," said the boyfriend. "Exclusively for the forward-thinking and very tolerant."

"I'd buy it," I said.

I felt very hip. Which probably means I'm totally not.