Okay, everyone out there in internet-land….. Where, oh where, have all the good roomates gone? With the help of my best friend, Mr. Internet, I’ve recently been searching for a new place to live. I have a couple of criteria that restrict my search:

Restriction #1: I’m broke. I love the idea of having my own little studio apartment to myself, but most of those run at about $800 a month, and my budget is only about $500 a month. Sigh.

Restriction #2: I have no car. My little Thunderbird that I bought two years ago decided to crack a cylinder head, despite all the love and care my boyfriend and I had given her. I know, it’s depressing. I’m twenty-five years old, and I’m tootling around this city on the same bike I used in junior high. I console myself by saying that it’s good for the environment, and that I’ll have a taut, toned little bikini body come summertime (*snort*..yeah, right!), but it doesn’t really help. So, I have to narrow my apartment search to within a couple miles of school, and that does NOT help with restriction number one.

You know what? In the interest of not being picky, I’m not even worrying about whether or not the potential roomate(s) are female. Of course, I have NO idea how I’m going to explain it to my family if I end up moving in with a couple of guy roomates, but I’ll worry about that later. Yes, I know it looks bad. Yes, I know it’s a bad idea. Oh, well. I’ve made worse decisions in my life. And hey, if I do end up with a male roomate(s), I’ll never have to worry about the pickle jar being stuck, right?

Anyways, moving on… So, with those two restrictions, I have been scouring craigslist, rent.com, and the recycler for rental apartments. Now, I figured that after a couple days of searching, I might have a couple of leads. It makes sense, right? I live in a huge city… how hard can it be?

Ha. I should have known. I am going to let all of you in on a secret: APPARENTLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IS A PARTYING, POT-SMOKING NUDIST.

Well, maybe it’s not EVERY single person, but it’s definitely every single person I’ve come across. I’m thinking of helping people out with this one. It’s kind of like the personal ads…. With personal ads, things always have a secret meaning. For instance:

“Weight proportional to height” means that the person is fat
“Mature” means that they’re getting ready to move into a senior citizen’s home.
“Fun-loving” means that they’re probably crawling with every STD known to man.

You get the point. So, here’s my new dictionary for searching for rentals.

Easy-going/laid-back atmosphere = If you can see the kitchen through all the pot smoke in the living room, consider yourself lucky. Of course they’re laid-back. They also have red-rimmed eyes and the munchies.

Fun-loving = Oh, were you planning on sleeping? So sorry. In order to find your way to the bedroom, you’re going to have to thread your way through the undulating bodies of all the dancing, drunken strangers. Of course, once you’re there you’ll probably have to kick out whatever couple has decided to “make sexy-time” in the relative privacy of your bedroom. Once you’re in your bed, be prepared to stare at the ceiling and listen to the walls vibrate with the bass until 4 am. Congratulations! You live in a party-house!

Almost Never Home = Yes, they are. EVERYONE claims that they’re never home. They’re never home, they work long hours, they’re away on weekends…In fact, after you’ve read through the ads for a while, it hits you. Why are these people even bothering to pay rent at all? If they’re really home as little as they claim, couldn’t they just catch a quick nap on a park bench somewhere, and avoid the whole renting mess?

Shared Room/Rent Free = Congratulations! If you answer this ad, this makes you a bona-fide mistress/prostitute! Has anyone EVER answered these ads in the affirmative? And for goodness sakes, this is CALIFORNIA. You don’t actually expect women to believe that a good-looking, clean, respectful, rich man is having such a hard time finding female companionship that they resort to renting out their room to an insta-girlfriend? Sheesh. We’re more likely to believe that your weight really IS proportional to your height, or that you really DO love long walks on the beach.

Nudist = This is probably the only claim that I believe, right off the bat. And you know what? It’s gross. I do NOT want to be sharing an aparment with someone who’s wandering around in their birthday suit. Think about it— they sit on the sofa nekkid, and they don’t even put a towel down first? What if they sit on the arm of the sofa? And then, later on, I rest my head where their… their… their “stuff” just was? No, thank you.

Smoke-free = Hey, do you guys want to know something really cool? Smoking pot really isn’t smoking! No, seriously! There are TONS of smoke-free apartments out there that ABSOLUTELY HATE smoking…. but they smoke pot. Oh, don’t worry… they also burn a lot of incense to cover up the smell of the pot smoke, so it’s not a problem. Excuse me? Let me see if I’ve got that straight… you don’t smoke, and you don’t want to rent to someone who DOES smoke… but you burn little sticks so that they’ll produce a LOT of smoke, in order to cover up the smoke from the still-illegal drugs that you smoke? Yeah, that makes a LOT of sense to me.

Must love cats/dogs = Run. Run away from this apartment, right now, as fast as you can go. Because if they’ve moved from “pet-friendly” to “must love”, then please understand that your new roomate will ALWAYS believe the dog/cat over you. Oh, so sorry… did Poopsie-poo chew up your shoes? Well, you should be ashamed of yourself! Those shoes gave her little tum-tums indigestion, and she threw up… and now you owe half of the vet bill it took to calm her back down.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit on some of these, but come on!!! I’ve been looking for days now, and all I’ve found are the dregs of society. Where do these people hide when I’m not apartment-searching? I’m scared that by the time I finish searching, I’ll be completely burnt-out on the human race.
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