Roommates

[The following blog entry is a lot more journaly than most - but now that I've written it there's no point in scrapping the whole thing, so I apologize in advance.]

This morning I had the best run I've had in a long time. Right around my marathon, before and after, I had several amazingly bad runs, and almost no good runs. Somehow I got out of that slump a couple weeks ago, and the last two weeks have been great. But today was amazing - it's days like this that help me to remember why I love running when my enthusiasm is waning a bit. I ran longer than I anticipated - things were going so well as I got near the end of my run that I couldn't help but swing out onto University and extend the run by just a mile or so. I ran strong from beginning to end and had so much energy, and I was in the absolute best mood all morning.

It probably helped that last night and this morning were cooler than they have been for a couple weeks. The little Eddie Bauer indoor-outdoor temperature display I have on my desk has been registering 80+ degrees (indoors) when I wake up, even after a night with the window open and my fan blowing. Last night, though, I even pulled a cover on over my sheet at about five in the morning because my room had cooled down significantly. Before I left for my run I opened all the doors and windows upstairs, and when I returned home and made my oatmeal and sat down to eat breakfast I was almost (but not quite) cool enough to close one of the windows.

Sometimes while I am running I don't really think about much of anything except running and how I'm feeling and the scenery. Other times I think through some random topic (and occasionally that topic will turn into a blog entry at some point). Today for some reason I started thinking about roommates. And then I started counting the number of roommates I have had since I left home, um, seven years ago (yikes, that kind of dates me). I was surprised by the total - I feel like my roommate situation has been relatively consistent because throughout all of my undergraduate career and the first year of my graduate career I lived with various members of the same group of freshman-year friends. But then I've also lived through several transition periods, and have stuck around Provo without getting married or going on a mission longer than the others, and so if I factor in every single place I've lived (seven, or eight if you count moving from one apartment to another in the same complex), my total comes to 29 now. 29!

Admittedly, some of those were for a very short time. In Virginia I stayed at one house for just two weeks before I was able to move into a more permanent residence, so that almost doesn't count. And at the very end of my stay on the east coast two more roommates moved in for just a month so maybe they don't count either. And when I moved back to Provo I lived in Old Mill Condos for about six weeks before I was able to move into my current home so maybe that one shouldn't count (especially since I only saw two of my roommates a grand total of about three times each, quite literally - that was a very...interesting...roommate situation). But that still leaves the total at 21.

And amazingly I have never really had a bad roommate situation. I've had a strange roommate situation (that short time at Old Mill, when all my roommates had a tendency to lock themselves in their own rooms whenever they came home), and I've had a roommate situation where things got ugly between some of the other girls (cursing and shouting during general conference, ending in one roommate storming out of the house and then moving a very short time later - very exciting), but I've always been happy with my roommates. Even the ones I didn't choose. In fact, especially some of the ones I didn't choose.

Somehow I've always been blessed, in every place I've lived for longer than two months, to have at least one roommate with whom I've really bonded. That wasn't really a surprise during my undergraduate career because I knew everyone I moved in with. But things have been a lot more up in the air since then and have worked out incredibly. Right before I moved out to Virginia to teach high school one of my Provo roommates ran into another girl (JW) at work who was doing the same thing and took down her number. The place I moved to had room for someone else, and so I called up JW and gave her the contact information. In the end, JW became the best friend I had in Virginia. We moved back to Utah about the same time, and are still in touch (in fact, I was the one who first introduced her to her husband, although I never imagined that that they would ever get married...).

Then my first year back I moved in with two of my best friends in Provo and amazingly bonded most with the third roommate, who none of us knew beforehand. She and I had very little in common, superficially (other than a passion for Boggle), and maybe in the end that's why we got along so fabulously. And in the end that turned out to be a very good thing as both my other roommates proceeded to get engaged and then married over the course of the year.

And finally this last year after a complete upheaval (two marriages and a mission left the rest of the house empty and ready to be filled) T* moved in, and saved my sanity on more than one occasion. She's gone for the summer, and my insanely purple roommate sort of fills the space - I don't know that I will ever consider her one of my best friends, but she's one of my favorite people, and we have fun living together. And once she likes you, she likes you and you never have to worry about losing her good favor - I love that. It took me awhile to figure her out, but after living with her for nearly a year I understand her a lot better than I did at the beginning of the year (and interestingly, learning about Peircian personalities and being able to identify her as a purple as explained so much), and now I just love her.

Anyway, when I move next year I will have just one roommate for the very first time every. I mean, I've lived with one roommate for very short periods of time, but never for an entire year. I already know her (housing just kind of fell into my lap) and I like her and I think I will like living with her. But I sometimes find myself wondering if my good roommate luck will run out on me. I always kind of hoped that I will find myself a permanent roommate before that happened :). And on occasion I've considered the possibility of living by myself. I would love to have my own kitchen, my own living space, a place to retreat when I feel the need. And as much as my mother may worry, I need people enough that I almost think living alone would propel me to be more social, rather than causing me to retreat from the world.

But in the end I kind of like having someone around when I come home.