My name is Lee and I live in a four bedroom apartment in Washington, DC. It's a cheap apartment in a nice, very convenient neighborhood (Van Ness). Unfortunately, the apartment gets very little natural light, is pretty small, and there's a compressor or something similar that goes on at odd hours and shakes the wall behind my room. On the plus side, we do have 2 bathrooms. One of the bathrooms is even bigger than our tiny kitchen, and features a shower and tub. Unfortunately, the other bathroom just smells weird from the pipes and we don't use it too often.
It's in this apartment that my roommates and I have created our little world. It's a similar story to many others. We're two males and two females, all in our early twenties and either just starting our careers or in grad school. None of us are from the area originally. None of us knew each other before we moved in. We met due to a wonderful little website called craigslist. We don't really hang out together, but are for the most part civil to each other when more than one person is here.
That's why it's great to write each other notes. I might not see Kelly for a week, but if I go to Whole Foods and buy too many apples, I can just place the following note on the counter:
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Figure 1:
"Free Apples!" |
I think Kelly knows that I went to
Beloit College. If not, she might recognize my one-day-will-probably-be-a-lawyer handwriting and think: "Oh, Lee bought apples and is sharing them. Isn't that nice of him!"
About half of the notes that we put up in my apartment fall into the free food category. The other half are reminders to take care of things, mostly cleaning. The place is pretty small like I said, and it can get dirty if we don't watch it. Here's a note illustrating that:
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Figure 2:
"Please be sure to wipe down the counter and stove top after
you finish cooking in order to help us keep the bugs out!" |
That's a nice way of reminding everyone to do their part, isn't it? Our building does have some bug problems. But sometimes you need to be a bit more firm, like, say, when your male roommate (who is not the writer of this blog), uses an electric razor somewhere other than his face, and leaves the trimmings everywhere, and you don't want to touch that shit with a ten foot pole, but eventually you have to because he leaves it there:
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Figure 3:
"Please clean all hair and toothpaste out of the sink after using.
All trash and hair needs to be thrown in the trash! Everyone
needs to help keep this bathroom clean!" |
Ah yes. It's this male roommate who inspired me to create this blog. You see, many times it seems like him and I are the only two people home together. But I hardly ever get a knock on my door when he needs something from me. Instead, he'll write me a nice little passive-aggressive note, that indicates his frustration with the way things are going at the current time. I won't say too many more bad things about him. I'll just let the notes speak for themselves as they come. Here's one from almost two months ago. It's a gem that is kept up in the kitchen:
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Figure 4:
"We all must do our part to keep this apt. clean; dishes are very
much central to this effort. Please don't leave any more
sink-fulls-of dirty dishes.
7-24 Jeremy" |
Now, might I just say that I am the reason that this note was written. At about 10:30 PM on the night of Friday, July 23rd I was feeling sick and tired and hungry and baked some fish in the oven. Because I was feeling sick, I decided to leave the dishes in the sink until the next day. When I got up late the next morning, the sink was clean and I found the note. Might I just say that I was actually going to clean up the mess I left when I got up, but I heard J-dawg in the kitchen and wanted to avoid going into it, one, because it was him in there, and two, because our kitchen is really too small for two people to be in it to begin with. Oh, also--I didn't hear a word from the note writer that night, even though he knew I was up until about 1AM (because he was too). I also wanted to point out the "take no prisoners" attitude that the semicolon gives this note. It totally lets you know that he knows grammar and thusly that he also means business.
Before I finish this first post, I also wanted to address one more thing. That is, I know that similar sites exist. There is already the site
Notes to My Roommate and there is already the blog
PassiveAggressiveNotes.com. That being said, Notes to my Roommate is completely anonymous and is for people who want to paste virtual notes to their roommate where they will never see them. Chances are they'll never see them if they're posted here, but this is for the real deal. PassiveAggressiveNotes.com isn't exclusively made of roommate notes, and I also don't intend for this site to just be filled with passive aggressive things either. I want this site to be a niche in and of itself, and I also thought of it without ever seeing those two other sites before. Maybe once this blog has been around for awhile I can get a book deal too.
Finally, I know this has been a long first post but let me say that I will
post the EPIC NOTE that actually inspired me to create this blog next time. I also can't run this blog just on the crap that gets put up in my own apartment, so please send me your notes at
notesfrommyroommate@gmail.com.
