Independence Day

I spent this past Fourth of July moving to a new place, because the symbolism of my freedom from Evil Roommate falling on the same day as America's freedom from the supposed tyranny of British rule was just too good to pass up. And also because the long holiday weekend enabled my parents to fly out here to help me. This is very important when you have furniture that, despite being mostly from IKEA, is heavy and not possible to move on one's own. Here's how it all went down:

Evil Roommate didn't come home one night, which was not especially unusual or notable until he called me the next day to report that he had spent the night in jail after being arrested for drunk driving. He did not call me at the time of his arrest because the police took away his cell phone, which had all the phone numbers he knew stored on it, including the one to HIS OWN HOME. That's right -- he doesn't even know his own phone number, for which he pays half the phone bill to maintain. Anyway, the next morning, his place of work noticed his abscence and wondered if it had anything to do with letting him leave the bar they were partying at the night before and drive home drunk off his ass. Someone took the initiative to call around to local hospitals and police stations until he was finally located. If they had not done this, Evil Roommate may still be in jail today, because he has no sense. It should also be noted that, had the police not pulled him over, Evil Roommate would probably be dead today, taking any number of innocent people out with him, because this was the only way he was going to learn his goddamn lesson, although that remains to be seen. He know puts his too-drunk-to-drive mark at ten beers (before it was twenty, I believe), and still thinks that, despite the fact that his BAC was twice the legal limit and he was swerving on a highway that he still doesn't remember why he was on, since it wasn't on his way home, he was still driving safely when he was pulled over. He gets his license back in a few weeks. Watch out, Los Angeles!

A few days later, after enduring several speeches (some angry, some tearful) from me about the dangers and stupidity of drunk driving and the dangers and stupidity of being friends with people who had no qualms about letting others drunk drive, Evil Roommate informed me that the ranch he works at was offering him a room in their barn for free. Since the DUI fine and doubled car insurance rates would make it almost impossible for him to pay rent, and the revocation of his license would make it impossible for him to get to work (yes, I know you can get a provisional license. No, he didn't want to bother with all that), he had decided to move out. This left me slightly upset for the following reasons:

1. I was planning on moving out on him because this was not the first time his alcohol abuse had affected the lives of people around him (namely me, who had to fish him out of his bathtub after finding him passed out in it at three in the morning, faucet running and drain thankfully unplugged, and thinking he was dead for a good five minutes until he finally woke up and started speaking to me in rapid Spanish), and now he had gotten the drop on me, which is annoying.

and,

2. He wanted to move out at the end of May, and meaning that I would either have to cancel a trip home to see my brother graduate from college and my grandparents visiting from England, or pay double rent for the month of June, giving me enough time to go back to Connecticut and then get a new apartment when I got back to California.

In the end, I decided not to let Evil Roommate's arrest affect any more innocent people than it had to, so I went home to see my family and we were all very happy. And then I came back to Los Angeles and freaked out because I now had to pay double rent and look for a studio apartment that was both safe and affordable. Plus, Evil Roommate decided that, since I was still living in our apartment and he still had the keys to the place, he would just not move any of his stuff out until he had to, so his furniture was still in my apartment, taunting me. And, of course, he hadn't cleaned his bathroom before leaving, which was to be expected since he hadn't cleaned it EVER in the year and a half since we moved in. It took me two days to clean that bathroom, and I saw things in those two days that no one should ever see, let alone describe to her readers. I wanted to sell all his crap off to try to make some of that double rent money back, but I ended up chickening out and letting him in a week later to get his mattress so he could sell it to some ranch guy for two hundred and fifty dollars. I also let a friend of his, who had given him a ton of furniture to borrow, in to get her stuff back before it disappeared forever. Everything else, I either took with me to my new place, like the television and the pots and pans, or just left there for the next tenant to deal with, like the furniture.

Next time on L.A.me:

Can Sara, her parents, and her non-red-meat-eating friend move all of her possessions without throwing out their backs or getting yelled at by the neighbors? Does Evil Roommate actually live in a barn now, surrounded by hay bales and horses, like Pam thinks? The answer to one of these questions is "no."