There’s nothing more pleasant than waking up at 2 a.m. to the sound of a large Asian man banging a ukulele against the wall. Of course, when I was woken with a start that late in the night (or early in the morning, whatever floats your boat) I didn’t necessarily know that was the sound echoing through my apartment. Upon further investigation I realized, “This isn’t Mommy and Daddy’s house anymore.”
A month and a half shy of my 18th birthday, I moved to San Diego from a smallish town called Thousand Oaks, near Ventura. When I went on Craigslist looking for a roommate, postings such as “male roommate seeking female roommate” and “older female looking for young, male co-ed” should have been enough to scare away any right-minded individual from the process entirely, but not me. I was determined. I was headstrong. No, I do not want the 8-by-8 closet space you call a bedroom and I do not want to live in a house with nine dudes. I don’t want to share that same 8-by-8 space with one other person and I definitely don’t want to pay $700 a month just because it’s right on Mission Beach.
When I moved into my studio apartment, I felt like the most badass underage college girl of all time. Fresh out of high school, I was already out of my parents house and not only living on my own, but, really living on my own. Five hundred square feet of pure solitude. It was awesome. It was the best situation I could have ever imagined … until I met my neighbor.
He was a single, middle-aged corporate sellout working 9 to 5. He hated it and, from what he told me, it hated him right back. He had two DUIs on his record and his favorite things in life were listening to football at a truly alarming level, knocking back a 12-pack of Heineken every Saturday and Sunday (having only four or five during the week after work was moderation). He would stomp up and down the stairs like he was wearing lead-soled shoes at 3 a.m. when he would drag himself home from the strip club. But besides these utterly charming traits, my favorite thing he did was park his giant boat-like Cadillac in the middle of two spaces of the parking lot and complain to me about how all these “white girls” were causing him drama. It goes without saying this guy was the furthest thing from a “catch” a boy could be, so whether it was drunken delusions or his mistaking signals from his coworkers, every night was a new story he assumed I was interested to hear about.
This guy really set the bar high as far as neighbors go. Needless to say, I wasn’t sorry to see him move out a year and a half later.
While there are pros of living alone, such as being able to sing in the shower at the top of your lungs, walk around in your underwear and drink out of the milk carton without fear of being judged, there are some unpleasant things that come to mind. Is it the paper thin walls? Is it the fact that, if your neighbor watches a movie or listens to the radio really loud, you are also forced to sit through it?
Maybe it’s being awoken on the one morning you don’t have to wake up for work or school and you’re in the middle of the perfect dream where you and Jake Gyllenhaal are skipping hand-in-hand through a field of daisies when, all of a sudden, it is interrupted by a hoard of small children who think the only way to start a Saturday morning is to run around screaming at the top of their lungs. Maybe it’s those nights when you’re quietly enjoying an old “Law and Order: SVU” rerun and all of a sudden, you hear the most foul expletives being shouted between two obviously drunk men right outside your door.
It’s not as though I even live in a bad area, but when your peaceful night is interrupted by a thud and then what sounds like someone falling down the stairs, you have to sit and wonder, is this new-found independence really worth my sanity? Or would I really be better off living in my room at my dad’s house being woken up by our two small dogs yelping at everything that walks by our front yard? At least that’s a little more consistent than the group of teenage boys across the way blasting gangster rap at 4 a.m. or the occasional late-night request from my always-drunk neighbor asking to borrow “just a few more ibuprofen.”
– Hayley Rafner is a journalism junior
