Snoqualmie

The solitary vice.

You may have noticed that I haven't posted this week. Or, given the general dearth of comments on my last few entries, perhaps you haven't noticed. Regardless. How could our logoquacious (which is a new and useful word that the English language has needed since the invention of the internet) friend Dianna move into an all-new house with all-new people and not have a single thing to say to the internet about it?

Evidently I'm expending my energy in other ways. No, not those ways. I've been engaging in a shocking amount of social activity since I moved in on Thursday. It just sort of happens when you live in a co-op; you take a book and sit in the living room reading, but three people wander in and you strike up a conversation. You hover in the kitchen making banana bread, but when you venture out to look for walnuts someone hands you a carrot and you have to stop and find out why. You could theoretically stay in your room all the time, but why? The house's common spaces are bigger and better-decorated. The kitchen stereo is connected to a computer that can access your iTunes library remotely, so anything you could listen to in your room you can listen to there on better speakers. If you do your letter-writing on the couch in the dining room you can have the house cat (who is as a matter of record a furry lizard and not any sort of warm-blooded domestic animal) sleep companiably on your feet. The sensible co-op resident takes advantage of these opportunities and hardly has the solitary time necessary for the composition of brilliant blog material.

Not to mention that I'm waiting on a proper chair for my desk, so I'm writing to you from a perch atop a stack of book boxes which is neither comfortable nor ergonomic.

Until such time as I get burned out on the company of my housemates, then (and because that could be a little while), I give you a brief list of reasons why I do, in fact, heart my co-op just as the pin on my bookbag asserts.

• The stencilled sign outside my bedroom door which reads "cunt love",
• The names on the toilet stalls all over the house: AC/WC, The Radio Head, Sonny Baño, sTool,
• The inexplicably named Ronald Reagan Memorial Zen Garden,
• Rope swing #2 in the backyard (rope swing #1 being appealing but highly perilous),
• The presence of an honest-to-god library and study room in the house, whereas in my last co-op the former was a smoking room and the latter was a storage closet,
• Soy milk from a milk dispenser! Soy milk from a milk dispenser!
• The aforementioned furry lizard,
• The 12-foot-long bay view out the window of my temporary room,
• Vegan chocolate sauce by the case, and
• The fact that there are upwards of twenty couches in the house, to a population of fifty people.

It's a woefully incomplete list, but a better one will have to wait until a time when I'm not in a hurry to go play my guitar on the roof deck. Ho-hum. American Dream of suburban nuclear-family living, eat your heart out.