Twenty-Five Rules for Living With Drew Mackie

This week, I’m getting a roommate for the first time in four years. I’m a little worried about sharing my living space with someone after having had so much time to develop my own routine, so I decided to send my new roommate a “heads-up” list of “suggestions” to make sure it all goes smoothly.

Below is what I thought was most important.

1. Vegetables go on the refrigerator shelf. The crisper drawer is for condiments and other things that do not go bad. This is inherently better than using the crisper for vegetables, because everyone forgets what’s in the crisper and it becomes decidedly non-crisp.
2. The green pillow goes on the brown couch. The brown pillows go on the green couch.
3. Do not attempt to befriend the neighborhood cats. They cannot be trusted.
4. When I am playing music, please don’t hear it. It is my music that I bought with my me-money.
5. When I’m singing, please harmonize to make me sound better.
6. In general, just try to mirror my moods as often as possible.
7. I have not yet obtained a dog, but I have purchased a dog bed and dog toys in preparation for said dog. As you will be the closest I have to a dog, please skew the bed and scatter the toys around the room periodically to create the illusion of a dog.
8. The living room wall immediately facing the front door is not, in fact a slightly different color than the other three walls. Please do not ever insist otherwise. My living room is pretty.
9. There is a pickle jar wrapped in brown package paper in the back of the refrigerator. Never open it. Never question me about the jar.
10. If you ever hear farting, it’s you who farted.
11. If you ever hear crying at night, it’s ghosts.
12. If you ever see a bag of potato chips that’s unopened and then, like, an hour later the entire full-sized bag is empty and stuffed in the bottom of the kitchen garbage can, it’s aliens.
13. If you are wondering where those tiny little sneezes are coming from, I would actually like your input on this matter because I keep hearing them during random quiet moments in the afternoon and I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S MAKING THEM. Isn’t that weird?
14. I have programmed the DVR to always have the four most recent episodes of The Golden Girls ready for me. I watch them daily. I cannot begin to explain to you how bad it will be for everyone if you were to delete these before I watch them.
15. Conversely, no, I don’t know who keeps DVRing Bones but maybe don’t delete them anyway and also don’t ask me about how weird it is that the DVR just randomly chooses to DVR new episodes of Bones.
16. If you watch channel 333 at 3:33 in the morning on a Sunday, a little girl will appear and ask you to solve her murder. She suuuuuucks. Just ignore her and she fades away usually.
17. The floor is always lava. You cannot ever touch the floor. THE FLOOR IS ALWAYS LAVA. (This does not apply to me.)
18. I have grown accustomed to using the bathroom with the door open, but I’m still shy. Therefore, when I’m using the bathroom, please wait outside until I deem the premises to be ready.
19. If one of my friends comes over, we’re married.
20. If one of my family members comes over, you’re a day laborer who I haven’t yet driven back to Home Depot.
21. If someone comes to the door asking for Amelia, you are Amelia, but only interact with this guy through the peephole.
22. Don’t ever point out how there’s no glass in my peephole and that there is therefore nothing to protect my eye from whatever is waiting on the other side of it, because then I won’t leave my bedroom for a while.
23. I’m totally fine with you wearing shoes in the house. I’m not one of those uptight freaks.
24. Clean your shoes twice a day.
25. Next month, I’m having the bathtub taken out and being replaced with an adult human-scale “kitchen sink” fixture, complete with proportionally large mock-ups of a dish soap bottle and kitchen utensils. I’m not one of those uptight freaks who likes to be treated like an adult baby. I just prefer to bathe like one. No, that isn’t weird.

Should be cool, I think. I mean, I feel comfortable pretty much anywhere in the house.