Seymour And His Cozy Roomies

How's this for random? For the past two days, I cannot, for the life of me, get the song "Rumors" out of my head. Not the Lindsay Lohan Rumors. The one from the 80s. How do rumors get STARted, they're started by the jealous PEOple and! AHHHHH. Make it stop! Please, someone. Make it stop. I don't know why this is happening. There are no rumors in my world right now. I am wholly unconcerned about the concept of rumors. I don't even think I've heard the song recently. Yet, I can't stop thinking about it, all of it, including the line about that guy who tasted Tina's juice. SO. WRONG.

I got a nice email from my freshman-year-in-college roommate today. I haven't seen or talked to her in YEARS, but through the magic of social networking, we're back in touch. My roomie, she was fabulous. The summer before my freshman year, my college sent me a little questionnaire in order to (supposedly) help them match me up with the perfect compliment to my weirdo personality. I remember I wrote down lots of things about how I was an extrovert (which I was at the time), how I was a night owl (again, I was at the time), and how I liked to, in the immortal words of Eddie Murphy, party all the tah-hime. And you know what? They took that questionnaire and flushed it down the toilet because what ended up happening is that my roomie had a few things in total opposition to me, such as being a calm, rational, mature 18 year old who knew enough to not be a pain in the ass to all she met.

But you know what? There must have been some good juju in the roommate match-up process, because it turns out that she was the perfect roommate for me. She had a penchant for silliness that cracked my shit up and we ended up doing all the stereotypical roomie things that roommates of that age do. We giggled profusely, we obsessed about boys, we ordered and consumed acres of pizza, we danced around the room singing into our hairbrushes, we had reams of inside jokes, and we talked and talked and talked. I certainly seemed like the crazier of the two, but let me tell you something I have learned over the course of my many moons on this earth: the quiet ones can always come over to the dark side. This situation was no different.

First of all, we got into this idea that all of our possessions should have a "cozy." A cozy is some sort of decorative covering that envelops an inanimate object. You know, like a tea cozy? So, we had a cozy for our computers (cloth covers that were all matchy matchy with our dorm room decor) and a printer-cozy for our printer. Our blankets were not our blankets, they were our cozies. Then, we took the cozy idea a step further- we started putting decorative contact paper on everything. I don't know where the hell this idea came from, but we thought it was the greatest, funniest idea ever. We contact-papered our dresser drawers, our notebooks, even our phone.


Stop looking at the 90s fashions and scrunchie in my hair and look at the contact-papered phone, please.


The fall of our freshman year, my roomie's mom sent her a care package for Halloween. In this package was one of those paper skeletons that are for putting up in a window or something. You know, the kind where the joints of the skeleton are hinged so you can pose it and stick it up somewhere. This particular skeleton was labeled "Seymour Bones." We put Seymour up on our wall and there he stayed for the month of October. After Halloween, my roomie and I decided that we had grown quite fond of Seymour and couldn't bear to take him down. From then on, Seymour became our room's mascot. Each month we got crafty and decorated him. In November, he was a pilgrim. Well, I guess he would have been a dead pilgrim. In December, we hung christmas tree ornaments on him like a morbid tree. Seymour was quite the conversation piece for the scads of homies we constantly had in our room.

These are the things over which she and I bonded. Seymour, cozies, and gales and gales of giggling. So thanks, social network site, for giving us the venue to have a Peaches and Herb style reconnection. We both get so excited 'cause we're, re yoo nited, hey hey...I'm a man who thinks not a man who drinks so please let me live my life! Oh geez. Now it's a Peaches and Herb and Timex Social Club duel to the death. Rumors and Reunited, the mashup. Yikes.