The setting sounds ideal: A three bedroom house in South Lansing. It would be closer to work and it has a driveway. Per the owner, you can smoke inside the house. Perks: Spacious, smoking, storage, garage. Problems: No central air, unfinished spaces, insane water bill.
So the girl who's looking for roommates and I play phone tag for a while and finally get ahold of each other. Within a half an hour, I know that her favorite aunt recently died of cancer. The frequency with which her father visits. The current social dynamic of her roommates. The list goes on, but the bottom line is this: Information is one thing, confession is another.
I finally managed to guide the conversation back to the actual HOUSE (it took more effort than you can possibly imagine) and she said that she didn't want me to look at it just yet. She wanted to meet me first. Okay. I'm down with that. Let's do some coffee and get acquainted. This turned out to be my biggest mistake.
I got to the restaurant first and got us a table. When the girl finally showed up, she wouldn't make eye contact with me. She kept doing this nervous laughing thing. She continued to regale me with the saga of her impressive (in its complete lack of substance) life. This didn't bother me too much until the very end of the conversation when I asked her if I could come and see the place. This is a close transcript of the conversation:
"So when can I stop by and take a look at the house?"
"Well... My, uh, roommates don't really know that I'm interviewing people to move in yet."
"Oh. When are you going to talk to them about it?"
"Well, Christy just had her wisdom teeth pulled and I don't really want to bother her and Courtney just broke up with her boyfriend and she's been moping around a lot lately and the couple that lives in the basement are always fighting, so there's not really a good time to talk to them, and..."
"But when are you going to talk to them about it?"
"Uh. I'll let you know by next week?"
Welcome to my pain.