"source dislaim"

Home for me is a three bedroom apartment I share with two other Blackmun co-eds. Also frequently present are cats, ferrets, boyfriends, and girlfriends. All of the tenants are upperclassmen, so there is little danger of wild partying of the sort freshmen engage in. We have learned to have those parties at the freshmen's homes, not ours.

Although we're all liberal arts majors, we are all fairly geeky in different ways. I nearly trip over a human on my way through the living room. They appear to be bingeing on some Playstation™ game so hard that the couch was no longer suitable. Stepping over the carjacker, around the couch, and deftly avoiding a particularly shaky pile of textbooks on the endtable (no one here studies architecture, and we're all bad at Jenga™) I acheive the hallway and move towards my room, watching for small mammals. The way seems clear, and I crack my door, slide through, and close it quickly behind me. After I check my ankles for extra lifeforms, I flip on the lights. The Cat, firmly nestled in the blankets of my bed, yawns. I step into the room, kicking off my shoes, and hang the courier bag on the office chair.

I collapse into the office chair in front of my desk, resolutely ignoring The Cat's unwelcome presence on my bed. I jiggle the hockey puck to wake up the fruity iMac on my desk. The office chair creaks under me as my weight settles into it. I'm not heavy! It's just that the chair is well-worn-in. Over the years I and the chair have adapted to each other's form and movement. Dropping my ankles over the crossbar beneath the desk, I drag us both under the keyboard drawer, and see life, ( well, fruity colors ) return to the iMac's screen.

There are no instant messages waiting on screen, and so I click to start looking through my email. I pass some time Junking spam during a particularly virulent burst of computer generated gunfire from the living room. By the time I get through the spam to the actual email, the violence rolling out of the living room (as digitized foley) has escalated. Where once there were clearly audible pistol shots and the occassional stutter of low-calibre machine gun fire, now I can clearly pick out sniper fire, distant thundering explosions and the distinctive whine of the eight-barrel air-cooled belt-fed minigun (A chaingun to you Doom-heads). He's using the weapons cheatcodes, for certain. I consider shouting at him to turn it down, or to "Give Peace A Chance!", but quickly realising the futility of such actions, I command the iMac to play music. Soothing music. In fact that is the name of the playlist: "Soothing". It will block out the munitions overflow, and now all I have to do is reclaim my bed from The Cat. Or, I could sleep in the desk chair.

The Cat has lived in the apartment as long as I have, and has actually been around longer than one of my human roommates. The Cat moved in with $roomie01 shortly after we all moved in here, freshman year. When $roomie01 moved back home, rather suddenly, in the Spring of that year, The Cat stayed.