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The Spoon Feed, Filling You Up Every Friday

LaxAllStars Spoon Feed

Another week, another noreaster’ snowstorm in NYC.  It’s got to the point that I’m out of snow puns to pretend its still not bothering me.  Bring on summer because unlike the mobs of kids on a snow day, the work must go on here at The Feed.

As you’ve probably figured out, The Feed is a place to let your hair down and I’d love as much interaction as possible. You got something you think we should see in a given week? Shoot us the link on our Facebook fanpage (Knox Hutchinson is partial to this gem) or hit us up on our Twitter feed.

In this week’s pre-Feed talk I want to pass along some more important advice for all you people still living the dream in college.  It’s really simple: choose your roommates wisely. 4 words that I really wish Baz Lurhman would have included in his stupid sunscreen song that everyone thought was the tits back in High School. Someday our kids will point back to Baz as why our generation was doomed from the start.

I’d like to consider myself a roommate expert seeing that I haven’t laid my head down in the same place two years in a row since I left Mom and Dad’s crib back in Portland circa 2003. 7 years, 10 different abodes stretching from a campus-side 19th and Alder “crackhouse” in Eugene to a spartan dorm in Northern Italia, back to the slums of outer Eugene only to finally settle for now in the armpit of Manhattan.  I’ve seen it all. During that time I can reel off 19 different roommates I’ve experienced (I threw in my parents in that figure. They let me keep my racecar bed and everything).

Something not explained to you in the excitement of moving out on your own (eventually to move right back home 4+ years later so you can feel like a giant loser all over again. I’m a big boy now, Mom, enough with the curfew!) is that your best friends do not equal your best roommates.  Your closest friends are actually the WORST roommates most of the time and when you come to that realization it can already be far too late.  Don’t mistake what I’m saying though, living with a bunch of dudes can be managed but only if you find a way to avoid all of the instances of  what I like to call “Roommate Roulette”.

Just a few examples (add your own in the comments):

– Any time you consider opening the closed dishwasher (assuming you even have one). If that baby is full of dirty dishes then great. All you need to do is toss in your gross plate and fire the sucker up.  You’ll even get the entitlement of  feeling like you are the “clean one” of the house even though you barely did anything. But what about if you open up the cave and its full of shiny clean dishes? Boom. Dead. Now you either have to spend the time to unload it or pretend you didn’t look at all and add to the pile sitting in the sink.

Side note: That sink pile can get freaking dangerous.  True story, I once made the mistake of unstacking a pile of plates that had been sitting since before Lebron was a puppet only to discover that a thoughtful person had devoured a t-bone medium rare and left a lake of steak blood on a plate in the middle of the stack. The rotting stuff had suction cupped two plates together like super glue. Unsticking them set off a stink bomb that made me puke all over the rest of the dishes.

– Playing the “leaning Tower of Pisa” game with the garbage can.  The bigger the garbage can gets, the more dangerous this sick little game becomes because the stakes are so high.  When you live with 5 dudes it seems like a great idea to get the industrial sized Oscar the Grouch garbage can for your kitchen but then nobody wants to get stuck lugging it out to the curb. Cue the stack of broken egg shells with maggots crawling all over them about to cannonball off the top of the pile!

– Getting down to the last few sheets on the singly ply toilette paper roll.  You’ll get the odd roommate who knows full well that his last grab at the holy roll has left a stamp sized amount of T-P. Your buddy will finish his business and all’s good until you unknowingly step on in to take the Browns to the Super Bowl.  Next thing you know, you’re stuck calling the bullpen for some relief at the top of your lungs because the same idiot decided to store the extra  ammunition underneath the beer pong table in the garage.  You can never have enough T-P when there are dudes around. The emergency shower because you are all out of toilet paper is humiliating and should be avoided at all costs.

– Even simple things like going to the store and buying food is a game of roulette.  Undoubtedly none of your roommates can cook so you all end up cramming the freezer with Stouffers French Bread Pizza in a desperate game of real life tetris.  Large groups of sorority girls living in a single house get on the same “cycle” (or so I’ve been told) and the same goes for guys and eating.  We always get on the same grocery “cycle” which means its a mad dash to throw your stuff in the fridge while there’s still space.  The poor bastard who gets stuck opening the lower veggie drawers always ends up staring at a pool of brown juicy gunk that at one point used to be some celery.  Good luck with that.

– We might as well lump any kind of cleaning that isn’t an eating surface in one moldy, sticky, funky smelling category of Roommate Roulette.  The microwave, corners of the shower growing mold, any area that’s carpeted, and underneath the couch…just to name a few of the danger zones.  Unless one of your potential roommates is an obsessive compulsive cleaner you might as well kiss those areas goodbye (Don’t literally do that you’ll probably get Hep-C or SARS) and mentally quarantine them off.

These are just a few places to watch out for but I’m sure you all have things I’ve missed or great/ terrible roommate stories.  At the “crack house” (as it was dubbed by GMODT’s grandmother) things got so bad that we we’re robbed by meth heads 3 times in 6 months and I was also threatened by a guy claiming he had a knife on my own porch.  Luckily I had a Louisville slugger at the time.  Funny how the landlord failed to tell we were living on a tweaker super highway. Thanks a ton, Bryan!

Be sure to tell your own tales of roommate woe in the comments but lets not get ahead of ourselves…

Time to get fed.

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Honorable Mention

#1. Natalie Gulbis Is Good, But Her Caddy Is Nuts

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5.Chat Roulette: We know you love it

Speaking of Roulette.  This would creep me the hell out but it’s the new thing all the kids are doing. I already feel a generation gap and I’m only 24.

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4.You can’t stop figure skating. You can only hope to contain it

It seems like ever since the United States climbed out of the Cradle of Liberty and learned how to crawl, every generation or so American boots land somewhere on foreign soil and give the world a little reminder of what American-style awesomeness is all about.  The halls of Montezuma.  The shores of Tripoli.  Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill.  Charles Lindbergh.  Normandy and Iwo Jima.  Neil Armstrong.  And last night, those boots had blades of glory on the bottom and were on the feet of one Evan Lysacek.

…So it was quite a night for Evan Lysacek, the man who, as we learned last night, couldn’t beat his sister in football, basketball or baseball.  So he asked his mother to sew him a superhero costume, got into figure skating, and did nothing less than make his mark on human history.  And show the world what being an American is all about.  God bless you, Evan, and God bless America.

Read the whole glorious post from Barstool Sports.

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3. Don’t mess with old people

Old vietnam veterans are a different kind of insane.  This guy makes Walter Sobchak seem like a kitten.

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2. Zombies…Robots…Birds?

This. Is. Birdemic! (via sproutworx)
[fvplayer src=”https://youtube.com/watch?v=YnNvBucoNSY”]

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1.Gooood for you Jay “Big Jaw” Leno

[fvplayer src=”https://youtube.com/watch?v=tJJ6o4eYynU” splash=”https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tJJ6o4eYynU/hqdefault.jpg” caption=”Tonight Show with Jay Leno Olympic promo”]

spoon logoAnd this only the beginning. Check out the rest of The Spoon Feed and see what else you missed.

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Got a question or news tip? Want your team covered?
Email the author of this post at ryan@lacrosseallstars.com