Roommate Found!

About a month ago, one of my roommates, H, declared that she was leaving our adorable CDM beach house for the joys of an Irvine Company Apartment. Lame! (Okay, fine. She's moving in with her boyfriend... this is exciting, blah blah blah).

This left my other roommate, J, and I with the task of finding a new roommate. At first, we thought this would be relatively easy; our house is super cute, clean, in a great location, and most importantly, affordable. We posted an ad on Craigslist and braced ourselves with the seemingly inevitable deluge of emails from interested prospective roommates.

So maybe we were a little over-confident. After about a week, we had only received two emails. The first one sounded bitchy: "Send me pictures of the room and maybe I'll reply with information about myself." I instantly hated her. But the second one sounded PERFECT! So we met and J and I loved her and everything was going to work out just great... until she emailed us a couple of days later saying she wasn't going to move out of her place after all. Thanks a lot, Tease.

A few rounds of Craigslist posts later, we had a meeting set up with Sierra. "Oh great! I love the name Sierra," said J, enthusiastically. "I bet she's super hippy and crunchy." (J is from Laguna Beach and while she herself is more "oatmeal," she has many granola friends).

"Really?" I replied, "Sierra sounds like a stripper name to me." A couple minutes later, the doorbell rang and Sierra did not disappoint: she had fake boobs, lips, hair, tan... everything including a raspy voice. She was totally a stripper. Sorry, but we're oatmeal and a med student, not strippers.

We changed tacks and started posting on Roommates.com as well as Craigslist (roommates.com, btw, is pretty fun and feels like an online dating site... but for roommates!). No luck. One girl was uber awkward and couldn't answer the even the simplest questions. For example, What's your name? "Well, you see... umm... it's kinda weird... but, uh... my name is E." Are you kidding me?! Another woman was a little older, super loud, and was moving to "pay down her debts." Here's a tip for people looking to rent a room from someone: Don't tell your potential housemates that you're in debt. You're pretty much guaranteed to not find housing. We even had a girl from England email us saying that she was going to immigrate... to our house (I should probably email her back saying no thanks... whoops).

In the end, I ended up taking the advice of my guy friends who would ask, "Is she hot?" after every single meeting with a prospective roommate. Our new roommate, B, is totally hot! But also, she seems really nice and friendly and, most importantly, normal.