Jonah Galeota-Sprung in The Point:
About a year ago, a strange thing happened to my roommate and me. The two of us were sharing one small room in a sort of boarding house in Harlem, full otherwise of French exchange students and travelers. We’d arranged the space symmetrically, with two beds pointing out of the left wall, a channel of dirty clothes running between them, a few steps of open space, and then two desks, both facing the right wall. Sitting at our laptops together, we felt like copilots of a comfortably junky spaceship. On the century-old fireplace between us teetered our commingled stacks of too-proudly displayed books. “It looks like a startup in here,” a housemate’s girlfriend once quipped, leaning through the door to ask for a lighter. We both cringed, but it was true, and partly my fault: I had bought a whiteboard and hung it up, though I had yet to write anything on it besides one large ellipsis: …
In most ways we were a typical pair. Him, a recent Georgia transplant, who’d come to the old cold city to write; me, a product of the green and liberal Jersey suburbs, in New York because that’s where those people go. He had a publishing internship; I had one at a health clinic. Our OkCupid profiles matched 96 percent. And, typically, we spent most of our time being confused and anxious about how we should be spending most of our time. Alone and together we fingered timeless worry-stones: What kind of job? Whence comes this surplus value? Why’s everything bad?
More here.
