Long distance relationships can be hard. They can be especially hard when you’re living with four roommates.
On a typical Monday night, after four hours of Zoom classes, three cups of coffee, and one bottle of kombucha, I decide to FaceTime my boyfriend. I walk into my room, laptop in hand, and I realize that my roommate has fallen asleep (it should be noted that it is only 10 pm). I sigh. I walk into the common room, where one girl is doing her math homework, another is playing with a kendama, and the last is doing something I won’t even try to understand.
At last, I decide that the only way I will be able to communicate with my boyfriend is in the privacy of the kitchen. So I take my laptop, find a nice seat on the kitchen floor next to the washing machine, and FaceTime my boyfriend. After several minutes, and several sips of coffee, I have an unexpected burst of energy. And, as any girl who has spent 20+ minutes on the kitchen floor and doesn’t know what to do, I decide to show off my Tae Kwon Do skills (it should be noted that I somehow have a black belt).
So I perch my phone against the Keurig machine and transform the kitchen into my studio. The washing machine is my opponent, and I go right in for the sidekick. Right at this moment, my roommate walks in, assumes I’m having phone sex, and leaves. It is awkward for all parties involved.
In such a crowded household, bad timing becomes like punctuation. It seems as if everyone is always moving, always working, always thinking, sometimes sleeping. There constantly exists a complex interplay between concurrent uses of time — coexisting within the four walls of a one-story house inhabited by five Berkeley freshmen. Thus, when you factor in the schedule of an outsider — say, a boyfriend who is six hours away — time becomes even more muddled.
I have never been good at online communication. Let’s face it, my worst nightmare is the Zoom breakout room. My capacity for communication becomes worse still when it is reduced to texting. As a hopeful writer and frequenter on Twitter, you would probably assume that I have naturally mastered the art of the text. But I feel like the text puts so much pressure on getting the right point across but not taking too long — write something succinct, it doesn’t need to be an essay damnit!
That is why I set aside a few hours everyday to FaceTime my boyfriend. Personally, I just need that face-to-face conversation, even if it’s mediated by a machine. This is the way that I make use of my time; it is the way my boyfriend makes use of his time; it is the way we come together to collectively use our time.
But that time doesn’t always pass by smoothly. Sometimes the Wi-Fi cuts out, most of the time I’m on the kitchen floor, and all of the time I’m wishing to be with him rather than six hours away. But I think part of the college experience is navigating through the awkwardness of time. Whether I’m falling asleep during my 9 am Zoom lecture or entering the third hour of my freshman seminar, I have to find ways to make my new schedule and my new environment somehow align.
Long distance relationships are hard. They can be especially hard when you’ve been thrown into a new environment with new people and new responsibilities. I don’t want to romanticize the freshman experience during a pandemic, because quite frankly, I wouldn’t be fooling anyone. Time seems to move at a different pace with each journey around the sun. The days in the week seem to move by too fast, yet there don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to finish all that needs to be done. It can be difficult to communicate with your friends, your classmates, and your boyfriend from back home.
I think it’s about time we accept bad timing as a fact of life. Parents walk in during the worst scene of a movie, your class starts before you have the time to wake up fully, your roommate inadvertently discovers your hidden talent in the art of Tae Kwon Do. It happens! But beyond the awkwardness, the frustration, the desire to be rid of these scenarios, there exists a tremendous capacity for humor. Instead of complaining, I have learned to embrace the art of bad timing.
Between disturbing my roommate’s fine-tuned sleeping schedule and sitting on the kitchen floor, I choose the kitchen floor.