Estrogenous Encounters

Nate's tips for the ladies #1: Hold the Door

2009-11-09T18:08:00.000-08:00

Hey ladies! Due to popular demand, I'm going to make an effort to help you live your lives by imparting wisdom to you via this very blog using a series I'm calling "Nate's tips for the ladies." I hope you like it.

TIP #1: Hold the Door
OK ladies, here's the situation. You're walking through a door, one of those doors that closes automatically. No, not opens automatically, just closes. You have to push or pull it open. Got it? There's a lot of people going through the same door at about the same time as you. Maybe they're all leaving a building at the same time. Maybe they're leaving the subway station. Use your imagination, I'm sure you can come up with some scenario.

Anyway, the guy in front of you walks through the door by pushing it open and holds it for you. Now I'm not talking about a chivalrous "stand-behind-the-door-and-wave-you-through" kind of door holding. This is a simple "give the door a bit of a push so it stays open long enough for you to get to it" kind of hold. So you, no doubt grateful for the help, enter the door and DON'T HOLD IT FOR THE NEXT PERSON. Maybe you hurry through the door. Maybe you even do a little sidestep-dodge move to avoid the closing door. When you do this, that door closes ON THE PERSON BEHIND YOU (most likely me). It's not that much to ask, you don't even have to look at me. Ladies... hold the door, please. That is all.

Video Games

2009-02-17T17:42:00.000-08:00

Over the last week or two, we've managed to gather a pretty significant number of new video games or to start playing games that we've had but never got around to playing.

Over the weekend, I started playing Bioshock, which I plucked out of the bargain bin at Gamestop a month ago. Pat happened to see me playing and was addicted before he even picked up the controller. Which he did that very night afternoon. And proceeded to not put it down for pretty much the whole weekend. Watching Pat rampage through Rapture all weekend got me thinking about how differently all the people in this household play video games. So allow me to enlighten you.

PAT: Pat has a shoot-first-ask-questions-later style of play that helps him survive in situations you'd never expect him to survive (playing easy mode also helps). Unfortunately, that doesn't mesh well with his rushed or nonexistent room searches. He has a tendency to run out of ammo and then change weapons wildly looking for something with ammo. These periods are intensely comical, as it usually results in a series of partial reloads, shots of eve, security alerts, and accidental research photos. He achieves nearly complete unpredictability.

LAUREN: Lauren's style is somewhat like Pat's, but with more finesse. She's impatient and so runs in with guns blazing, but usually in a slightly more organized fashion than Pat. While this takes away the element of chaos on which Pat thrives, it creates a James Bond-type atmosphere that makes her look quite badass when it works properly. When it doesn't work properly, it makes her look quite silly.

NORA: Nora plays video games the same way she reads books: in marathon sessions. Nora may not possess raw video game beating powers, but will play at all hours of the day and night until the game submits. Nora plays a Rocky Balboa style game of sheer endurance.

SHARON: Sharon doesn't play enough video games with us, so I can't comment on her style. I do know that she is quite good at Space Channel 5 and Soul Calibur.

ME: I don't think it's fair to judge myself. I leave it to everyone else.

Old Ladies

2008-12-29T18:28:00.001-08:00

I live with a trio of 24-year old women, but you'd never know it from the way they act. Starting now we are going to keep score. Each old lady thing is worth a point unless we judge it to be particularly old ladylike, in which case it will be scored as we deem fair.

Lauren
-Buys Butter Cookies (in the tin) [+1]
-Loves knitting [+1]
-Owns a corded phone [+1]
-Watches neighbors out the window and compares our snow shoveling job to theirs [+1]
-Drinks ginger ale and ginger beer [+1]
-Putting "the" in front of words like Google [+1]

Nora
-Loves knitting [+1]
-Goes to bed at 9:00 [+1]
-Really likes turtlenecks [+1]
-Putting "the" in front of words like Google [+1]

Sharon
-Loves knitting [+1]
-Talks like an English person [+1]

Scores thus far:
-Lauren: 5
-Nora: 4
-Sharon: 2

Unfortunately neither Pat nor I have particularly good memories. However, thanks to the magic of the internet we won't have to remember things for a particularly long time.

Girl's Night II: The Empire Strikes Back

2008-11-19T12:13:00.000-08:00

14 November 2008

Jed arrived first that night, to find me alone in the living room watching The Warriors and eating buffalo chicken wings, while Zora hid upstairs. We discussed the simplicity of fleeing from a roller-skating gangster in a subway system. Nate arrived and the girls soon followed. As soon as the talk of dancing surpassed the noise of my liver singing whiskey songs, we were out of the door. Nate, Jed and I traveled down to Allston in an attempt to escape the dreaded girl’s night that would be culminating at a quasi sports bar near Commercial Street on the West End/North End border and entirely too much dancing with too few drinks. Needless to say we had already won. When we got close to our destination we opted to stop at the liquor store in order to grab some refreshments. On first entry into the magical place where happiness comes in colorful bottles, we were greeted by a woman with a dazzling Scottish accent offering us samples of Scotch (40$ a bottle). Nate and Jed had two of the half shots and I partook in three, as they were amazingly delicious. On this third the woman allowed too much to be placed in the sample with a befuddled and adorably sinister “Oops!” then stated, “I’m just getting everyone drunk today!” She was unaware that I had already been drinking.
We were greeted at the apartment by the residents and sooner than later goulet, whose name will remain without a capital as long as he insists on taking two block ambulance rides, arrived with a 36 pack of Budweiser. It’s not good beer, but beggars can’t be choosers. The 36 pack was drunk as we watched clips of Gay Town, the story of a straight man in a topsy-turvy world where homosexuals dominate and persecute Heterosexuals, The Whitest Kids You Know sketch comedy, Always Sunny and Venture Brothers. The night eventually lead to the sound of The Street Dogs, Stray Bullets, The Clash filling the small room as one by one we separated and slept.

Girls' Night

2008-11-10T19:05:00.000-08:00

So last Friday, the girls held "Girls' Night" at our place. For those who don't know, Girls' Night is an opportunity for any girl who has an affiliation with Lauren, Nora, or Sharon to get together, cook food, talk about Jane Austen, and knit. Prior to "the night", Lauren informed me that there would be something like eleven girls there. That's a little more girliness than I was prepared to handle, so I ran away and we ended up having a de facto "Guys' Night" at Dave, Tellef, and Walsh's place.

As it turns out, Guys' Night was way better than Girls' Night. Here's a scientific comparison for you:

Girls' Night	Guys' Night
Ended by 10:00	Went later than that
Jane Austen something or other	It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Some kind of chicken thing that had vegetables and was white. And salad.	Steak tips in Guinness marinade and kabobs
Knitting	Fallout 3

I'm a little too lazy to put more detail in here. Someone else finish this for me.

The Cast

2008-10-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't exactly been diligent up updating this thing, and if I devote a whole post to every person I'm going to be talking about, we'll never actually get to any real posts. So here's a list of the people I'm likely to see just about every day:

Lauren: My girlfriend of four and a half years and now my roommate too. She's currently attending grad school at UMass Boston for Gerontology. She's not afraid to voice her opinions on anything, and gives me a lot of grief for not updating this thing.

Nora: Nora, Lauren, and I met in our freshman year of college, when we all lived in the same dorm at Northeastern, Melvin Hall. Nora works for Dyax Corporation and will probably be responsible for (or at least on the front lines of) the eventual zombie apocalypse. Also now a roommate.

Sharon: Sharon is originally a friend of Lauren's from high school and I met her at the same time I met Lauren. She didn't go to Northeastern like the rest of us, but was still around enough for me to get to know her. She went to UMass Dartmouth and now works at the Mapparium at the May Baker Eddy Library. When she landed that job, she knew she couldn't continue living in New Bedford and dealing with 2+ hour commute each way, so she moved up to Boston and now is my third roommate.

Pat: Pat isn't technically a roommate in that his name isn't on the lease. But he's been with Nora longer than I've been with Lauren and, as such, is here a lot. He's currently attending Bridgewater State College.

The Dog

2008-09-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

Today we added another female inhabitant to our apartment: Zorra, the Spitz-Corgi mutt. Lauren and I made the trek up to New Hampshire to pick her up after her long trip up from Tennessee. Between being drugged up (her foster mother gave her Dramamine for the trip), having been on the road with a bunch of other no-doubt nervous dogs, and being handed off to two strangers who then drive her for another hour or so, she was understandably timid, confused, and tired.

Fortunately, Nora is dogsitting for her friend Veronica's dog, Fiji. Fiji is smaller than Zorra and very friendly, and is making Zorra's transition a lot easier by playing with her (or trying to) and leading her on walks. Shortly after we got Zorra here, we four roommates and Pat witnessed a scene whose hilariousness is impossible to convey with mere text. We watched as Fiji tried everything she could think of to get Zorra to play with her: furiously squeaking her squeaky toy, running (and sliding) in circles around the house, barking, and all possible combinations of these things. Zorra was unmoved, but the rest of us were bent over in pain from laughter.

Pics to follow, but for now enjoy the ones Lauren has posted on her blog.

The Visit

2008-09-07T19:55:00.001-07:00

Today, Melissa and her friend Kathryn came up from Texas for a week or so to visit. As Pat pointed out to me, this increases the estrogen level in the apartment significantly. According to my calculations, that means an estrogen increase of approximately 66%. We hope that we can offset that slightly by going to a baseball game tomorrow, but I doubt it will be enough.

Nora, Lauren, Pat and I spent a good portion of this past weekend painting the apartment. The girls spent quite a bit of time making sure to get exactly the perfect color and debating what the landlord meant by "neutral color". Being a male, I doubt that I have the vocabulary to accurately describe the colors that were picked, but I shall try. Women seem to be born with the ability not only to discern differences between colors that men cannot, but also with the vocabulary to name such colors. And other women know exactly what they are taking about. In any case, my limited male color detection and vocabulary detect the color of our living room and dining room as "peach". We also painted our bedroom a light green.

Profile: Nate

2008-09-04T15:21:00.001-07:00

I was born on the North Shore of Massachusetts, but please don't hold it against me. I spent all of my childhood that I can remember firmly entrenched on the South Shore in Halifax (Massachusetts, not Nova Scotia). After high school, I came to Boston to major in Computer Science at Northeastern University. It was there that I met Lauren, in the basement of Melvin Hall playing Dance Dance Revolution with her good friend Sharon. Lucky for me I was pretty good at it, (good in normal person terms, not good in terms of people who are actually into Dance Dance Revolution) which apparently caught her eye. So remember, kids: video games get you the ladies.

I'm a skinny, nerdy guy who is still too into video games. I have a weak spot for sci-fi and strategy games and... yeah. You probably get the idea. I like to get outside when I can, especially for tennis, softball, and even the occasional basketball game with friends. I rarely turn down free stuff and usually don't care how I look.

Now I'm a web application developer at BigBad and living in Somerville along with Lauren, Nora, and Sharon.

Welcome

2008-09-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

Welcome one and all to Estrogenous Encounters. My name is Nate and this is my story: I lived with an overabundance of men for pretty much my entire life. Growing up, my mother was the only woman in a house with my father and two brothers. When I moved to college, I spent all of it living with male roommates, Ethan and Tellef (more on them later). My latest move, however, has put me in the unlikely position of the lone male in a house of four. The purpose of this blog is to the tale of my experience with Lauren, my girlfriend of several years, Nora, Lauren's roommate and our mutual friend of several years, and Sharon, Lauren's close friend from high school. Let's not forget Pat, Nora's boyfriend, who is around quite often and nearly qualifies as a fifth roommate. More on all of them later, when I get around to writing some profiles.

Anyway, with Pat's help, I'll be putting together anecdotes about the kind of things that could only happen in a house full of women, from a man's point of view. Hopefully you'll get some small degree of entertainment out of it.