when life gives you lemons you move to the red light district

One night last year after ten pm, one of my flatmates knocked on my door an invited me to come have soup with everyone.

I had just moved into a new apartment building - a former 18th-century brothel that had very recently been turned into awesome studio apartments. There were about fifteen people on my floor and only one of them loved telling jokes about bordellos. She has a blog. You're reading it. We all shared a toilet and I only walked in on someone once all year. And we each had a little kitchen in our room, but there was a communal kitchen on the floor below us, and every day someone made a dish from their home country and everyone ate dinner together before smoking cigarettes in the unlit spiral stairwell all night while the homeless men did their homeless thing just outside, leaving a fresh coat of Heineken bottles on our doorstep every morning.

Anyway the ceiling of the kitchen was really low and the room was tiny and packed and the soup that night was from Brazil. It had olives, chicken wings, and giant chunks of lemon in it. Nothing else.

After everyone had asked me if I liked Johnny Cash and told me they had a friend who lived in New York, things died down, and I looked around at us, all eating our soup. We were all from different countries, all wearing crazy clothes, all speaking horrible French with wild accents, all avoiding squirming when we bit into a chunk of lemon and we were all laughing together.

Like the cheesiest and worst tv show in the world.

But then I thought back on roommates I've had that would have made really great tv. As you read this filler sentence, imagine them. And I thought, sometimes the best television material makes the worst roommates. And I think the opposite is also true.