In my experience, when you are placed in a communal living area out of necessity with people that you didn’t know ahead of time, generally speaking you will not develop a deep bond with the people that you end up living with. If you are lucky you may be able to find one or two people that you will develop a kinship with because you share similar interests or personalities with, but generally speaking your relationship will likely not go beyond that of a casual wave when you run across each other in the common areas.
That is really what has been the case with my living conditions these days. There are currently, not including myself, five college students of various ages and majors living in the same house that I live in. You would think that the fact that we are all around the same age and especially the fact that we are all Asian would mean that we would have all bonded and became friends already, but that has really not been the case. We all go to different schools and have varying schedules, so running into each other other then during the dead of night is actually fairly rare. So while we will have the occasional short conversation about school and local news and whatnot, our relationships really haven’t escalated beyond the casual hand wave as we pass each other in the halls.
That is, until earlier tonight.
I was working in my room earlier tonight when I heard a scream coming from the kitchen area. Naturally I ran out to see what was going on, and one of my female housemates, Amy, claimed that she saw a mouse run under the dining room table. I returned to my room to fetch my flashlight, which also gave me the chance to casually close the room to my door so that the mouse wouldn’t run into my room. When I returned to the kitchen, flashlight in tow, most of the household has pretty much converged in the kitchen because of Amy’s scream. Leo and Ray, the two male college students that lived upstairs, have began removing the some of the clutter beneath the dining room table to flush out the mouse. Stephanie, our other female college student housemate, along with Hailee, the daughter of the other family that lives upstairs (the one mentioned in The Sick Fatty), had also converged in the kitchen.
The next half hour or so became more of less a bad comedy routine. The guys spent more of their time on their hands and knees with flashlights and plastic buckets trying to find and capture the mouse. All three girls, I kid you not, ended up standing on top of the dining room chairs that we had moved away from the dining room table to find the mouse. Two of the girls were actually wearing bathrobes because it was late at night, making the whole situation feel, for lack of a better word, so stereotypically cartoon-y that it was laughable. One would have expected that at any moment they were going to pull up their skirts while screaming, “A mouse! Eeeep!” while jumping around on their tippy-toes. They were clearly already halfway there, having already willingly stationed themselves on top of the chairs in prime screeching position.
There was plenty of nervous and silly banter as we spent thirty or so minutes trying to find the mouse, but despite our efforts, we did not catch it. While we did manage to flush the mouse out from behind the refrigerator, it managed to run into the front hall closet before we could catch it. Unfortunately there is so much clutter and junk inside that closet that there was more or less no way for us to find a single mouse in that mess, so we more or less had to give up and just call the landlord about the situation and hope that he could somehow deal with it tomorrow.
After we gave up on trying to catch the mouse the six of us ended up spending another hour or so in the dining room area just chatting about the whole situation. We talked a bit about how we could mouse-proof each of our areas, wondered how the mouse could have gotten in the first place, and what we could do about our foodstuffs to prevent more pests from showing up in the house. Perhaps more than anything else we talked about how absurd the whole situation was, that our approach in trying to catch a mouse was probably too silly to work.
Throughout that hour of banter I couldn’t help be amused by the whole situation. Obviously, the whole situation was a running comedy gag to begin with. Not only that, but the fact that the act of hunting for a mouse was really the biggest form of bonding that we as a household have done during our time together is also kind of silly as well. And yes, the irony that a this bonding experience of a house full of Asians was brought about by a mouse just a few days shy of Chinese New Year’s and the beginning of The Year of the Rat did not escape me.
And that, folks, was the story of a how a mouse was able to bring an entire household together.
