I truly doubt that my title made it clear, but I’m home alone this week.

Home. All by my lonesome. For eight entire days.

With the exception of course of the seemingly semi-friendly ghost and my roommate’s Basset Hound, I will have the entire house at my disposal, and I’m not sure that is a good thing.

I actually kind of feel like the young Kevin McAllister. My feelings of being alone lie somewhere in between being really excited about having some much needed “me” time, and being completely frightened about what might happen.

Growing up, my grandparent’s lived across the street from me so I was rarely left alone. I had a friend who’s mom frequently left us alone until our peanut butter and popcorn cooking experiment nearly left their house in ashes. She eventually trusted us to stay there alone again, but then we literally tried to reenact the Home Alone movie, so her trust was short lived. Then there was the one time in high school that my parent’s let me stay home overnight unattended. Of course that was the night I decided to watch Event Horizon and ended up sprinting across the street to my grandparent’s house at 3 in the morning, head down, pants nearly soiled, and had to ask if I could sleep in their spare room.

It’s not that I don’t like being alone, I actually quite enjoy it. It’s just been forever and a day since I’ve had more than a couple of nights without at least one roommate around, and I’m not sure what to do with myself. LA works from home so she usually takes care of most of the cooking, which means that I’ll be living off of a diet of beans and chips and salsa this week… which is exactly what I lived off of last week out of poordom, so it’s really nothing different.

I plan on spending my nights taking long leisurely baths, reading, watching movies, painting and writing a bit… so that’s really nothing new either. The one major difference is that I won’t have someone calling to get me to watch all the good parts of shows and I won’t have the background noise of LA crying during Grey’s Anatomy or Gossip Girl. But I do have the freedom of playing my music as loud as I want, as late as I want (and I’m totally NOT listening to the Bieb-meister)… which is pretty cool. Maybe it will drown out the sound of gunshots in my neighborhood, which I haven’t heard since last week and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the gangsters don’t know that I’m on to them.

I actually lived alone for an entire year before I moved in to my last house with my four roommates, a house which I now affectionately refer to as the “rainbow house.” Aside from being the most miserable and lonely year of my life, living alone wasn’t so bad. I typically stumbled home from happy hour, ate a huge bowl of ramen noodles, and drank wine whilst mowing my way through the entire Netflix library.

Oh and I almost burned down the apartment complex, twice.

The first time could have happened to anyone. Anyone with a gigantic gray cloud following them around, that is. Ever since the time I caught fire to the Thanksgiving table by half hazardly throwing a table napkin down on a candle, my grandmother has warned me that I’m not the sort of person who should keep candles around in the house. Of course candles are pretty much my favorite thing in the universe besides John Cusack movies and ketchup, so I never thought to heed her advice. The night in question was a particularly stormy night, so I naturally wanted to light every single one of my one-hundred candles to set the mood. I then opened the porch door so that I could hear the storm, and settled into a bubble bath with a glass of wine. I had no idea the storm was such a windy one, but luckily my head was above water to hear a ginormous gust knock over about ten of the candles. Luckily I was able to grab a towel and nakedly whip the fire out before they caused too much damage.

The second fire I almost caused also happened when I was in the bathtub. I cooked something that I can’t remember but I’m sure was of the pasta variety, and once again got into the bathtub, only to be rudely interrupted about ten minutes later when the building’s fire alarm started sounding. I knew the fire was coming from my kitchen before I even grabbed a towel. There was smoke everywhere and I went into full panic attack mode. When I got into the kitchen I found that I had left a stove burner on, and had accidentally thrown a dishtowel on top of it, which had caught on fire. Luckily, I’m a quick thinker and threw a pitcher of iced tea over it, and batted out the rest of the flames with my towel. I’ve occasionally wondered why I don’t have any towels, but I’m now realizing that I’ve used the majority of them to put out fires. After putting out the fire, I grabbed a blanket from my futon to cover myself with and ran into the hallway shouting that the fire was out and not to panic, which I was clearly still doing.

I also wondered why none of the neighbors wanted to be my friend, but thinking back it was probably because they knew me as the type of person who started fires ran around in nothing but a leopard print blanket.

And there was also the time I woke up in a fever with no power and knocked on every door on my hallway claiming the world had come to an end, but that’s an entirely different story.

Tonight I will be lighting no candles, and I’ve already checked 8 times to make sure the burners are off so I should be OK. But send me some good juju just in case.

Oh and also, I’d like to go ahead and let you know that I wrote this entire post while naked. Because I can.

(LA if you’re reading this… I am in your chair, but don’t worry…I’m sitting on a towel.)

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3. Late Last Night While You Were Asleep….
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