I am in college i.e. I revel in the obscure. Five second movie bites are at the top of the list. Therefore, when We Seven Roommates decided to hold a vote for naming our house, there would be no chance for the cute and comfy wordplays on the house’s color like Tomato Clamato or Blood Bath and Beyond. Oh no, give us House of No Gables. Give us Between Two Ferns or Stratford Upon Avon. But, as you’ve already guessed from the title of this blog, something was missing from these pretentious little gems of literary or Galafinakian wisdom (I am currently attempting to bring Zack Galifinakis up to the coveted position of ‘adjective’ currently held by Shakespeare.)
What were these names missing? you ask. Well, as someone old once said, Better it is to sleep under the leaky roof of the heavens than to sleep in a house named after an easily googled catch-phrase. Seek out, therefore, the five second movie bites which have been critically acclaimed by the drunk and giggly. Therefore, when the phrase Fatalistic Farmer was pulled out of the hat on voting day, what really won me over were the confused looks on Amanda and Priyanka’s faces, some of the less bookish among us.
We were sitting in Round Table fashion around our only common furniture in the house: the kitchen table. (Our living room has become a bedroom to accommodate the last minute roommate, Drew.)
Amanda, not knowing the reference, became the first to speak.
“Fatalistic?” she said, in an English accent that she often dons in order to appeal to our academic sensibilities, reminiscent, naturally of Shakespeare or perhaps, a media analyst correspondent from the Daily Show.
“Do you really want to send out a fatalistic sort of image to the town?” Amanda asked, cocking her head. “I mean, when I think of fatalism, I don’t think ‘nice parties and tea’, you know?”
I jumped at the chance to explain the reference, as The Fatalistic Farmer had been my idea. “From the movie about Bob Dylan,” I explained in a strictly American accent which I do not donn, but like to attribute to clever leftist political shows such as The Colbert Report.
Tabitha, also an English major and my best friend, cut me off. “You remember that line when Cate Blanchett’s character is being interviewed and they ask him if he thinks he’s fatalistic, and he says, ‘I’m not fatalistic, I’m a farmer. Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer?’ It’s ironic, see? We’re not actually fatalistic.”
“We’re not actually farmers, either,” said Dutch, the pessimist. Dutch, Tabitha’s boyfriend, is going into linguistics. “But I like it,” he said. “It’s clever. Better than The House of No Gables. I don’t know if you noticed, but the house actually has frigging gables.” What followed was a lengthy and detailed definition of the word ‘gable’, which I find very easy to omit since I don’t remember much of it.
Amanda and Priyanka looked rather less than won over, and I like to think this comes from their common interest in the health care profession, the latter planning for med school, and the former for a nursing degree. My philosophy is health care, shmealth care. I am an English major, and real jobs, along with the real world, bore me.
“What about Moulin Rouge?” Amanda asked, dropping the accent for sincerity’s sake. Sincerity was needed since this was a touchy subject; Dutch had already denounced this name on the grounds that we were not a whore house, which he then proceeded to do again.
“But we’re not a whore house,” Dutch said. “And in case you didn’t notice, some of our neighbors seem like the kind of people who’d take that for an invitation.”
I winced.
“It wasn’t just a whore house!” Amanda protested.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “They were courtesans, not whores.”
I am known for being a feminist, and whenever I am able to make differentiations such as this, I’m in heaven. I write poems with names like ‘Responding to an Ex-Geisha in San Fran’, and once made a poster depicting all of the major figures in Third Wave Feminism. Once, my facebook status actually read, ‘There is no such thing as post-feminism. Get used to it’.
“I mean, come on,” Amanda protested.. “Moulin Rouge is all about a poet—there were all kinds of poets and writers and theater stuff. It’s about art, and we love art, and music, and all of that.”
“It’s a whore house,” Dutch said, not making eye contact, but turning visibly red. “We’re not naming the house after a whore house.”
To be fair, Moulin Rouge could also be seen as a reference to the house’s color, which we’d already established to be rather lame. Reluctantly, then, I gave up the idea on the grounds that naming the house was an attempt to unify us, not divide us.
“Going back to the Fatalistic Farmer idea,” I said. “We do grow tomatoes.” We’ve got about six or seven plants in the backyard.
“True,” Tab said, distractedly, and then lit up. Tabitha, like myself, could be considered spacey. She is also a victim of the random English major factoid, and could be thinking anything. For instance, she could be thinking about how Paradise Lost was published in 1667 just one year after the Great Fire of London in 1666, which is just weird considering that, well, that is obviously just ominous. You see?
“How about Persephone’s Pimple?” she suggested with the suddenly wide bright eyes that seem to suggest that she, in fact, does not give a shit what the house is named, and is being flippant simply to annoy me.
“How about your mom’s tit?” Isaac said.
“Also an invitation,” Dutch said, currently engrossed in filing his guitar player nails. Dutch is Isaac’s big brother, and if someone were taking minutes on any of their conversations, that could pretty much be the title for any of them: Big Brother talking Condescendingly to Little Brother.
The conversation went on pretty much like this for the next fifteen minutes, with Dutch cutting down everything, Tabitha making flippant suggestions, and Drew occasionally being solicited for opinions which he vehemently refused to give. Eventually, we broke up the Round Table, with the tenuous final decision of Fatalistic Farmer.
Over the next four weeks, our policy for deciding the name, much like the Senate’s policy on the threshold for the national debt, was consistently postponed, debated, or ignored. However, it’s probably safe to say that now, we’ve gotten so fed up with the whole thing, that sticking with The Fatalistic Farmer is the only safe way to finally end it.
Naturally, the name will not really stick until a sign has been made and hung up on the front porch, proclaiming the philosophy under which we are all unanimously united.
This experience typifies my indecision track record: a cat named Gandoph/Grey Goose/ Jagermeister, a ferret named Jumpa Lahiri/ Jumpy/ Hopsy IPA, and files in my computer named variously ‘Something in the Washing Machine’, ‘Tulips? Too Lips?’ and ‘Katelyn’s Rolfcoptering Turtle Soup’.
I imagine myself being the sort of person who’d look at my seven year old daughter and say, “You know what? You’re not a Susan at all! What was I thinking?” For this reason, I will never have children. For this reason, I have six roommates and no current pet, and am now going back to school for a Spanish degree although my first was in English. This indecision is curable, I’m sure. If only, for the rest of my life I had a congress-like group of six other roommates who earnestly argue like Amanda, flippantly disregard like Tabitha, and completely cut my legs out from my under me like Dutch. Without them, how will I ever decide what color to dye my hair next or whether or not to invest in a new tattoo?
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