Being a young 20 something in Portland pretty much means you either pay out the ass for an apartment...or resort to finding house shares on craigslist. This is inevitably, in my experience, a total fucking shit show.

I got my first taste of it with Becky. She seemed perfectly nice when I first met her,but the first glaring red flag appeared on day 1 of me living there. Her dog peed on my bed. I had a cat at the time, and she insisted that it must have been my cat and her dog never does anything like that. Anyone who's ever owned cats and dogs knows there's a distinct difference in the smell of their urine, and the other roommates agreed it smelled like dog, not cat...but I let it slide. Cue months upon months of witnessing her neglecting this dog horribly. It was a young border collie that never got taken for walks. It got into the garbage and spread it throughout our entire house on a nearly daily basis, it started shitting directly in front of my other housemate's bedroom door and she'd go days before cleaning it up. She vehemently refused to take responsibility for this stuff and went so far as to say someone was actually breaking into our house and spreading the garbage around. One day I left a bowl and spoon on the living room coffee table, and left the house for a few hours. As I was walking out the door she asked me to clean it up, but I had a bus to catch and it was only one god damn bowl so I told her I'd be back soon and do it then. I came home to an entire sink's full of dirty dishes on my bed. She argued that she did it to teach me not to leave my dishes out, even though the dishes in the sink belonged to my other roommate. Shortly after that I got her evicted because her dog was technically causing a health hazard with the trash. She would also giggle incessantly the entire time she had a guy over for sex.