Size only matters if it's 90 cm or less

It's a bit like my first year of college, except I'm a bit older (although maybe not wiser) and no longer look forward to the prospect of "dorm living" -- basically a year of summer camp for 18-year-olds, without the adult supervision -- with giddiness and glee.

Maybe my standards have gotten higher, or I've just become more finicky in my old age. I've started to appreciate the finer things in life, like the joy of not having a roommate walk in on you while you are...ummmm...otherwise occupied, or being able to saunter around all I please in my birthday suit since I'm the only one paying the rent.

Another small pleasure I've grown accustomed to is sleeping in a bed somewhat wider than a balance beam. My first year of college, I somehow managed to sleep in a single twin bed with my freshman boyfriend, with his roommate peacefully slumbering across the room in his matching twin bed. A few times -- on the rare occasion that some poor girl was drunk enough to think the roommate was actually attractive -- there were four of us waking up a room slightly smaller than the kitchen closet currently housing my kittens' food.

Yet somehow, we survived. And it didn't really seem all that bad, at the time. Maybe we just didn't know any better.

But after four years of college and almost the same amount of graduate school, the novelty has worn off. Nothing is more important than a good night's sleep. (Except for maybe the mind-blowing sex that precedes aforementioned good night's sleep).

So I have been accused of being a bed monopolist. AND, to add insult to injury, a cover hog.

I plead guilty, although there is not much I can (or am willing) to do about it, short of getting a bigger bed. And there is no guarantee that even that would solve the problem.

It's a condition, I tell you. Even when I was a little girl, my mother hated sharing a bed with me. The most diplomatic of her descriptions of the experience was that I was a "whirling dervish."

I was recently complaining to my mother that the Guy had the nerve to accuse me of being a bed hog, and you could hear the sympathy in her voice, all the way across the Atlantic. I put him on the phone, and I’m sure he would have had a lot to say, had he not been stunned silent at the prospect of talking to a woman he had never met about the fact that he shares a bed with her daughter.

“So have you gotten an elbow in the side yet?” I heard Mom ask.

He mumbled some kind of response, and I had to muffle uncontrollable laughter since I had accidentally kneed him in the forehead that very morning.

When it comes to sleeping arrangements, we have two choices: 1) we can sleep in my 120 cm bed, located in my cat dander-ridden apartment that is occupied by two small, furry creatures (one of them orange) that makes him sneeze; or 2) we can sleep in his 90 cm bed, in his dander-free apartment that is also occupied by a not-so-small-or-furry-but-also-slightly orange creature, known as The Roommate.

And just to clarify, when I say 90 cm bed, I mean 65 cm for me and 25 cm for him, if he’s lucky.

One night, which was particularly cramped, I woke up several times, and I can only describe his slumbering in the following terms: he was sleeping angrily AT me. He was sleeping so angrily AT me in fact that he seemed to prefer cuddling up with Flora, the cold, hard concrete wall on his other side, to cuddling with me.

Another evening, at my house, I was the one who suffered, as he had implemented new preventative measures. Try as I might, I COULD NOT wrest the covers away from him, as he had firmly anchored them between his knees so I couldn’t steal them.

The next morning, he was well-rested and quite proud of himself. I, one the other hand, was still shivering and VERY grumpy.

“That’s what I call offensive sleeping,” he proclaimed.

“Yes,” I said. “I found it very offensive.”

The moral of the story, gentlemen, is that regardless of what she tells you, SIZE MATTERS. So go out and buy a bigger one, already.