Invader Him

Today's post will sound like a rant, mainly because that's exactly what it is. The following post will be nothing but rhetorical questions, facts (what I like to call my opinions), and stories issued in the form of complaints from my final summer of college. Enjoy :)

Let me also preface this post by saying that I have a particular talent for having bad random roommates. Some people always pick the slowest cashier, or always have their order messed up at restaurants. I'm constantly forced to live with, let's just say...challenging individuals. Any incoming college freshman, please don't be concerned. In all likelihood you will never have to live with people like the ones described in this post, I know several people who have had great luck with random roommates. I'm just not one of them.

Prequel:

For most of the year she wasn't so bad. Of course, she went to bed every night at about 8PM and didn't wake up until well after 9AM, so I had to prepare for bed and the day with no lights, no noise and no hope of looking presentable. As far as I can tell she was majoring in Netflix with a minor in boyfriend-from-home drama. Between her occupying our room 24/7 and never going home for the weekend, I really won the roommate lottery (SARCASM). Needless to say, I spent a lot of time hiding out in Hannah's room sophomore year. And Taylor's room. And Caroline's room. And Alex's room. And anyone else who would have me.

Things really got interesting the last week of school. Allow me to set the stage. We are not the kind of roommates who go to parties together. Or go to dinner together. Or share things. Or interact ever in any capacity. At this point, she has moved some of her stuff home, including the all-important futon, so there is no seating in the room other than our beds. She leaves for a few days, for maybe the second time all year. I am pumped! I get to like, actually have a room for a little while. I invite my friends over to watch The Breakfast Club because I've been occupying their rooms all year and now I can finally share my room with them. Here's my mistake, with 5 friends piled onto my bed and 1 sitting in a chair, there's no room for me. So I sit on my roommate's bed. I know we aren't close, but I really do not think this will be a big deal. I even wonder if I should lock the door but remember she shouldn't be back for a few days still. That should have been my sign, if you have to lock the door first, you shouldn't be doing it.

You see where this is going. I was wrong. She came back. She saw me on her bed. She stormed out. Seriously, it looked like a scene from a movie where a girlfriend walks in on her boyfriend cheating on her, it was that dramatic. My friends all said she was going to murder me in my sleep. My friends who had heard her complaining about me on the phone all year. I am very curious as to what she complained about. As far as roommates go I'm obviously perfect.

So I texted her explaining that I was sorry. I also explained that for the combined 7 hours and 23 minutes she had spent outside our room all year I had never sat on her bed. She did not accept the apology. She was very rude to me. The same roommate who spilled liquor on my desk and my makeup could not believe that I had touched her bed. With less than 7 days left in the school year she bought entirely new bedding. She said that I knew how she felt about germs. Correction...I knew that she liked to clean. I had no idea this was a Howie Mandel-level germaphobia. "I like to be tidy" in no way translates to "I am deathly afraid of people in a shared living space touching my things." And we never spoke again.

Main Feature:

It should probably be stated that I would react to most any random roommate with hostility as I'm not a fan of new people or human interaction. But this guy really takes the cake. As in if I had a cake in the fridge he would have taken it, keep reading, you'll see.

I've come to refer to this one exclusively via clever monikers based on the 2000s Nickelodeon cartoon Invader Zim (Invader Him, Invader Dim, Invader Grim, Invader You're The Worst Please Leave). Imagine my surprise as I raced down the walkway to my house (tbh not running, more like walking with a purpose) to find large house plants chilling on either side of my door. Still not sure if they're real or fake. What college student has house plants? These aren't cute little potted succulents or window plants, I'm talking big whatever the plural of ficus is.

I have this thing where if the plural version of a word sounds weird to me I refuse to use it. I just work around it. I still use it to this day when I tell my students that I will be handing everyone a syllabus or when I talk about one single octopus and all his friends that I saw on the Discovery Channel.

So I'm already thinking "wow this guy brought house plants" when I walk into what used to be my living room. It now looks like an area where someone tried to play The Floor Is Lava, realized they suck at that game, and decided to cover every square inch with furniture in order to complete a round. Another possible explanation is they decided to combine Tetris and Jenga in the area formerly known as my living room. I am very confused as to why this guy felt that it was a good idea to bring enough furniture to fill 2 bachelor pads, quantity-wise and style-wise. But I'm still in a hurry so I head to my room to pack and he tries to introduce himself. I think I mumbled something like "hi I'm sorry I'm in a rush" and a beautiful friendship was not born. I realize this was rude of me but I was actually in a hurry and I'm a jerk sometimes.

After being gone for a week, I come back home to find that all of my things have been moved from the cabinets and refrigerator and placed onto his tables. Now I didn't have a lot of perishables in the fridge, but this is a matter of principle. I have one roommate who is completely out of town this month and she had some groceries in the fridge that were ruined.

So in the midst of being confused as to why he felt the need to move my things I, being an understanding human being, looked for reason. Well the cabinets were pretty crowded, I told myself. Perhaps he collects kitchenware like he collects furniture and needed room for his dishes. So I check the cabinets and discover that many of them are empty. He needed to move my things to make room for...nothing. Now in his defense, he needed to make room in the fridge for his homemade jam. That's right, my single Gatorade was wasted space but room must be cleared for a dozen vials of homemade jam. That he made. On the counter. In a device that looked like a set of hot rollers.

After several random roommate incidents you begin to reflect and start to question yourself. "Am I the problem?" and "What are my faults as a roommate?" and other questions without answers. What I've concluded is that I am afraid of confrontation, passive aggressive, ridiculously messy when I'm working on a project, incapable of adjusting the thermostat and I use 99% of the ice in our house. Perhaps this new guy emailed his parents to complain about the rude girl he's living with who watches One Tree Hill until 2 in the morning and has a different cup for every day of the year. I wish him the best and am insanely curious to see how he will tackle sharing a fridge with other roommates in the future.