Weird roomies

For some reason I started thinking today about some of the roommates I had in college. Maybe it was a subconscious effort to remind myself that it could be worse. So I thought I’d share some of my favorite tidbits of living with different roommates through four years of college.

First of all, let me say that I always had one fantastically awesome roommate each year, without whom I never would have made it. The first two years that was my BFF Heather. Heather and I came up with little sayings to help us deal with the roommates we couldn’t handle. The one that I later cross-stitched and framed was “Not everyone thinks the way I do. My way is not the only way.” We meant it in a very facetious manner and would often follow up by saying, “Everyone should think the way I do. My way is the best way.”

The reason for this was our roommate “K” (names have been changed to protect the innocent and not so innocent.) K was great at first, but soon she began doing things that really annoyed us. Our policy was everyone wash your own dishes, and she would leave pans soaking in the sink until they had rusted through. Then she got a boyfriend who was over at our apartment all the time. As in sleeping over. As in using our shower. We put a stop to that really quick. The boyfriend was trying to grow dreadlocks, so she tried to help it along by smearing vegetable oil in his hair. He left a slimy trail wherever he went. He was the reason that Heather and I started saying, “I don’t have to be nice to anyone who doesn’t live here.”

The best day however, was the day that K’s boyfriend agreed to pierce her nose in our bathroom. They bought some kind of home piercing kit and decided to give it a go. Now she didn’t want a nose ring on the side of her nose or anything, she wanted him to pierce it right through the middle, like a bull. It took several tries and her eyes kept tearing up but he finally got it pierced. Then, instead of a regular nose ring she decided it would be so much cooler to get some little nails from the hardware store and stick those through the new hole in her nose.

The most random and weird part of the whole thing for me was the fact that K kept saying that she was planning on going on a mission. We asked her, “What about the nose ring then?” She said that she could just get half a ring to put through her nose so she could flip it inside and no one would be able to see it. Yeah… she was a real thinker. It really bothered me that she was there on a massively huge academic scholarship. She had free tuition for four years, plus an addition $2400 a year for room and board. She messed around so much freshman year that she lost the scholarship, pulled out of school at the end of the year, and moved in with some friends, or so she said. It was definitely an adventure.

The following year wasn’t quite as eventful, although we did have a roommate who would sit in a chair in the living room and peel off her sunburned skin and leave it in a pile on the floor. But that is a different story.