College time is near again! With new places come, you guessed it, new roommates. Whether you choose to live with a spouse, a loved one, a pet or are forced to go out and find a stranger for a roommate, sharing your space with other living creatures is really awkward. Everyone has their odd behaviors, ranging from a little off to just plain weird as f*ck. This week’s Twenty-Something Tuesday makes fun of celebrates the uniqueness of our past and current roommates.
1. One person I knew removed their twin XL mattress from the bed frame and placed it perpendicularly on the floor. They used the bed frame/mattress support instead as a place to display an odd but creative and homemade forest scene, complete with millions of tiny mushrooms, trees, shrubs, flowers, etc.—made of wood, clay, and actual nature stuff. It was deeply intricate and interesting, but the mattress placement made the room unbelievably tiny.
2. One of my roommate’s favorite snacks were cold tortillas. Plain, cold tortillas. Weirdly enough, I caught on to that trend during especially broke weeks.
3. My freshman year roommate had a boyfriend that went to a different university about an hour and a half away. Every weekend he would come visit her and I usually made a fast dash for my friend’s room once Friday hit to avoid the horrible uncomfortableness that was the three of us together. One particular Monday, after I knew it was safe to re-enter my room, I was cleaning up a bit when, to my utter disgust, I found something hanging off my personal wire waste bin, refusing to plunder into the large outside trash can. You guessed it, her man’s clearly used (read: I am gagging through my typing of this story) condom had hardened to the side of my waste bin with a death grip much like Leo refusing to let go of Kate. I made the executive decision to throw the entire bin away and slap myself in the face so that I could forget the image.
4. My roommate had a secret treasure chest, I kid you not. It was huge. Whatever comes to mind when you picture “treasure chest,” I guarantee, that is what it looked like. Blue with brass finishings and a big ass combination lock on the front, keeping curious roommates, such as myself, out. I never thought much about the secret chest until one afternoon I came back from class and interrupted her rummaging through it. I would not have noticed her in the chest had she not startled me by WWE style slamming her own forearm in the opening and looking at me like Gollum protecting his ring. She tried to play off the obvious injury she had just inflicted on herself and said hello as tears welled up in her eyes from the pain. A few days later a big bruise took shape and every time I saw it, I had a good little laugh to myself. And for the record, I tried to break the lock a dozen times, no luck. I still wonder today what was in that chest.
5. My roommate and her boyfriend spent the weekend banging while I spent the weekend staying as far away from their strange sexfest as I could. One particular weekend, I forgot a textbook in my room that I absolutely needed. I went to our room and listened, I was not going to enter unless I assumed they had taken a break for food and air. On the other side of the door, all was quiet. I knocked loudly, nothing. I entered. I immediately regretted it. On my nicely made, perfect bed were homeboy’s underwear. Mortified, I paced the room staring at the dirty ass underwear as one would a ticking bomb. Finally, I ran full speed toward them and flung my entire comforter, catapult style, toward her side of the room. They were off my bed. As if things could not get worse, I then realized that they were in the shower, with the door open, loudly having sex. Water squishing noises along with ass cheeks slapping around and gasps are not sexy, my friends. Take an outsider’s advice.
6. During the whole “who is your doppelganger phase” on Facebook, my roommate and I were quite resistant and spooked about the whole thing. Like, really creeped out about seeing someone (or something…) that looks exactly like you. So, one day I got the brilliant idea to print out a colored, lifesize photo of roommates face, and to hang it in the bathroom. I had it positioned so her face was reflected in the mirror, as if her double was standing in wait for her in the corner of the bathroom. Unfortunately, I wasn’t home when she went in. But apparently there was a lot of screaming, slamming of doors, and a very tense attitude when I came home.
7. I once had a roommate who was easily worked up and stressed all the time. On move in day she brought all her stuff into the room, piled it on the floor and her desk and then never put any of it away for the rest of the year. She would keep all of her food in one tiny upper desk draw, complete with one knife, one fork, one dish and one plate. Whenever she was having a particularly stressful day she would go to Giant and buy one potato at a time, then come home, chop it up, dip it in ketchup and eat it raw. She would sit on the floor in the middle of her stuff just staring at the wall and eating her raw potato.
8. Walked into the living room to find my roommate, wearing nothing but an apron, straddling a guy on the couch while Star Wars p*rn played in the background. This was at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday.
9. Roommate did not get hangovers so had no consequences for getting slurring drunk regularly. She had a serious boyfriend and was hardly ever home, however, anytime they spent the night at our place, two things would happen: 1) They would get in a drunken screaming fight at 2 a.m. 2) She would throw Mexican food at him (usually a burrito, sometimes nachos) and wouldn’t clean it up. Literally, it got to the point where I would walk in, see cheese and lettuce on the floor, and say to myself, “Oh, she’s home.”
10. My roomies and I had some lovely hardcore-skeezy redneck neighbors that lived below us one year, that we despised. We practically considered them our roomies because all of their noise, junk, and skeeze overflowed into our space. They were those guys that have the “truck nuts” hanging from the back of their trucks—which from my experience, never bodes well. During one of their drunken frenzies they decided it would be brilliant to throw empty beer bottles up on our balcony, which fortunately didn’t come through the glass door. Another time they were playing beer pong with scantily clad girls who saw us watching them (we thought sneakily) through our blinds, and popped up the stairs to drunkenly ask us if we wanted to join. We answered the door in our nighties and with our retainers in, and politely said no thank you. We lost count of the number of times we had to call the cops on their noisy, drunken asses.
11. My freshman roommate stole my underwear and bras and I had to go commando the first week of college. I moved out soon after.
12. One of my roommates talked in her sleep… about her new boyfriend. Totes awk.
13. Roommate basically existed in a different timezone, so she would sit on her bed (on the other side of the room) late at night while I was sleeping and talk on her phone. But, it was that infuriating whisper-talking that is not conducive to sleeping. It drove me crazy, as I was a very light sleeper.
14. Demon roommate would come slamming in to eat with us all. Loudly complained about her step-sister who had temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorder, and that her jaw popped while she ate. Meanwhile, this girl is smacking the entire time she’s eating and her jaw is crackling and popping because she also has a wicked case of TMJ, and abused her pain meds that were prescribed for it. She was also a chronic liar, a complete bitch, and treated her dog horribly—for the record. We ended up “email-divorcing” her.
15. Our roommates was engaged during one of the years we lived with her. Her fiancé lived almost 12 hours away so they were always talking on the phone. But, there were four humans and one dog living in 900 square feet so privacy was hard to come by. This girl would go in the closet to talk on her phone, and she was REALLY loud and would often end up crying—this would go on for hours every day.
16. One of my suitemates, freshman year, would kick all of the roomies out so that she could make sex tapes. There’s nothing more that can be said about that.
17. My sophomore year of college I lived in a sorority house and roomed with a girl I barely knew, and she never really answered most of my messages trying to organize who was going to bring what. When I showed up, she was decorating the room with her horse competition ribbons and photos. At first I thought it was unique… until it took over our whole room and I had to (sparsely) decorate around it. I was under the impression I was living in a bedroom, not a shrine dedicated to her….
18. I had a housemate who was the girlfriend of a really close friend at the time. She was a huge control freak and also insanely emotional about literally everything. She didn’t like talking directly to me and my then-boyfriend for some reason, so messages would get weirdly relayed through her girlfriend or in passive-aggressive emails. She would make sure her girlfriend told us not to eat her Lean Cuisines and Diet Coke. She would make breakfast and leave peanut butter and jelly smeared across the counter tops. We had an ant problem because they were eating food on the living room floor and not cleaning up, but she didn’t believe this was a concern. One of the last straws was confusion over the cable bill (which we shared four ways) that caused her to wail to her girlfriend and stomp about the house. She refused to let us look at it, though, because it was “her responsibility” even though we were responsible for half of it. She kind of made it sound like it was none of my business to look at a bill in her name. We decided to get out of dodge after about two months because everything was weird and stressful all the time.
19. One of my roommates (who wasn’t even technically a roommate but spent most of her time living and sleeping in my room) “borrowed” my underwear without asking. I didn’t notice, but I kind of knew it was missing at some point. She later confessed that not only had she borrowed one of my sexiest red thongs for a hook-up, but she had her period in them. While hooking up with him. Luckily not in my bed. But still.
Ok so in comparison, my situation is not so bad… I don’t know how I would react if somebody stole my underwear though.