Sleeping With One Eye Open/Wondering If Living With Your Parents At Age 30 Is Really So Bad

WARNING: ADULT THEMES

I am going to have to restrain myself from sharing any personal experiences, because I have no idea who reads this. People kept responding, "I want to talk about so-and-so, but he/she reads your blog."

Best of "Describe Your Craziest Roommate" Roll Call

1. BYU: She was in massage therapy school and so we never knew when we would come home to a random naked person in our living room getting a massage; she claimed to see the spirit of her dead grandfather all around the apartment; and she kissed another roommate while said roommate was taking a nap and then pretended like nothing had happened when that roommate woke up.

2. Yale: roommate one: crazy redhead in her 30's who had a much older married boyfriend who was the most famous flute player in America. They had very loud sex with the door open and made her poor crazy cat tigger watch! one time, they miscalculated when I was leaving for the airport and i ran by their open door with my ears burning!!! after she moved out, we discovered disgusting porn magazines--like really hard core dirty stuff--under her bed and my roommate and i had to triple wrap them in layers of newspaper and bags so the neighbors wouldn't think they were ours when we threw them out!


3. Yale: second horrible roommate: she was a dirty hippie environmentalist (proving that some stereotypes do come from reality, although not all environmentalists are dirty or hippies) who argued with us about flushing the toilet--her argument, not flushing the toilet and leaving feces and all manner of things in water was conserving water. our rebuttall--its dirty! she also routinely left gifts of her dirty underwear and clothes in the bathroom. she left food to rot in room so that we thought an animal died in there and the worst thing she ever did was drink too much one night and get high off of marijuana, after a concussion (she was on pain meds as well!) and forget her key, knocking on our door then waking up our poor 80-year-old landlord at four am in the morning!

4. Probably the craziest was my bulimic roommate whose mother sent her money to buy "fruit only" after she told her mom that I got her to eat Oreos with me. She would also pound on the wall of her room if she thought anyone in the living room was being too loud.

5. Pratt: We shared a 12x14' room with two twin beds close enough together to confuse bedsheets in the night. E. watched 'Girl Interrupted' just about every single day. Sometimes she would write something on a post-it and when I asked her a direct question she'd just point to a slip of yellow paper stuck to a dresser drawer or attached to a door knob. She'd often 'diary on the fabric of her life', which involved scrawling on her designer jeans with acrylic paint. At times we would each carry on separate phone calls while sitting in our cell. I guess it's safe to say we weren't what you'd consider 'friends'. She'd send herself in to a hyperventilating panic whenever her mother came to town, scrubbing the tops of cabinets with WD-40 while she sobbed. On one such occasion her mother announced that "Bill" had phoned the house. E. swallowed a gasp and I casually let my eyes drift to her side of the room, "He's out??!" she clapped and giggled. It turns out that Bill was the boy she'd lost her virginity to "the first time". (E. lost her virginity on a bi-annual basis). Along with this juicy piece of information, it was also brought to my attention that when they were fifteen he'd stabbed their mutual best friend 8 times. He had nowhere to go after the half-way house and so in the Spring of 2001, I was introduced to Bill, my craziest roommate.

6. My roommate herself wasn't crazy, but she had a crazy cat. I moved in when this kitty was about the equivalent of a male teenager. Non-neutered. He fixated on me and decided I was his girlfriend, and he was a very jealous boyfriend. Anytime I came out of my room, or my bedroom door were open, he would leap at me, dig his claws into my arm or leg or wherever and proceed to, ahem, try to take advantage of me. Luckily I am much bigger and stronger and could fight him off. I had a boyfriend at the time who would also get attacked every time he came over. It got so bad that we plotted doing away with the kitty, and in the morning I would dread coming out of my room because I never knew if he would be waiting to pounce on me. My roommate FINALLY took him to the vet, and when he came home snipped he was a much calmer, though slightly confused cat.

7. BYU: Scary M. Very dirty. And did the nasty in the apartment common room on top of the pool table with a STRANGER. sick. Maybe this is too racey for your blog

8. BYU: This guy I shared a room with in Provo had some very strange ways of interacting with women. Less than a week after I moved in, he told me about a time he was trying to decide which of two girls to ask out, so he made a spreadsheet and rated them 1-5 in several categories. They ended up tied, so he didn't ask either one out.

I would sometimes see other spreadsheets sitting on his desk, with a list of girls' names in one column, followed by his most recent interaction with them, his assessment of how it went, and in the last column his planned next move. Often this next move involved trying to talk to them at a meeting of the BYU Too-Tall Club.

Once, he found a girl that liked him enough to date him for a while. I heard him talking about her on the phone with his brother. "She's pretty," he said, "but she's not REAL pretty."

In addition to this weirdness, he was also pretty self-righteous (as a self-righteous person myself, I'm good at identifying those tendencies in others). Once I had some friends over, and was showing them a sketch from the most recent SNL episode that I had enjoyed. Roomie walked in right as an admittedly off-color joke was made. He froze for a second, then grabbed the frame holding a copy of the famous Harry Anderson Second Coming of Christ painting, and laid it face down on the top of the entertainment center it had been standing on. I was flabbergasted.