April 10, 2005

• Hmmm... many years ago I roomed with a guy and a girl. The guy eventually moved back to New Hampshire. The day after he moved out, we found stacks of porn mags waiting to be thrown out. Stacks and stacks of it, the pages all soft and dog-eared.
• Well, there was the time I lived with my boyfriend, my boyfriend's best friend, and the best friend's girlfriend -- who happened to be my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. In a small two-bedroom apartment. It would have made a great reality show, especially the parts where the boyfriend's best friend tried to actually physically strangle me, or the part where my boyfriend's ex (and our mutual roommate) would wait for my boyfriend and I to go out on a date, and would then call his cell phone. Or when the boyfriend's ex would wait for the boyfriend and I to go have sex (it was a SMALL two-bedroom, everyone knew everything) and would then stand outside the room sobbing loudly until we paid attention to her. Or the time that the boyfriend's best friend made out with a Catholic girl on the couch while his girlfriend was in the bedroom. Oh, fun times, fun motherfucking times. It's a wonder any of us lived to tell about it. We're all still bitter. Every last one of us.
• You know, it's going to be really hard to follow that one.
• I married my housemate. That was unexpected. We did have one housemate, still a fairly good friend, who had some issues with alcohol. On one memorable occasion, he got drunk and thought he was a tiger, spending the party crawling around on all fours and occasionally growling at someone. Another girl we got in (who is not a friend) was supposed to be a perfect, neat, studious, born-again pious no-sex-before-marriage sort of girl. She turned over a new leaf right before moving in with us and decided to be the world's messiest party animal. Still a virginal type, though, which was the one amusing thing about it all. We were a pretty boring lot on the whole, rosters and all. Too busy playing Doom II to be weird.
• I lived with my best friend and my boyfriend who ended up sleeping together but that wasn't weird, just annoying. The roommate after that would get packages of mail-order experimental drugs, "If you take more than ONE MILLIGRAM of this stuff it could KILL YOU!" so I asked him to do all his drugs at his girlfriend's house because if I found him dead I would be really pissed off. After that, I hardly ever saw him. Which is probably for the best. The roommate after that I found on the internet and was just strange. He had one set of dishes, smelled weird, and was either pissed at me or would follow me around when I was home. He started dating a Tibetan translator who giggled non-stop (including during the entire Matrix II movie giggle, giggle, giggle) and aside from the movie I saw for maybe an hour total. They would lock themselves in his room and all I would hear is giggling and crashing. The roommate after that I'm marrying in a little over three weeks. And he does my laundry and goes on chocolate runs for me so I broke the scary roommate streak! Believe it or not, except for the whole boyfriend sleeping with best friend thing, I kind of liked my roommates.
• Three weeks!? Crikey.
• One of my roommates had his first psychotic breakdown; this I realized after he set our house on fire, then told me he'd had sex with a sheep, asking, and I quote,"I wonder if we have a child". That is when I discovered my remarkable ability to keep a straight face no matter what crazy-ass shit anyone tells me. After that, he asked if I would go with him into the Endowment Lands which is a big murky forest near the university, beloved of those encumbered with a suspiciously dead body; which I presumed would be my body should I go in the fucking woods with Sheep Boy. We took him to the Psych Ward instead. Also had a roommate who ran away to join up with White Power skins in Salt Lake City and do bank jobs. He came back to town in a cherry late-fifties Cadillac, white, about 80 feet long, and it had a button up front that would electrically slide the whole back bench seat forward and back. He also said he "couldn't go to the States anymore".
• When I was looking for a room to rent in San Francisco at the height of the dot-com boom, I interviewed with a woman who was the PETA-hippie version of the first link. She started off with a no shoes in the house rule - no problem. Then, no men - I guess I can go to his house, no problem. Then, occasional cat-sitting - well, as long as I'm not out of town, no problem. Then, no cooking of meat or fish in the house - um...can I bring in take-out, as long as it doesn't smell meaty? Hmmm...I guess no problem. Then, no fur in the house - wha? um, okay, no problem. I actually managed to pass all her tests. But then she asked what I did for a living, and I had to tell her I am in grad school for genetics. I don't actually kill the cute little mice, but they definitely have to die so I can get my data. So, that was that. Luckily, the economy went crunch and I was able to sign the lease on a hugely rent-reduced three-bedroom place and make my own absurd roommate requirements.
• When I moved up to London to be a student I was of course skint as a button, so I took a friend up on the offer to rent a room from mis sister. She was a late 30s rock chick in rapid decline after what I heard was years of amphetamine abuse. She'd sit on the sofa all day watching the cable feed that showed all bazillion channels at once, dressed in her coat with the hood up. She'd ignore me then, but at night she'd go manic and either collar me in the kitchen for lengthy rambling rants in classic crazy arse style or attempt to get me to sleep with her. She hardly ever left the house but did occasionally get visits from a bunch of swampy crack-head mates. They were all maniacs but quite friendly really. I had to get out though as it wasn't doing my study much good. After that I upgraded to sleeping on the floor of another friend's sister, but they were all trainee dancers so I got invited to a lot of free shows with attractive people so that was a result.
• My old barracks roommate was to cheap to buy toilet paper, he would buy coffee filters instead. Realize that coffee filters are designed to allow fluid to seep through. When I would supply the toilet paper, he'd go through more than one roll each day.
• Coffee filters are cheaper than toilet paper? o_O
• I should be able to come close to topping these stories, but I am not sure if for purposes of this discussion my mother can count as a roommate.
• I don't think I'll ever complain about Greg and the Magic Fridge again.
• For some reason, during my college years, I thought it would be a good idea to move in with my (insane) best friend, my (pyschologically abusive) ex-boyfriend (who was still bitter at my dumping him--gee!) and eventually crazy bestfriends boyfriend. we were all doing lots of experiments with um, chemistry, the organic pyschedelic kind...ugh! I shudder to remember those days...we were all functionally pyschotic and overly dramatic and it was a big mess.
• the night of candyflipping, pink floyd and "what sort of woodland/mystical creature are you?" particularly comes to mind. I am a sylph, in case you were curious...
• One of my current roommates won't stay off the counters. No matter how many times I yell at her, she just goes back up again. If she weren't so amazingly cute, I think I'd get mad at her. The human one is just fine, though I had better go vacuum the living room - I have to move out this fall, and she's inviting a potential new roommate over.
• Wow, my roommate only tried to kill me. These are all a lot weirder, and presumably more long-term. It was college, first term ever. She arrived on campus with box of Cosmo/Seventeen mags and a phone. Nothing else. Mewed to herself while reading. Never went to class. Talked about me while she's on the phone and I'm in the room, five-ten feet away. The final push was when I found her at the foot of my bed with a knife talking to herself. I didn't have a roommate again after that; I think the college made some arrangements after throwing her out and telling her parents that she wouldn't be allowed on campus again until she had a full psych-eval. They insisted that, her previous inpatient psych stuff notwithstanding, I was the crazy one. But yeah, fairly bland. I didn't lose anything except a carpet and a good hunk of trust. I did gain some nice paranoia out of that.
• Most of my roommate situations were pretty tame. I think I may have been the crazy roommate in at least one situation, though...I was going through my sexual experimentation phase at the same time as sharing a house with these three guys, one of whom was a very buttoned up control freak of sorts. I shudder to think of the stories they would tell of me. The control freak would get really pissed if we turned the AC down past 80 degrees, though. That was odd.
• Weirdest one for me was the girl who systematically slept with every male housemate, then after flaming out with each one, cut of all ties with everyone she knew and moved down to Brazil.
• My boyfriend in college lived for a time with a co-worker, and the co-worker's girlfriend in a mobile home. Going over to visit once, he took me into the kitchen and showed me where they'd marked every single dish, piece of silverware, cooking implement, appliance, and food item - right down to the individual eggs - with permanent marker and/or Post-It notes that said either "NO!!" or "YES!!", depending on whether my boyfriend was allowed to touch them or not. The sink faucets where a "YES!!" while the toaster was a "NO!!", for example. To be fair to the roomies, he did have boundary issues... but yikes.
• In college, I lived in a house with four of my classmates. Everything was chill, except for the one housemate with clown paintings in her room. We put colorful wirey sculpture on the wall in the living room and she broke down in tears due to her fear that it would leap off of the wall and attack her. I also shared an apartment with a born-again christian (I didn't realize this until I looked at his books in the living room after he moved in). He had a raging virgin/whore complex that became apparent when a friend dated him. He used to do a lot of crazy shit before finding Jesus, but of course now looked down at such behavior. So that was a fun year.
• Mine are relatively tame by comparison. There was the guy Carl I shared a house with senior year of college. He was in a fraternity with the other roomies, despite being 25 and not enrolled in the school- he was something of a con-man. The highlight was when he got busted for stealing from his job at Blockbuster. A cop came to the house to get him, and in true white trash form, he answered the door sans shirt.
• bernockle, dude, c'mon! It all counts--details, spill it!
• This is not my story, I've had too many weird roommates to count, but this story right here describes what may or may not be a true account of the worst roommate ever. I have known psychos, and some of them can go quite far, so maybe it is true.
• I live with two fetishists, who have devoted time, energy and money to acquiring the accoutrements related to their two particular fetishes. When the adult-sized cloth diapers showed up on the front doorstep, I decided that I could no longer wear my "Celebrate Diversity" button because I just can't celebrate that much diversity.
• Considering some of the things I've done, I am probably one of the strangest housemates I've ever had. Some of these things I've done: I buy Jell-O anonymously for strangers in restaurants. Sometimes I send with it a message saying, "Penn says hi." I've gone out with all exposed areas of skin painted dark blue with gold stars. I spent a lot of time that night in Denny's, glaring around at everyone staring back at me, and commenting out loud that you'd think they'd never seen the Egyptian goddess of the night enjoying a SuperBird before. I've dragged roommates to 24-hour grocery stores in the middle of the night to do slow-motion aerobics and a tango or two to the Muzak in the frozen food aisle. I wandered around downtown San Jose in pajamas, robe, and bright yellow Grimm slippers. I wore a pair of felt antlers for a month and insisted that everyone call me Blitzen. I'd only refer to my roommate as Vixen, and her girlfriend as Dasher. I've taken a pin, carefully inserted it through the skin of a banana, and wiggled the pin back and forth to pre-slice the fruit, in order to confuse the roommate I knew would be having that banana at breakfast. I haven't done it yet, but I'm making plans to go bar-hopping while dressed as a nun. After the things that I do, and the way I usually try to drag roommates into joining me, my roommates all seem quite tame by comparison.
• Come to think of it, my first year in college I must have been the weird roommate. On my roommate's birthday, I decided to make her a nice card. And wouldn't it be nice if that was the first thing she saw in the morning? So, I was in the process of taping the card to the ceiling right over her head when she woke up to me leaning over her in the dark. A completely (or at least somewhat) rational explanation, but probably pretty scary nonetheless. And I hadn't learned about putting my clothesin drawers yet, so there was usually a couple of piles of them (clean and dirty) on my side of the room. Usually pretty large piles. And I mean exactly on my side. If you weren't standing on clothes, you were on her side of the room. And I dated her calculus teacher. That couldn't have made her very comfortable.
• Doris - that link was insane. It was like a horror movie. I need to go shower and review my lease.
• yeah, interesting link. Assuming it's true, (big assumption) the fact that the author went to the extremes he did, rather than simply move out, makes him come off just as insane as the roommate. Seems like if they did a "roshomon" (sp?) type thing, the other guy could also claim to have the weirdest roommate ever from his POV.
• Bad roomate stories previously discussed here.
• I don't know about you all, but I want to live with Christophine. I think it might be good to have someone who you can count on being weird. :D
• I'm not a good roommate, I'll admit (not crazy bad. I just don't want another roomie unless I'm in a relationship with them). But I would definitely like to do some supermarket dancing with Christophine :)
• Doris, that is so far beyond the pale, I don't even know what to say. That cannot be real. If it is, the good roommate needs to be knocked upside the head. The bad roommate sounds like a classic heroin user with lot's of baaaaad mental problems. It almost reminded me of the guy in "Silence of the Lambs", except worse.
• MonkeyFilter: I just can't celebrate that much diversity. I, um, don't know what to say. Perhaps I really AM boring.
• Whoops, forgot to put in this one. MonkeyFilter: We're all still bitter. Every last one of us.
• I think I've seen Christophine in San Jose. The Grimmy slippers were a dead giveaway. Seriously, if you meet a zombie the first thing they do is offer you Grimmy slippers. Then they say "breaaaaaains". Wait, that would make them an undead giveaway. Never mind.
• When I was on exchange in Florida, I had one roommate in the dorm who, although unknown to me, had gone through thirteen roommates in two years. His strategy was simple -- keep driving out your roommates until you end up with a supersingle (i.e. a double room with just one person). His strategy was obvious, as most of his half was taken up with furniture ready to go on my half. I figured that since he was the asshole, it shouldn't be up to me to move out. Plus, I'm extremely stubborn, and there was no way I was going to let this yobo win. Needless to say, my year was a genuine Laff Riot. Some things were deliberate, like his impromptu practicing for his a cappella showtunes choir, other things simply related to his being a slob. (Examples -- he spent the ENTIRE YEAR sleeping on a bare matress. No sheets. And these are campus matresses, which are covered in vinyl, to protect against damage from bodily fluids. Did I mention we were in Florida? Where it's hot? He never cleaned his side once, meaning that I found myself cleaning the dandruff from his Michael Bolton mullet on MY SIDE. Plus, the guy put his deodorant on before he showered. BEFORE. Did I mention we were in Florida? Where it's hot?) Personality wise, he was a basket-case. He'd sleep in until mid-afternoon, and go to bed at nine at night -- to avoid having to deal the fact that he had no life, so he might as well sleep through it. Or how he would interject into my phone conversations. Or how he would read the gay personals in the Tampa papers, and make fun/gaybash each one. I could go on, but it's much too depressing. Like the time when he brought a girl back to the room when I was sleeping, and she proceeded to blow him while I was supposedly 'asleep'. (First thought: my god, that's gross. Second thought: why the hell is this clown getting some before ME?) On top of all this, he was militantly Jewish, and he thought that I was of German descent. I'm not. After that, no more roomies. Paid a bit more for my own place. Maybe a bit further away than I'd care for, but an easy price to pay for my sanity. Bitter after all these years? Who, me? What?
• If it wasn't blocked at work, I could direct you all to a hysterically funny similar thread over at B3TA. You'll just have to find it yourself. It's worth it.
• My stories aren't funny at all. Some minor ones, but I've forgotten them, I think. They were good times with the going-to-hell part lurking underneath, that I didn't know about until afterward - and what I did know about I wasn't in any place to change, because my status in the house was too low. I'd rather think about the good parts. Life is too short. Stories about all this hellish stuff when people put up with it - they're strange, but I get irritated at the tellers too. Why do they stay? Do they feel martyrous, sainted because they're so much better than the mentally ill fuckers around them? Get out, if you can, and if you can't call the damn cops. I hate that mindset of hanging around "dropping hints" and acting horrified. You can stop it with a phone call, moron, and if you can't then get out of there. It's not rocket science. I think people enjoy it in some way. Which pisses me off. They're CRAZY, you dickheads. They need help. It's not your responsibility to get them help, but it doesn't make you a better person to let their illness fester and spread stories around for the entertainment of strangers. I'm a little bitter, heh. It all sounds very cute and handkerchief-to-the-mouth shocking to read about crazy people on the internet. It's kind of scary in real life. On the other hand, people who are militantly "quirky" - look at me! look at me! look at me! I'm SO DIFFERENT I CAN'T STAND IT, LOOK AT ME, DAMN YOU! LOOK! - irritate the unholy hell out of me, which is bad to them, because oh no, I'm not looking at them. Sooooo it's a matter of taste. ;) this post was rather thomcatspikey. Sorry.
• my favorite from my days spent in the International dormitory: (apologies for the long post!) The semester started well, 3 of us in a 4-person apartment. Me and my roommate from Japan shared one bedroom, and on the other side was Tim, openly gay and proud to share that side of his life with everyone. Two weeks after the semester started, a knock on our door late one night. Aha! The missing fourth roommate finally showed up [damn!]. His name, Ali. He just arrived from Karachi, Pakistan. He only carried one small suitcase, claiming everything else was lost. Pure hell ensued from that moment forward. 1. hygiene! Ali stood in the bathroom silent for several minutes. Finally, he asked, "how do you bathe? how do you clean your teeth?" Ali said that back home, he had several servants: a servant to bathe him, a servant to attend to his shoes, a servant to feed him, etc etc. We thought he was joking, but quickly realized this guy was a complete idiot. He didn't take a shower for the first couple weeks. Instead, he DOUSED himself in this horrid Aspen cologne [I shall never forget the smell as long as I live]. I woke up unable to breathe many mornings because the cologne sucked all breathable oxygen from the apartment. He didn't spray, he poured... 2. The phone calls! Ali would call his family back home in Karachi every morning (usually about 4:00 am). I should not call it talking, it was more like YELLING. Not only did he wake all of us up, but also the people in adjoining apartments. The typical yelling phone call would last 40 minutes. I wanted to strangle him. Hell, everyone wanted to! 3. Armani Exchange! and Fast Times at Ridgemont High! Every day, Ali would ask every person he encountered, "Do you know where there is an Armani boutique?? Please, I need Armani! Do you know the Armani Exchange boutique!?" Every time I pass an Armani Exchange in NYC, I shudder... His second question posed to every human: "Do you know an American high school movie I can watch? I want more movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High! I want a collection of every high school movie made in the US." 4. sexual tension! Ali was a devout Muslim. Ali shared a bedroom with a devout gay slut. Ali + Tim = BAD mix. After dealing with Ali's insanity for weeks, Tim decided to take the not gonna hide anything route. Tim brought his date home one night, knowing full-well that Ali would arrive minutes later. Tim left the bedroom door unlocked and proceeded to give his date a blo-job as Ali walked in. Ali's reaction? He did not take it well! He ran in horror throughout the building screaming hysterically, "He sucked dick! He sucked dick!!" The incident was talk around campus the next day. As if that wasn't bad enough, two nights later Ali was caught masturbating in the living room in the middle of the night. Aaah, roommates! 5. hygiene Part II After one-month, Ali still did not grasp the concept of bathing and cleaning up after himself. Usually upon entering the bathroom, one could find numerous heavily-stained tighty-whitey underwear scattered on the floor. Disgusting would not describe the scene. Tim staged a "cologne coup d'etat." After Ali left for classes one morning, Tim poured the remaining contents of his cologne down the toilet so we could finally breathe. That was the last straw for Ali, he moved out!!!!
• I hope none of my roommates find this thread. ^^;;
• I think I've told this story elsewhere, but technically it's not a roommate story because this was during my year in the dorms, where we all had single rooms. I lived on an all-girl floor and this one guy lived in a room on our floor but off the stairwell, so separate to us. He used the upstairs guys' bathrooms, so we were all fine with it. He was a nutcase, pure and simple. I went down to the dining hall one night to get a snack and tripped over him, lying naked under one of the dining tables with just his feet sticking out. He was wide awake. Other nights he'd roam the quad naked, and one winter night slept out in the quad. Some kind person put a blanket over him. When Braveheart came out at the movies, we all went off to see it. Soon after, he started painting his face blue and going around like that all day, every day. Anyone who asked him a question would get a blank stare or, if he'd been drinking, incoherent nose-to-nose yelling. What should have been the last straw was the night he smashed the window in his room, mid-winter. He took the dryer from our floor's laundry into his room and turned it to high with the door open to keep himself warm. He managed to start a small fire when the element blew, but the guys from upstairs put it out. Another time he took the fridge from our floor and locked it in his room, for no obvious reason. I think I had one coherent conversation with him all year in which we discussed American high-school wrestling because he'd spent a year in the US on exchange, and my stepdad is a wrestling coach. I also think the reason he stayed the whole year was that he coincidentally had the same last name as the principal of the dorms.
• I never had any truly weird roommates (not like some in this thread), but I had weird living situations. My freshman year at B.U. I was a "nomad" for 2 weeks at the beginning of the year, due to a housing shortage. When I finally got a dorm room, it was a "quad": a huge, open room shared by 4 women. My roommates were a wacky Venezuelan named Marisa, a theater tech major named Misty Dawn, and a cow-eyed girl named Melanie who was going through a teary break-up with her high-school boyfriend (who eventually told her he was gay). My senior year I was supposed to move into the apartment where my best friend was living, but at the last moment his asshat roomate decided he wasn't leaving, and had found a place for me to live (how nice!) in a house with 6 other women (!!!). These women (seniors like me) were all buddies forever, all majoring in things like business or politics or whatever, and then there's me, the weirdo art major with all the freaky theater friends. Needless to say I was the black sheep. I guess you could say I was the weird roomate there. That was the last time I ever roomed with anyone I wasn't close to.
• None of my roommates, past or present, compare to some of the crazy stories here, but I did have one roomie who transcended filth to a level that no one should have to witness. It wasn't just that he would go months without brushing his teeth (I finally bought him a toothbrush), or unclogging his toliet (I laid down the law when he started using my bathroom), or that my other roommates and I made him keep his door closed to prevent the stench from spreading. No, the moment of clarity for me came when I was cleaning out his room after he moved out. He had left behind a tall bookcase, it almost reached the ceiling, and I was cleaning it off. I got up on a chair to reach the higher shelves and found on the top shelf, just inches from my poor abused nose, the decaying carcass of a whole rotisserie chicken, the kind sold in supermarkets. It was hard to say how long it had been there, but the parts that weren't covered in maggots looked pretty old.