When I was in college, I had some awful (and I mean awful) experiences with roommates. My first roommate, freshman year, was the typical never-showered, partied-all-the-time kind of roommate. Let’s call her Smelly. Smelly came from a town close to our private university, with a relatively privileged background. This meant that her parents were footing the entire bill for college. Which meant she didn’t have to do well in class to keep her scholarships (like me) or work to pay part of her bill (also like me) or worry about getting a good job right off the bat to pay for her loans (again, like me). [I was by no means underprivileged and I too had help from my parents, but I still worked part-time and I walked out of college with a pretty sizeable debt looming over my head]
For some reason, she was an education major, although she didn’t seem to like going to class, studying, or even learning very much. I have enormous respect for teachers, especially those who teach in public school, but if this girl’s GPA and partying habits are typical for the next generation of teachers, I’m homeschooling my kids. Anyway, I naively thought she was the worst roommate in the world. Over the next four years, I would radically change my thinking.
Sophomore year, I moved in with my best friend, who I met at freshman orientation. Everyone said not to do it, that it would end our friendship. They were so wrong! She gets the title of Roommate—Roommate with a capital R. Every day was like a slumber party. The only downside was that we often had trouble remembering to study, because we were having so much fun doing other things. Sophomore year was wonderful. But, alas, it came to an end. Not a bad end. Just a temporary, geographic end.
You see, I got an internship in Washington DC after sophomore year and Roommate went home to California to live with her parents. I got stuck living with two of the girls from my program in DC. One didn’t stay past two weeks, but during the time she was there, she would leave the front door unlocked and open in the middle of the night, because she kept losing her keys. Since I’m a small town girl slightly afraid of big cities and DC is one of the most crime-ridden areas in the nation, this made me uncomfortable. But again, she moved out quickly and I’m not sure she can be categorized as much more than an annoying houseguest.
The other roommate (we’ll call her Boston) stayed the entire time and we became friends. For three weeks… Then she went on a weekend trip to attend her brother’s wedding and came back a different person. I’m not kidding: on Wednesday, I helped her shop for dresses for the wedding; on the following Monday, she wasn’t speaking to me. Everything I did sent her into a passive-aggressive whirl. I tried to talk it out or fix it, but she wasn’t having it. I had no clue what I was doing wrong and the tension transferred to the office, which was uncomfortable to say the least. On the last day of the internship, she went out with friends and wasn’t home when my cab came to take me to the airport. I haven’t seen her since. And I’m not particularly sad about that…
Tune in next time for the continuation of The Roommate Saga and meet Munchie, Liar, and Crazy Boss Lady.
P.S. The whole reason for posting my (hopefully) colorful living history is that Roommate is coming to visit! She’s taking a six hour flight from her hometown to mine for the very first time in the six years I’ve known her. She has promised this visit at least once a year during each of those six years. And now she’s finally going to visit. So I’m taking a moment to relive what a great friend she has been to me and what a blessing living with her truly was.
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