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C lived nearby but not close enough to live at home, so hence, the dorms. Her roommate, a barely-there Japanese student, was either going back to Japan or moving off campus. I never quite knew. We were all friendly with the same people, and this just seemed great. I’d finally get to share a room with someone I LIKED! We configured the room with bunkbeds, so we could have more floor space. A mutual friend of ours, A, would often stay the night in our room, sleeping on the floor. We had a GREAT set up. Unfortunately…. C was a little unbalanced. She had a boyfriend living in another dorm building and they hung out quite a bit. They were also involved in this thing called the Internet. I’d heard of this from my best friend from high school (now at school in Michigan), and she’d been pestering me to get an email address. So I went to the computing people on campus and got myself one. Then I was shown how to check email and C showed me this thing called a “talker”, which is basically a prehistoric chat room. I told my friend so she could sign on and we could talk, almost like talking on the phone! Cool!

I got more into the whole “talker” thing, but all of us were. Well, maybe not C quite as much becuase she was caught up in her own drama and was starting to get annoyed that instead of paying attention to her, we were sitting in front of the computer down at the lab. THEN, I figured how to get my ancient (and I’m serious when I say ancient) computer to access the campus internet from our room. Sweet! Except, C wanted to limit my use on that in the room. Whatever. I made friends online and, being a rather impulsive person, flew out to visit them one dreary March weekend. I had a great time that weekend. Things had been getting more and more stressful back at school. C did not like me going on this trip and let me know it. So it felt really good to hang out, have fun and be carefree for a change. I know I was lucky. These people I met were just like me, college students playing around on the internet. It could have been worse, but it wasn’t. Really, the whole thing was pretty innocent. I was sad to leave there and by the time my flight landed in Reno, I was feeling awful. I knew I’d caught some sort of bug, and all I wanted to do was get back to my room and crawl in bed. Which I did. Until C came in with some of our friends and a sheet of paper for me to read. It was a CONTRACT. I forget all the details and stipulations, but the long and short of it was, she wanted to limit my time on the internet or she was going to kick me out of OUR room. Like she could even do that. But since I felt like my brain was nearly about to explode, I signed and passed out.

A few short weeks later, the girl had some sort of episode. A and I were having a good time, talking. A was going to be staying the night again. So we were sitting up on my bunk (the top one), talking about various internet things (since we knew the same internet people) and laughing. When C started getting ready for bed. We asked her if she wanted us to stop talking or leave or something. No, she said. She was going to read. Okay. A while later she turned out the light and put her headphones on (she often listened to her headphones when going to sleep), so we again asked her if she wanted us to stop. Nope, she was cool. Okay, but we lowered our voices to a whisper. It wasn’t ten minutes before she leapt up and grabbed the phone. Apparently, she was calling her boyfriend but swore when she got a busy signal. See, he was on the internet in his room. Whoops! This really blew her top so ordered A to go down to the computer lab and get on the talker and tell him to call her NOW. She was obviously MAD. I went with A and I can’t recall if we got ahold of him or not. But when we got back to the room, there was a bottle of asprin spilt ALL over the floor. Obviously, this was some serious drama going on. A and I knew it, and it pissed us off. So when C came into the room, boyfriend in tow, there were a few awkward minutes where C tried to be a little blase in explaining the pills before A burst into tears and ran out, and I followed. We huddled in the bathroom, commiserating about Psycho C. The boyfriend called to us from the hall, C wanted to talk to me. Fine. Whatever. Basically, she was mad that we were talking when she was trying to sleep, hated the internet, etc and so forth… obviously after sympathy. I was running out of patience.

The stickler came when she got the phone bill at the end of the year and I’d had a pretty expensive call on there, which I told her I would pay. Since I wasn’t working at the time, I told her I’d pay her out of my summer job here in a few weeks. Which I did. But she was the sort that never let me forget it. It’s hard to explain here, but she had a way of picking on these sorts spots I had. Telling everyone things about me that weren’t necessarily true. She loved to make generalizations and was really pretty much a faux friend. Luckily, I got a true friend out of the deal, A, and we were friends the rest of the way through school.

You’d think it’d end there but nope! When I returned my sophomore year, I had a barely-there Japanese roommate of my very own. I was actually pretty glad for it… finally someone who would stay out of my business! We just never talked, which is sorta awkward when you’re sharing a room roughly the size of a shoebox. And I do remember right before finals she played the same three songs off her Mariah Carey Christmas CD, over and over and over… Thankfully, I liked “All I Want for Christmas (Is You)”, but the rest drove me bats. She left at the semester, and I got a new roommate when I got back in the spring. She was a South African tennis player, there on scholarship. Friendly enough and we got along fairly decently for most of the year. No, the troubles with HER came after our tenure together. First off, this year the phone was in my name. She’d run up some large calls and I paid them so she paid me back. There was some sort of confusion about money, that I can’t quite remember. What I do remember is that she thought I owed her money, but in reality she owed me money for a phone bill but I’d decided it was better to let it go. Which I did. But my junior year, she tracked me down at my new room (in a new building, no less) to ask for this money. I told her to fly a kite. She even came by once when I was laying in bed, sick to death from food poisioning. Finally, one day she threatened to have the international students office put a hold on my student record so I couldn’t register for classes if I didn’t pay her. I flew off the handle and gave her an earful. K, who I was just starting to date at that time, was impressed with my show of temper. I don’t show it often, which tells you how pissed I was. I think she ended up calling my parents, asking them for the money. I’m not sure if they paid it or not, I think they did. Anyhow, come to find out, over the summer vacation, they’d been in the dorms and ran up a HUGE phone bill on someone elses phone. Well they were caught and forced to pay it, except she didn’t have the money to do so. So she thought she’d bilk me. Nice, huh?

So that fall semester of my junior year, I had a barely-there Taiwanese roommate. And I was living in an “on campus apartment” sort of setup. Three rooms, living room, kitchen and two bathrooms. I should have known it would be a red letter year from the way the first day started. I was moving my things into my room when the girls (who’d been there a few days before) from the other rooms ambushed me. Would I mind terribly switching rooms? They’ve gotten to be SUCH good friends the past couple of days and I’m barely moved in. Pretty please? I didn’t really want to, I’d requested that particular room for a good reason (it didn’t have a wall that bordered on the living room, I thought it’d be quieter), but I felt there wasn’t much I could do. I didn’t want to be a bitch on the first day. So I switched rooms and ended up with the Taiwanese roommate. The one who liked to keep the heat in our room at “inferno” and lay under her piles of blankets wearing sweats. The one who made these horrible things called “tea eggs” which smelled INCREDIBLY nasty and then she’d eat them in our room. Bleh!

As you can guess, at the semester Taiwanese roommate left (you sensing a theme here?). She was replaced by H, the evil evil evil roommate from hell. Because everyone up till now had just been the margarine of evil. This here? The real thing. First off, she was rude to me. Which, fine, by now I’m used to it. I can take it. But she was also rude to my friends. A would often come over to hang out or whatever. We had a communal television set and vcr in the living room so we’d watch movies out there. Feeling the spirit, I put my extensive video collection I toted around with me for some reason on the shelves out by the tv so we could all enjoy them. The other girls offered up what they had and we had a good thing going. One day, A was over while I was fetching something quick out of my room. Then we were going to head out to the mall. H was at her desk, studying and our door was open, giving her a good look at the living room, and A who was perusing the video selection. A was a HUGE Christian Slater fan. Just loved the guy. So upon seeing one of the movies, “Bed of Roses” (which belonged to H), she squealed in delight and picked it up to look at it. She said she really wants to get this one, maybe we should stop by Walmart while we’re out. Then she set the movie back down. Apparently, while I’ve got my back turned, H leapt up from her desk, dashed out and grabbed the video in question and took it back into the room, where she put it in her desk drawer. A was mortified. Obviously, H didn’t want my friend to look at it? Was afraid she’d take it? Whatever. I was SO mad that I took all my movies off the shelves and kept them in a drawer in my dresser. Forget that.

The girl was also a raging ho. She had this boyfriend who was going to school up in northern California. She had pictures of this guy all over her side of the room. She always talked about how they were going to get married in four years or some-such. Well, in the meantime, she’s screwing a guy who lives one floor up from us. And not just in private. In our room. WITH ME RIGHT THERE. What posseses people to DO this? My walkman and I became great friends, just to drown out the NOISE. And oftentimes, I would retreat to K’s room for the night because HOLY HELL. My favorite? Was when the boyfriend came to visit and she asked me if I could spend the week out on the couch in the living room. Then, when he finally left and I figured I had my room back? Guess who came over that night? You got it; boy from upstairs. :mad K didn’t end up having a roommate the last half of the semester so I essentially moved in with him. This gal was the WORST. And what made it so intolerable? She was a freshman. To understand the extent of the injustice, the dorm building we were in was supposedly an “upper-classmen” dorm. I think you could live there as a sophomore but definitely not as a freshman. H loved to brag about how her daddy talked the housing guy into letting her stay in that building. So she? Wasn’t even supposed to BE THERE.

I hope she got herpes. Or worse.

My senior year was better. I won’t go into a lot of details, but the only bump in the road involved an insufferable ass-munch, ruining the situation for four other people. And no, the insufferable ass-much was NOT me. K and I were married that summer so thank GOD that put an end to my roommate career. I don’t think I could have taken much more. And if you read this far? You’ve earned a cookie. God bless you.

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