Roommate Fouls

A 228 square foot space is generally associated with bathrooms, closets and pantries—intimate spaces. Sharing such a space with another person can be cramped. Sharing it with someone you’ve previously only shared a few texts with is downright weird. But college is inherently weird, and I digress. When I moved into my dorm in August, finding balance in a space that was both uniquely mine and my roommates came with an adjustment period, during which I made a few of what can only be described as roommate fouls.

My roommate moved in a week before me for bandcamp, which kept her out of the room the whole day I moved in. By 9 pm I hadn’t met her and was headed out, so we met up in the common room. There were a bunch of other girls there eager to find their bridesmaids introducing themselves, so we did little more than say hi. You can imagine how waking up (practically) next to someone who you know about as well as your barista would be weird. Later that night, I made it even weirder. I walked into my new room, exhilarated by the reality of finally being at college and the fact that I could get home after midnight without my mom sending out an Amber Alert, and discovered my roommate sleeping. I tried to remember where I had unpacked my pajamas in my pitch black and unfamiliar surroundings. Despite my best attempt to be discreet, I walked straight into the storage cube sitting next to my bed and face-planted. The sound of me tumbling onto the floor awoke my roommate. She said only, “You can turn on the light,” but I imagined she was thinking something along the lines of, “Is this bitch serious?” They say first impressions are everything, and this one set the scene for more mistakes to come.

Sometime during the first week of classes, I had just finished cleaning my room and was trying to get an “insta-worthy” picture of my new home. Yeah my walls were cinder blocks and half of my christmas lights had already gone out, but this was college, the best four years anyone could wish for. Asher Roth had serenaded me with high expectations and I was not about to let my followers believe that I was experiencing anything less. The night before I had worn a shirt that was strapless/backless/low-cut enough to require a sticky bra, which was now sitting on my desk drying. The entirety of my new “home” could fit into the frame of an Instagram, so their was no room for error. The chicken-cutlet-like object didn’t really fit the aesthetic of my picture, so I moved it to my roommate’s desk for the time being since she wasn’t in the room anyway. Harmless, right? WRONG. Unsurprisingly, I got distracted with picking the perfect filter/caption combo for my picture that would say, “My dorm is both chic and cozy and better than yours,” and forgot about the object that had dutifully stuck to my bare boobs just 12 hours before. It wasn’t until a full two days later, after my roommate had sat at her desk, several times while I was in the room, that I realized, with horror, what I had forgotten. I immediately removed the wet, skin colored, boob-molding bra, and we never spoke of the incident again.

A few weeks later, things were more adjusted. I learned to fall asleep with the lights on if my roommate was up doing homework and had mastered the art of quietly stumbling in at 3 am when she was sleeping. I decided it was time for a little Netflix binge. I was four episodes deep when I got up to get a drink, took off my headphones and discovered that my wireless beats were not in fact connected by Bluetooth, and the sound was playing right out of my laptop. Not only did this mean that the so called “sound blocking” technology of my headphones was a sham, but my roommate now probably thought I was more of an asshole than your average beats wearer. I’m not sure what she thought I was accomplishing by listening to my computer’s speakers while wearing headphones, but I am eternally thankful that I was only watching The Office, and not Girls or another show more prone to graphic sex scenes.

So Jerks, learn from my mistakes, and check yourself and your Bluetooth connection before your wreck your relationship with your roommate. Mine was incredibly understanding, but yours might not be. Hell, I might not have been. As you know, or will soon discover, a college dorm is not a big enough space for an elephant in the room.