On the final day of living in my freshman year dorm last week, my roommate spent the entire night packing. I'm not kidding. From eight at night until five in the morning when she left for her flight, she noisily filled her suitcase, made boxes, and cleaned her entire side of the room. All in complete darkness, mind you.
You might be thinking, why not just tell her off and say, "Hey it's finals week and, um, some of us are trying to sleep?" Well, my answer to that would be because it's what she's been doing the entire year, so why would the last night be any different?
It was fine in the beginning. Of course, on move-in day you have your parents around to help you with the awkward small talk. Then, you go down to breakfast together the next day and attempt to learn more about each other.
However, after the first month or so that friendliness quickly wore off. We each took our studies pretty seriously, and never had free time in our schedules to all do something together. I was okay with this, since I knew it wasn't always a big deal to not be best friends forever with your roommates (I even wrote about that in another article.)
The biggest problem I had was when one of my roommates would come in every. single. night. around midnight or later. She would be gone all day long, and I have no idea where she went. No one can possibly study for fourteen hours straight, right?
Every time she would come in to our dorm, everyone's lights would be off (duh, we're sleeping like normal humans) yet she would just make as much noise as she wanted and leave lights on as she brushed her teeth or just paced around the room doing nothing.
I just brushed this off because I could easily fall back asleep after, and truthfully I was kinda glad she wasn't in the room during the day, so I let it be.
Now, you might be thinking, "That's pretty disrespectful," right? And I agree, but turns out I was being the disrespectful one the entire time! I know, plot twist. The person who's lived in an apartment her entire life, and knows what it's like to live in the same quarters as someone else, is actually the one who doesn't know how to live with other people. Crazy.
In April, I was completely blindsided by all three of my roommates. My RA had to have a meeting with me, asking me about my "rude gestures" toward my roommates, which I had absolutely no idea about. I was accused of slamming things constantly and my roommates went to our RA, out of "concern."
But, clearly they weren't concerned enough to actually come up and talk to me about the problems they had. They just painted me out to be the bad guy, maybe because I was an easy target. I kept to myself and didn't get involved in anyone else's business.
After the meeting with my RA, I cried all night and had the worse migraine. I hate when people view me as someone that I'm not, and I am definitely not the bad roommate in this situation. I was actually quiet at night and always made sure our bathroom had toilet paper, soap, a clean garbage. I guess that wasn't enough.
So, to my freshman year roommates, a couple of final words:
1. Thanks for making my dorm such an awkward environment that I didn't even want to be there.
2. Thanks for making absolutely no effort to solve the "problems" that we supposedly had, and just tattled straight to our RA.
3. And finally, thanks for making the final stretch of my freshman year one of the most dreadful times of my life.
You're the best! :) (Not really.)
