8 may 2003- roommate
it’s been awhile hasn’t it?
credit that to plain laziness. i have had nothing really to rant
on, but now that it is moving time, something has come up. namely my roommate.
i know for an absolute fact that i am a difficult person to be around. i
am an antisocial, i don’t speak if i don’t have anything to say and i
am a complete mess. my
area is about as clean as a mudpit. those are my faults
but i keep them to myself. one would expect
other people to have their faults as well and that is to be expected. my roommate (whose
name i will withhold, he wasn’t really that bad a
guy) had some strange and annoying faults.
i had early morning classes (one at 8 and another at 9 and
9:30) so i try to get to bed fairly early, no later
than 11 if i could help it. if i wasn’t in bed before he came back (wherever he was) i am up until 12 in the morning easily. the reason: the
bright florescent lights. it is not possible to attempt to try to get any sleep with
those things on. and
the kicker- he had a desklamp and a 6 ft tall lamp to
use. never once
did he ever on his own use one of those lights when he had to work late or
decided to catch the late sportscenter. and speaking of such
he seemed to think that the most important show in the morning is the
i also think that my roommate is
afraid of the dark or something. i can tell if my roommate was in
the room previously if the lights are on.
he always has the lights on. even when it is
bright and sunny outside. and the blinds are open.
i like a dark
room. that’s me
personally. if
something’s there in the light it is certainly there in the dark. and i didn’t have any books to read so there was no real reason
for me to have the lights on unless i was looking for
something, but if given the choice, i prefer natural
light to the artificial one. he has on several occasions done both prompting me to sport
my sunglasses inside. it
gets especially bad during the late afternoon/early evening when the sun passes
directly in my peripheral vision.
there was also another way to see if my roommate had
recently left. he
brought an office fan with him in the room that oscillated and had a breeze
setting. my
roommate had left the room if the lights were on and the fan was off if it had
been on when i had left for class. later he also had
the window open and the door open but the fan off because he said that the room
smelled (prolly because of my clothes and my
skittishness of the floor shower- long story) and the room needed some air
circulation. circulation
is fine. use
the fan as well. the
fan can move the air around and is much more efficient in doing so rather than
waiting for a chance breeze to move the air.
everytime he left the
room and was the last person to leave, lights on fan off. the fan eventually
locked up and burned out in the beginning of spring (i
don’t think from overuse. it could be rolling along, be turned off for a second and then
not function for several minutes. it sounded like a belt that lost grip and then eventually
got it back after a while) so the window always would be open.
that posed three problems to me at the time: 1) allergies,
2) insects 3) late night flights. problem 1 was taken care of with an investment in claritin after a week of suffering an unusually bad case
this year. problems
2 and 3 are still ongoing. I have seen
moths, ladybugs, flies, and gnats flying around and keeping the window closed
at night (because my roommate usually comes in late at night) is a problem so
me waking up to a late night arrival wasn’t uncommon. my selection of stuff to overpower the noise
was woefully underpowered and was forced to be lower in volume because I woke
up sometimes two to three hours before my roommate did and my stuff ran through
my computer (from my radio to my selection of audiobooks
and collection of Art Bell shows).
during the day when i was
listening to something, he sometimes had his stereo blasting literally. i
keep my stuff relatively quiet, low to the point where i
(and only i) can hear what i
am playing. he
would play whatever he called it at a level where it could be heard quite
clearly 10-15 feet in the hallway with the door open (he liked the door
open. people
would come in without invitation or prior warnings and stay for several minutes
talking with him). so
to make sure i heard what i
wanted to hear, i had to use my studio-style heavy
headphones (very thick earpads. it blocked nearly
everything out). one
time his stuff was so loud i couldn’t hear even with
the headphones on and the volume at as loud a level as possible without distortion. he never turned his
stereo down. and
he never had headphones to listen to while he worked. that stuff gets real
annoying real fast.
the thing i am upset with is the
fact that when he gave our phone number out, people called constantly. he does have a cell
phone. when
they did call, most of the time they didn’t leave messages. by the time december had rolled around, i had
had about enough of being his secretary so i stopped
taking messages. it
didn’t really matter by then as he came in after i
had gone to bed and forced him to keep the lights, television and music off. and by that time
those people had probably come to expect me on the other end of the line. he never bothered to
give me his cell number so that i could relay it to
whoever wanted him. that
would have saved him the headache of me relaying the messages and me the
headache of receiving them.
when i was in the room, and he did stuff (open the window, prop
the door open, turn on the lights, turn off the fan) he then leaves and doesn’t
come back for several minutes. when he did, after five minutes i
got up turned off the lights, closed the door, turned on the fan and close the
window. occasionally
I would get wrapped up in whatever and left things as they were until i realized he was gone and reset everything. him being gone
nearly 20-30 minutes after he left was not uncommon. and when he came
back, on go the lights and the window comes open. mind, it was in the
middle of the day out with plenty of reading light. i
can count on one hand the times when he came in to drop something off or to
pick up something and leave when he did not touch the window and turned off the
lights when he left. how
very considerate.
i realized that living with someone else would be a difficult situation, not for me, but whoever stayed with me. i have always been sensitive to my roommates tendencies. i feel like who i will be moving in with this summer will be much more considerate (and compatible) to me. i just wish the one i spent my first year of college with was much more sensitive to mine.
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i
am open to response. e-mail
me at jcarti01@louisville.edu or jcarti01@yahoo.com. hate
mail summarily deleted.