My roommate at Saint Leo and I are the perfect example of why you shouldn’t take things at face value.
Before the school year started, he emailed the resident director asking him to put us as roommates. He obliged, and we were both assigned to Henderson 321.
Luckily for the both of us, the room was a triple, and it was just the two of us living in it. The way that the room was set up was so that it looked like all the other rooms on our floor, only with an added room on the side; it even had a cinderblock wall dividing the two rooms so that if you were to look at it from the doorway, you’d never be able to tell that it was a triple.
That wall saved our roommate-ship.
After a few weeks, and the ‘roommate honeymoon’ had finished, we realised that neither of us really knew what we were getting into. Our personalities are about as different as night and day.
I, on one hand, am more socially withdrawn, and not much of a social butterfly.
He on the other hand, is. It seemed as though every gay person in Pasco County came to our room on Friday and Saturday nights, and I remember the multiple boyfriends he had over the course of the year.
(I’d like to point out that the reason why he asked for us to be roommates is because we’re both gay.)
His schedule-both academic and social- was busy. He was a double math/biology major, as well as the de facto host to the local gay community. It was, uhm, interesting to say the least.
We never actually fought about anything, since the cinderblock wall dividing our spaces made it so that we didn’t have to. The only time that I really had a problem with him was when I found him smoking pot in his room. It wasn’t because I’m against it (if smoking pot is something you want to do, I’m not going to hold it against you, but at least be smart about it), but because his room didn’t have a window, and the only way for it to get out of there was to pass either through the window or our front door (the latter of which wasn’t the best idea- our RA lived right across the hall). I was rather perturbed about my stuff reaking of pot.
There were a few things that happened in our room that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
Things like listening to music only to have one of his boyfriends walk out in his birthday suit to open the door, and waking up to find broken Corona Light bottles sprawled EVERYWHERE, some broken, some still intact. And of course, that time we got kicked out of a gay club and I had to drive his car home (he was the DD for his friend) and wound up pushing 90 down the freeway (the speed limit down there was 70, btw)
We haven’t talked since I moved out. In fact, I haven’t talked to anyone from my building since moving out. There’s only one person that I’ve talked to since leaving Saint Leo, and she was a classmate of mine in my Social Work class.
Not everyone you’ll meet will be a person you like, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t get some good memories out of your experiences with them.
