Roommate Woes & Broken Toes

College is a time in life brimming with extremes. During my freshman year, I alternated between tomfoolery with brand new friends and sitting miserably in the corner of my cell block dorm room in a state of depression, desperately missing my family and friends at home.

One of the most amusing things about college is finding out who you will be bunking with all year. I attended Westmont College in Santa Barbara, and bless the housing staff, they sent out contact information toward the end of the summer preceding my Freshman year. I was able to talk to both of my roommates on the phone about a month before actually meeting them. No, a ten minute phone call does not give you a true idea of who a person is, but it made us feel much more at ease when we did meet face to face on Move-In Day.

Sharing a room is a challenge. Especially when you've had your own room your whole life, and are suddenly expected to share a room no bigger than your bedroom at home, bulging with twice as much furniture, with two other people. People you've never met.

Sara, me, & Misty: our first day together... Page B 316

Misty was the first roomie I encountered. She was settling into our room in Page B when my family and I showed up. A musical theater student who dreamed of living in New York City one day, Misty and I didn't seem to have a whole lot in common at first. We still joke that if we'd attended the same high school, we may have never even met, let alone become friends. Misty was outgoing, organized, confident, talented, and seemed very excited to begin our first year.

Sara showed up later. Sara was a sweet Catholic girls' school graduate who was very clearly, even from the first day, attached to her family. She was apprehensive at first, and seemed much more hesitant about starting school away from home. She was a health nut who ran at least four miles every day, like clockwork, and never put any kind of sweet treat in her mouth. She called her mom once a day, finished her homework weeks in advance, and started listening to Christmas music in October.

We discovered immediately that we each had very different schedules. Sara went to bed at nine and woke up at dawn whether she had class or not. I was the middle ground, finishing my homework somewhat late and turning in around eleven each night. Misty was our room's night owl, partly because of her internal rhythm and partly because she had night rehearsals for the plays in which she always earned starring roles, and couldn't start her homework until midnight some nights.

Me, Sara, Misty, & our next door neighbor
and dear friend, April... Winter Formal 2000

Another reality we quickly became aware of was the difference in our individual perceptions of "clean" and "chores". Misty and I had a respectable handle on keeping things tidy, and it drove us batty when our tiny room became even tinier with the haphazard placement of Sara's piles of dirty clothes and free weights. We learned that Sara had never done her own laundry at home when she asked us how to use the machines downstairs, and had to be told to separate her whites and colors. After a month or two of living together, Misty and I realized that we were the only ones taking out the trash and borrowing the third floor's shared vacuum (it took an average of 45 seconds to vacuum our room, since only about three and a half square feet of carpet showed). We passively aggressively experimented with "waiting to see how full the trash can could become" and "how many hairballs will get stuck between her toes" before Sara noticed and took it upon herself to contribute to our room's hygiene. This never worked because she never noticed. Misty or I, without fail, would either become so frustrated at throwing a piece of paper onto the top of our trash mountain, only to have it roll right back to us, or become nauseated by the smell of Sara's daily banana peels rotting in the can. One of us would eventually give in and huffily yank the bag out, tie it up as loudly as possible, and stomp out, hoping she'd perceive the hints. She didn't.

Misty finally had a brilliant idea: she fashioned a chore chart and taped it to the wall by the door. Yes, the same kind of chore chart you'd find on the refrigerator of a family with preschool children. The three of us rotated through the two chores required to keep our room livable, but we found that when it was time to complete our duties, we still had to prod Sara to do her share. (The first time she took out the trash, weeks after school had started, we had to tell her where the dumpster was.) As ridiculous as it seemed for three eighteen-year-olds to need a chore chart, it seemed to help get Sara involved.

 Outside study session SUNBURNS

The differences in opinion over acceptable living conditions came to a head one day in the spring. Things had gotten tense in the room. The weather had changed, tricking our brains into thinking it was summer, classes had gotten more demanding as teachers assigned even more homework, and the novelty of roomies-turned-built-in-besties had long since faded. The walls of our small living space were closing in on us, and the once seldom occasion that all three of us needed to be in the room at the same time grew increasingly more common, putting us all on edge. We were working furiously on homework one afternoon, when I heard Misty push her chair back behind me, and pad across the room to her closet. On the way back to her desk, I heard a dull THUD followed immediately by Misty's high pitched screeching. "SARA!!! WHAT ARE YOUR WEIGHTS DOING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM?!?!" She hobbled over to her chair and sank into it, her face red and her eyes glistening with tears of pain. (We were told later by our friend next door, April, that she was also studying and could hear everything.) Misty grabbed her foot and pulled it into her lap, inspecting the toes she had bashed into Sara's misplaced exercise equipment. Misty ultimately had to go to the health center and was told she'd broken her pinkie toe. Sara's constant state of disarray had finally resulted in a casualty: one of Misty's precious phalanges! 

Even after an entire school year, Sara still needed to be schooled in certain aspects of household cleanliness... and simple biology. Another day in spring, when the three of us were once again sharing our minuscule workspace to study, I was violently shaken from an enlightening chapter of my American History book to hear, "Sara! Why did you just throw your contact on the floor?!" (It was obvious by Misty's tone that she was absolutely disgusted.) I turned to see Sara sheepishly looking at Misty, her contact lens case and bottle of solution sitting accusingly on her desk. I could just barely make out the reflection of the overhead light in the tiny half moon on the floor, which had apparently been dropped on purpose. Sara looked back and forth at both of us, confused and defensively, before replying in all seriousness:

"It's okay! They're biodegradable!!"
 
I'm not sure how we survived that year together, but we did, and were able to remain friends. I'm assuming by now, ten years later, all of our living conditions and housecleaning skills have improved. I haven't visited Sara's house in Colorado, though... there is a possibility that she has a room with a pile of crusty, used contact lenses on the floor, waiting to biodegrade...