Sunday, March 07, 2010

new home

For now, I am living here.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Things My Roommate Does That Make Me Want to Take A Machete to His Skull

Err, things that bother me. I have been keeping track in my head for a while now, I figured it was time for a comprehensive list. Allow me to preface this by saying that we did not know each other prior to my moving in, and we are not friends now.

Bathroom:
  • He occasionally urinates with the door open. While I am in the apartment. While I am in the living room.
  • He frequently does not wash his hands, judging from time between flushing (if it happens) and leaving the bathroom. I don't pay consistent attention to this, of course, but I have noticed once or twice.
  • Lately, he has been not flushing the toilet. I go in the bathroom not only to find the seat up (really, him putting the seat down would be a luxury at this point) but to find it left used. Which means I have to flush it before I use it. And while I'm not a fragile and delicate flower of a woman, I'm also not a barnyard cow, and not flushing the toilet is just beyond the pale of what I'm willing to deal with.
Kitchen:
  • Instead of putting his dirty dishes in the sink, he fills them with water and scatters them around the counters and stove.
  • Rather than hanging pots and pans on the wall, or finding another place for them, he leaves both dirty and clean ones on the burners. Routinely, there is something on every burner, for example, the tea kettle, two dirty pots and one clean pan. One or more of these might be sitting full of water.
  • He washes and dries his dishes with paper towels instead of sponges and cloth towels.
  • Certain kinds of garbage--I'm not sure how he discriminates here--are left on the floor around the garbage can rather than inside of it. These seem to be recyclable items--beer bottles, cardboard boxes, glass jars--but he doesn't recycle, he just leaves them there. Which makes it look like we just throw garbage on the floor.
Living Room:
  • He literally lives in the living room. On this one spot on the couch. ALL THE TIME. If I come home at any time, there is a 50% chance he will be on the spot on the couch. He spends no time in his own room. According to our other roommate, he only started doing that since I moved in, which weirds me out. All of his books are strewn on the couch and coffee table (some are falling behind the cushions), his laptop is sitting there, and his jacket is there as well, which prohibits anybody at any time from using the couch without moving his stuff.
  • The television is on literally all the time. Sometimes he watches C-Span or MSNBC, sometimes old movies, sometimes it's on a channel that just plays classical music. But it's always on, loud, and I can hear it in my room because it's just on the other side of the wall. If he isn't watching these, he's playing a loud shooting game on his computer that leaves me to hear "BANG. BANG. BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG. BANG" OVER and OVER.
Miscellaneous:
  • He occasionally smokes cigars in the living room. Such that they can be smelled throughout the apartment. He never smokes them outside.
  • He has no social skills. You can say "Bye" when you walk out the door, and half of the time he won't respond. Same goes with "Hi." He buzzes up and opens the door for my friends and they say "Hi" to his face and he turns around and sits back down.
  • On the other hand, he knocks on my door at every opportunity to show me a "funny youtube video" or other arbitrary and stupid thing.
Now. I am not a neat freak. My desk is covered in stacks of papers and books, and my dresser is covered in a pile of clothes and newspapers and books. But that's just the thing, it's my room. Not the living space shared by everyone. This apartment is already old, run-down and questionable in its clean state--put garbage on the floor and full dishes with water and leave them all over, and it looks like an abandoned shitfest. My roommate is an aesthetic cancer on this poor apartment.

So now... what to do? I was so miffed yesterday by finding the toilet unflushed for the third time that I attached a sticky note to the top of it reading: "(1) close door (2) flush toilet" and that's beginning to solve the problem, I think. I haven't encountered these two problems since I put the note there. But how do I begin to explain how obnoxious and disrespectful basically all of his behavior is? Do I continue to throw away the trash, put his dishes in the sink and hang up the pots and pans, hoping he gets the hint? Because I'm afraid that, given the right mood and circumstance, I might snap and just scream at him.