  Happy Birthday (tomorrow), Janel! Damn, I feel old. Last time I checked, you were still 5 years old. That was 10 years ago. Stop growing up, damnit! Alright, all home from the great easter weekend of 2003. I arrived home shortly after 6 this evening and brought with me some leftovers, a shitty haircut courtesy of mother, and the worst backpain I've ever encountered. All in all, a pretty decent weekend as far as weekends at home go. The haircut was my own fault in a round-about sort of way. She mentioned that she'd learned a new trick for cutting layered hair and wanted to try it out on me. I said (last time I was home) that maybe she could try it next time I was home. Well, she actually remembered me saying that (she usually pays no attention when I talk), and sat me down in the chair and got the hair cutting cape out on Saturday morning.
By that point, it's too late to protest. So she cut it. It looks alright when I go to the trouble of actually doing something to it (like curling the top layer under and the bottom layer out to hide the obviousness of the "hey, you have exactly two layers in here and they're obvious" look). I prefer just drying my hair and leaving it be after that, but with this cut, I have to get out styling products and tools and scaffolding and other sorts of things. I'll have to start saving my parking money to get this fixed by someone who knows how. At least it's still long enough to pull it back.
Barely. Apparently three inches to regular people is one inch to her. I requested no more than an inch be cut off. The pile on the floor indicated a solid three inches had been lopped off (although, there were shorter pieces, but I assume that's from layer number two: the long underside layer). The backpain is a complete mystery to me. I was sitting in church (yeah, I know. I only go on holidays when I'm home, so don't worry, I haven't gone all religious on you) and noticed a twinge of pain right under my shoulder blade on the left side.
Throughout the day, it got worse and worse and worse until when I went to bed last night, I could not lay in any position and not feel as though I was being stabbed (which greatly reduced my sleep time). I've tried stretching it, getting it massaged, heat, ice, Icy Hot, heat and massage all at once, hot shower, cold shower, and ibuprofin. It still hurts, and it hurts more now than it did last night. Mom told me she could literally see the knot sticking out of my back, but she couldn't work it out. I may not like her much, but the woman can rub out a knot when a massage therapist is not on hand. I even tried her parafin wax melty thingy (descriptive enough? I think so). No help. I guess it's time to see the good doctor this week to see what he can do for me. Muscle relaxers would be helpful, maybe? I don't know. Every once in a while, I feel the muscle grab and tighten around my ribs in the front, so I think this knot is just trying to gather strength to be the biggest muscle knot in the guiness book of world records or something. You know, like they do with the biggest ball of aluminum foil. Hopefully this goes away soon.
I have things to do. Like lug Crazy's crap around. And I can't do that with a bum shoulder/back. Tonight some people and I got into a discussion of past roommate experiences. Some people were telling their sob stories about one or two bad roommates. I must be an attraction for bad roommates. They flock to me. Let's see. The first roommate I had took a shit in my closet on the first night she spent in our very first dorm room. And no, it wasn't a water closet. She moved out the next day (per my request, but she later dropped out to get some psychological help, which I believe was probably much needed). So a week later roommate number two shows up. She spent every second of every minute she was in our room on the phone with her boyfriend.
You see, this guy had figured out how to get through his college's phone system so he didn't have to pay for long distance. This meant I got no calls. None at all. About a million voice mail messages, but never ever did I get to pick up the phone and have it be for me. Oh, and she liked to turn on the television as soon as she entered the room. To porn. And she liked to hide the remote. And she routinely left snot remnants in the sink after she blew a snot rocket in there (not that I'm against snot rockets, but rinse them down the sink, please). And snot on the walls. And snot in a lot of random places. And she wore a fragrance (purposely) that smelled like old people at a nursing home. And she never heard her alarm in the morning, and it went off for like 90 minutes before I'd have to get up and shut it off (and to do so, I'd have to crawl across our loft into her bed and over her to shut it off.
annoying). Eventually the phone scheme was put to an end after he got caught and was served with a $2000 phone bill. She, to this day, doesn't know this, but I was the one that called her boyfriend's university and turned him in. I'd had enough. Him being rude to me on the phone (asking me why the hell I was answering the phone in my own room, and then telling me to just fucking put her on the phone) was one thing, but when he showed up one weekend and demanded that I stay elsewhere so they could have the whole room to themselves was another thing entirely.
The day he demanded I leave was the very day I looked up the department of residence at his school and gave them a call. The lady I talked to was very greatful because they'd been trying to pinpoint the location of those calls for quite some time. I explained to her the whole scheme (because said roommate was stupid enough to give me details), and told her that if she couldn't find the addresses of the person she needed to call me back. She did, and left the most hilarious voicemail I've ever received. I'd told her she'd get my voicemail because they're on the phone nearly 21 hours a day, and the other three are spent sleeping.
The message started with roaring laughter and her telling me she's been trying the roommate's number (two numbers, but both to the same room, so they rang on the same phone, but had two different voice mailboxes) every few hours for about 2 months and kept getting her voicemail, and now she understood why (apparently the computers spit out the number called, but never the number, length or time of the calls, so they didn't realize how long these calls were).
She also said that my voicemail message cracked her up. At the time it was this... "Hey, I'm here. No. Really. I am. You just can't talk to me right now because seargent phone thief is using it. She's ALWAYS using it. You can reach me by mail. But not email. Because i can't get to that either. Because. She's using it. You could come over. But don't knock too loud. She doesn't want to miss a word out of her lovely moron's mouth.
And don't mind the stolen porn on the tv. You get used to it after a while. Oh, and if you have a question that requires me to think, you might want to find me and get me the hell out of this room, otherwise I don't know the answer. If you've called 47 times today and I haven't returned your call yet, I'm sorry. I want to. I probably don't know you called yet, but I promise I'm excited and enthused to return your call.
I might know you called sometime next century. Whenever she gets off the phone. If you've lasted this far into my message, you really want to talk to me, so really, leave a message and I swear I'll call you back as soon as psycho goes to class or dies. Whichever comes first. " ...The lady said it was the most defeated and hilarious voicemail message she'd ever heard. She had all her coworkers listen to it and they were all cracking up. Anyway, they busted him and the next year he transferred to our school.
She broke up with him for being too clingy. She was a moron. Roommate number three was another random roommate. She was a freshman. I was a sophomore. She (Jeana) was (and is) the sweetest human being alive. She's our little soldier now. Best. Roommate. Ever! After we'd finished rooming together in the dorms, we'd planned on living together in a place off campus, but her financial aid got all messed up and tuition went up and she decided to do some military things to pay for school instead and took a year off from college. So I moved into a house with a few of my friends. Actually, I moved in right after school (I'd planned on taking a month or two off and doing my own thing, but a co-worker of mine had committed suicide and they needed me in the office ASAP, so I got a week off after classes and then started right back in). At the time there was three people in the house. One girl (Mary) was going to be staying on as my roommate, but the other two were subleasing from the other two girls who would move back in August.
Katie (one of the subleasers) was a trip. She was the strangest thing I'd ever encountered. She was not the brightest apple on the tree, and was actually only getting by in life on looks (and I'd seen her before she put herself together. Not good). Anyway, she was weird, but Mary and I kind of joined forces to point and laugh at her every chance we got. The other one (Jill somethingorother, I don't remember her last name, but I remember it was funny.
Why do last names matter, you ask? Well, coming up, you'll be introduced to another Jill) was only there for a month. Although we stored her shit for the better part of 18 months after that. Free of charge. Anyway, those two didn't last long (Katie was gone after the summer) and our actual roommates moved in. Jill and Kathy. Jill is one of my best friends to this day, but Kathy really didn't appreciate that very much, so she successfully got us to fight quite often. Kathy wasn't ever one of my favorite people, but the word hate certainly applied to her at the time (she's not so bad if you don't have to live with her).
She'd tell Jill things that simply weren't true, and after a while, Jill bought it. This was about October, and about this time Mary and I had had enough of each other. She had never been one of my favorite people, either, but over the summer we kind of hung out because we felt like the puddle of normal in the sea of morons.
Mary started hanging out with Kathy, too, and I lost interest in dealing with any of them. It was an unpleasant 8 months after that as we tried to figure out who was going to stay and who was going to go. Eventually Kathy found some other people to bother and decided she'd go. And by eventually, I mean the end of April. And she was moving out April 30 (she still had to pay her rent for the rest pf the lease). Our lease ended at the end of May. We scrambled and tried to get Jeana (because, seriously, everyone loves this girl), but she'd already committed to live with her little brother (another of our country's soldiers) in a tiny apartment near campus since neither of them had a car.
Actually, it was their parents' idea because they didn't want little Jimmy living with any irresponsible people and making the opportunity to blow off school less likely (oh, if they only knew). In this time, Jill and I made up and were all fine again. Mary, on the other hand, was annoying the hell out of both of us. Jana moved in during May to use up Kathy's last month of rent (she needed a place to stay. She was Kathy's friend. I didn't like her from before, so we just steered clear of each other). We finally found someone to take the 4th spot on the lease, but were going to have to eat the fourth portion of the rent because this person refused to pay over the summer since she was already in a place until August.
Until Jeana stepped in to save the day. She got a summer job up here, so she came and lived with us for the summer and damn were we sad to see her go when August came. And she was sad to leave. The three of us had a LOT of fun (Mary was doing a summer thing at the U of Minnesota), but she had a lease to honor with her brother. We found out later they could have gotten out of it and both moved in with us. That would have been fine with all of us, as the place they lived was a major shit hole. So August rolls around and in comes Julie. Oh, Julie. This was trouble from day one. She walked in and moved all kinds of things in with her.
She was a little Korean girl who had been living in LA until about 6 months prior to moving in with us. She had the most crap I've ever seen one person have. Why she didn't just get a place of her own is a mystery to me. She also brought with her the strangest, worst smell I've ever had to smell in my life. Not just any smell.
A BO kind of smell. And she shared a bathroom with me. She was pretty sure that she knew everything better than the rest of us. She was the loudest, most inconsiderate person we'd encountered in a very long time. Jill and I had never met this girl, but she'd been in school with Mary, so that's where she came from.
There were electricity problems (she brought a space-heater with her, and a rice cooker, and a million other little appliances she kept in her bedroom and blew fuses every morning), bathroom problems (the drains were always plugged with something or other), space problems (our place was huge, but apparently not big enough for her and all her crap), noise problems (she slammed every door she ever came in contact with) and scheduling problems. You see, she had class at 8. I had class at 8. I asked her what time she had to be in the bathroom in the morning. She'd give me a time and decide instead of waiting for her to get done (which sometimes didn't happen until 7:55 and it took 10 minutes to get to campus), I'd go first and get out of her way before then, and she knew this.
So, I'd wake up at 6 or earlier to get done and out of the way. Unfortunately, she either didn't remember, didn't care, or whatever, but either she or her boyfriend were ALWAYS in the bathroom when I NEEDED to be in there. And I could have used the bathroom upstairs, but then I'd be in THEIR way. After about 6 months of this, I took my stuff into my room and just went to campus to get showered and ready in the locker rooms. So much easier than dealing with this idiot. Unfortunately, some days getting to campus was a lot easier said than done. We had a four car driveway. Two in front, two in back. Well, she never really grasped the concept that she shouldn't park behind anyone if she wasn't sure whether or not they had to leave before her.
And she never parked in the "spot". She parked squarly in the middle of the driveway. So that meant that NEITHER car in front of her could get out. And instead of hanging her keys by the door like the rest of us did, she took them into her room and stashed them in her bag. I was in a bad mood one morning and nudged her car onto the grass with the monster rubber bumper on my car (it was an old old cavalier with a big rubber bumper all the way around it). She never noticed, since she was in an accident every other week, so her car was pretty dented anyway. One of my friends (who was also living next door to us) was outside getting ready to leave at the time. He said that as soon as I walked out the door and saw that car sitting there he knew I was going to just hit it. He said he was going to offer me a ride, but decided to watch and laugh instead. Jill watched me from the window of the house as well, and rumor has it, she did it the next day using the same tactic. We got to be quite comical for the neighbors. It was like "let's see which one of them rams the car next.
We all took a couple cracks at it until we finally stole a parking baracade from campus and just put it in the driveway before she got home every day. She continually became more and more annoying as the days went on and finally our lease was up. All of us were graduating except her, so we all headed for other places and didn't even bother wondering where she was going.
So, that's the end of the roommates in college, and as we all know, they got worse after, so now I have no roommates. I'm very happy about that. Roommates can be evil, evil people. Jeana was the only roommate that never pissed me off, and Jill and I worked out our issues a long time ago (the day Kathy moved out, actually). Mary wasn't bad for a little while, but got to be just too much for either Jill or I to take. So really, there were two and a half that didn't suck. I gave Mary half credit. Two and a half out of 10 isn't a great good to bad percentage. Ah, that was a fun trip down memory lane. Makes me remember why I live alone. 
