Last year I was accepted to graduate school located in the South; having lived in the North all of my life, I was hopeful that the well-documented Southern hospitality would also extend to roommate interactions and I would finally get a good roommate. Most of mine have been the typical /r/badroomate material, with the last rooming setup being the best simply because they made sure the house was clean despite having terrible attitudes and personalities.

I’ll preface this by saying while I don’t keep my personal room very clean, I do, however, keep shared space as immaculate as I can; dishes are never in the sink, trash is taken out routinely, counters, stove tops and oven racks are relatively spotless. I make sure parties are well contained and the aftermath is dealt with swiftly, and I try to get along with all my roommates, chat with them whenever I see them in the house and get to know them. I’m obviously not perfect; I tend to be loud, I swear a lot and I’m abysmal at turning off lights in rooms when I leave them, but I do my best to correct myself or accommodate roomies’ requests if they bring something to my attention.

The apartment complex I’m renting out just underwent a full renovation, so the places are very nice and super cheap, which is a huge bonus of being in the South. On move-in day, I met my roommate (whom I will refer to as ‘JT’ from this point on); our third roommate was a foreign exchange student who hadn’t yet made it into the country let alone state. In the brief chat my family and I had with JT, I felt semi-confident that this situation, albeit thrown together, could be good, and was pretty excited about the change of culture and the prospect of having a good roommate. I should have probably prepared myself for what has since come when I found one of my favorite and most durable glasses that I’ve had for years was the only thing broken out of boxes of possessions.

With the story portion out of the way, it’s time for The List:

• JT will make random noises all throughout the day. I don’t mean like coughs, laughing or sounds that you’d normally associate with someone watching sports or their favorite show, I mean sounds like caveman grunts or bird squawks that would only seem in place if you were vacationing in the rain forest. Even after months one would think one would get used to it, but no.

• JT also sings, loudly. In a larger apartment, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but since the complex is set up with suite-style apartments and the walls are almost paper-thin, you can hear him anywhere. This, along with his random bird calls, has been super disturbing on nights when he stays up while I’ve been trying to sleep, or days where I don’t have classes and am trying to get make-up sleep. Luckily, this and his noise-making is few and far between, so it really hasn’t bothered me that much.

• He walks around all the time in nothing but boxers. I used to make fun of my friend at my last job because he was really anal about his roommates wearing at least pants when sitting on furniture, and I can sort of understand why now. He does it regardless of who is over, so any time my foreign roommate has brought a girl over, or anytime my friends and I are just hanging out, he’s letting it all hang out. If he was a fit dude, no problem, but the kid is massive and carries his weight in his gut. My foreign roommate has told me that he’s been blue-balled because seeing JT in the almost-nude immediately kills the libido of his date. It’s not really an issue with me, except for the unnecessary plumber’s crack I’ve seen too many times since he never pulls his boxers up far enough. Ech.

• He cannot cook. I have had roommates who have ranged the gamut from chef to burnt water, and they have all been better than JT. He burns his toast almost every morning and his dinner almost every evening. Anytime he burns his food, he burns it to the point of setting off all the smoke detectors in our suite. I’ve become so used to it that whenever he goes to cook food an I’m on a skype call with family or friends, I count down until I hear him go to pull his food out of the oven, then immediately mute my microphone to save them the pain of listening to smoke alarms go off. At one point near the end of last semester, the smoke alarms would ring for shorter periods of time, so I thought he finally learned to burn things less. It turned out that JT was running over to the main smoke alarm, popping off the cover and manually shutting it off. To make matters worse, every time he did this, he would damage the unit to some extent, so every couple of days throughout December, he would have to call maintenance to replace the cover since it wouldn’t stay on, fix the wiring in the alarm or replace the backup battery thanks to the overuse of the alarm to keep it from making the annoying ‘insert new backup battery please’ beep. I’ve also had to buy at least three times the amount of spices simply because he steals all of mine, despite having his own supply.

• JT is an absolute slob. When the semester started out, he used to cook his food directly on the racks in the oven. Anytime he made pizza, it would fall through the holes without fail. He started using some of the baking trays that I brought, and has since destroyed half of them by leaving burnt whatever on the surface and letting them sit for days without cleaning them to the point that I can’t scrape the remainder off. He nearly ruined my entire set of pots thanks to over-boiling pasta and other stuff for a party and then leaving them uncleaned; I spent hours scraping the remnants of his meal during finals week when I should have been studying. He eats as much as the average horse (or something close to it), and leaves the packages all around the kitchen. Since he eats so much, either my foreign roommate or I (since JT never does it) had to take the trash out every two days, whereas any of my other roommate situations it was usually weekly, sometimes even up to two weeks since some of them barely ate. He stuffs his dry food wherever he feels like, even though my foreign roommate and I only take on shelf in the pantry each while he has the other four shelves. The same goes for the fridge; whatever he buys goes wherever despite him taking up an entire shelf-and-a-half and the whole damn freezer. Like any spectacularly shitty roommate, he has either cooked food I have bought for his own use without telling me or eating some of my leftovers.

• He puts his dirty plates in the dishwasher, leaves them there for a random amount of time, and then pulls them out again and uses them, not without complaining about how shitty our dishwasher is and how hand washing sucks (our dishwasher is not very good, to be fair). He was the only one to use the dishwasher to clean, I mean hoard, his dirty dishes; my foreign roommate and I hand-wash our dishes since we both cook frequently. He has left countless amounts of food to rot in the fridge, left dishes in the sink when the dishwasher was full, and used to put dirty dishes next to perfectly clean ones on a drying rack my foreign roomie and I used to dry our hand-washed dishes, forcing us to constantly rewash our stuff. And, because he stockpiled the dishes in the dishwasher, we would eventually run out of silverware or plates, so I would have to run the dishwasher or do the dishes in it by hand, depending on how low we were. Anytime he cooks, the counter is left crusty, covered in gunk, and I cannot tell you how many times I have had to clean the entire stove-top (including where the buttons and knobs are) because he coated it with cooking spray.

• I’ve had to buy a set of glassware and two extra sets of silverware on top of the first one I bought when I got down here because he cannot clean leftover food off of what he uses. He melted my set of tongs when he left them on the side of a hot pan, has scratched all of my pans non-stick surfaces to hell, and broke my filtered water jug. A couple weeks back, I went to use my favorite custom-made mug that the Associate Dean of my alma mater gave me as a graduation present for some tea, and it was gone. I asked both JT and my foreign roommate about it, and neither of them said they saw it. A couple days before I was going to go home for the holidays, I saw JT moving some stuff out to bring with him back home. We chatted for a minute before he went out to load his car. He came back, moved his trash into the main trash bin in the kitchen and then left. I later went to make dinner and while I was throwing away the food packaging, I saw that my mug was in the trash, broken, so not only did he lie about it going missing, he broke it at some point too. When I got home, I went to visit my alma mater and asked the Associate Dean of the school of my program (Engineering) where she got the mug made. Turns out, the faculty wanted to get a mug for school pride, so she had a couple of designs made, including the one I had. The faculty liked that design the most, so the department ordered a bunch more of them and she gave me one of the spares. It was nice to have it back, but damn was I pissed.

• JT is involved with social justice and has the ego to go with both. Every once in a while, he would invite his friends over, and they would just hang around, drink wine, watch Survivor reruns and complain about whatever big social justice noise had been trending recently. I tend not to pay attention to stuff like that, so anytime he and I would chat in the apartment, he would be three steps from outright offended that I had no idea what he was talking about. On the occasions when the chat would go past the ‘Wow, how could you, like, not know about that? Do you live under a rock’ portion, anytime I didn’t agree with his viewpoint, he would get extremely argumentative. When that whole Mizzou business was going on, I said that I didn’t really think firing the president was going to do much to stop the problem, which flipped his rage switch and he went off on how marginalized the students involved in the incident were and how me not really caring/knowing about the issues was basically condoning what was said to the students. I just left mid conversation and went to class; not the nicest thing to do, but I’m not about to be lectured by someone who can’t make popcorn right.

• I mentioned he was big, and he is big. To give you a frame of reference, I’m about six-foot and am pretty overweight at about two-sixty pounds. JT is about six-three, six-four and weighs probably one-and-a-half times as much as I do, easily. I go to the gym at a fair clip. If I don’t make at least four days, that’s an ‘F’ to me for the week in terms of being healthy. Anytime I’ve taken a cheat day and ordered a pizza or made something super-fattening but super-delicious, like bananas foster or snickerdoodle bread, JT doesn’t make the harmless ‘you’re gonna have to run twice as far tomorrow’ comments, he makes the ‘Way to undo all that work eating all that sugar’ or ‘You know, you won’t lose weight by eating pizza all the time’ kind of comments. Almost every time he does this, someone knocks on the door with a delivery order for him, leaving me standing flabbergasted for long enough for him to waddle back to his room before I can process what’s happened and smack him across the face for being such a dick.

• During one of our brief conversations back around the beginning of November, when he was telling me off for being completely unaware of whatever asinine social justice thing was in the news, I just snapped and told him that I didn’t give a fuck about these supposed problems, that I saw no reason for wasting my time on that kind of shit and that people who spent all their time being offended should go do real and important work, like curing cancer or building the space program back to glory instead of posting on blogs nobody will ever read or making petitions that will never get signed. After that point, anytime I would set foot in the main suite area and he was there, he would immediately run and hide in his room, or jet out the front door if he was headed somewhere. One time, he was pulling a pizza out of the oven and I was going to the fridge to get some water. That was the fastest I’ve ever seen him move, and because he’s so heavy, his thundering foot-stamping knocked over the vase on the coffee table by the couch and broke it. When I went to clean it up, I could hear him wheezing. It’s probably ten steps from his room to the kitchen, at best. Then again, this kid breathes super heavy just walking around casually so I guess a short sprint that I can only assume was done because he was afraid I was going to challenge his worldview isn’t that surprising. Still, I found it funnier than it really was simply because he’d been such a dick to me before.

Thankfully, I was able to completely decompress over winter break and came off of the tightrope of rage that I had been walking the last few months. On the day I was making the first half of the drive back down, I was hoping against the odds that, since he lived local to the university I’m at, he just didn’t burn down the apartment while I was gone; I don’t care if I have to sift through a swamp of frozen pizza boxes, just let there be a damn apartment. I’m sure if you’re still reading you’re expecting another list to add on to the long one I’ve already put up to justify the last paragraph where I ask ‘my question is: how should I kill this son of a bitch’. While I can’t say it’ll always beat the odds, sometimes you just have to keep hoping it will be okay.

He still makes the squawks and sings, but other than that, it’s like aliens stole JT in the night and replaced him with one of their own. He has not burned his food once, and he even uses the stove timer and his own phone timer to make sure he checks on his food regularly. He changed from spray to cooking oil and the stove top is never messy. Dishes never sit in the sink longer than a single night, and if they sit they are filled with hot, soapy water to pull off all of the caked-on whatever. JT now runs the dishwasher once a week, makes sure it’s full and will do secondary dishwash/hand-wash if the dishes come out still slightly dirty. There’s no more complaining about chores, he cleans the counters, takes out the trash and even makes less trash on the whole. He has not touched anything I’ve bought and left on my shelf in the pantry, and reorganized all the shelves of his so he only takes up about one and a half shelves, and whatever he puts in the fridge stays on the top shelf and is cooked well before it goes bad. It’s nothing short of amazing.

There’s still things I can complain about, like how he takes an entire day to do his laundry because he just balls it up and stuffs it inside our super tiny and super shitty dryer that takes two ours to even dry small clothing loads. He’s still skittish around me, but we’ve been talking more and he doesn’t talk so much about the social justice stuff. I’d like to think that all my passive-aggressive displays of leaving his dirty stuff uncleaned, not taking out the trash and not picking up after his messes was the driving force to change his shitty behavior (even if being passive-aggressive is a shitty way to do so), but it just can’t attribute to a change of this magnitude.

Hopefully I’m not in a coma and this is a super-realistic level of lucid dreaming, because that would really blow. Here’s to hoping that I’m not, to the continued hope that JT will keep from devolving back into the absolute troll he was before.