The universe always finds a way to remind you that it is full of idiocy, just like it always finds a way to metaphorically shove itself up your anus.

When we last left the story, my half-brained roommate JT had made a miraculous turnaround. He had learned how to cook, how to clean and, above all, how not to be a dickhead. You would think life would be great and could only get better going forward, but no, of fucking course not.

Two weeks into the semester, he got pulled over for some reason. He never specified what, and my guess was speeding or running a stop sign/red light. Maybe it was due to drinking; I don’t know and it’s not important to the story. JT sat on this for a couple of days, then came to me saying that when he got pulled over, the officer found his license was expired and put him on suspension for driving with an expired license. Thus, he now needed someone to shuttle him around the campus and get him to and from his group meetings. He hinted at needing money to pay for all the related fines, but never outright said it, despite constantly mentioning how he’d need to ‘get his iPad back to pawn it’ and asking me how much I would pay for a barely used iPad.

Seeing as I’m the only other one with a car and I generally have a pretty even-keeled demeanor, I offered my time up because I’ve barely talked to the guy in the last four months and I figured it’s a good chance to get to know each other. Even if we’re essentially salt and pepper in terms of outward interests and similarities, perhaps we’ll find some common ground. Ha.

The best way I can describe it is that awkward silence that happens when two people run out of things to say, with the only difference being that, instead of it being a brief moment, it went on for lengthy minutes and over the course of almost a month. At no point did he start a conversation. How in the hell can you be a Media Studies major and not have shit to talk about? Nevertheless, since I have no problem starting a conversation, I did so every time. I’d like to say I was successful and we had good chats, but then I would be lying to you. I never got more than a paragraph out of the guy on average. The only times he would actually talk were about his obsession over Survivor and other reality TV, and even then it was never about the show or the content in the episodes, it was about how he knew everything about the show and how he could give you all the information, including useless tidbits on the contestants and how he was pretty much the most knowledgeable person to ever watch the show.

I have never watched Survivor outside of season two and some episodes way later on out of boredom, and anytime it came up, he would always ask me to quiz him on it. What, and perhaps a better question, why? I get that you’re personally impressed by how much time you’ve sunk into the show and on Wikipedia, which is cool, but I don’t watch the show. You could say that in season 7 everyone fucks each other, two girls end up pregnant and there’s a live birth on the show during the last voting session or whatever and I would believe you. Me quizzing you also doesn’t get me interested in the show, it just allows you to mentally and verbally flagellate yourself while I’m around, which is what arrogant dickheads and children do. Again, if you like something a lot, that’s cool, but if all you’re interested in is showcasing your knowledge, you don’t want to make a connection, you want to show off.

I glanced over the whole suspended license bit, and that’s because even now I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it because I have never known anyone in my life circle or any adjoining circles to simply let their license expire like JT did. I mean, the stupid card has dates right on the front of it; you would have to be actually blind to not see the dates and without an actual brain to not understand what those numbers mean. I also don’t understand it because half of the story doesn’t fucking add up. His story is that our previous foreign exchange roommate picked up some mail, opened it thinking it was his, found out that it was JT’s mail that was incidentally a notification about renewing his license and never said anything about it and never brought it up when the two of them were talking in the common area of the apartment.

It should go without saying I find this premise hard to believe. First, he’s a foreign student from Europe in the modern age. How much postal mail is he actually getting and is it really getting sent to his box here in the US at one specific university at one specific off-campus apartment complex? Really? Shit, I live in the US and I don’t even use my apartment P.O. box for my mail or deliveries, I just send them to nearby UPS stores or nearby actual post offices because I frankly don’t trust my roommates to not rifle through my mail, or my apartment complex to not do the same. Sure, it’s a bit paranoid, but I’ve lost mail and gift money sent from family because of this, so I’d say I’m not too far off base. Second, the entire apartment is one main room with all the bedrooms attached. Are you actually telling me that it never came up when you were both in the main space at the same time, or that you couldn’t be arsed to walk the twenty feet to his door, knock on it and check? Give me a break.

Most importantly, JT’s birthday was at the beginning of the Fall semester. This shit happened at the beginning of the Spring semester. For those not from the United States, when you turn sixteen, you go for your permit, which is stupidly easy to get, and then you have to spend X amount of hours (it was forty hours when I went through it) in driving education, eight hours of driving supervised with a driving instructor and ten hours of driving with someone over the age of twenty-five who had a license as the passenger. Before setting up your driver’s test for your real license, you need to wait at least six months, whereas most kids go a full year. Then, when you go to get your license, you have to pass a piss-easy test, and you get your magic card, but you can’t have more than one passenger your age up to the age of twenty-five in your car with you until six months have passed. Your first license also lasts four years instead of the standard six, so the expiration times perfectly with either your twentieth, twenty-first or twenty-second birthday, depending on when you got your license (some states have varying starting permit ages), and the DMV will send a notification well before then telling you to not be a retard and renew your license.

What this means is that for all this to have occurred, JT would’ve needed to have gotten the letter well before his birthday before last semester started since he was hitting the expiration period. This means that the latest he would’ve received it was essentially the first few weeks of school starting, which happened in mid-late August to early September. This is important because our third roommate didn’t show up until days before the start of the semester, and by days, I mean within two days of the start of the semester. So either two things have happened:

1. There was a perfect storm where JT’s mail got sent right at the time our new roomie came and the new roomie went through it, never said anything, and then left JT to deal with it.
2. JT is lying.

I don’t believe in perfect storms because I paid attention in my statistics courses and understand that most shit that happens falls within one to two standard deviations. This story is at least four standard deviations out, which means it’s bullshit. Hell, we wouldn’t even need to laterally apply statistics here since the whole scenario, at best, means JT is a fucking moron who just let his license expire and drove for months on an expired license. However, considering that this is a guy who only recently turned into a passable functioning human, I think we can safely say that he is a liar.

Why did I go on for a few hundred words about this? I hate people who lie. I cannot stand people who use weasel words, sob stories, and guilt trips to get what they want. I live in a family that isn’t Catholic, but has the Catholic guilt trip down so well they should be teaching master classes on it. I had an entire friendship destroyed because of lying. My most stable relationship that was almost ten years long was destroyed because of lying and the repercussions. All lying does is create an infinite circle of information manipulation that needs to be fed with further lying until it collapses in on itself and, like a bomb, destroys everything around it. Lying is for the weak and the stupid.

Back at the story, I’m trying to connect to this kid, but no dice. It took him weeks just to get his iPad back, and then even longer to get it sold. I didn’t mind, however, because I’m too nice. Nearly a month later, and it’s the last time he needs me to drive him anywhere because he’s going to pay everything off and yada-yada. We get it done, and for once we actually have a decent conversation; nothing mind-blowing, just talking about music and shit. He gets his intermediate parking sticker or whatever and then hits me up for forty bucks, which I don’t mind me since I know he has a job and will be good for it as any money I’ve lent I’ve always gotten back. Until now.

You see, during the first semester he had left his job at that point in time due to ‘anxiety’. I first need to tangent on this before getting back to my main point: anxiety is not a problem. It is not a mental disability, or mental disorder or any garbage that people who take shitty psychologists’ words for. It is a natural reaction to dealing with life. There is no reason to medicate over-anxiety when no medication or clinical diagnosis exists for under-anxiety. Anxiety and ‘panic’ are two entirely separate things, and while I personally believe people who suffer panic attacks are equally full of shit, I will grant that being diagnosed with a panic disorder is mentally more stressful than anxiety and thus harder to deal with. That aside, quitting your job due to ‘anxiety’ is bullshit because it comes with the territory because it’s part of fucking life.

Anyways, he had made it clear that he had a better job lined up, and he was busy all the time during the days, thus perfectly reasonable to assume he had a job. He didn’t; he’d been getting money from his parents the entire time. That’s not a problem, except for the fact that he still owes me forty fucking dollars and it’s been more than enough time for him to get my cash to me. Fuck, I’ve seen him buy hundreds of dollars worth of groceries; he has plenty of wine and even threw a fucking party for the Grammys. I know he has money and I haven’t seen a dime of it. Moreover, I found out later on by happenstance that he still has his iPad, which means he never sold it. What?! So the entire time he harangued me for rides and was ‘hard up for cash’, he never actually did any of what he said he was going to do and, instead, just got helped by mommy and daddy? Fuck right off, man.

This pisses me off all over the place because my time is worth more to me than his is to him, and it’s worth more in general. I do useful shit with my time, like research, draft articles, network and work on my various crafts not related to school to help solidify my back-up plans. All he does is pant, eat and watch shitty TV shows. It also pisses me off because it’s him lying again. He was never hard up for cash. He never had to sell his stuff to make ends meet. Shit, we have a robust bus system at my university and he has a ton of friends on campus and around the area, so he never needed me to help him out. All it tells me is that he fucked up royally, and his friends either didn’t care or didn’t want to help him, which tells me that they don’t actually like him all that much. Thus, he came to me, who is essentially a stranger in a foreign land, with a sob story and sold it well enough to get my dumb ass to help him financially and transportationally. Fuck JT.

If that weren’t bad enough, all the good changes that started the semester off are gone. He’s back to leaving mountains of shit in the sink. Anytime he uses the cutting board, he just stuffs it into the dishwasher and leaves it until the dishwasher is full, which means that if you need to use it, you need to fish it out and now it’s your problem to clean it, use it, clean it and put it back. Seriously, it’s one of the most used items in the kitchen, and your response to dirtying it is to put it somewhere that needs to be filled to be useful and not just take five second to clean it off? The hell is wrong with you?

He still squawks, except it’s louder and at all hours of the day. It was so bad at one point that our new foreign roommate had to ask him to essentially shut the hell up, which he did for all of a day and then went back to it. He now plays loud music at random intervals and cranks his TV even louder than before. He’ll stuff his groceries wherever in the fridge and pantry, despite previously acknowledging who had which shelf and which drawer. He’ll put away completely dirty pots and pans, and mix his own set (which are consistently dirty) with mine. I’ve lost a drying towel, and my food has yet again gone eaten. He doesn’t, however, burn food anymore, which is a fucking godsend. At least some of the improvement was kept.

I had a huge epiphany, though, which has helped calm me down quite a bit. It doesn’t mean that when absurd shit happens I don’t bitch, I just don’t hold onto it as long. The other day, the dishwasher over-flowed because it’s a piece of crap. I ninja-cleaned it, and everything seemed to be fine. However, as I was fed up of turning back into the guy who took out the trash, did the dishes and was the ‘Mom’ of the house, I left the dishwasher alone and pulled the passive-aggressive ‘I do me, you do you’. Periodically, I checked in on the dishwasher and it went days without getting dealt with. At the end of the week, JT comes up and asks if I have any dishwasher cleaning agent packs lying around; yeah, because the most useful place to put those are in my room and not near the dishwasher, you fiddle-head. I say no, and then ask if that’s why nobody has run the dishwasher; never mind that it would take less time, energy and water to just pull them out and do them by hand. JT informs we that we’ve run out and then goes to leave, and I say since I need to go to the store, I’ll pick some up, which I do about a half hour later. When I get back, he was very appreciative and even helped put away my groceries, and so I thought nothing of it.

Of course, it later dawned on me that he had no intention of going out and buying the cleaning agent packets, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked me in the first place. It was this moment that my epiphany occurred and I realized that the reason JT was the way he was and is is because he doesn’t think, at all. He operates on what I call the Goldfish Paradigm, or the paradigm that he is only focused on what he wants to get done, and other stuff is just in the way. If it isn’t immediately related to what he’s trying to do, it gets forgotten and lost in the cavernous space that is his head, which leads to dirty dishes, leaving chores and almost everything else that I’ve complained about fro two huge diatribes now.

You may be thinking, ‘Sahltines, that’s just someone being stupid and selfish.’ You would be right. I’m simply trying to apply logic to something illogical for shits and giggles and because I know he’s never going to change. I say never simply because change is easy, but sticking to it and disciplining yourself is where it gets hard, and considering in conversations since he’s been able to drive again, JT has implied that he drives to the campus and parks illegally at different establishments close to his classroom buildings rather than taking the goddamn free public transit that comes to the complex every ten minutes, I don’t see this fat fuck putting in an iota of effort be slightly less shitty.

I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell as time goes on. Hopefully he’ll either fail out or move in with someone else and I’ll get a cool bro roommate or a two sexy mamacitas for roommates next semester, but I should probably go back to playing the lottery since there’s a greater chance that’ll happen than this turning around. Fuck roommates.