With the advent of the new Fall semester, a recharged me from a summer of just vegging and working on small projects that I’ve wanted to get done forever and a new roommate coming in for the whole year, I would’ve been lying to say I wasn’t excited. Mostly it was because once you get into week three of vegging, you just hit the saturation point and while I’m more than capable of creating work for myself that isn’t related to studying or looking for an actual job (which would defeat the purpose of a non-working summer), that never staves off that saturation point. That sounds a little odd, so think of it as being in ‘the grind’, if you will; that feeling of just getting up and doing the same thing every day and because of repetition, you’ve gotten really good at it so there’s a near automaton proficiency and efficiency of it, complete with lack of deeper, more critical thought. Indeed, that was the goal and I achieved it spectacularly, I’m simply saying that even relaxing can get tiring to the point that I was actually looking forward to sitting in a chair and taking notes.

I was also cautiously optimistic because the winner of ‘Worst Roommate Sahltines Has Ever Had’ award was going to be coming back and when he had come back from Winter break, JT had improved across the board and actually become sort of tolerable. Granted, I’ve made my peace with some of his less annoying man-child habits, like the yelling and squawking and just random noise making, but the point remains that he became a better roommate after the break, so perhaps this is a trend.

Since you’ve read the title, you can rightly assume that no, this did not become a trend and in fact, he has objectively regressed. Then again, he is openly and vocally in support of the entirety of the BLM movement and is clearly invested in Tumblr-based social issues, social justice and crusading based on the loud conversations I’ve heard him and his friends have, so I guess when you let your mind rot, your actions and previous goodwill atrophies as well.

As a precaution, this is going to be very long and likely not going to be very humorous at all. This is simply a written catharsis, as most of the ‘Hope’ series has been, since most of anything I’ve complained or will complain about in the series I’ve discussed with JT already and he has completely ignored either due to an actual lack of measurable intelligence or out of feigned ignorance (I believe the latter, obviously). It should go without even saying that a list that’s already as long as it of these issues should be a massive red flag in and of itself to the person that is causing the issues, but having been on the Internet for quite a while and meeting people as bad, if not worse, than JT in real life, I can unfortunately say I can comprehend how someone that douche-tastic would not see themselves as douche-tastic at all.

JT came by randomly near the start of July with no prior notice. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t care because under normal circumstances, a roommate would let another roommate know a day or two ahead of time in case the roommate living in the house needs to put some stuff away, like certain kitchenware that they’ve left out just for easier use, or to rework the fridge since the roommate who has been used to living alone may have simply just shoved their shit wherever as there’s nobody else to accommodate. JT, of course, did not offer me such a luxury and let me know barely twenty minutes before he was to show up. Even with such a short notice, those who know me know of my skill of doing quality work under ridiculous time constraints and high pressure and I probably could’ve taken care of what I needed to accommodate him for however long he planned to stay in that twenty minutes. However, he sent me this text at seven in the A.M., on a rest day, in the summer, and then proceeded to be slightly miffed when he had to move my shit in the fridge around. Sure, I probably could’ve been up, but that would’ve required me to have goddamn clairvoyance or a reason to be up at seven in the morning, both of which I did not have. Regardless, the point is that he was miffed I didn’t do anything about something I couldn’t have possibly had any control over because he texted me while I was busy sleeping. Instead of being miffed, how about being a good roomie and telling me way in advance so I can plan accordingly, you nimrod?

What then followed this gave me enough pause to seriously consider JT having some sort of mental developmental condition. He dumped all his stuff in his room, which consisted of a TV, a DVD player, a hamper of clothes and shit in a duffel bag and promptly left. I still have no idea why he brought a TV considering we have one in the living room, or the reasoning behind bringing a hunk of dirty clothes when he was living at home and wasn’t planning on staying very long, but this is JT we’re dealing with and logic might as well be Greek. Now completely awake, I made some tea to try and roll into my day easy while mentally cataloging what I wanted to get done on that Friday after hitting the gym, and this went well until he came back from the grocery store. Now, my dear readers, if you had planned to stay somewhere for a weekend or a short three-day trip, I think you might consider going to the grocery store and stocking up on some light stuff, like pre-made sandwiches or the salad bars that most stores now feature. Hell, I have a friend who goes and hits up the deli and gets enough meat and cheese to last her the entire trip if it’s really short. Anyone else I’ve met generally just eats out or usually has their meals comped because it’s a business/play trip or some shit like that; in short, what I’m saying is most people don’t really worry about food or, if they do go to the store, spend very little since they won’t be in the area long.

JT did not do this. He came back with enough food to last half a month, plenty of it requiring the use of a fridge. As I drank my tea and watched SportsCenter from the living room couch, I tried my damnedest to think of what he could possibly be using this food for. Maybe he was planning a cookout? Maybe he got news that he could take more time off and instead decided to stay for a week? I don’t know, but no matter what I tried to think up, it didn’t make any sense. Fuck’s sake, the kid bought a family size pack of chicken breasts and a gallon of milk. That would be enough for a week of food for one person, even a person who takes up as much volume as JT does, but that’s what he bought, including other food and snacks. Once he put his crap away, he disappeared into the hidey-hole that is his room, and I just left for the gym while shaking my head vigorously, simultaneously trying to process the stupidity I had just witnessed and remove it from my head to keep my brain from exploding.

This was not the only event up until this point in time, but I wanted to stick it here because it also has to do with food. When the semester ended, I hard-cleaned my room, stuffed my valuables away and did my best to seal my room off to keep anyone out of it, including JT as living with him for a year and living through his reprehensible behavior regularly displays left me understandably wary of him being the kind of guy who will bust in to someone else’s room and steal their shit while they’re away. This work included cleaning out all of my perishables from the fridge, and when I went to leave, I reminded JT to clean out what was left of his in the fridge to avoid it from spoiling while I was gone. He said he’d handle it and, despite being wary, I left. He texted me a couple days later telling me he’d moved out and taken care of everything and, while I was a little relieved, I still had a cloud over my head. Unfortunately, when there’s a cloud over my head, it eventually rains and when it rains, it fucking pours.

I was greeted with an unholy stench when I opened the fridge and the pantry while moving in my goodies from my travels. JT did not clean the fridge. JT did not take out the trash. He did not take care of anything he said he had. Despite logging nearly twelve hours of solid travel, having jelly legs and tons of more fun and interesting goodies to bring in to enjoy, I had to be the parent of the apartment yet a-fucking-gain and clean up after this dipshit’s mess. Thankfully, I was the only one in the complex that night, so I didn’t wake anyone up with my raucous cursing, but even if I had, I think they would’ve understood had I explained the situation to them. It took me two hours to scrub everything clean and the entire following day to ‘fumigate’ the house. It is no lie when I say that had he shown up at any point during the first week of the summer, I would’ve picked his fat ass up, carried him to the top floor of the building and tossed him off. When JT left after his short stay, which didn’t even last until Sunday morning (he showed up on Friday initially) I ended up having to throw out what was left as each item went bad. I know that the smart thing would’ve been to use it, but considering I already had a stock of food and that this moron wasted half a paycheck on shit any normal person would’ve been smart enough to not buy, I didn’t give two fucks about putting it in the bin.

Normalcy returned and I was happy once again. However, like anything good, this didn’t last. The original plan was that JT was supposed to be living at home and working at his summer internship, wherever that was, for nearly the entire summer and would’ve ended up back in the apartment about a week before the semester started. Instead, he finished about a month early and ended up coming back far before that time. Unlike his drop-in, he gave me more than enough time to rearrange everything of mine, which was a positive. Now, while I have no problem with changing up an existing plan, it was understandingly depressing that this Jabba-like human waste had now returned and I had lost all of the convenience I had been accustomed to. Plus, now I had to deal with said walking lump, which is a far worse punishment.

As soon as he came back, everything went to hell. The first thing to go was our pantry organization. Initially, I had one rack which was specifically for me, and JT had one rack that was for him. Whomever was our third roommate got the last big rack, and we used the top rack for storage of kitchen implements we didn’t use and the remaining tiny rack for general supplies like soaps and detergents and other supplies like trash bags, food preserving bags and the like. By the end of the past year, JT had taken over the storage rack as only he could reach it with relative ease and he had also taken over some of the supplies rack. I believe I mentioned this in my first entry, but he also constantly put his stuff on my rack, so anytime he cooked he moved shit around and I would have to go move it back. I’ve had roommates long ago who did similar things and the first thing I knew that was going to happen was that if I didn’t constantly move JT’s shit back, he’d start going through my pantry for things to use while cooking. When he left for the summer, I moved all his shit into his rack and reorganized everything, so I was naturally all frowns when he came back and commandeered every single rack that wasn’t filled with my food-stuffs upon his return.

I also had to go out and buy another stash of food preserving Ziploc bags because once JT had made his massive grocery run, he immediately used up every single bag to re-portion out his chips and cookies. I still don’t understand why he does this considering when he re-portions out his snacks into what I assume is single servings for lunches and individual snacking, also eats while he’s re-portioning, thus leaving him with less available servings to re-portion. Additionally, when he goes to grab some snacking material, he just grabs as much as he wants anyways, so again, what the fuck is the point of the extra bagging? He also started making PB&J sandwiches, so I assumed he was now making actual lunches for himself. This might’ve been the case initially, but over time, he just let the sandwiches clog up random parts of the fridge and the freezer, so the bags that I had planned on using for marinades and rubs were now housing an army of frozen sandwiches which, to this day, still haven’t been eaten. I would throw them out but since I never use the freezer, I frankly don’t care how much space they take up and how much he’ll bitch when he realizes they’ve gone bad due to frost-rime.

Speaking of the freezer, thanks to living with this human-sized comet, I’ve stopped enjoying wonderful things like ice cream, frozen vegetables and other amenities that you get to have when you get freezer space. JT, in addition to the pounds of regular food and snack food he buys, also buys a fuck-ton of frozen food and, as you would expect, none of it is nice and compact for a freezer. He has frozen fish that he rarely eats, three different bags of frozen flavored chicken nuggets, two different kinds of frozen pizzas at any given time and other assortments of garbage that remind me of the first time I was living on my own. I have a tiny corner that houses small bagged foods that generally last a long time since there is no space in the freezer. I also don’t have the nice amenities anymore not just because of room, but because JT will eat it if you don’t since he essentially owns the fucking freezer. One of my favorite self-treats I would do was occasionally buy some Talenti gelato-ice cream, but that shit stopped when I came back with two of them from the store early last spring and before they even had a chance to sit, he gobbled them up. I wish I was kidding. To hopefully combat this shitty behavior, I started marking what was mine in the freezer with a consistent letter, and my food has yet to be touched, but after the shit JT has pulled since his return, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.

Running with the food theme, there have been multiple times JT has used my food in his cooking or just to eat without asking me or even telling me. I’ve lost bags of shredded cheese multiple times over the course of the last year and I had always assumed it was our foreign roommates, who mostly cooked easy meals like canned soup or pasta, who used my stuff, but when I caught the leftover evidence and him doing it while I was going for a water-cup refill, my roommates who had long left were finally absolved for their non-committed crimes. Recently, he’s been asking to use two strips of bacon since I’ve had a lot lying around thanks to a mid summer sale. I allowed this, because two strips is nothing to a pack and it means I consume less food overall which I’m cool with, despite it being a super weird request. Plus, JT actually asked to use my food, so I was so taken aback that I happily said yes. That was, until he went ahead and cooked half a pack of my untouched bacon and didn’t ask or tell me.

Thankfully, since that was the last pack of bacon, I made the decision to yet again cut something wonderful out of my life to keep my turd of a roommate in check, but looking back, who asks for two fucking strips of bacon? Keep in mind that this was a weekly thing. That means that every week, this moron went to the store and stocked up on garbage, walked right past the bacon every time and upon that same time every week when he wanted to make his whatever that involved bacon, his first thought was, ‘Hey, Sahltines has some, let’s ask him’, not ‘Hey, I’m out of bacon, I should go get some.’ Some of you might see nothing wrong with this, and in truth there isn’t up until he fucking took my food without my permission. However, those above two lines of thinking show the thought process of someone who is an idiot at best and a mooch at worst versus a responsible adult who, even if the plans they lay out go awry, can still compromise. I also want to add that I have never once asked for any of his food; that’s mostly because I don’t want any of what he’s peddling, but also because I refuse to sponge off the people around me just because it’s the objectively ‘easier’ method.

It’s not just raw food stuffs, either. We’ve never spoken a single word to each other about what is shared and what isn’t, yet he has no problem running up my bill on spices and flavorings. Back when I was finishing up my undergrad, I had one single small salt shaker last me almost three years through multiple moves. When I initially came down here, I bought a big salt grinder and that was gone the third week in and I had only used it three times. Plenty of my combined spices would disappear well before what I would consider a reasonable time-frame and my stock of cheap mixers at the time didn’t even last a week, despite the fact that I don’t drink often enough to run through my mixers on a weekly basis and JT doesn’t even fucking drink. Three months in and I had to switch up my entire diet and suss out new recipes because this jackass was running up half of my grocery bill anytime I went with just spices and extras.

You’d think it would end there, but it doesn’t. As I mentioned in my very first entry, he destroyed an extremely sentimental coffee mug and then tried to hide the evidence. Since then, he’s ruined my entire set of Tupperware containers. I’ve lost half a package of cheap silverware due to him simply throwing it out like a half-wit, he broke one of my higher quality frying pans. He’s poached razors from me multiple times, cleaning supplies like 409, Windex, Febreeze and even bathroom supplies like toilet paper. He’s ruined at least three individual sets of kitchen hand towels either by taking them and not returning them to the kitchen or by using them to clean everything without washing them in a timely manner. That’s not also counting the innumerable times I’ve needed to clean a spill or mess and he’s busy using the only available towel as a convenient area for him to place a red-hot baking tray fresh from the oven on. We have fucking marble counter-tops and even if they weren’t rock, most counter-tops can handle the a hot tray being placed on them no problem, so all he’s doing is just being inconvenient to everyone else.

On top of all that, I had a half year’s supply of tide detergent packs with probably about six of the sixty or so having been used. In the three weeks prior to the actual start of classes, I went from fifty-four to seven. You read that right: fucking seven. When we eventually ran out, he had the gall to ask me when he went to do his laundry ‘Are we out of detergent’? First, despite what your K-12 teachers say, there are such things as ‘stupid questions’ and this is one of them; if a container is empty then you are out of whatever was in it unless the purpose of the container was initially to be empty and thus making it storage. Second, I have never heard this question not be followed up with a ‘Do you have any *insert thing that is missing here* that I could use?’ Thus, its sole existence is to allow dipshits to mooch and beg off of others while seeming pitiable, which helps them get what they’re looking for. Naturally, when I said ‘I guess so; is the container empty?’ to subtly emphasize the stupidity of the question, he asked me if I had any detergent in my room. Yes, you fucking clod, I keep a spare under lock and key in my room and then buy a second one to share with you that I also use because that is an intelligent way to spend money. When it was made crystal clear that there was no detergent in the house, he then bought a gigantic container and used it and didn’t even offer to share it with me. As more insult to injury, this is not the first time he has used my detergent to completion, but this is the first time he’s told me.

After a near month of fuming, our new roommate showed up and instantly grounded me back into reality and likely saved me an aneurysm. Part of that has to do with him actually being a living, breathing and real person and not a cartoon-y caricature of a handful of stereotypes, and the other part is that he brought a dog and I love dogs. Even if I’m more of a small animal person simply because they’re the easiest to care for, I can never not smile when I see a dog, especially one that is well-cared for, well-trained and likes to be around people.  Since the new roommate, now named R, has a dog, is studying something that requires more than a pulse to complete (he’s in veterinarian sciences whereas JT is a digital media studies major) and a girlfriend who is equally amicable, he’s really busy and extremely chill, which is a fucking god-send compared to the frenetic Jabba the Fat I’ve become used to. Unfortunately, because JT immediately took advantage of this and shoved his snacks and shit into R’s pantry space, there was a tiny squabble, and by squabble I mean JT getting flustered and R being cooler than a frozen cucumber and just moving JT’s shit back onto JT’s shelf, then immediately filling his shelf so that JT wouldn’t be able to do that shit again. As a result, JT has occasionally been stuffing his supplies back onto my shelf, along with rooting around in my shelf for my spices and mixers and delicious goodies, but I’ve done the smart thing and since moved all my tasty treats, spices and shit that JT has become accustomed to accosting from me into my closet and simply filled my shelf with canned foods and other stuff that he can’t stand. As for the stuff he’s been putting on my shelf, I just move it to his shelf and out of his immediate eyesight just to mess with him a bit.

There’s been zero incidents since R came and I moved what I wanted back into my room, and while it’s unfortunate that I have to lock my room more regularly now, I’m happier for it since very few incidents have come up now that JT has to completely provide for himself and that he can’t bird-speak his way into what he wants. I’m sure there will be another chapter in this saga, which sucks because it’s just more evidence on top of the pile that proves I can find garbage human beings wherever, but despite the impetus for writing this entry being entirely based around rage, I have to say that the catharsis has successfully kicked in and I’m feeling extremely relaxed now. Stay classy, you beautiful people.