While watching some playoff basketball and power-slamming some water in a vain attempt to settle out what a garbage-filled cheat day I’ve had, I was a hit with a realization: I haven’t bitched about my roommate in forever. ‘Oh man, Sahltines, has he gotten better?’ Not really, at least not by any measurable amount, as every bit of progress he’s made always regresses eventually. I’ve simply become more accepting and relatively numb to it, which is not dissimilar to how I dealt with the roommates I had back when I lived in Pennsylvania and our schedules never met up so I had no opportunities to try and get everyone on the same page.

Looking back on all the entries into this series, I can at least say that JT has actually and markedly improved. He does not hoard dishes in the dishwasher anymore, he’s stopped with his shenanigans of moving things in the pantry around and he’s setting off the smoke alarm less than twenty percent of the time he cooks. Unfortunately, these small improvements are not enough to give him the MIR, or ‘Most Improved Roommate’ award, because for all the tiny improvements he’s made, he’s regressed heavily in some areas and not improved at all in others.

There have also been more one-off events and things I’ve learned about JT that have solidified my previous theory that he is a walking example of the Goldfish Paradigm. Additionally, while I had been joking before about him being developmentally challenged, what I’ve learned actually has me believing that he fits into this category in some form, even if it’s very slightly. I’m not entirely sold on it, since most of his behavior still fits into the ‘moronic douche’ category extremely well, but if I were looking for an excuse on his behalf, being medically slightly retarded would be a believable one.

I’ll recount everything in a list similar to the very first entry, as this will be the definite final entry; he’s moving out as he’s graduating and was offered a position at the job he’s been interning at. Part of this is because two of these entries have been more narrative and having two list-based entries would balance it out, but if I’m being honest, I don’t want to put a narrative spin on this and all these events and tidbids I’ve gained don’t connect to each other well. With excuses for my malaise out of the way, let’s get started:

• JT’s sister and boyfriend came over, and their short visit was enjoyable. It wasn’t anything deeper than brother-sister back and forth, but having grown up without a sibling and having a best friend who always fought with his sister, watching sibling rivalry is always entertaining. Some of the gems I gleaned were:
  • JT claims he has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His sister said ‘yeah, you’re OCD is you stuffing candy wrappers in between the couch cushions.’ When JT tried to refute this by saying, ‘I don’t do that anymore’, his sister countered with, ‘JT, we’re still cleaning out the ones you left from the last time you visted.’
  • JT apparently opened a line of credit earlier on and maxed it out, putting his family in hefty financial trouble. The two glossed over this, but his sister mentioned they had just finished paying it off, which tells me whatever he did was pretty expensive since he’s so young.
  • The car he now owns was also bought on a whim, possibly during his spending spree.
  • His bathroom is apparently disgusting. I did go in it one time to help him Nair off all his back hair before spring break. I didn’t notice any mess then, but perhaps he was keeping it spotless at that point.
  • He might be on the line for diabetes or already have it, as his sister freaked out when he was telling a ‘story’ about how he stopped by a new Starbucks that opened less than a half-mile from our apartment complex and mentioned some ‘Unicorn’ coffee drink they have. JT stated that he didn’t go in and buy it, which I don’t believe since it’s the only Starbucks I’ve ever seen with a drive-through. However, I’ve never seen him drink anything coffee related, though I’ve never seen him on campus, so perhaps he does there or on the way to his job. This one makes me both laugh and shake my head because when I was a super chubster as a preteen, I had a doctor tell me I was on the way to become diabetic. I took that shit incredibly seriously and have worked to eat well enough to not have to worry about becoming diabetic despite being pretty big. Consistently working out, even if it’s not consistent in the sense that I do it daily or even a set amount of times a week, has obviously also helped.
• Speaking of the Nair incident, his room smells like rotting beer/age-old dry vomit. I almost vomited myself, and my gag reflex is typically ironclad. I have no idea if the smell was the room itself, if it was actually his bathroom that reeked, or if it was JT himself. I’m most inclined to believe the third positing since there have been days where he’s walked around shirtless after hitting the ‘gym’ that the complex has and the place smells fucking horrific.
• JT, despite cooking better, has also cooked more and still leaves dirty shit in the sink. His brand new slob habit is to completely cover the cutting board while preparing his food (both sides), then just put it back when he’s done with it. While I guess you could say it’s a step above him stuffing it in the dishwasher, it’s still a bunch of bullshit since the board is still dirty.
• The kid coughs every day, all the time, and without covering his mouth. As a sizable guy who used to get sick a ton as a kid, but that kind of sick where you’re never in bad enough condition to just rest, I learned extremely early on that not covering my mouth just spread my germs everywhere, making others sick and increasing the chances of relapsing once I got better. I also covered my mouth because my parents taught me not to be a fucking slob. I wouldn’t care if he was just coughing in his room, but I’ve seen him cough on the entirety of the fridge.
• A couple weeks back, our AC broke. However, the fucker switched directly to fan mode, so we had the bitch running non-stop and it obviously wasn’t doing anything. I only noticed after fiddling with the system and filled out a work order. Seeing as I filled the work order late on Friday and they wouldn’t be able to get to it until Monday, I bit the bullet and went to the store to buy some groceries. While I had no problem bringing my haul in, while I was putting it away, I stopped to pour some water to slow my beast-level sweating. When I came back from filling my mini-fridge with food that I didn’t want JT to sneak away with, I caught him drinking from the house filtered water jug. No pouring, no attempt to waterfall; lips straight on the goddamn opening. JT then tried to play it off by saying, ‘Oh, I was just joking…’ while trailing off, and then scuttled back to his room. I don’t know what my look was, but I can only assume it was very similar to the time I came in last year and saw him hunched over the counter, wearing only boxers, attacking some left over ribs he had like a fucking maniacal animal.
• While doing my laundry about a month back, I had to pull out R’s stuff from the dryer, which is something that annoys me about R, but he’s such a spectacular roommate in every other regard and the laundry is something he already feels bad about since he can’t predict his hours, helping him out or just dealing with it doesn’t bother me at all. When I left R’s laundry on the very tiny kitchen table, as his room is right across from the table and nobody but JT uses the table for anything, and even JT uses it infrequently, JT lost his mind. As soon as he walked in, he started flipping out about this, saying, ‘Are you fucking serious?’ and repeating, ‘This is where we eat!’ JT put his stuff away and then proceeded to repeat the ‘This is where we eat’ ad infinitum while pacing from his room to the table. Having to switch my laundry, I attempted to time it so that he would be in his room and I’d be able to make a quick switch, but as soon as he heard my footsteps, he ran out to bitch to me. ‘How can he leave this here? This is where we eat!’ I shrugged and said, ‘I dunno, but they’re clean and it’s not that big of a deal. Move ’em if they’re in your way.’ I didn’t see the look on his face after this, but if his tantrum-esque stomping was any indication, he wasn’t very pleased that I didn’t validate his non-problem.
• JT threw out a couple of quart jug containers I would rotate in and out of spot in the fridge when I wanted to make a big batch of some Crystal Light stuff or attempt to make a wacky alcohol-based punch. Like everything else, he did not tell me he did this, so I found out at the worst possible time.
• He ruined the one frying pan I have by putting it in the dishwasher improperly and causing it to deform so that the pan’s bottom was caved in. I spent half a day trying to rework it back into shape.
• During his party for the Grammys this year, he got stupid wasted and corralled me into tallying up these score sheets he made and gave to all his friends. I guess he does it to make the whole experience some kind of competition, which I sniggered at when him and the early birds of his friends were talking about it as it effectively proves that awards shows are so boring that fans need to extra entertainment to keep them lively. I was confused as to why he didn’t ask his friends, and his response to me was, ‘Well, you’re a graduate student, you know how to grade papers and stuff and you’re not doing anything right now’. Keep in mind that I had told both him and R that I wasn’t taking classes this semester since money was tight and I wasn’t getting funding from the department. Even if I was taking classes, the fact that all he thinks graduate students, especially those in a STEM discipline, do is grade papers was unbelievably insulting. I probably shouldn’t have gone along with it, as I was in the middle of writing a new song, but I did because all of his friends we’re super embarrassed by how slammed he was and I figured a pointless fight wasn’t worth it.
• Speaking of his dumb friends, despite saying they would help JT clean up after their party, they did no such thing. As soon as I ‘graded’ their sheets, they left and gave me that ‘we’re so sorry, but we have to go’ that shitty people like my family give when they want to ditch a scene. JT promptly then stumbled around and flopped on his fat whale back and passed out. R was gone (because he’s a goddamn genius) and the whole place was covered with trash, so I picked it up because the last party JT had didn’t get cleaned up until half the week past the date of the party was over.
• Over this past weekend, JT approached me while I was cooking to talk about shifting the power bill out of his name and into mine; naturally I was surprised because I didn’t figure he was capable enough to think that far ahead and was simply going to force me to deal with this after dipping out of the apartment post-graduation. He told me when he was free and then asked when I had finals, which I reminded him that I could go any day. He then stated that he thought grad students have finals, which tells me that all the classes he has ever taken have finals, meaning he’s never had a lab-based class or a class that doesn’t have a final exam; it’s not important, but just something I thought of in the moment. Anyways, I explain and remind him that I wasn’t taking classes due to finances and in the middle of my explanation, he began to walk away. I asked him if we were still gonna go on the day he was free, and he confirmed, doing his usual shit where his words trail off into mumbled nothingness.
• This is not the first time he has left a conversation when someone else is talking to him, and about the fifth time he has done it to me personally. He consistently talks over R and myself at points where his statement has clearly ended, yet he feels the need to just add a little bit more, despite it never being useful. JT also does this to his friends.
• I may have mentioned this in previous entries, but when he orders food from Pizza Hut or Domino’s, he will take his food out to our extremely tiny deck, stuff his face, and leave the boxes on the floor of the deck, or snarf his food down and then sneak out onto the deck and then drop the boxes there. It’s a behavior he’s actually done since day one, I just didn’t catch onto it until the last spring when I went to store my bike on the deck. Since that point, I have gone out every night after he falls asleep and brought the boxes back in and put them on the table for him to deal with; there was one time when he kept bringing the boxes back out to the deck, which finally clued me into the fact that JT was doing this shit on purpose and it wasn’t a ‘Goldfish Paradigm’ thing. When I found that out, I actually questioned how much of the shit that he does isn’t just him being a spoiled brat, which is why I stated in the opening that while he is a total dipshit and could easily pass for having some serious mental impairment, I don’t honestly believe that and instead believe he’s just a huge cunt.
• While going to grab my vacuum from the closet attached to the deck, I found a ton of old Pizza Hut boxes, meaning that some of the times that I brought the boxes back inside, he stuffed them into the closet. I’m surprised we don’t have roaches here, and at the point I found his stash (which was during spring break so I couldn’t chew him out for it since he was long gone), it convinced me that JT was an immature bastard.
• He has come home either raging or crying about what one of his supervising staff has tweeted ‘about him’ since he got his internship. One of the times when he was raging he tried to explain the problem to me, but he was so mad I had no idea what he was saying. I’m not saying he has no room to be emotional or upset, but as he’s never showed me the tweets and my own digging through his place of employment’s Twitter feed/the friend’d employees’ Twitter feeds, I can only question the validity of his claims.
• JT stomps around the house even louder than he used to, still squawks and sings at ungodly hours and now occasionally rants about things very audibly. I rant too, but I don’t rant at a volume that would only be acceptable at a playoff game or packed concert. Half of his ‘rants’ are unfinished thoughts or devolve into his signature trailing off, and when I say ‘unfinished thoughts’, I mean he just stops halfway through them; it’s like his brain just quits working, blue screens and resets, and is partially why I initially thought there might be credence to my assumption that he was, in fact, clinically retarded.
• JT stole the one sharpie I left out in the main kitchen drawer specifically to make food-stuffs in the freezer with as nobody in the freezer has a set area and it’s a goddamn free-for-all. This one seems really stupid compared to everything else I’ve mentioned here, but I have an irrational love for all Sharpie pens and when someone steals one of mine, the kid gloves come off. When I asked him about it, he lied and said he didn’t have it, but the pen ‘mysteriously’ appeared back in the drawer the following morning.

Having learned that he is absolutely not staying in the apartment once he graduates and starts his job is, without a doubt, the best gift I could ever receive. I’m sure with R and I will have some growing pains now that it’ll be just us and the little things that we do and don’t do that the other of us doesn’t like will be magnified since JT’s shit-stain behavior will be gone, but seeing as R and I are both extremely reasonable, I’m hoping it’ll work out. That’s not even touching the excitement of getting a roommate who we can lay down some ground rules with or will just be way fucking better than the catastrophe of a person that is JT.

If you’re reading this JT, good luck wherever you go. I hope your pastures are as green as Montana; you really don’t deserve them, but you’ll be out of my life forever and that alone is reason for me to send you off like a king. Just know that there is no way you’ll ever have a roommate situation as good as this one in the coming years, because the average person does not have the extremely high tolerance for bullshit that I do. Hopefully, you’ll learn to become a ‘real boy’, à la Pinocchio.