psycho roommate quiz

I love living with the girlfriend, but there are moments when I fondly remember living alone. And that it kinda rocked. Drinkng milk from the carton, deciding to listen to all my Carpenters cds on shuffle and repeat, or just have one of those days when I don’t see any reason to get dressed (I know– I led a rich, full life)And I was lucky, because I only had one psycho roommate.

Now in my experience, psycho roommates don’t usually seem psycho when you first meet them, but then you see that one quirky behavior that used to be just goofy but now seems to be proof of profound mental illness. I’m gonna tell you about two roommates, but (here it comes..wait for it…wait for it…) there’s a catch! Only one of them was really a roommate of mine and you have to guess which one!

Greg smoked a lot of weed, which was one of the reasons I thought he’d be a cool roommate. I figured there would always be pot in the house, and we’d laugh a lot. What I didn’t realize is that if you’re not stoned, stoned people aren’t nearly as interesting. Now if Greg were a typical pothead, he would eventually get really quiet, nodding off while watching a ‘Becker’ marathon . But Greg liked to talk when he got stoned. Constantly. About nothing.

“Dude…I made up a new word! This doctor was talking about the knee reflex, and I was thinking you should call that a kneeflex!” “Dude–they should make a cologne that smells like a new car so that women think you’re rich!” Then I got to witness that perfect storm where stupidity, laziness and THC meet. I come home one day, he’s got a bag of pretzels on his right, a bag of mini-chocolate on his left, and he’s nodding. Then he takes a handful of pretzels and a few of the candy bars and shoves them all into his mouth at the same time.

He chews and nods, all the while gesturing to me in that way that says “No–hang on–I got somethin’ here”. Finally he announces that what he’s got is the “greatest snack food idea ever”. Chocolate-covered pretzels. After I explained to him that they…had already been invented, he called me an asshole, went into his room and slammed the door. I had never seen a stoner get that upset about anything, and from then on things between us were always a little tense.

Jim was my roommate during freshman year at UCLA. He was a computer genius who had designed some important software when he was 17. What he hadn’t done is learn how to interact with other humans. He didn’t speak for the first three weeks we lived together, and while quiet can be good when you’re studying, this was creepy-brooding-antisocial-No Country For Old Men quiet. He spent his time hacking into the university mainframe to play this early role-playing game. This guy was such a freak that he gets access to every student’s personal file AND DOES NOTHING WITH IT!

He was also such an oblivious slob that when I had company, I threw a large blanket over his half of the room, forming a hideous blob-like sculpture, which even at that was less likely to scare a date than the piles of fast-food wrappers, beer bottles and underwear beneath the blanket. I didn’t have to kick Jim out, though. Fortunately, the university did that, and when they did, he put on mountain-climbing gear and proceeded to rapel down the side of our eight story dorm building.

So, who did I really live with? Who’s fictional? Why am I asking  rhetorical questions? Just knowing that there are Gregs or Jims out there who are just a Craigslist ad away from masturbating in the room next to me makes me appreciate my drafty overpriced studio I had in Chicago.

It was a marginal neighborhood (apparently the real estate term is ‘partially gentrified,’ which means you can still buy crack on the corner but you can also get a vanilla latte with it), but despite the occasional mouse and the one cockroach I spotted in my kitchen (who I’m convinced was some sort of scout), there were things I really enjoyed. Like being able to cook naked.