Shock and awe

The long weekend was roommate-tastic and not in the way I’d hoped. Let’s see. There was the enormous pile of dishes in the kitchen, so big that it flowed out of and over the confines of the sink and onto the counter surrounding the sink. This made it hard for me to wash my own dishes and I certainly wasn’t doing hers just to make room for my own. Then there was the bathroom sink. It backed up—I don’t know why. All I know is I came home on Friday morning to find the sink full of nasty, dirty water and bits of….something, as if someone had thrown up insulation into the sink. When I asked A about it, she said, “Oh, it stopped draining so I used the toilet plunger to try and unclog it, but it pulled up all this nasty stuff, so I just left it there to drain.” Did she try to scrub the sink after using the TOILET PLUNGER to clear the pipes? No. Did she leave the nastiness there until the water eventually drained, leaving gray clumps of pipe litter in the sink? Yes. The concept of Drano apparently didn’t enter the equation.

On Saturday night, she and a friend came home to the apartment at 3:30am. I know this because they were less than subtle about their entrance and preparation for bed. Now, I am a self-professed sleep dork and I wear earplugs to bed, a habit I picked up in college when T came down with a barking cough and refused to go to the health center. The point is that it takes a lot to wake me up at night, but somehow A and her friend managed it just fine. Crashing, banging, loud laughing, stumbling into walls, a complete lack of consideration---it was just like being back in college again. In the morning, she asked, “Did we wake you up last night when we came home?” Yes, you did. “Oh, I’m sorry. We were at a cocktail party all night.”

On Sunday, her new boyfriend made an appearance. Or rather, his smell preceded him into the room and heralded his arrival. If you mix the odor of stale cigarettes, incense, bad BO, unwashed hair, unbrushed teeth and general rankness, you’d get an idea of what this guy smelled like. And what A’s room smelled like for the rest of the weekend. She’s talked about this guy like he was the second coming of God, but when he finally vacated the bathroom, I found out that he’s actually the second coming of Gollum. Short, skinny, with a hooked nose and frizzy black hair down to his waist, he looked like an Orc--specifically, the Orc that tries to eat Merry and Pippin before they escape into Fangorn. Except the Orc probably smelled better. Lunchboy came over yesterday to help me with some furniture and I asked him to stick his head in A’s room just to make sure I wasn’t being an oversensitive drama queen. “No,” he said. “That’s AWFUL.” I lit a candle outside A’s room and I have no idea how to discuss this with her.