One of the first rites of passage we experience as college students, aside from the discovery that we have zero tolerance for alcohol, is meeting with our freshman year roommate.
The process began when the roommate assignment letter arrived in your mailbox.
No matter what the poor girl’s name was, you had her life story written in your head before you dialed her phone number. The members of the class of ’08 were the last sad souls without the luxury of Facebook, and therefore we were forced to use more conventional methods: Our imaginations. The crop of first year roommates that my high school friends and I had predicted included a drug dealer, a Russian Mob Princess and a lesbian (we went two for three that year).
From the first phone conversation to the first meeting, no word besides awkward is more appropriate to describe the relationship you had with your new roommate.
Living with a stranger for a year? Awkward. And it’s even more awkward when you discover on move-in day that everything she owns is purple, or that she has an affinity for arts and crafts (i.e. crocheting, making bead mosaics and any hot glue gun activity) and a tendency to hyperventilate in, you guessed it, awkward situations. It is possible to make the best of a bad roomie situation. Solution? Find a best friend whose roommate is equally awkward. This way you can commiserate as well as secure one another as roommates for next year.
If you make it off campus, you’ll have to deal with a whole new set of problems. Now your roommates are also your best friends, which means you’ve reached a whole new level of comfort (read: dirtiness). If you haven’t encountered the “whose turn is it to buy toilet paper” standoff, I’m jealous.
Another problematic situation is when one of their [half-naked] boyfriends will bump into you en route to the bathroom at 4 a.m. Though, if they’re still around in the morning, you’ll probably get breakfast out of it.
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