Letters to Freshmen: The Cure for a Difficult Roommate

Dear Freshmen,

Adapting to college can be hard. Granted, you’re probably intelligent and hardworking enough to navigate most of the obstacles which you’ve inevitably faced as a college student thus far — after all, how else would you have managed to make it into the Happiest College in America? Nonetheless, even smart people have to deal with inconvenient circumstances and daunting problems, and that’s especially true for all you freshmen out there.

And if there’s one thing I remember about my first year of college, it’s that there’s one issue which seems to be a constant source of unhappiness for some freshmen: your roommate. Now, troublesome roommates are not a problem that everyone has to deal with. Granted, even if you and your roomie are like Calvin and Hobbes you’ll still have to deal with the occasional hiccup. But if you’re in a situation where it seems like you and your randomly chosen buddy are constantly butting heads, that’s when you have a problem.

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I was reminded of this reality just the other day during a conversation I was having with a freshman friend of mine about the problems he was having with his roommate. My friend, who we’ll call Sammy for the sake of convenience, had nearly come to blows during the fall semester with his roommate. Sammy had thought that, after some time and a little breathing room, things would be back on track after break. He was wrong.

“It’s not like my roommate is a bad guy or anything,” Sammy told me; “it’s just that he can be so inconsiderate — he sexiled me the other day, and it must’ve been like the third time this semester alone… and on a Wednesday?! I just don’t know what I’m going to do!”

I could tell that Sammy was feeling helpless and I decided that, as a senior, I was eminently qualified to let him know that he was anything but. I decided to give him a bit of advice that I wish someone had shared with me when I was a freshman. I too, like Sammy, had dealt with a slightly problematic roommate, and the fact is that not a day goes by that I don’t regret the way I handled my roommate situation; and, as I told Sammy, if you let a situation like that fester, you’re going to regret it too.

Yeah, maybe your friends have told you to just let things go — or, even worse, they might tell you to try and get even with your roommate. But if you want to handle this problem like the mature young adult you no doubt are, you need to realize that there’s only one surefire way for you and your roommate to deal with these kinds of  problems.

You need to murder your roommate in their sleep and violently dispose of their corpse.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: it’s one thing to read that advice in a pamphlet from Student Health or hear it during orientation from your RA, but it’s an entirely different thing to actually wrap your fingers around that motherfucker’s throat and squeeze the life from their pathetic-ass body. And I agree with you one hundred percent on that: if you could just wave a wand and fix your relationships, everybody would. But you can’t. You can either let your roommate walk all over you, or you can cut the little bastard’s face off with the jagged edge of a broken bottle and wear it as a hat. The choice is yours.

And you might think to yourself “Oh, it’ll blow over.” Don’t kid yourself, we all know what you’re really thinking: “I can’t believe this chickenshit douchebag still has not figured this out! It’s goddamn February… I mean, what the fucking fuck?” And if you’re thinking that, then it’s time to admit you have to address your problems head on — and if you don’t, they just might.

It won’t be a walk in the park. Admitting you have a problem is only going to be half the battle; the real challenge is going to be in answering the questions “where?” and “when?” and especially “how?” when you realize that you’ll have to get all Jeffrey Dahmer on the entitled turbo-bitch who has been watching Gilmore Girls on your Netflix for the last five hours.

Here is where I must admit a small defeat: at the end of the day, your relationship with your roommate is a unique one with unique problems, and that means there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Sure, I could sit here and tell you that you should mail your roommates eyes to  their parents or store them in your closet with a humidifier after you’ve put arsenic in their Smirnov so that the body will be fresh when you inevitably record the intermittent sex acts you’ll perform on their corpse. But I’d be lying.

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The truth is that only you can determine the appropriate means by which that stupid asslicker gets the punishment they deserve. There are some things that you can probably expect, though. If you see the fear in their eyes as you extinguish their life and find it intensely arousing, that’s perfectly normal — consult a doctor if that lasts for more than seven hours. Bleach is your friend. And if you’re looking to get rid of them discreetly, your gut reaction is going to tell you to go somewhere up on Mount Baldy — trust me, Green Beach is better.

They never look under Green Beach.

– Billy Ostermeyer CMC ’15