Back in October, my Freshman seminar went to France. I was really excited and nervous because I do not enjoy plane rides. I went and had a really good time. I brought back a lot of really cool souvenirs, including a little Eiffel Tower paperweight for my roommate.
We arrived back on a Saturday and I was picked up at the airport by my family. We went out to dinner and then we went home. The next day, I did laundry and prepared to go back to school later that night.
My roommate did not notice my cute new haircut, or if she did, she didn't comment on it, she just studied or left the room to go talk to people. I didn't give her the souvenir because I was really tired and I wanted to wait a couple of days. The next day, Monday, I was watching Monk with Megan and Amanda when she knocked on the door to their room. She asked me if I would come with her for a second. I didn't really want to because I could tell from the way she asked me that something was the matter. I had already been a little suspicious before I left for France that something was up, because I would come back from class and she would be in our room with another girl from our hallway and as soon as I walked into the room, everything would go silent. So anyway, I walked down the hall with her and we went into the room of the other girl. When we got there they told me and the other girl's roommate that they wanted to be each other's roommates and they did not want to be our roommates anymore. They told us that they had been discussing this for two weeks before they mentioned it to us. We asked them for a little bit of time to think it over because they had been planning it for so long. So they said ok. Two days later, the other girl's roommate and I were talking and we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to move. It was the middle of a semester and it would just be inconvenient. We also decided that since they had talked about it for quite a while, we would wait and reveal our decision the next week. However, the EXRs were not satisfied with this arrangement because later that night I was working on my computer when my EXR started talking to me. I took off my headphones and she asked me if I had made a decision yet. This caused another meeting, this time in our room. They listed off their reasons for wanting to switch and why they wanted to switch right now. My EXR told me that she felt guilty when she came in late at night after having gone to frat parties and I was trying to sleep. She made me feel like I was a social reject with no friends whatsoever. Then, if that wasn't insulting enough, she gave up on subtle insults and came flat out and told me that I creeped out her friends when they came into the room because I would acknowledge their presence then ignore them for the rest of the time they were there, unless they spoke to me. At least I acknowledged her friends. When Alex or Megan or Amanda or even my grandparents and parents came to the room, she would pretty much ignore the fact that they existed. When her Mom came to bring her stuff or to put together another piece of furniture for our room, I would always help her out and be polite.
We asked for a few minutes to come up with a rebuttal, so we went across the hallway to talk. We decided that nothing we could say would make them change their minds, so we came up with a few reasons, then talked about whether we would be able to handle being roommates. Then we went back to my room, where the fact that we had the same name which would cause a lot of confusion was shot down immediately, so finally we gave in and decided that we would be better off as roommates to each other than as roommates to the EXRs. We had to meet with our RA and our RD, but eventually, about two or three weeks later, we were finally able to switch rooms.
When Roommate and I cleaned out our refrigerator for Winter Break, we discovered some surprises that my EXR had left behind that we had both assumed belonged to the other. She left us some butter packets, some jam and a leaky bottle of fruit juice. We put them outside of her door, but I guess she had already left so we had to pick them up and throw them away. I know it's really evil, but I was kind of hoping that she would trip over them.
