The student halls in my first year at Uni in London were a huge fortress like complex on Drummond Street, where all the good vegetarian restaurants are. They contained apartments that housed five or six people at a time in their own rooms, but there were smaller flats with just two rooms in. When you applied, they asked you your interests so that they could match you with like-minded folk. For my interests, I wrote 'PUNK'. Meanwhile in Malaysia a lad named Mahathir was filling his form out, and his interests were 'DEATH METAL'. Consequently we shared one of these flats.

Mahathur said I should just call him 'M', which I refused to do beause he didn't think anyone English would pronounce his name correctly. In this he was in fact correct and I spent the year calling him something that didn't sound like his name should sound at all. But I still felt better calling him a name rather than a letter, even if it wasn't the right one.

He was a good lad; we had a lot of laughs. One night he cooked some mushrooms that he had been promising to cook for me for a long time. They were fucking awful. Imagine if I just fried some mushrooms up in a big load of oil and gave you them in a bowl, with the oil. That's not food, is it? However, I refrained from casting aspersions on the quality of Malaysian cuisine in general based on Mahathir's mushrooms. It would be quite funny to visit Malaysia and find that this bowl of mushroomy shit was the national dish.

I once spent the best part of an hour shitting myself crying after he misheard my drink request in a pub and ordered me a pint of Old Speckled Head.

I went with him and his friends to a Chinese restaurant once, which I'd never seen before, in Chinatown. They ordered my food in Chinese. I was made to feel a bit guilty for not eating meat while they were all eating lots of it. If it was now I would be eating lots of it, but I sat there with my steamed vegetables and listened to the Chinese conversation. There were portraits of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin on the wall.

Aside from his DEATH METAL he also liked to listen to one particular singer, a lady who seemed like a Chinese Celine Dion, when he was going to sleep. One weekend he went away and left the cd on repeat, so I heard the same terrible song about ten times before I went and pleaded with the building supervisors to unlock his door and turn the damn thing off.

One night my girlfriend got cramp in her leg in the middle of the night and emitted the weirdest noise I've ever heard come out of a woman. It was a long, billowing moan that got louder and louder as it went on. She only did it the once but t was really fucking weird. When it was over, there was hysterical high pitched laughter coming from next door, for a long time.

Over the course of the year, he got into body building in a big way; big vats of protein powder in the kitchen and all that. So the quite tall but regular-built lad who I first met was fucking huge by the time we moved out of there.

I think he was doing Electronic Engineering or somethng, so I guess he's probably doing alright somewhere. He was a really nice lad, would do anything for you, always with a positive attitude, liked a drink, oily mushrooms and DEATH METAL. That year was a very good year.

Salut Mahathir, where ever you may be. It was a good year we had in the fortress on drummond Street.

He was a sophmore, a clean freak and a virgin.

A virgin at a college with a 66% female population.

Yeah.

El Protoolio wrote:He was a sophmore, a clean freak and a virgin.

A virgin at a college with a 66% female population.

Yeah.

So, did y'all hook up?

My freshman year- I started mid-year, so I was only with this roommate for one semester. She started this same semester as well (Spring admits), but she did not arrive until maybe the day before school started, so for a week I thought I wasn't going to have a roommate at all, and I was really excited. Then she moved in and all of the other people on the floor noticed, as did I, that she had a very strong personal smell (the guy across the hall said "She smells like Asian"). Melanie was an army brat, recently living in Texas but before that China. She brought a terribly ugly floor lamp and put it RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of our room because really there is no place for a floor lamp in a dorm room besides right in the middle. She also had all of these tacky asian/girly decoration thngs everywhere.

She was very outgoing, and by outgoing, I mean slutty. She really liked to drink and fuck other people in our dorm, which meant that more that one night I came home from my boyfriend's house, walked in on legs and asses tangles together, and turned around and went back to my boyfriend's. (His housemates were much worse though, but we weren't sharing a room with them. He lived on a house much like the house on Paper Street- no joke) Anyway, I think she fucked every guy on our floor by the end of the semester, among others. She also had a boyfriend who went to another UC school that came to visit, who was one of the most annoying, egotisitcal little dweebs I have ever encounted. She ended up breaking up with him, and he ended up jumping out of the window of a second story dorm room at his school.

The great thing about my freshman year is that I mostly lived over at my boyfriend's, coming home only to shower, change and write papers- so I didn't have to spend much time with her. Actually, the nametags on our doors by the end of the year tell how much I was actually in the dorms:



All this pretty much makes her crap, with a waffle factor of 5 just because I was never there.

However, my sophomore year roommate was much much weirder and much more asian, but I was there a lot less. I never came to the room unless there was something in storage that I needed, or unless my parents were in town. But when I did come home, I found much or the room taken up with Chinese new year style decorations hanging from the ceiling, the walls, everywhere- and puzzles always set up at my desk.

He was a sullen, tortured Chris-Robinson-from-the-Black-Crowes lookalike theater guy with whom I got along great the first couple weeks of school, but then his art angst kicked in and we would go whole weeks without saying a word. We lived across the hall from each other the following year and never spoke then either.

i lived in the dorms for two years. my roommate for both years was great -- a gay bassoon player from rural illinois. i am positive that i was the 'bad roommate,' in that i was usually out of my head on punkrock and chemicals, but we got along very well. he was unfailingly polite and quite funny and i should really get in contact with him as i haven't seen him in like four years. anyone with the chutzpah to have a framed picture of george michael on his desk on the first day of college - having not yet met his roommate & attending a big ten football school - is a keeper.

my freshman year roomate was the best. a gay former chemistry major turner painter. We fucked with the rest of the student housing community constantly. We had full apartments, not dorms, and we would cook meals together and have people over, and he was much cleaner then any of my roomates since. He found endless amusement in flirting with the slower college girls.

Only crap part is he spoiled me to roomates. I have to get super pissed and sharp before my roomates now will even think about cleaning up their own messes. It sucks.

The Best. NC.

Freshman year, at Albany, I had a suite full of drunken cows as roomates. I worked at the radio station (amongst other things) from 3 - 9 AM twice a week, and they would always make sure to play drinking games and blast their music so as to prevent me from getting any sleep.

They sold my CD's to the record co-op on campus, but this was stupid, because I also worked there, so the other staffers would buy them (they had to) for much less than they were worth (like a quarter apiece) and give them back to me.

Amongst other disgusting things like fucking guys in my bed when I wasn't there, they filled my toothpaste tube with piss.

There were a lot of other things that I have blocked out.

Res Life made me move out, even though it was clearly three of them against one of me. WHAT-EVER. I learned a great many things that year, and one of them was that I can remain very, very level-headed under adverse conditions.

Which prepared me for my second roommate from hell, from my first year at Fordham. She was all the other roomates plus a raging cokehead.

The thing that saddens me is that to them, I was the bad roommate.

burun wrote:Freshman year, at Albany, I had a suite full of drunken cows as roomates. I worked at the radio station (amongst other things) from 3 - 9 AM twice a week, and they would always make sure to play drinking games and blast their music so as to prevent me from getting any sleep.

They sold my CD's to the record co-op on campus, but this was stupid, because I also worked there, so the other staffers would buy them (they had to) for much less than they were worth (like a quarter apiece) and give them back to me.

Amongst other disgusting things like fucking guys in my bed when I wasn't there, they filled my toothpaste tube with piss.

There were a lot of other things that I have blocked out.

Res Life made me move out, even though it was clearly three of them against one of me. WHAT-EVER. I learned a great many things that year, and one of them was that I can remain very, very level-headed under adverse conditions.

Which prepared me for my second roommate from hell, from my first year at Fordham. She was all the other roomates plus a raging cokehead.

The thing that saddens me is that to them, I was the bad roommate.

Maybe you should post their contact info so that we can return some favors.

garble wrote:Maybe you should post their contact info so that we can return some favors.

This was 16 years ago. I am sure they have kids of their own and are currently being tortured by them

At least, I hope they are.