Live With Me: Ten Times Your Roommate Made You Ask ‘WTF?’

By Natalie Silver

Every night before I turn off the lights, the last thing I see is an image of the much younger, much hotter, and much more stoned version of this nation’s president. 

His glazed eyes crown the joint he presses in between his lips, and the cloud of smoke around his head seems to diffuse out of the 24x36 black and white poster and onto the off-white Unit 1 bulletin board wall holding this holy image of Obama over my head as I sleep.

You all know what picture I’m talking about—the dopest image on the internet other than maybe Lenny Kravitz’s #penisgate, and the greatest reminder of the progress (which, though far from being enough, is progress nonetheless). Let us recall 2pac’s 1998 masterpiece “Changes”: “We ain’t ready to see a black president, uh”) that the 21st century has seen…

I am a brutally obnoxious, loud and self-righteous, bleeding heart filthy liberal, with strong, radical and (subjectively) revolutionary opinions that I often can’t back up. I am so totally and holistically and consistently and sickeningly one-sided in my opinions that it is semi-deplorable.

So although I think it’s totalllly killer to make a shrine of this Obama image, fangirl Elizabeth Warren, and publicly judge everyone’s teeth in comparison to those of Joe Biden, I cannot tell you how many times one of my ‘passionate’ outbursts has pushed it a little too far and triggered the classic question: “Natalie…What. The. Fuck?”

Everyone has quirks, but these can sometimes manifest into intolerable characteristics when they infiltrate your home space. Like my former roommates who started calling each other “mom,” which eventually drove me out of the apartment and into the asylum (and then back into the Units, a different type of asylum), or how I’m sure how my sleep talking, anti-mayonnaise fundamentalism and strange inability to do dishes was NOT fun to live with, roommate quirks can be insanity catalysts.

Whether you love your roommate or hate your roommate, their quirks can quickly take malicious shape when you’re around it all the time. It doesn’t take a lot for a LOL to turn into a WTF. We’ve all been there. You are not alone.

Here are the top 10 WTF roommate moments of 2015 from California’s finest:

10. Caitlin (Berkeley City College): THE ROOMMATE

“My roommate keeps a knife under her bed in case an intruder ever comes in.”

9. Victoria (Cal): BASIC WHITE GIRL

“One time my drunk-ass roommate came home and puked inside one of my brand new Uggs…I think she legitimately thought it was the trashcan.”

8. Caroline (Cal): BLUE AND GOLDILOCKS

“Three of my roommates and I went home for Thanksgiving freshman year but the fourth stayed home. When we got back, the whole place smelled like rotten meat, there was trash and dirty dishes everywhere, and there were strangers sleeping in each of our beds. The weirdest part was that the entire suite was covered in Oreo cookie crumbs…the kitchen, bathroom, closet, everywhere. She must have had some weird kind of themed party while we were gone because there were Oreo cookies and unconscious people everywhere.”

7. Josie (UC Santa Cruz): GHOSTBUSTERS

“Third week of my freshman year my Peruvian Catholic roommate broke the news that we were sharing our room with a ghost. She told me it was a ‘friendly ghost’ though. Turned out, Mrs. Supernatural only bothered us with the occasional knocking over of desk items at 6 a.m. and changing the speed of the wall clocks. All of this story is 100% true. #ghostbusters”

6. Bryce (Cal): AMERICAN IDIOT

“I had a roommate who made a special point of putting his UK flag higher than my USA flag, which was on the wall opposite his bed. It made me pity the fool, for how could he even think the UK is a stronger nation than the United States of America? If it wasn’t for us, Germany would’ve fucked them.”

5. Alison and Olivia (Cal): “CAN YOU EMAIL ME THE REST OF THAT STORY?”

“One time we put a trash bag in the common room so that we would remember to take it out and our suitemate EMAILED us about how that was rude because the common room is supposed to be a space that ‘everyone can enjoy.’ She and our other suitemates later called the RA on us because they thought it was too inconvenient to walk out of their rooms to ask us to turn our music down….it wasn’t even quiet hours!!!”

4. Ali (BCC): TURD ON THE RUN

“My roommate clogged the toilet multiple times and always just left it there all day for me to plunge when I got home. The first time I confronted her she played dumb, but the second time I asked her to plunge her own poop she said she didn’t know how and didn’t worry about it because it was always gone when she got home.”

3. Ben (Cal): SLUMBER PARTY

“I had a roommate with infrequent and often destructive bowel movements that would almost always clog the toilet. I caught an accidental glimpse of one once, it was the size and shape of a baseball. Poor kid…Also, he rarely left the room, even when I was having sex. Sometimes he would even climb up to the top bunk while we were going at it.”

“I also had another roommate who told on me for having alcohol in our room. We had to have multiple mediation meetings with the RA. I thought everything was fine until I noticed that my bed smelled like chocolate. I found an open, half empty hot cocoa packet on my roommate’s desk.”

2. Emmanuelle (Chico State): FRIENDS WHO ROOM TOGETHER, POO TOGETHER?

“My roommate would shower and go to the bathroom in the same stall with her best friend down the hall. They weren’t dating. They were just really good friends. I would never do that with my friend—what the FUCK?!?”

1. Dano (Cal): ROLE MODELS

“I have a roommate that obsessively talks about Columbine and exhibits textbook antisocial behavior. His heroes are the two Columbine kids and Bill Cosby.”

With supreme intelligence and ambition comes incredible intensity—and that intensity, when taken into the home space, can transform into something brutal. We are California’s finest, primest, and sublimest—but that also means when it comes to unwinding, we may need to unwind a little bit more. And when we are all together in the same home space, that simultaneous unwinding can be discordant rather than harmonious, and it can further culture our edge.

We are ALL freaks of nature. We are so great because we are so damn out there. The Cal environment especially fosters the most beautiful and unbelievable cult-like fervor for this school, these people and everything it represents. Being a Golden Bear means something transcendent of its university’s world-class status. We are Cal—we are greater than the sum of our parts.

But to be a sum, we have to be put together. And when we are all so great and smart and perceptive and intense, every classic roommate conflict is going to manifest as something greater than it should be.

We are all Cal. We are all good people. And we are all bad roommates. Which is pretty fucking typi-Cal .