Roommate Battle Tactics

Roommates. They are a wonderful invention. They lower the cost of housing, they give you someone to come home to after a long day of school, they have kitchen supplies that you don't have. It's great.

Most of the time.

Sometimes they come straight from Hades.

The particular roommate I'm thinking of actually came from a city on the east coast, but close enough. She and her boyfriend were both 17. They were madly in "love" and they didn't care who knew it. My other roommates and I had been good friends for a long time and we had a system going. This roommate, we'll call her "Trudy," clearly did not realized that we had a defined system that was going just fine, thank you very much.

Trudy and her boyfriend had a system of their own that became defined to us very quickly.

They would come home, sit on the couch, put on a sci-fi show like Firefly or Dr. Who and then proceed to make-out for 2 hours. Sometimes they ate Chinese food beforehand, but usually they just went straight to making out.

I like to think that I am a patient person.We gave them their space, we stayed in our rooms and only crossed the muggy, dark living room when we absolutely needed to get to the kitchen.

They started off only taking over the living room once a week or so. They were testing the waters to see how tolerant we would be. Once they realized that we wouldn't fight back, it was like we never had a living room in the first place.

At first, we adapted. Then we got angry.

I would shout things like "I JUST WANT TO FEEL LIKE A DECENT HUMAN BEING AGAIN!"

Never in Trudy’s presence of course. Because openly communicating would make too much sense. Instead I opted to glare at them as I scuttled through the living room. This did not work because

a) It was not only dark in the living room, but hazy. Somehow they always made it hazy.

b) They were locking lips vigorously, so paying attention to my even squintier already squinty eyes was not the highest thing on their totem pole.

(Side note: I heard somewhere that we’ve had this totem pole thing mixed up for years. It’s actually the lowest carving on the totem pole that is most important. Can anyone confirm or deny this?)

Low or high totem pole, the point is, they didn’t care about what I thought. 

One day, I decided that enough was too much.

I was in the kitchen making food when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I checked my microwave clock. It was Firefly time. Then I heard the sickening, coo coo-ey, googly-eyed laughter. In a fiery-eyed decision, I ran to the back bedrooms to my roommates and said "TODAY, today we are taking a stand! Everyone on the couches!"

My roommates, startled, but sensing that I was not to be messed with, extricated themselves from their rooms and quickly came to the living room. We had to be quick and we had to be quiet.

We rushed in, leapt onto the couches, and spread out nonchalantly and very widely, so as to make clear that there was no available space.

Trudy and Mr. Lips came in laughing and then stopped when they saw us all on the couch. We slowly flipped our magazine pages and raised our eyebrows like we were thoroughly absorbed in our articles.
What we were really thinking was "Please work. Pleeeaaassee work."

Trudy sipped on the straw from her Panda Express cup and pulled honey bunny out the door. If I'm not mistaken, I saw her raise her cup ever so slightly and nod her head in defeated respect. We watched with bated breath as they walked past the window and down the stairs and then heaved a collective sigh of relief.

We all went back to doing whatever it was that we had been doing before with our self-respect and our living room reclaimed.