Day one of move in weekend last Fall I walked out of my room to take a leak and found four weeping adult women on the kitchen floor comparing childhood traumas. It's been like the movie Groundhog Day ever since. I imagine it wasn't very funny for Phil Connors as he experienced it in the moment either.
You know Groundhog Day, right? Where Bill Murry plays a weather man living the same day over and over. He does everything he can to stop living February 2nd over and over, including kidnapping the ever fluffy and charming Punxsutawney Phil. Yeah, well I've been living a way less pretty and cinematic version of Groundhog Day since that moment I realized my room mates would never stop crying on the kitchen floor.
Anyway, the good thing about living with crazy people is that you get way more interesting stories out of it than when you live with sane and pleasant people. You learn and grow from it and gain all these valuable life lessons, which I will impart on this blog occasionally if I remember to. I can be scatter brained. You may rest assured knowing that you will definitely hear about the stories. If I could sing them to you I would, because I have a beautiful singing voice the likes of which every Disney princess would hate me more than my room mates do out of pure and utter jealousy. And I could be over-exaggerating. After all it wouldn't be the first time my confidence level combined with my powerful imagination has lead me to believe I'm more extraodinary than I actually am.
Back to day one. I had to take a leak and I still hadn't emptied all of my boxes in my room, but I was making progress. I opened my door and before I could get down the hall to the toilet I was confronted with a very uncomfortable situation. Mind you, not one of us actually knew each other yet. We had exchanged very superficial text messages saying things like:
Room mate A: "I like pugs, do you like pugs?"
Me: "I have no opinion on the pug issue, but thats nice"
So there was no background between any of us to really justify having four women ugly crying on the kitchen floor in pools of mascara and snot. And when I say ugly crying I'm not calling names, I'm just saying this wasn't some glamourus movie version of female emotion where the nose gets a little red and a single tear flows down the acne free cheek. This was full on, I-just-watched-an-episode-of-greys-anatomy-and-I-can't-deal crying where you spoon feed yourself and cling to your comfort object as your face gets smushy and voilent red and you don't know which liquids are which and you realize YOU DON'T RECOGNIZE YOURSELF ANYMORE!
I get that sometimes we just gotta cry it out. Crying isn't a weakness, it's a skill really. It just seemed a little inappropriate amongst a group of strangers in a dorm while they compared really terrible, inconvienient personal histories like a dick measuring contest of emotion and turmoil. Here's a rough outline of how that night went.
Room mate A: "I was adopted"
Room mate B: "I'm deaf"
Room mate C: "I'm blind"
Room mate D: "I have trust issues"
Room mate A: "I hate myself"
The contest went on... for hours. And I just sat on the toilet devising a plan to sneak past them. This was pretty stupid of me. I mean a really dumb plan, because my room lies just across from the kitchen (not even a yard stick away) where they had morphed into a single human entity of sadness and bodily goo. By the time I realized just how naive my plan was it was too late. I reached my door to unlock it and retreat just as the four weeping heads turned to me for support and validation. I kid you not, it happened in slow motion and everything.
I am really not that emotionally constipated, but my instinct was to pretend it wasn't happening and lock myself in my room while they judged me for my lack of participation in what I like to call the "Kitchen Cry Fest of 2013." I acknowledge it sounds very paranoid to imagine they were judging me or thinking of me at all while reliving all of thier former traumas and misgivings. Unfortunately, I'm not paranoid. Not even a month into living with them I had to have a come to jesus meeting over Room mate A's hurt feelings over my lack of emotional communication with her. She mentioned Kitchen Cry Fest 2013 specifically as an example of how she felt distanced from me. This then morphed into a group mentality supported by emotional validation with the ring leader being none other than Room mate A.
The herd has found itself many targets since the beginning of last semester, some of which were members of the herd itself. Thier first target was me. Apparently a common mix up in bathroom cleaning schedules makes you good fodder for the herd. But that's a completely other story in its own.
Day one of movie in weekend will forever be the Groundhog Day of the 2013-2014 school year. I have yet to steal a rodent in any of my plans to end this time loop, does that mean I'm not trying hard enough? I don't believe so, but maybe Phil Connors would have a differing opinion on that. More importantly than the Groundhog Day bit, day one of move in weekend will forever be the day that I started learning how to choose room mates that were NOT the room mates that I chose. Not to get all "Anarchy! Fight the norm! Listen to The Used!" on anyone, but I am not a sheep. I am some kind of undiscovered crazy looking awesome animal that is probably yellow, and probably does weird shit all on its own without the influence of other yellow, crazy looking, awesome animals telling it that it should. This blogger is making better choices in room mates for next year and finding at least a few fellow undiscovered animals to live with. Even if the rest kind of suck, having SOMEONE that doesn't want to cry on the kitchen floor will be a plus.
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