Ranger's Blag

So I mentioned my roommate in an earlier post, so now I figure I'll make a post about him and how he made my life at times hilarious, at other times less so.

So first off, I had a roommate lined up from last year, but the college kicked him out at the last minute because of his grades, so they stuck me in the lottery of people who didn't already have roommates, so I got put with someone who I had never met until a week into the first semester of this year (he showed up to classes a week late, yes).

So the kid doesn't speak English, at least not in an accent I can understand. He was actually Chinese, and pretty much the only thing he ever said to me was "okay" or "sure," sometimes in situations when those words really didn't make any sense, but I left it more or less alone. But he slept during the day. I think he skipped most of his classes and never did homework, but I can only be sure about two of them (which he definitely did not attend on a regular basis). He woke up at about 11pm or so most nights, and started babbling on Skype, while at the same time playing either a flash game, or a strange card game in Chinese online. He would do this until about 5am (keeping me up till this time roughly half the time), and then leave the room and come back a few hours later to wake me up as he climbed in bed. Several times during the last two weeks people came to beat on our door looking for him, but he was conveniently gone, since he was apparently skipping out on a group final project. Why he paid tens of thousands of dollars to not go to class, I may never know.

He also didn't shower. Maybe once a week or so he would, so by the 4th day the room began to smell foul. Luckily I had a can of Lysol, so when he left I'd typically get up and make the room smell somewhat acceptable. He was also a bit of a slob; at one point in the first semester he dropped a large quantity of caramel popcorn behind his desk. It was still there when I left a few weeks ago.

He had other, more humorous, habits. One of these was his thing about water. He had a pitcher of water that he wouldn't put in our refrigerator. He would sit it on his dresser, next to a mug of water he would keep mostly full. Every time he walked into the room, he would top up the mug of water with his pitcher, and then take a sip from it and sit it down. This always amused me, but I never did ask what it was about.

Another thing he would do that shot my nerves all to pieces was this: He'd sometimes be sitting at his desk, staring into space. Suddenly he would scream something in Chinese at the top of his lungs and run out of the room. A few minutes later, he would walk back in completely calm as if nothing had happened, though sometimes he would be missing some articles of clothing. I found this at once amusing and terrifying.

That's all I can think of at the moment, though I'm sure there's more that'll come to me.