There are some things you just don't think about when you get that roommate- assignment letter the summer before your first year in college. Most students choose to worry about whether or not their roommate will be "cool." For males, this becomes a question of how much alcohol the other guy can consume before losing the ability to crush multiple beer cans on his head. Girls tend to look for more practical traits, such as the number of shoes owned, how many of these shoes are "cute" and the proportion of "cute" shoes that the owner is likely to share.
Alas, these are highly desirable attributes by anyone's standards, but they are not among the most important. Keep in mind that your roommate is someone with whom you will live for a year of school. If this person likes the Pokèmon: Unplugged CD, you will hear it over and over again all year long. You will notice every time when your room reeks because leftover Gumby's pizza has fermented into a white paste resembling O-Hill menu items because your roommate has neglected to throw it away. But these inconveniences pale in comparison to that one most important attribute - I speak of nothing other than the level of your roommate's sexual activity.
If you are among the blessed, you have been rewarded with a sexually inactive roommate. If you are among the cursed, you often will be subjected to a horribly devastating condition known as sexile. In the college vernacular, you are sexiled when you are barred from your living space because your roommate brings someone home for the night.
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With these considerations in mind, one has no choice but to find another place to crash for the night. Residents of suite-style living arrangements have an advantage in this situation - they can merely set up camp in the common area. However, this option is not open to residents of traditional dormitories with only hallways (e.g., me) which lack this additional space. Occasionally, I was lucky enough to find friends whose roommates were out for the night. I actually had somewhere to stay when this was the case. On more than one occasion, however, this option was not available, and I was forced to sleep out in the hall lounge. After dragging out my mattress, alarm clock, shower items and other necessities, I posed in my new abode as a friend took a snapshot. Somehow I hoped that taping the photo to my door would send the subtle message to everyone, including my roommate, that "Every time you do it, another college student becomes homeless." Unfortunately, the next day my roommate responded by scrawling on our message board about how he didn't "give a [synonym for excrement]".
A final consequence of being sexiled is that you develop a rabid bias against the person who consistently displaces you. One day my roommate happened to be in one of his more contemplative moods following one of my lengthy three-night sexiles:
"Hey Sam, do you think my girlfriend is pretty?"
My immediate thoughts were, right now, she ranks somewhere between the fermented pizza in the fridge and the yellowish substance that accumulates in your ear.
"Um, yeah man, definitely."
"You really think so?"
Come to think of it, her physical appearance resembles that of a diseased Rhesus monkey.
Putting this thought aside for a moment, I instead gave the obligatory answer.
"Of course - she's one in a million."
I have a vague feeling that if I had vocalized offensive things like these to my roommate every time I had them, one or both of us would be missing various appendages by now. There is probably an easy solution to the situation, which I can't think of right now. In the meantime, I'll be hoping that my roommate for next year is asexual.
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