My roommate is GONE.
He is now my ex-roommate! He has turned in his keys and taken his stuff way and he is GONE.
Hurray! I can’t say how glad I am that he has gone forever. Words can’t explain it. Now this place is my own for two weeks and then T. will move in!
My EX-ROOMMATE did not go without leaving his telltale signature, though. And now I’m going to complain a bit.
1. He left a heap of cigarette ashes in the kitchen sink. And he smoked so much while moving that the lingering stench made both me and Zaubi sick.
2. He drank my bottle of wine. ALL of it. (It was significantly large.) And then put it back, empty, in the same spot it was. Grrr.
3. He dropped my TV on the floor and smashed it.
4. He dropped my plants on the floor and smashed them.
5. He dropped Zaubi’s boom box on the floor (it survived, somehow)
6. He left me two cupboards full of shit to clean out.
So my TV, an amazing device, produced by the Samsung company, that I bought 8 years ago with the first solid paycheck I ever earned, is still working just fine. You have to understand, this TV has been through hell and back again and again. It has accompanied me just about everywhere since I got it at the age of 18 (MIT dorms, apartments with Muta, apartments without Muta, San Diego, New York City, and back here to good old Cambridge). It has played hundreds, thousands of hours of bad movies. I have dropped it several times before. I accidentally melted it with a halogen lamp. It is scarred with burns from varied fire ‘incidents’ in college. It has served as a food table and been spilled on. Elma has thrown up on it. My crazy MESH students from way back when abused it in their own special ways. I have used it as a stepladder while doing home improvement in my dorm and other places. And now it has been dropped again. And although it has a multitude of horrendous cracks in the plastic (to match the big wavery melt marks on the other side) it still performs its duties as cheerfully and perfectly as ever.
This TV has never required maintenance except once when one of my MESH students destroyed the built-in VCR in the summer of 1998.
Zaubi just taped it back together with electrical tape.
The plants did not survive so well. The bastard got new pots for them (albeit much smaller ones) and repotted them but one is just lost (it was dying earlier and this has been the final straw). So I threw it out. It was my favorite plant, this really cool spicy-smelling tiny tree that Muta bought me for Valentine’s Day when I lived in NYC. Ah well. All good things must die.
The smoke and ashes really pissed me off, as did the missing wine. He promised me before I moved in that he would not smoke indoors, and even though he sneakily did, in his room when I was home, I didn’t bother him about it. But leaving ashes in the sink is just plain disrespectful. A deliberate disrespect, if you ask me. Ugh. I don’t even want to get into it. I have been so good and patient with this rotten guy; lent him money, fielded endless calls from him while at work, kept his drunken indiscretions from my landlord so he didn’t get evicted, cleaned up his messes when he had drugged food fights with himself in the middle of the night, put up with his petty thefts and whimpering excuses all the other times he stole things and tried to conceal them from me.
Bah!
I will look on the bright side. He’s GONE.
nice-
i, too, have an ancient TV that refuses to die. it’s a Magnavox i bought midway through highschool (12 years ago?!), and it has never been out of service. it now sits loyally in my bedroom, blasting me with deathrays as i watch DVDs. they don’t make ‘em like they used to, and all that…