When I was a senior in high school, I had a writing assignment about comparing two opposite things. I chose to write about something that I feared deep down in my heart of hearts, way down where egg blankets and that scene from Nightmare on Elm Street (the original) when Freddie’s arms were all long, lie. I dreaded being stuck with a college roommate like my friend Daina. Now, don’t get me wrong. Daina is totally getting one of the cushiest clouds in heaven, with full access to all the half-naked hot man servants she can stand, I just really wasn’t into the idea of sharing a shoebox-sized excuse for a domicile with her.
At that time in my life I wouldn’t have considered myself a tomboy, exactly, nor so “punk rawk” that I denied my lifelong obsession with Days of Our Lives. In fact, I didn’t even know I liked punk rock until the Hench later pointed out to me that most of the songs I liked, that the pirate radio station with no jocks back home played, were in fact punk in nature. I was just kind of a t-shirt and jeans girl. Makeup and interesting haircuts were just too much work. I had my getting-ready-for-school routine down to 7 minutes from bed to car, and I wasn’t going to sacrifice another second of sleep for some mouth-breathing sophomore. Instead of batting my eyelashes, I thought the way to the boy’s heart was through a thoughtfully chosen Adam Sandler quote. I can’t help it. I always had older brothers, and if I wanted to stay in the room and MAYBE get a chance at the NES controller during a Baseball Stars tourney, I had to adapt to their sophisticated social practices. Even if when I got my turn, I insisted that my bro do the code so my team could wear the purple uniforms.
The long and short of it is that, like MC Skat Kat and Paula Abdul, for mine and Daina’s friendship, it was opposites attract. She was organizing the carpool for everyone to go up the road to see Romeo & Juliet starring Leonardo Retardo and Angela Chase, I was planning the Monty-Python marathon. In fact, as I type this entry, I am instant-messaging with Daina. I suggest we meet up in Philadelphia on Saturday to take in the Dali exhibit, and she points out that Debra (formerly Debbie) Gibson will be signing autographs on South Street. If I knew then what I know now, that even though Daina has mastered the art of the Thank-You card (and any other kind of card, actually) and I usually slip by with a simple “thanks man!”. You know, that old Japanese proverb that says “Only that which is the other, gives us truly unto ourselves.”…blahblahblah—koombyahcakes.
So back to the roommate thing. I showed up at ODU on a sticky August day, with two brothers loaded down with boxes of my crap. When I opened the door, I was greeted with a sea of sunflowers. Sunflower bedspread. Sunflower hand towels. Sunflower mug holding sunflower-topped pens. Sunflower shower curtain acting as closet door. The 4 foot-nothing ball of sunshine AKA my new roommate and her mother were applying something sunflowery to another surface when I walked in. She’d gotten permission to move in a day early since she was coming all the way from New Jersey (ahem, so was I). So she picked the “good side” (re: inner) of the room and had already gone all Christopher Lowell on that bitch. So there you go. I got a Daina. Sort of.
Tracey, AOL Screenname: Sunflwrs79 (what else?) wasn’t all that bad. Sure, she was a sugary-sweet little sprite, but she had a car. And she was funny. Once, while driving down Little Creek road, she shouted out for no apparent reason, “Norfork Paint! That’s crazy!”---a soundbyte that simply will not leave my head, and plays back whenever I drive past one. We were also an extremely compatible sleeping team. We’d stay up until 4 or so, get up 10 minutes before the 9am class, then report back around 2 for the nap until dinnertime. Lather, rinse, repeat. It was with Tracey that I forged my rag-tag group of dorm friends before the Hench and I took on world domination. We’d go to parties and while I pretended to be too cool, Tracey would disappear into the crowd and re-emerge with some new interesting person she thought I’d like to meet. Once, I commented on some guy walking by being hot, and twenty minutes later I was beckoned from across the party, and UP ON STAGE, by Tracey (she was a shortie, remember). When I made my way to her she just said, “This is Ben”, motioning to the hot guy who passed by earlier (it should be noted, that while this Ben was given the moniker “Beautiful Ben”, I would have laughed at such a notion if he was encountered later, given the true perfection that was Ben from downstairs. That boy sure was pretty.)
I soon found out that all Tracey’s sunflowery-goodness was chemically based. She was on some kind of anti-depressants, which I really don’t have a problem with. Hell, I chew one of them bitches down once a day so I can’t even front. Problems arose, though, one night when she was hanging out with some friends of ours over in Whitehurst. I was stuck cranking out a creative writing portfolio (that I should have been accumulating over the semester, natch), so I wasn’t there to witness her whip out a bottle of her pills and wash the whole thing down with a couple of swigs of Goldschlager. Blech. I can barely get just a swig of Goldschlager down, let alone a bunch of pills to boot. So yeah, I got a call from the boys about what she had done and that she was on her way back to the dorm.
One stint sitting in the swanky waiting room of the Norfolk Sentara emergency room between my ultra high strung (and miffed that he couldn’t go out to the club because of this) RA and the drunk idiot friend who wanted to get in her pants later, I came to find out that even if she took a few hundred of those pills, she couldn’t have killed herself. Anti-depressants are kinda designed that way. So they pumped her stomach and sent us on our not-so-merry way.
That was before Thanksgiving break. She came back after pretending like nothing happened. Over Christmas break I actually hung out with her and my friends from home as we were venturing into NYC for some Chrimmastime fun and she lived on the way. We even slept at her house. She made the effort to lug all of her crap back to ODU from North Jersey after Christmas break, only to decide the night before classes started that she was going to leave. I was sort of bummed. Sure she made a quick trip to the booby hatch, but when haven’t we all, if not to such an extreme degree. This one time I was trying to fix my fan, and all of a sudden I thought of a new, ingenious way to fix it, and thought out loud to myself “Am I getting smarter?”. She heard me and put on this little stance maybe like a body-builder or a troll of some sort and grunted “Am I getting Smah-tah???”, for no reason whatsoever. She was random like that.
She could be really annoying and downright weird, but I would come to find out that she really wasn’t that bad. Probably number 3 on the long list of roommates I had over the years (Not counting the Hench, who was a by-proxy roommate or Meredith and Julie, but they are for another manifesto altogether).
I know I really should bring Daina back in around here at the end somewhere, as is proper writing technique and I’d be shamed by the writing community (or maybe just my 12th grade writing teacher, but who’s counting)…but I don’t really have any way of bringing her back. Daina’s never washed down Paxil with any kind of schnapps and she really doesn’t do voices. I dunno. She is short though. A weak connection indeed.
Next up from the Roommate Chronicles: NN8!!
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