Adapting to dorm life.

By Spencer Dobson
Staff Writer

For some of you, this is your first time away from home, and the first time living with someone who is not a family member. That’s right; your mom isn’t here to make you grilled cheese sandwiches and get the nacho stains out of your Ed Hardy T-shirts. You are an adult, or at least you are adult-ish now. 

Living with a roommate can be as traumatic as it can be exciting, and living in a dorm full of people you just met is a very new experience for many of you. It can be a tough transition, but there are things you can do to make it go more smoothly.

If you are coming to North Dakota from some place where people talk things out, you need to understand that you are stepping into a world where everything is always fine. Until it’s very much not fine and people are crying and throwing things or burning things or stabbing things or whatever. It is almost impossible to distinguish a “that’s fine” that means “that’s fine” from a “that’s fine” that means “I’m going to bite you on the face if you ever do that again.” So here are a couple of rules of thumb.
1. Buy your own food. Seriously. Get off the couch; take a study break, whatever you have to do, to fix it. You know why your mom doesn’t get mad when you eat the last piece of pizza, the end of the bag of potato chips, or the last pop tart that you didn’t pay for? SHE’S YOUR F@#KING MOM. Your roommate isn’t. This goes back to the opening of the story. Just because your roommate didn’t say, “Stop eating my Cheezits you miserable parasite” doesn’t mean that they aren’t peeing in your shampoo (you can afford shampoo but you can’t afford food?) Plus, you have to sleep near this person. Do you want to sleep near a person who is seething with rage over a Toblerone?
2. Don’t smell like a giant box of a$$! Let me preface this by saying “Axe” and “Patchouli” are opposite sides of the same coin. B.O. and over-powering scent is just as horrible as raw unmasked stink. Do you want to know why somebody had to sit down and type this sentence “Make sure you take a shower, brush your teeth, and wash your clothes”? Because so many college students have suffered brain damage from breathing in the fumes of people who hadn’t come to terms with the concept of soap and water.
3. Realize that if you’re the person that’s stinky or doesn’t buy food or doesn’t clean up after themselves, you are going to get on the radar of some miserable Machiavellian a$$ hat who is going to use your slovenliness to rally people to their side. The will use your selfish/stinky/ grossness to hate bond with others and congeal their own power.

See you’re in North Dakota. This is the capital of passive aggressive. We say everything is fine no matter how many times you ask, and then one day BOOM, it’s all hitting the fan. The gloves are off and the fists are flying. You have to realize “that’s fine” means “that’s fine” and “I hate you” and “so help me god if you even look at a single one of my Pringles I will bite you on the face while you sleep.” So then some power grabber gets wind of the fact that maybe you’re not the most perfect roommate in the world and all of the sudden they’re building this case against you. And one day you come home to the dorm to find six or eight smug solemn-looking jerks who are just dying for a chance to rip you a new one so they can feel all superior because they spend 35 seconds a day rinsing out a ramen noodle bowl and don’t roll out of bed three seconds before class, therefore they have time to shower.

Look, this is the first time in your life you don’t have your parents breathing down your neck. You’re free from your miserable siblings and nobody knows that you broke down crying in the middle of a 7th grade soccer game because you missed a pass. You don’t need your fresh start to get screwed up because you’ve showed a hint of weakness and now this weasel-y little jerk is just dying to exploit it for his own gain. And by the way, WHO are these people? This isn’t about body odor, this isn’t about a pack of Chips ahoy, this is about power man, it’s all about power. It’s about who gets to say how things go and who doesn’t get a say. So, guess what stinky? If you don’t start scrubbing your stinky butt, you’re gonna be on the wrong side of the Salem Stink Hunt…These people, like yourself, are on their own for the first time in their life. They have more power and freedom than they’ve ever known and they are drunk on it. Drunk! So make your life easy pal. Buy some cereal, wash the bowl out, take a shower and brush your teeth. If you’re lucky, you’ll be here for four years and then you’ll go on to your new job as a whatever. You’ll get married, fart out some puppies and then after a couple of years you’ll croak. Realistically, if you look at the economy, you’re probably going to move right back in with mommy and daddy anyway. I mean, are we pretending there’s jobs out there? Is that what we tell ourselves? That you are doing all this work because when you graduate you’ll be a Phlebotomist? You know what? If it all falls apart the only job skill you’re gonna need is rat hunter. Which brings us back to, why is everybody so uptight about a friggin dirty dish? Jesus. There are people dying of AIDS in Africa and these people want to lecture YOU about washing a DISH? Please.

Make a chore calendar, assign each roommate a job and stick to the calendar.

Welcome to your new life. Have a great year. Enjoy being an adult. 

[Editor’s Note: Spencer Dobson is a Stand up Comic who lives and works in East Grand Forks
]http://www.spencerdobsoncomedy.com]

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