Guest blog: Atypically Relevant: Vote Mandi for Jesus 2012

Today I am turning my blog over to Mandi, who writes the blog Atypically Relevant.

Seriously, you guys, if you've never read her blog, DO IT NOW.  Do not grab a cup of coffee, do not stop to pee, don't answer the phones ringing at your desk, ignore your boss, coworkers, and internet filters that can get your ass fired if you go to certain sites... GET THEE TO ATYPICALLY RELEVANT AND VOTE MANDI FOR JESUS, 2012!!!

 (*Sidebar:  Um... Sorry about the whole banging on your bedroom door at 4 in the morning because I needed to pee thing...)

Anyone who’s ever been to my site knows that the basis of my “Vote Mandi for Jesus in 2012” political platform centers around the fact that college students and twenty-somethings in general are idiots and should not be let out of their parents’ basements until they pass some form of social aptitude test. Only that wouldn’t really work out, now would it? Even if we only rely on those dim, gin-addled brain cells, none of us really has to think very hard to come up with an example of so-called “proper adults” who still couldn’t pass a social aptitude test if it were a game of Simon Says.

No, my friends, it does not get better after college. 

We may leave behind the days of drinking Franzia out of pencil cups because all the dishes were dirty*. 

We may never again need new dishes because the old ones molecularly bonded with the kitchen sink**. 

We may live out the rest of our days without burning the kitchen cabinets when the bottle of Everclear gets too close to the stove burner***.

*I never did this.
** I definitely never did this.
*** Okay, I may have done this. Once. Screw you for judging me.

But we will never truly be rid of the stunning displays of inanity that drive us to drink, because we will always have neighbors and roommates that make us seriously weigh the benefits of moving to a survivalist camp in Montana.

For a long while there, I was fairly certain that I’d suppressed all memories of my former roommates for the sake of my sanity.  Silly me – I just hadn’t had enough wine yet.

There was Aleida. Aleida was a 29 year old Mexican Catholic with the moral flexibility of silly putty. She was also mother to three of the devil’s own hell spawn. We all shared a 3-bedroom apartment in Costa Mesa, California along with her boyfriend? Fuck buddy?Surrogate daddy to the devil children? I don’t know - He didn’t speak English. The whole lot of them terrorized my cat, screamed at each other incessantly, and motivated me to stay in a relationship with someone I genuinely wanted to stab so that I could sleep at his place. In the end, the damage they did the apartment exceeded the actual security deposit and she skipped town, leaving me with a $400 bill. I vowed after that to never have a femal roommate ever again.

Try as I may, I could never forget about Vito, Albert, and the Dick. Vito was this short little Italian guy and Albert was a 6’5” Asian guy. I moved into an empty room in their townhouse and they seemed like pretty cool guys. Then Vito asked me for a ride to the airport to go visit family the week after I moved in and never came back. Then, out of nowhere, Albert was telling me to go to the office and sign the lease to add a new guy that I’d never met. The new guy ended up being some angry little Asian guy, and a total dick that kept trying to throw my shit away and stacked my furniture in the corner of the living room because he didn’t like how
my bookcase and reading chair were “cluttering up” the otherwise empty room. They didn’t believe in vacuums, or cleaning the kitchen and bathroom either. I never did find out what happened to Vito. He was probably murdered by the mafia.  I vowed after that to never live with an Asian roommate ever again.

And of course there was Slapnuts. Slappy was my on again, off again boyfriend/mind fuck buddy of 2 years. He’s also the aforementioned guy I suppressed the urge to stab with a Bic pen so that I had a place to escape the Mexican Love Machine when she and her crotch droppings became insufferable. Unfortunately, not only was he a mediocre lay and an ignoble, cheating little worm; he was also a heinous slob. When I first saw his bedroom in the daylight, I couldn’t see the floor. Or the bed for that matter. The only clear space in that room was the area immediately surrounding his computer. He also had a roommate that loved to wander around the apartment naked in various states of arousal, and wasn’t particularly ashamed of his rather limited endowments. I guess it really is the motion of the ocean… I vowed after that to never have a roommate whom I had vivid fantasies of causing bodily harm.

Meet Jason. Jason was a 28 year old man boy. Socially awkward, boring as shit, had the common sense of a retarded Dalmatian. But he was probably still my best roommate. The worst experience I had with him was the night I went to dinner with friends and came home 4 hours later to a house full of natural gas, and a seriously groggy cat and dog. Dumbass made himself dinner on the stove, but forgot to turn the burner all the way off. He came out of his room as I was opening all the doors and windows and making sure the dog knew how many fingers I was holding up. “Dude! You didn’t turn the stove all the way off! You could have burnedthe place down!” “I was wondering what that smell was...”I vowed after that to subject all roommates to an IQ test.


Then I moved in with Ken, and we’re doing quite well for ourselves 4 years later, but I can’t say that I didn’t dream of cock punching our roommate. Since it was graduate student housing, your roommate is forced upon you rather brusquely, and our roommate Michael was so much of a douche as to be offensive to douches. He smoked weed in the apartment CONSTANTLY. He never cleaned. He used way more of the kitchen than he was entitled to and got pissy at me when I’d move his shit out of my way so I could cook.

The worst thing about him was the fact that he’d have ridiculously loud parties and invite all the neighbors without telling us – the people who lived with him. It would be 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning and some drunken skank would pound on our bedroom door screaming about how she needed to pee. Let’s just say that the smoke alarms in that building were very sensitive, very loud, and necessitated that everyone vacate the building until the fire department gave the all clear to go back in. And there may have been some burnt toast in a toaster too close to the smoke alarm at 6:00 am the morning after such a party. I vowed after that to never have another roommate.

Dani, you may be subject to the periodic inconvenience of Mr. Awesome’s continued existence, but at least he doesn’t have easy access to your underwear drawer.