The harsh reality of first world problems weighs heavily over the hills of Malibu. No longer able to avoid the piles of homework accumulating around campus, students skulk sheepishly back toward the library, swimsuits concealed under bulky blue and orange sweatshirts. Payson triumphs, swarming with frantic students, at last disillusioned as to what their semester social calendar will look like. Lesser students have stolen all of my usual spots and thus I crouch, hunched in the unlit corner by the emergency exit, contemplating those issues so urgent to Pepperdine students:
Dear Grace,
My roommate is disgusting. She never leaves our dorm, sits huddled on her bed rotting in an ever-growing pile of dishes, food and dead skin cells. How do I bring up the issue of hygiene? Would it be advisable to switch rooms?
-Neat Freak
Take solace, Neat Freak, in the reality that many have suffered as you suffer. Recall the naive optimism that permeated freshman halls during NSO: bags upon bags of shiny new college student things unloaded onto your navy blue mattress, soon shoved to the floor while parents strategized as to how beds might be efficiently lofted, inevitably resulting in an unstable and unhinged bed frame piled with gaudy Target throw pillows, wobbly beams just waiting for the right moment to collapse. Only after the painstaking process of lofting the rickety bunk do you notice the discrepancy between the lower ledge of your bed and the height of your Pepperdine-issued dresser; a 15th trip to Bed Bath and Beyond is now in order as the bed risers you already purchased were of course two inches too short.
Remember the urgency of finding a place for every little thing you didn’t know you would never use as you settled into suite life, blindly optimistic that your suitemates would be normal, functioning human beings. Raise your hand if you thought the eight of you were going to be best friends. Keep your hand up if you can still remember all of their last names.
It might seem hard to reconcile those initial high hopes with the way things actually turned out. Carefully coordinated desk lamps and picture frames quickly pile up into what can only be described as a horrific episode of Hoarders, roommates speak only to lodge passive aggressive complaints against one other and suitemates disappear for days at a time. “Ground rules” laid out during your suite meeting seem part of a different lifetime. Stacks of filthy dishes obscure your view of the bathroom mirror as you resign to the reality of living as an undomesticated wolf.
I wish there were an easy and effective way to solve these problems. Alas, unhygienic lunatics pervade universities everywhere. I myself struggled to stifle a scream of disgust last Thursday after discovering my roommate’s magpie hoard of shiny, food coated wrappers shoved deep into the cushions of our living room couch.
Disgusting roommates will remain in a pile of filth, unfazed until people like us cave to their indifference and clean up after them in an effort to preserve our own sanity. The nasty roommate is unbothered by mess and perfectly fine with cleanliness; for them it’s a win-win.
The solution is this: if you can’t beat them, join them. One need only turn to nature for evidence that laziness can prove vastly more effective than ceaseless toil. Tigers, for example, hunt every day, diligently stalking their prey. Humans press 10 buttons and pizza appears outside the front door. Which species is nearing extinction? Something to think about next time you find yourself fighting the urge to vacuum the remains of last November’s pretzels off of your roommate’s throw rug.
