I can't eat chocolate so that means you can't either, right?

I’m allergic to chocolate; my roommate is not. Ever since I became allergic to chocolate, I managed to avoid chocolate by completely shutting it out of my life. Like trying to get over an ex-girlfriend, I removed every food or item in my house that possessed cocoa so that I would not think about how horrible it was to not eat chocolate. My family even went along with this idea and never brought chocolate into the house, or at least I didn’t think they did. My sister would hide bags of M&M’s in her room to snack on whenever I wasn’t around. For the most part, my family helped me to never have to be exposed to chocolate.

Before I left for college, I figured I might run into problems with the whole practice of removing chocolate from my environment. For most college students, chocolate is a staple food group that one builds into their diet, just like fruits or vegetables, and my roommate was no exception. I quickly had to get use to the fact that the shelves of my room would be filled with massive bags of M&M’s and boxes of chocolate chip cookies. At first, I was a little upset that I was constantly going to be spending so much time with a chocoholic, because I had no way to get my mind off of how crappy it was to not eat chocolate, but my roommate helped me discover an alternative to chocolate that wouldn’t send me into anaphylactic shock. Reeces pieces, resembling M&M’s in appearance, but completely composed of peanut butter, became my new staple food. Once we found out that I wasn’t going to die from eating Reeces pieces, my roommate went and bought me a massive bag of them; a true sign of a friend. My roommate knows that if I’m having a rough week or if I need to pig out on some snacks, he can always buy me a bag of Reeces pieces. A true friend is someone who knows exactly how to cheer up your day, one bag of candy at a time.

O God, I Talk In My Sleep

So up until this point in my life, I’ve never had the pleasure of sleeping in a room with other people on a consistent basis. Sure there’s the school sleepovers and occasional hotel stays, but I’ve never actually been told what I do in my sleep. I guess college has brought on a ton of new experiences, one of which is finding out what my body does when I’m not conscious. Since my roommate is always up much later than me, he is used to seeing me asleep - a lot. I was so glad to find out that I don’t snore or thrash around uncontrollably in my sleep, because that would just be the worst; or would it be?

It turns out that when I have to wake-up super early or I have an exam the next day, I tend to have major anxiety about over-sleeping and I feel stressed in general. I have a new found habit of talking back to my roommate in my sleep, whenever he asks a question. It makes perfect sense. I’m so used to hearing his voice every day seven days a week, that when I sleep, my brain automatically responds to him. For example, Tuesday night I was very worried about getting to my PT session on time without slipping multiple times in the black ice. The last thing that I saw before I went to bed was the ending of the movie, I Am Legend, which involves the lead actor taking a hand grenade out of a desk. That night, I told my roommate, “Make sure to grab all of the grenades in the room.” He is now use to my odd conversations in my sleep, so he responded, “Yep, no problem, I got ‘em all.” I was apparently satisfied with his response and went back into a deep sleep. Another night, I was talking to my roommate as if he was a military officer and said phrases directed towards him, such as, “Yes sir,” and, “I’ll get right on that sir.” He thought it was hilarious and played along with what I was saying. I of course have woken up with no recollection of what has happened the night before and get to hear all of the stories each and every time.

Wake-up Call

So the first week of fall semester began, and woe and behold we had our first real roommate issue. I was very nervous and paranoid that I would oversleep for my first Army workout Monday morning, so I wanted to make sure I woke up extra early, and most importantly, got a good night’s rest. I was thinking to myself that if I went to bed around ten, I could get a solid six hours of sleep in my system before the big first day. My roommate and I had discussed what time we needed to wake up in the morning, but some how we had skipped over the part where we would talk about when each other was going to sleep. So I jumped into bed around ten o’clock sharp and much to my surprise, my roommate was still watching T.V. How in the world was I supposed to fall asleep listening to fanatic soccer fans screaming for their favorite professional team? I figured that if I just shut my eyes really tight and turned the other way the noise and light from the television wouldn’t bother me, but I was wrong. I tossed and turned for hours praying to the god of sleep that he would just knock me over the head so I could rest before my big day, because in all reality, tomorrow was MY day and the world revolved around my wants. Yah, that wasn't going to happen. Around two thirty A.M. my roommate finally went to sleep, and so did I. “O boy,” I thought sarcastically, “now I can get an awesome two hour nap before I have to start my day.”

The next dilemma of the day, dealt with the speedy shutting off of the alarm clock. I’m sure most people can relate, that when moving into a new room, sometimes it’s hard to track down where the hell the alarm clock was placed, especially when waking up when it’s still pitch black outside, and navigation through a dark room is nearly impossible. Four thirty had arrived and my alarm clock started its annoying cycle of beeping and screeching that is only supposed to be heard for a matter of seconds. I felt all around the shelves of the walls and squinted my eyes to try and track down a light switch. By the time I had tracked down my alarm clock, I had committed one of the worst sins man can do to another man; waking them up early in the morning when they don’t have to be up. My roommate had that dazed and confused look on his face, as if he was a bear waking up from hibernation in the middle of the winter. I quickly apologized and prompted him to go back into his deep sleep, a sleep he had only started a little over two hours prior. What I learned from that first Monday morning was that I was going to have to learn to fall asleep, no matter what what going on around me and that I would need to develop night vision in order to change into my clothes in the dark, a feat I’m still working on to this day.

A Good Place to Start

My roommate is quite the kid. We met over the summer and instantly clicked, mostly, because of our shared hatred of the three and a half our classes that we would endure twice a week. We knew that we wanted to be roommates for the Fall semester, so we gave up all of our preferences so that we could live together. When we found out we were going to live in East it was sort of a shock. You see, since we had been at PSU for six weeks, we thought we pretty much knew everything about the school. All we knew about East was that it was far away from our familiar surroundings and it was going to be a huge change.

The first step was to move all of our possessions into our room in East all the way from Pollock, and being freshmen, we didn’t have a car to move everything. So we managed to fit all we had into hotel luggage carts and wheel them up the large hill on Bigler road. Once we arrived at our building, we came across the first big decision for roommates; which side of the room you want to claim. I, however, happen to be pretty smooth with words, so I was able to convince Matt that it would be a good idea to bunk our beds, and that he should sleep on top. He agreed with no complaint. What a guy! I’m convinced that a conversation like this would never go so smoothly between two female college freshmen. On our way back from moving our stuff into our new room, we discussed our schedules for the upcoming Fall semester. Matt was excited that he didn’t have to wake up before 10AM; I was dreading having to wake up at 4:30AM. It fazed me for a second that our conflicting wake-up times might become an issue.