I Did Tell You to Keep Me Awake, Right?

A good quality in a roommate is one that can inspire you to do something for the better. On Wednesday night, I knew that the next morning was going to be a very early one, but I also knew that I had a ton of homework to cram in before my Thursday set of classes. I told my roommate that I needed to stay awake until at least 12, something that doesn’t happen very often, considering my early weekly schedule. He told me, “No prob, I’ll make sure you stay awake.”

At around 10 o’clock, I started to feel extremely tired and started to rationalize with myself that I could skip my morning workout and get my homework done then, so that I could go to sleep now. I finally convinced myself that deviating from my original plan was a good idea, so I crawled into bed. Around 15 minutes later, my roommate walked in the room and saw me curled up in my bed. He turned on all of the lights in the room, turned the television up as loud as it would go, and started to play the, “THON dance” on his computer. It was by far the most obnoxious way to get someone out of bed I had ever encountered, so I took evasive maneuvers and pulled the covers over my head to try and hide from the bright lights and obnoxious lyrics of the, "THON dance," which happens to be my roommate new pump-up music. My roommate then began to flash the lights so many times I thought I was going to develop epilepsy. I finally jumped out of bed so that the madness would stop. He then calmly turned the t.v. volume down, returned to his desk, and began his work. A good roommate is one who will always keep his promises, even if that means forcing you to stay awake so that you will be prepared for the next day.

Hey Wanna Try A New Sport?

When you compete against someone, it’s great to win and be able to go home and pat yourself on the back for how awesome you are. When you compete against your roommate, it’s a different story. My roommate loves to play racquetball, a sport that I introduced him to. Earlier in the year, I had asked him if he wanted to go learn to play racquetball so that we could have a sport that we could play together in which neither of us has any particular advantage. The first time we went to play, not to toot my own horn or anything, but I absolutely destroyed him. I had played a few times at home and had a pretty good awareness of the court. I told my roommate it was no big deal and that, “I’m sure you’ll do better next time.” The following week, I didn’t see my roommate a whole lot, and I started to wonder where he had been sneaking out to for the entire week. The next weekend my roommate was finally back in our room, so I decided to ask him if he wanted to play a quick game of racquetball. He said, “Sure, I guess I could try and play again.”

            So we went to the IM building to go play. The last time we had played, the game started out very slow; this time, however, things were different. He was ready. He beat me; well to tell the truth, he completely annihilated me. Any confidence that I had in myself regarding athletic ability was completely gone. After he was satisfied with his victory, I asked him, “So where have you been all week?” He responded, “Practicing, of course. I’m really starting to like this game.” HE now is part of the IM league and has a chart of all of the ranked players that he hopes to defeat in the upcoming season. I created a racquetball junky. 

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.