SRS Roommates

A few posts ago, I wrote about my experiences at SRS (the religiously conservative college I attended for 2 1/2 years.) Here is another entry about my time there. Enjoy!

At SRS, getting hooked up with the right roommate could be an interesting and, for some, a long and involved process. If you managed to find your perfect roommate, then you had it pretty well made. In fact, there are some people who roomed together so long and coexisted so well, that it began to be almost impossible to think of them as anything but roommates.

Eventually, through the process of two, maybe three semesters, roommates sought each other out. Personalities clicked, as did attitudes. For my first two years I had but one roommate. I had known him for some time and we made a public show of being good friends. The truth was that we actually got along pretty well. Of course, the fact that we hardly ever saw one another may have helped a bit. We had few classes together and then at about 3:00 pm he would go off to work. I would hang around the room, energetically avoiding my studies, until it was time for me to go to the gatehouse at 8 (or 9, depending on the semester). He would get back about 10 pm and usually was in bed by the time I came in at midnight or one o' clock. So we had little time to do much of anything.

This may not have been a bad thing, because the things we did do were rather dangerous. There was a lot of wrestling that went on the men’s dorm, but the other guys were such wimps. The minute you began choking someone, they would croak out, "You don't have an arm in that!" Who cares? The point was to win, wasn't it? When my friend and I wrestled, it was no-holds barred. I have lost a tooth, been rammed into doorknobs, and bled from the ear. He, on the other hand, has been shoved against dresser drawer handles, had his head sat on, and choked. Our matches were brutal. One of our favorite games was the Basketball-Wrestling Combo. We would hang a laundry basket on top of the door and try to get the ball into it using any means possible. Another favorite was getting on the top bunk and attempting to throw one another off.

Speaking of my friend as a roommate, I might mention here that he was (and I presume still is) a snorer. A professional snorer. As I say, he was normally asleep when I got off work and was therefore in full swing by the time I got in. After a few minutes of this torture, I would commence throwing objects down on him. Anything that was handy: cassette tapes, rolled-up socks, etc. When we disconnected the bunk beds and moved them to opposite sides of the room, I tried throwing droplets of water across to him. He would cease his rampage for a bit and I would hastily attempt to fall asleep.

My last semester at SRS, I had three roommates. We teemed up with two other miscreants, we’ll call them Sam and Mike, and set up a little apartment using two connecting rooms. Actually, Mike was not a miscreant, although I think I would have preferred one. Mike was a nice guy. A good guy. Too good, actually. There were instances when one felt like yelling at him,

"Mike! Swear! Commit adultery! Doooooo something!"

But he would only smile and bounce off to class, in order to maintain his perfect attendance record. With time, however, we managed to corrupt him to a certain extent. Once, when Sam was taking a shower, Mike threw a bucket of cold water over the curtain. Way to go, Mike, you’re making progress!