Relive and Relieve 1

My therapist says I have "a lot garbage in the basement." I hope he wasn't referring to the size of my ass.

This probably comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me well, but this "garbage" has seemingly accumulated over the years and is adding to my daily "baseline of stress." This baseline, according to him, grows and grows until I become the human equivalent of an M-80. He contends the only way to eliminate some of this garbage is to haul it out of the basement and spread it across the dining room table during Thanksgiving dinner. It sounds pretty convincing coming from a professional, even though this "therapist" is actually my "hair stylist." But he's as close to my head as anyone else, so I think I'll go with it.

Anyway, I thought I would heed his advice and take space in this blog to "relive and relieve" some of the more stressful things I've had to endure in my short and uneventful life -- hopefully putting them in front of me once and for all. Call them rants. Call them unforgiving negative attacks. Call them poor writing. But please don't call them petty. Here goes...

Relive and Relieve 1: My Freshman Roommate
Daniel weighed 98 pounds after a large, heavy meal. He had an affinity for Magic cards and sorted through them incessantly. Daniel had odd hygiene habits. No, strike that. Daniel had a surprising lack of hygiene habits altogether. Daniel showered but once a week, every Sunday morning before church. I guess he wanted to be sure he was clean for god.

Daniel read his bible every night. He often took to reading his bible atop the heating register, after turning the heat up full blast. I would walk into the room to find Daniel perched on the radiator which would be cranking out heat at a toasty 87 degrees, spreading his stink all over the room. I'd ask him to turn it down. He'd flip open the door on the heater and pretend to turn it down, then continue reading his bible.

Daniel slept in a sleeping bag every night. He would lay the sleeping bag out on his bare mattress and sleep in it. In the entire first semester, he never washed that sleeping bag. After a couple weeks I was afraid to be alone in the room with it. Come to mention it, Daniel never did any laundry that I knew of. He wore the same clothes every day: a white BugleBoy sweatshirt and white jeans. If you don't do laundry often (read: ever) white is color you should probably avoid.

We originally had our beds bunked, his on top. He would always dismount from his top bunk by jumping straight down onto the floor with a loud thump. This would of course wake me up every morning by scaring the living bejeezers out of me. Then, every single night the bed would shake in a way that left little to my imagination. Eventually I decided (unilaterally) that we had to de-bunk the beds. I should have asked him first. Instead, my friends came in and hoisted around the furniture while Daniel was out. Daniel came home later that night to find his bed relocated to the other side of the room. He asked me why I had done this. I said it was for religious reasons. He didn't find it very convincing or funny.

With his bed now on the floor, the sleeping bag was much more visible and eminently more aromatic -- a consequence I had foolishly not foreseen. But l deserved it, given what I had just done. What I also now noticed, was a piece of paper, folded in half, that Daniel had taped to the cinder block wall above where his pillow now lay. I asked him what it was. Daniel said it was the program from the funeral of his best friend from high school who had died the year before. Okay then... I asked if he had a picture of his friend that might serve as a better reminder of their friendship. He said he didn't have any pictures of him. It was clear Daniel found much more comfort in the wrinkled funereal program.

From this point on, instead of sitting on the heater, he would now sit on his bed facing that program while he read his bible. Was I wrong to be totally creeped out? Either way, I was completely and utterly weirded out by this. Not to mention he continued to turn the heater on full-blast. And there's nothing worse than being creeped out AND hot in your own room. To boot, I was now left with someone who probably came to hate my guts even more than I hated his. But at least I had clean sheets on my bed.