The Wake

You love them but sometimes they make you so irritated that you could literally scream: they are your roommates. October is typically the month when people get the first inkling that sometimes the people they live with (who are often close friends) are less than perfect. So, to make things a little easier, I offer a roommate etiquette guide to follow, in order to maintain better inter-housing relationships.

Before we get started, “roommate” has a few different definitions. When students say “roommate,” we’re often talking about someone we share a house or apartment with, someone who helps pay part of the cable bill. For anyone who is living in a dorm, however, a roommate can be the person who takes up half of your 10-by-10 room.

If you live in a dorm, work out a system of sharing. If you need some “alone” time with that special someone (or a string of randoms), work out a marker board code or signage system. No one wants to be walked in on and, furthermore, no one wants to come home after a long night of studying at the library (or binge drinking) and see butt cheeks that don’t belong to them.

Likewise, if your roommate is in the room, keep it PG-13 and keep the slurping and gurgling to a minimum. If you are lucky enough to have your own room, pull your headboard away from the wall. Please. And everyone, keep the funny business in/on/around community property (couches, showers) to a minimum. Don’t ask; just trust me on this one.

When you’re done with your laundry, take it out of the dryer; other people need that thing, too, you know. And clean out the lint trap when you’re done—that’s your hair stuck in with all the fuzz. Gross.

But if you take only one thing from this article, let it be this: change the toilet paper. If you truly care about your roommates at all, you’ll change it if you’ve used the last of it. They will remember the day that they waddled across the hall to get to the closet to find more because in your stupidity you didn’t change it. And they will remember FOREVER the day they waddled across the hall to get to the closet to find more because in your stupidity you didn’t change it, and someone came up the stairs and caught them with their pants around their ankles.

I am now living alone for the first time in my life, in a one-bedroom apartment. I miss my former roommates because they are some of my best friends; we would cook together and hog-pile on one of my roommate’s beds when we were all hung over. But I swore that if I found one more wad of hair in the drain—you know, one so big that the water won’t go down properly so you end up bathing your feet in dirty water and have to wait a long time for it to all go down—I was going to quit showering altogether.

In closing, I hope that this article will in some way make your living situation a little better, and you’re future a little brighter. Or, at the very least, that it just made you smile and almost laugh, and that’s OK too.

Now please, go do the damn dishes.

Colleen Hellenbrand is the Voices editor and welcomes comments at .