Here, in MIT's Foo-red dormitory, 2W (2nd floor, West Parallel), all is not well. The hall known as Futz is being defiled continuously since it admitted a resident at the beginning of September 1996. There is one twist to all of this. I have the unfortunate situation to live with this freak of nature which is known by most as "foo."
Since that time in September, his freakish attributes have mushroomed exponentially, so that it has become increasingly difficult to tolerate his existence on our hall, much less in my own room. For that reason, he has caused a wide variety of effects on residents, especially myself. Here's a list of a few of his characteristics which most defy logic and human reason... those things which have caused me great grief for more than half a year:
As of yet I have still not received money, so if you are waiting to find out that I don't need any more, please keep sending. However, one astute member of our group of readers (Thanks B!) picked up an excellent poem which I thought would be quite appropriate. In fact it was written for someone else, but you might agree that it applies just as well.
Another Day Yesterday by Mitch Brown Twisting your neck And hearing you scream Oh how wonderful The sweetest of dreams. Every one broken Your spine throbbing with pain You feel you're in the middle Of a thick black rain. In a fetal position You lie on the floor I kick you in the teeth And you scream once more. You're eyes are glassy And your mouth drips blood Then another wave of pain Comes in a flood. As I step on your knee And lift on your foot We hear a loud snap And that leg is no good. Grasping your ear I give a great rip Every last hope for survival Through your fingers has slipped. Smashing your fingers Gives me great pleasure My hatred for you Too enormous to measure. You beg me to stop And I laugh in your face You start to cry As I set you in place. In place for your final punishment To take care of your nastiest trait You can't get away This is your fate. Your nose and forehead Pressed to the ground Then I step on your head What a lovely sound. MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS!
Early in September, our sleeping schedules seemed to be pretty well in sync. My classes started at 11 on Mon, Wed, Fri and 9:30 on Tue, Thu, though his were mostly after 1, so I tended to try to find my way to my bed by around three in the morning most nights. We were freshmen, on pass/fail, or more accurately pass/no record, so having to stay up to work hard was not even a thought at that point. Not until sometime later did we start having tests or problem sets or other major indicators of performance when it was imperative that things get done. Generally, timing was OK in September. We even both tended to stay up until very early (or late) hours of the morning - 6 or 7 often - on the weekends.
October and later started a new trend. The freak's computer arrived around early October, and from that point, Netscape and Eudora became the new fascinations. Sound applications became the toy of the day, and radio was generally going until some hours in the morning. In fact, it was noted that on one particular day, I had a paper due in my French class the next day and I started writing it in the early morning the night before. The freak, who was going to bed, kept saying in this whiny voice:
I don't know man... You've gotta finish that paper... [incoherent mumbling]
This would have you believe that the freak strongly valued education and getting school work done, but it will be demonstrated later that this was not actually the case. It seems in retrospect, that the freak was merely muttering about the fact that I was disturbing his sleep ritual. It is to be noted that this would in general be a very infrequent event as it is opposite to the greatest trend.
The problem with sleep began to emerge in early October. The freak was staying up later and later, making it harder and harder to get to sleep in time to get up for early classes the next day. This is to be observed when my parents called and awakened me a few minutes before 11 the Friday of Parents' Weekend (first weekend in October) and had me come down to greet them, noting that my chemistry lecture started in a few minutes. This demonstrated the new habit of adopting a late sleeping pattern taking priority over attending classes, though at the time I considered it to be an infrequent luxury.
Times became considerably later as the term drew on. I noted in later weeks that after missing the first class, it is easy to convince oneself that it would be much harder to get up to go to the others, and so in that way I sometimes missed full days. I only kept my spirit up by the fact that I had never missed a French class (held 2-3:30 twice a week), yet on a fateful day in November, I was to break that trend as well. It is ever so slight a trick to tell oneself when one is half asleep and class has already started that going to class would only disrupt class and would not reap any benefits... such an unconscious philosophy pervaded my very existence.
At some point I came to the realization that I could not personally account for missing so many missed classes. This was made most obvious one Saturday morning in December when I looked over as my alarm went off and saw a hand reach up and turn it off. My mind jumped, and I saw the many other days when my alarm had somehow failed to wake me without any recollection of turning it off myself. I realize that the same hand had acted on many other occasions, causing me to miss many a class and probably even a major test. I was not very pleased. Over the coming days, I noticed that the alarm was either turned off or the volume turned all the way down such that the alarm would have no effect on a prospective client, and that annoyed me greatly.
During IAP (the month of January, during which I had no classes), I was fortunate enough that the freak was gone. At the end of the month he came back, for classes, I suppose (although I don't remember him going to many). I notice that I missed both 10:00 6.001 lectures (my first class of the term!) during the first week, and then missed another a couple weeks later, and I have reason to doubt that it was my fault in each case. Fortunately, I have learned to check the alarm at many occasions and to double-alarm (set each about five minutes apart) so as to have a backup in case the first fails for some mysterious reason. The freak lives on.
One thing I learned early on is that the freak is really into music. It didn't take too long, however, to figure out that the operative form of music is bad music. We both enjoy various forms of rock, not heavy metal but usually things that are somewhat lighter. He claims that he likes "indy rock" which happens to actually stand for independent label rather than industrial. At some point, I realized that independent label meant that the people he was listening to were not good enough to be popular and get on a real record label such as Columbia, RCA, Sony, Virgin, etc. and had to settle for an "independent label." In other words, my roommate's real criterion for music selection was that the group was not popular.
He has a turntable which he uses most of the time, and a huge collection of records, which in my mind, suck. In general, his music falls into two or three general categories. The first would be the one I think I have come to hate the most, generally some sort of rock with a bad singer. Usually the rhythms and sounds of the band are alright (they vary from strong distortion to some simple guitar melodies), but the singer comes in and screws everything up. I can't tell you how many times I've listened to the music (it is in my room after all, so it's hard not to listen) and thought "this might actually sound good, if that singer had a voice." The major problem is that the singers either sounded whiny or just couldn't match pitch with the rest of the band, basically creating a disgusting dissonant tone. Worse yet, my roommate is apparently tone deaf, for he would try to sometimes sing along with the lead singer or some part of the tune, and that made it even worse. A musician such as myself can hear such small deviations, like being a half step off for instance. I very much hate anything that reminds me of those sounds today.
The second category would probably be those records which are weird. In my mind, a lot of stuff falls into this category, in fact sometimes records straddle both this and the previous category quite well. In these, the singer makes reference to some strange theme or speaks/whines/yells in some sort of drunk stupor. Usually the resulting product is not very good, and makes me wish to have my ears removed. Sometimes I believe the songs were made as a lampoon of creations by other bands, but that makes them no better in any light. One song in particular sticks out in my mind as being the song that characterizes the freak the most. The main chorus of the song was (and I'm not joking) "Make it fucked up." Following this line, the singer would use a rap style to tell us to do such things as "paint the walls" which my roommate apparently took him up on. In fact, he's added quite a few new things to our walls without the permission of anyone else on the hall, but that's yet another story. I would say that the one main line/theme of that song would have to be the driving philosophy behind the freak's behavior, whether it pertain to our room, the hall, his own condition, etc. It is also curious to note the small collection of weird French music that the freak listens to, especially considering his inability to speak or understand French.
The third major category of stuff is usually old traditional or folk sorts of music. Some of this is quite tolerable, in fact much of it I think might be stuff I'd listen to on my own, such as big band and the like. Unfortunately, this third category doesn't seem to get much attention from the freak, and even when it does, it generally causes the problem that all his music presents, which I will discuss now.
The freak insists upon playing his music during all hours when he is awake. As I mentioned above, his sleeping schedule is quite twisted as it is. Generally, one can expect to hear this cacaphony eminating from our room at many hours of the night - generally until around four o'clock or sometimes even later. On many an occasion, Josh who lives across the hall and to the side, actually walks over and asks to close the door many nights because he is bothered by the sound in his own room. You can probably imagine then what it is like for me, and I can't even close a door. On the few occasions when I have actually attempted to go to sleep with the stereo on, the freak always gives me odd looks like I am attempting to do something inconsiderate. Sometimes I have asked him to turn it off, which to him seems to be an intrusion upon his lifestyle, essentially convincing me that I shouldn't bother asking. I even remember one night that he turned it off, and a few minutes later I regained consciousness long enough to realize that he'd turned it back on and was doing his usual dubbing or whatever exactly it is that he does, oblivious of the fact that I might be trying to sleep in my bed. As a result, in many cases I have found it best to turn out the light in the lounge and lie down on the couches until I have gone to sleep, and later when he was actually asleep, I could get up and get to my own bed where I would no longer be disturbed.
The freak's sense of right is so warped that he believes that he has the right to listen to his music at any time he likes. In fact, I generally turn my stereo off out of courtesy late at night while he is still pumping the loud junk out as usual. Even on some occasions when I was listening to music, he would then turn his music on so that both stereos would meld into one horrible sound. The fact that mine was already on didn't seem to deter him. Then during the day, when I am awake and he wants to sleep (usually at least until one o'clock, though usually around three o'clock as well), I'm not supposed to turn on my music because it would disturb him. Poor freak! I guess we all need to sleep sometime, right?
My only way to take advantage of this situation has been rather unsatisfactory. Sometimes when he is around, I like to put my music on rather loudly for a few hours to keep his off. Even better, because I know of his great dislike for Pearl Jam, I have enjoyed putting it on a number of times when he was in the room. I don't think he was amused, but I got some small sense of pleasure from it.
First of all, let me say that the freak is not very religious. I do know that he is muslim and in a few ways may celebrate those traditions, but certainly not around me. The most I've seen of his religious is some book he keeps on the Qu'ran in his bookshelf, though I've never seen it move. I am only stating this as a disclaimer because people always seem to ask me if he has special religious needs.
A few days after he arrived here, my roommate started burning a substance known to all of us as incense. At first, we had our window open all the time and the smell was not so bad, in fact I might even venture to say I almost enjoyed it. And he sure seemed to have fun burning it. I told him I didn't really have a problem with it as long as I could breathe and such...
A few days or weeks later, I entered my own room with the horrible smell of several different types of incense assaulting me. At that point, I was forced to ask him to tone it down a bit. I asked if he thought he could cut it back some, maybe to just one a day. That seems more than reasonable to me, and he reluctantly accepted. Later in the fall, it got colder and our window was kept shut more and more, so the smell became more intense and it became harder to breathe.
I went on without saying too much about it unless it was a real problem. I don't remember how it stood, if anywhere, when we left for winter break. Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with the smoke over IAP while he was gone. The night he came back, he celebrated his return though, with probably two or three different flavors of incense in the room. It smelled quite awful, and in fact I'm not sure that I slept in my room for a few days. Rather, I tried to stay out of it as much as possible.
A week or two into the spring term, I asked my roommate if he could stop burning the incense, at least until it got warmer and we could open the window. It seemed like every time he burned the stuff, I would come back to the room, leave the window open all the way to try to air it out, and he would return the next time and close the window, in a never-ending cycle of not being able to breathe. He reluctantly agreed and gave me a look like I was imposing some horrible restriction on him by not letting him play with his little toy. I really didn't feel sorry for the freak.
Sure enough, a couple weeks later, I walked in the room again to the malodorous stench of incense. At that point, I decided that I hadn't gotten my point across clearly before, and I said again, "Do you think you could not burn that stuff in our room anymore, at least until it gets warm and we can open the window? It gets really strong in here with the window closed and it's hard to breathe." It seems like a reasonable request, and he quite reluctantly said OK. About a week and a half later, I came into my room after class one day, hoping to relax, only to smell that horrid stuff yet again. This time, I didn't bother saying anything to him, because I told him plenty of times already and he apparently didn't pay any attention to me. I called a number of people in housing and tried to find out what the rules were for burning things in a dorm room, especially without the consent of one's roommate.
During this inquiry, I was horrified to learn the MIT housing policy on smoking. Although people are not allowed to smoke in many restaurants, classrooms and academic buildings, and other public places today, there was no particular policy to discourage smoking in a dorm room. Students were merely "encouraged to discuss" the preferences of their roommates regarding smoking policies in their room, but then I suppose they could do whatever they wanted to do. In this case, it seems like the right of an individual to express themselves through this unhealthy activity are deemed more important than another individual's right to live in a healthy environment. Very pathetic, MIT. I would have expected them to have done better in dealing with such an issue, especially in the 90s.
The only help I got from MIT housing officials was that I should go to my hall tutor (basically a grad student who serves somewhat like an RA at other schools) with my problem and ask for help from him. So I e-mailed the hall tutor, asking him to talk to the freak and explain that I was entirely serious when I asked him to stop smoking incense in our room. The hall tutor wrote back that he would not do this, which would potentially mark him as a go-between with the freak, but instead he would be happy to sit down and work through conflict resolution of some sort with us. That was entirely unsatisfactory.
In the end, a friend was able to convince me what the right thing to do was. One day while he was out, I pulled the hundreds of sticks of incense out of his top desk drawer and hid them elsewhere. In elementary school, if you bring something to school you shouldn't have, usually you get it back at the end of the year, and this is what I intended to do. The freak couldn't respect other people's wishes and so he would have to be controled in some other fashion. Needless to say, he was quite disturbed at the disappearance of his cache, but I cannot feel sorry for the freak. Unfortunately, the solution was only short-lived. Somehow, the freak has taken stock in some other sort of incense, which now stinks up the room pretty much permanently. To be sure, I will have to hunt down the culprit and again confiscate the offending sticks of incense. And yes, if the freak has a problem with my stealing his incense, he should go to someone higher up in authority. After all, the way MIT works, they'd just tell him to work it out with me, which would be rather revealing.
Pretty soon after arriving here, the freak started using our dorm as a meeting place. Specifically, he would invite friends to come over here. I got to meet some of them, and several of them seemed polite. However, they all have something about them...
One of his friends lives across the river and goes to school at the Museum of Fine Arts. Apparently a group of them rent an apartment over there and find it fit to sometimes hang out over here. On several occasions, we had unexpected "visitors," and once I had to ask him that he have people smoke elsewhere than our room, because I do happen to live there.
Oddly enough, I don't know where these people come from. To be the freak's friends, they must be odd indeed. The freak did not get out much during rush - for most people here, that was a good time to get around and meet some people. He basically wanted to live here because it was no walk to campus. He doesn't seem to have endeared himself to many people living around him, and there are sometimes complaints about his self-planned modifications to the hall. He doesn't appear to have friends here, or even to go to class that often, though he does seem to know quite a few people at the radio station.
Perhaps the strangest incident occured the first weekend of November. The freak warned me that he was going to have someone up here staying for the weekend, and I said that was alright. friend-of-foo arrived on a Saturday afternoon, and he seemed like a pretty nice guy. I soon heard my roommate asking him questions and I deduced that he lived in Florida. It made me wonder some things. Why was the freak asking his friend about things that he should already know? How did the freak meet this Orlando guy?
At some point, I asked the freak how he happened upon the acquaintance of this friend-of-foo guy. "Well, I don't really know him," he told me. "He's sort of a friend of a friend. Actually, the guy who knows him really isn't a friend." "So you don't know this guy? Why is he staying here, again?" "Well, no, I never met him before. I mean, I've heard stories about him. He didn't want to have to pay for a hotel while he was visiting someone up here. I said he could stay here." I guess I didn't mind too terribly much, although the mattress on our floor was getting a little annoying.
The friend-of-foo character grew stranger, as he seemed to come in every night, and somehow the weekend turned into a much longer event. Sunday night, he stayed. Monday night, still here. I started to wonder about the legality of this guy's visit. Were we harboring a fugitive? From then on, he was known by the sum total of people living on the hall as "the fugitive," i.e. a fugitive from justice. It almost became exciting, because we never knew when he would pull a gun or something like that. On Thursday, he was still here, and he got to witness our hall feed, when we set out cookies and people came to eat and talk and have a good time. Apparently this event stuck with him.
Thursday night, the freak and his guest were talking about shipping a tape or somehow packing it to protect it, and I think they started cutting up cardboard boxes. I realized that the freak was about to go back to the airport from whence he had come early Friday morning. Sometime in the early morning, I decided that I'd had enough and I went out to the lounge, which was to become my new sleeping place for the next few months. I tried to sleep through the rants. In the end, friend-of-foo was gone, but he left a piece of him here on the hall. He wrote a wonderful Haiku on the freak's message board, and it was about our hall. As I remember from the first set of lines,
Flies in the showerI was mildly amused by this set of lines. I believe the second and third verses went something like this:
Could be disease carriers
Think I'll stay dirty
blah blah
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Sounds like ToriThat last line was most likely not there, but I thought it would go well with the rest of it. Basically, the guy thought he was some kind of artist. He put his e-mail address at the bottom of the Haiku, and had I been more resourceful I would have written it down. Oddly enough, it disappeared within a day or two, probably the freak's act to stop him from getting harrassing mail. Funny, I had never noticed the flies in the shower. Probably just an excuse to smell.
Reverberating the hall
I wonder who is sad
Smells of fresh cookies
Brought them from their rooms like dogs
Packing heat with the gang
The events since then have not been as interesting, but I continue to meet new and varied friends. Some of them even sound like they have a green thumb, as I heard of their efforts to grow some merry wanna. It is an exciting place, this Boston is, for a young boy like foo bar.
Early in the semester, there were just boxes here. A box or two on the floor, just to hold certain things. The freak went home most weekends, and always seemed to bring some sort of stash back. That's when it started.
There is simply not enough room to just store random items in our room. As a result, the freak started a pile near his bed, and to this day it has grown into a huge junkpile. Worse yet, the freak found out about the "reuse" mailing list here at MIT. Basically, being the resourceful people that we are, people who would normally have to throw out old items, either well used or even in need of repair, can instead post a message to the list noting the item they have up for adoption, and most things are claimed in a matter of minutes. My roommate has found it key to respond to as many of these give-aways as possible, especially old useless stereo equipment, and then store his finds on the floor of our room. Don't worry about me; I know to wear shoes. But the piles have just become unbelievable.
I have seen no fewer than maybe 15 to 20 devices lying in numerous positions on our floor. Sometimes they're stuffed in a box, sometimes they're just sitting there, and sometimes he decides to put them all in a nice pile. It's hard to say, but I think one would be hard pressed to find more junk in a week then we have stored in our room at any one time. To worsen the situation, the pile gets added to with random things every day - mail, flyers, clothes, and even food end up with everything else in this pit of hell. Right now I can see in particular one pile of assorted shoved up against the radiator next to his desk, and behind me are about 3 or 4 boxes of loot, covered by foods and clothes and more goodies. What more could one ask for? I always jump at the opportunity to leave a plate of food lying around here, hoping that maybe the roaches will come out of the woodwork and take it away. It would make quite a show!
In September, I had my computer set up here and the freak didn't have one yet, so I figured it wouldn't be any harm to let him use it. That was one of my first mistakes.
Several times, I would go somewhere (class, band rehearsal, etc.), and when I returned I would find that Netscape was open on some arcane music site, such as caroline.com. Basically these were a number of "independent record labels" which happened to have web sites, and for some reason or another he wanted to look up individual bands and such. Soon enough I figured out what he was doing. I found a bunch of random sound clips in a temporary directory or some other Netscape area that I didn't remember putting there. What were these? Just as I suspected... more copies of his bad music [see above]. It was apparently not enough to just blast the stuff through the hall at all times of day and night (actually not normal daytime hours), but he now had to play the bad music on my computer.
I thought that was it - just the freak storing files on my computer, which isn't so bad as long as I can find them and eradicate them from my hard drive so as to prevent spreading of their diseased nature. At some point, I opened clicked on a file in Netscape and a new program that I'd never seen popped up on the screen. "Hmmm, that's weird, I've never seen this before. Did you put install this on here?" "Oh yeah, it said that I had to download it to view some files." [Oh, I'm glad you asked me first.] And so things went.
I wasn't too pleased with the installations. It looks like he put a different version of QuickTime and other animation viewers on my computer, and they overwrote the old versions so that I can't get them to work anymore. Furthermore, whatever he put on my hard drive is just an annoyance because I can't find all the files to fix the modifications. In fact, I noticed that there were several failed installations of the software so I don't even know what's really there. But I should be reasonable, right? Those things happen, sure?
He brought his computer in here at the end of October. So, maybe that's the end of it? Think again. On various occasions, I noticed that some of my e-mail that I hadn't seen before was already "read" for reasons unknown to me. At times, I let the freak print things out on my printer because I think in general, I'm a pretty reasonable guy. How would I know what else he might be doing? So things just went on.
I left for home after the fall term on Wednesday, December 18 at around 1:30 PM. I remember checking my mail at about 12:30 PM, then shutting down Eudora so it wouldn't process my mail. The idea was to transfer my mailboxes to my computer at home when I got there. I set up my MIT account to forward my e-mail to my computer, which now had a mailserver running from which I could get my e-mail. Little did I suspect anything... So a little after midnight, I initiated an FTP (file transfer protocol) session with my computer at the dorm to download Eudora and my mailbox files. I watched TV during the wait which was probably several hours, and then started to install it. In the middle of one of the transfers, the file stopped where it was. I assumed that I needed to reset that connection, so I stopped it and tried to restart, but it wouldn't restart. I tried disconnected to try a new FTP session, but now my computer was saying "Invalid User" or some other nonsense error such as my password not being correct. I really didn't know what I could tell it - how could the password have changed? So I decided to try to contact someone who was still at the dorm to take a look at it.
I logged into a friend's computer on the MIT network, and then to check if my machine was still working, I ran a finger check on my computer. The result was quite unexpected; my computer had apparently booted into Linux, my other operating system, and the freak had logged into the MIT network on it! Boy, this was going to take some explaining. I tried to send him a message, but he had already left, so I had to look for someone else. I ended up finding another freshman from my hall logged into one of the computer clusters on campus, so I started an online communications session with him. I told David Gandy to call the freak and find out what he was doing with my computer. He called him and harassed him for a bit, and when he got back he said that apparently our circuit breaker had somehow been tripped, and so the computer shut off and rebooted in the other operating system. Of course, that didn't explain why he was logged in. I sent a message to the freak telling him that I was about to reboot the computer and I wanted him to make sure it booted in Windows this time - after a couple minutes I was able to get back into it again. I quickly downloaded the rest of my files and then checked my mail.
When I opened my mailbox, I knew something was different. I had received two new messages later that afternoon, even though I closed Eudora before I left, and they were marked as already being read. So not only had he messed with my computer, but the freak had read my e-mail. Even better, I noticed that the Trash box had been updated, so apparently he put something there that I'll never know about. In any case, things were back to normal, so then I sent a message to the freak asking him why Eudora was open, and telling him that it was messing things up. I noticed at some point that he had put a disk in the drive with a few strange files in it, included a couple named "crybaby" - unfortunately I didn't have access to actually see them, and I didn't really feel like asking either. Of course, the freak denied having done anything with my computer, and the power went out "accidentally" while he was playing with the lights or something. I was not impressed. Over the next two weeks of vacation, I noticed that my computer's idle time (the time since it was last touched) would be reset every once in awhile as strange forces moved to change it. I still have no idea what exactly was going on, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Kosher. Since then, I've learned to never trust the freak with anything I own. As such, I implemented password protection in my screensaver as soon as I returned, and in fact I tell the password to everyone but the freak. Why? Nobody else messes with my files, so now I have protection. I learned the lesson. Never trust a freak.
Speaking of computers, the freak is constantly tapping away at his Windows 3.1 box in the corner. Every few minutes (actually it's usually seconds), he lets out a laugh or a giggle or a chuckle or a snicker. One has to wonder sometimes: does this one freshman from Connecticut get more funny e-mail in three minutes than the whole world got in the last 20 years? Is there any particular reason for him to constantly laugh at things (other than his own amusement, that is), for example does he possibly have a group of the funniest friends on the planet? Does he think that what he writes is so funny that even he cannot help but issue a chuckle every few seconds? One must wonder.
And why does the freak go onto music sites? It's always fun to hear the music blasting on his stereo, plus he goes onto websites and then plays sound bites so that he has two songs going at once. I'm sure this is more fun for him than anyone else in the world, because I sure haven't gotten any enjoyment out of it. Can anyone understand these acts of insanity? Please tell me if you can, because I have a hunch that I'm the normal one here. You might have some small clue that the freak is using his computer to do homework or something else productive. Sure enough, he writes plenty of e-mail with people at the radio station here, but I don't think I've ever seen him do any serious work on the computer. Sometimes he can just entertain himself for hours and stay up till 7 AM, playing with Netscape (what more does one do with the web these days) and listening to his tasteless music. Is there any decency here? Obviously not, even Congress cannot control the horrid situation in our room.
The best situation I've seen yet happened last week (April 10). He was still asleep when I went to class at 2:30, and then when I got back at 4:00 the room looked vacant though the window was open. I noticed something missing immediately... his monitor, and keyboard and mouse, none of which were on the desk. But the computer was still on the floor! What might have become of them? I glanced around the corner, and noticed the back of his monitor sticking out of his bunk. What is this, repairs? I wasn't sure, and I didn't really want to know either. I sat down to check my e-mail, and a second later I heard rustling. Oh no... sounds from underneath the sheet that he uses to cover his bunk... what's going on? Sure enough, he was in there, and it looks like he brought the monitor, mouse, and keyboard in there with him too. I didn't want to ask - who would? Apparently he's got some really bad problems. Only you can guess what was really going on. And to help you out a little, I have happened to glance at some sites that he was looking at during registration; these sites weren't about classes, they were pornography.
In the fall, there was some major construction being done in Building 56, and on my way back here through the basement, I picked up an abandoned Exit sign in late October. I thought it would be cool to hang that someplace in the dorm, maybe even get it to work. I make way too many mistakes.
Within a few weeks, the Exit sign had been used for one of his projects. Specifically, the freak had cut a hole in the box where power enters our room to our new outlets, and then he had spliced wires directly into this power supply so that we could have the Exit sign lit 24 hours a day. Needless to say, I was not pleased. At that point, we had a permanent night-light, and it was rather annoying.
Also around that time, the freak happened to pick up a fluorescent light fixture from God-knows-where around campus, and on several occasions he had put bulbs into the fixture and then turned it on while it was sitting by his desk - at such times I hoped the freak would be electrocuted, because every time I walked into my room I was blinded. Finally, at some point, he mounted this ugly fixture above his desk and rigged up wires and a switch to turn the stupid thing on and off. We would like to call this a "regulated sun." In fact, when I asked the freak why my computer had turned off on winter break, he informed me that "our lights have a new feature." You can bet I was really looking forward to finding out what it was.
Meanwhile, the freak created numerous hooks and nails in our wall so as to hang his toys most conveniently; currently he has a number of strange (and stupid) posters, a plastic meat cleaver, a "Dr. Smooth" wrapper, several really annoying advertisements, a wooden duck from which hangs some monstrosity of wires and electrical components that he must have soldered together, two bits of mirror, and a radio front. There is also random scrawling on the wall, for example it says "fat nut" by the door, under which appears a blue fish; he asked me if I knew how those got there, strangely enough. He has mounted a number of things to the wall outside our door as well, which I'm sure passers-by get a lot of amusement from. There is in fact a column of records (in their cases) on one side, and on the other side a microwaved CD, a miniature Mrs. (Santa) Claus head, and who knows what else. Overall, I'd have to say that the freak turned our room into a freak show.
I finally decided to pin him in April, so I e-mailed the director of campus housing about the "additions" to our room, in light of the rules stating that you must consult the House Manager before making room modifications. The House Manager came up to look at our modifications a few days later, and she claimed that the light was "OK" but she would have someone look at the Exit sign. An electrician or mechanic did that a few days later, and apparently told him to take it down. He finally did, but next he wanted to install an outlet in the box where power enters the room; I think they stopped him from doing that too. Oddly enough, he confronted me a couple days ago (April 18) because the House Manager told him that I was the one who had reported the Exit sign. He said that if I didn't want it, all I had to do was say so, because he didn't feel it was "very important" to the room. Of course, maybe he should have asked my opinion in the first place...
At some point, I became aware of the fact that the freak is a distasteful slob. Don't quote this as libel, but listen what I have to say about this fact. Altogether, it's pretty disgusting. First of all, he seems to think that our sink is a toy, and he can exploit it for his strange private uses. One sad example of this is when he covered the fluorescent light bulbs in the lounge with green paint, and he leaned them against our sink. It meant that I had to use the hall bathroom sink to brush my teeth, and as usual I couldn't get to sleep. Then there was green paint on our sink, and I really enjoyed that. Since then, he's become quite disgusting with his food. He often uses his Egyptian plates and tupperware containers to make and eat food in the kitchen, and then leaves them in our sink, possibly to soak or something. In any case, it doesn't do much good, because he just leaves them there and doesn't wash them, not without a lot of prompting at least. I have adopted the habit of giving him 24 hours; I generally wait one day for his dishes to become moldy in the sink, and then when I'm tired of having to use the sink around them, I take them out and place them gently on the floor underneath the sink. Hey, if he wants to wash them, all he has to do is pick them up and wash them right there, but it's stupid to just leave them there in the sink. Well, he doesn't even bother to pick them up - right now he has one plate and a tupperware container that have been sitting on our floor for almost a week now. Worse yet, I don't think he cares. Of course, next time he wants to eat, he'll probably wish he'd washed them, and maybe then he'll finally do that ritual. I always wonder why he keeps such things as cassette tapes and envelopes and electronic equipment sitting in boxes above the ground, but he hasn't figured out that he should store dishes and utensils on shelves above the ground rather than right on it.
Having a desk by the sink made me realize something early on. In fact, having the computer on that desk made that realization acute. Most times that the freak uses the sink, he turns the water on too far, so that its power is not controlled well by the faucet, and it splashes out of the sink and onto the desk. Which means onto my mouse, my mousepad, my keyboard, my monitor, and whatever else important forms happen to be sitting anywhere on my desk. That was quite an annoyance.
So, doing what every good roommate would do, I asked the freak politely, "Could you be more careful when you use the sink, to not splash water out, because I have books and papers over here?" "OK" was his standard response, and so two days later I would return home to find another problem set simply ruined from all the water stains on it. It was somewhat frustrating.
Finally, I figured out the solution. I went to our lounge, cut off one side of a cardboard box, and wedged it very nicely between the sink and my desk. He didn't make any comment, as if I was just doing it for my pure enjoyment. And so he has continued his splashing habit, such that even when I leave things on my chair or on the floor by my desk, they are sure to be covered in water when I check back.
If the sink sounds like a problem to you, you should hear how the freak does laundry. Every once in awhile, maybe when he decides that his clothes smell too bad (it couldn't possibly be him), he decides to throw his clothes in a bag and take them down to be washed. As if his other habits aren't queer enough, he refuses to use a clothesdryer, and so he decides to "drip-dry" his clothes, in our room of course. So every time he did laundry, I found out soon enough from the fact that every possible corner in our room (the top of the door, the edge of shelves, or numerous other places he's found or created since) is covered with his shirts and pants; I don't want to know what else. Oddly enough, he even gets mad when a door is opened and his clothes fall, because he didn't realize that it would happen if he left them up there.
A few weeks ago, he got another bright idea. He put a row of wire clothes-hangers on the ceiling, wedged underneath the conduit for our new power lines, and then hung his clothes on these over his desk. It wasn't until a week or two later that I put two and two together, and got five. I noticed one day that all my clothes-hangers that I had used for my jeans were missing from the closet, and I started looking around to figure out where they might have wandered - all it took was one look at the ceiling. Finally one day, I took them down and returned them to their proper owner, although somehow the one that the freak put on the bulletin board in the hall had disappeared. I was not too pleased, and he never mentioned taking them without asking; I guess he figured they were community property. What a freak!
When we were first meeting, it seemed the mandatory thing to discuss our background and what we planned to do here. I mentioned that I liked physics and math a lot, but I also was enticed by computer science quite a bit. He said that if possible, he would like to major in "acoustics engineering" or something along the lines of designing speakers like Professor foo-speaker-corporation, and so he thought he would probably major in Course foo (foo Engineering). Since then, his interest has gradually dropped to the point that he decided that "electronics [in audio equipment] are tough to fix, but mechanical systems are pretty easy, so I'm leaning more to Course foo [foo easy] now." Of course, little does my roommate understand that he won't be majoring in either if he continues down his current path.
Since the beginning of the year, I have seen the freak work on homework maybe a dozen times total. Not only that, but he has failed to attend classes, take tests, and taken numerous other shortcuts in his academics. Basically, he seems to have no motivation to do well here. Worse yet, he also seems to blame some of this on me, as it sounded in his "I wasn't able go to sleep early because of your loud typing, and now my sleeping schedule is all messed up" speech in mid-March. Of course, maybe if he actually did his work when he was awake, he wouldn't be in this predicament.
My sleeping schedule was actually destroyed from his habits on Netscape and his stereo last semester, and so I missed a huge amount of class (by my standards), and I also missed several problem sets. His academic tom-foolery spread to my inability to concentrate, and yet he claims that I did it to him. I narrowly passed some of my classes last semester, and finally figured out that I must give up these dangerous ways and rise to the top; this semester I attend almost every class and turn in every assignment. I can't say as much for him.
In February, when we were registering for classes, I happened to catch a glimpse at his schedule, and I was rather amused. Last semester, he took qux (first term qux), qux (first term qux), qux (intro qux), and an qux course. Although probably 95% of freshmen are also in a 6-unit low-pressure qux, he was not in one, in fact he thought that being in one was "weird" (hard to define based on his standards). And so he continued in his qux-integer classes, while the rest of the Western world actually went to their qux-integer classes. Several days before drop date, the freak started mentioning that he might end up dropping qux, but nothing more was said. The night before the chemistry final, we asked him if he wasn't going to study for it at all, and he said "no, I'm not taking that class," so I guess he did drop it after all. So his schedule was qux-integer-minus-one classes, pass/no qux. Stress? I think not.
What made me laugh from his registration were the classes listed. He is quxing qux and qux, and now qux (intro to qux) for qux. He also has an qux class, but what I find so amusing is that he made it back to Tech only because he was able to pass his qux course, which is probably more unfortunate for me than anything else. In any case, he's still fooling around in his simple freshman courses, as I move on to quantum mechanics and Fourier analysis. Needless to say, the Institute hasn't been much help in curtailing his wild habits so that I could actually do well this semester - I've had to get every square inch of ground on my own. Apparently the Institute seems to think it's doing me a favor, because I'm learning how to deal with people in real life or something like that, but I can't honestly say that I've learned anything from the experience. Actually, I have become quite embittered and given up any hopes of enjoying my college life, at least while the freak is around. One might think that the Institute would value education enough so as to intervene when one student is causing havoc to another's education, but everyone I contacted wanted to put the responsibility on someone else, and then they would just tell me that I could do mediation (which doesn't help me a bit). At this point, all I'm waiting for is to get out of here so that I won't have to put up with the freak's antics again.
For the record, I'm taking six difficult classes this semester, and I became a sophomore on grades to do it. Despite my difficulties (I often sleep on the couch, for example, and the freak seems intent on turning off my alarm when I have to go to class), I have managed to continue my work in my classes: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Circuits and Electronics, Introductory Biology, Quantum Physics I, Fourier Analysis -- Theory and Application, and The Age of Reason - Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries. In fact, I am probably earning in A in most of those courses, and in fact at least a B in just about every course. I am in the MIT Concert Choir and Concert Band, both of which have a concert coming up in two weeks, and I am one of the newly elected social chairs of the Concert Band. I have 200 units of credit, which is more than most sophomores, and I plan to double major in computer science and physics or possibly math, if not triple major or get a masters (in four years). I have a full-time job at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland for the summer. What can't I accomplish? The freak, meanwhile, continues to play on the radio station regularly, which seems to be his staple, and I see him do work from time to time. Is he going to pass his freshman classes or just fail them like he did last semester? Will he come back to try again, or has he figured out that he's just not good enough? What does it take to tame a freak?
The foo bar Extermination Fund 3 Ames St. Box #222 Cambridge, MA 02142-1305