The infamous roommate: Her Super Ego...centrism

One of the most disturbing qualities of my ex-roommate was her inability to think for someone else. She always claimed that her ways were the best ways, and didn't understand why she was not functioning well with others. She criticized me for not having as much Korean friends as SHE would have expected. I really didn't understand why she had to stick her nose into everything I do and lecture me about it, but I doubted that it was a normal thing to do for a roommate.

One of the most hurtful and unfair things she said to me was how she pointed out the fact that I never hang out with other Koreans and she thinks that I'm trying to be an "American." Her almost exact quote was "I can see that you are trying to be an American. You do realize that it's never going to happen right? You don't even have an American citizenship." I really couldn't understand that why she had to think that all Koreans HAVE to only be friends with bunch of Koreans, and seriously, what's wrong with the people from other places? I just had to assume that she was a racist person in a way.


Picture from: http://iranscope.ghandchi.com/Fun/Racist.jpg

I once over heard her and her friend talking (in my room so I wasn't eavesdropping), and I heard my roommate criticizing Indians. Her friend mentioned that she was with her Indian friends while telling Ms. Northkorea a story, and my ex-roommate received the information with a mocking voice saying "Ha! You were with Indians? Why? they smell and they have weird accents and sound like adadada..." I'm sorry, but that was the most ironic and ridiculous thing I've ever heard. As Ms. Northkorea has grown up most her life in Korea, she does not have the perfect accent. At all. And her tone just made me realize how limited her thinking was about people who are different from herself.

The infamous roommate: Quirks - Part 2

As promised, I continue the list of quirks that my roommate had.

Ms. Northkorea was the kind of a person who didn't seem to be skilled at socializing. She would stay in the apartment most of the Friday nights, watching whatever she watches and laughing. Very loudly. In the beginning when I was more concerned about her before she completely lost her respect from me and before I was used to her living style, I was worried whenever she laughed. It always sounded like she was choking on something and she was struggling for breath. This was very possible since she was often eating something while watching Korean shows, and I worried that I would have to do the abdominal thrusts (a.k.a. Heimlich maneuver) on her someday.


source: http://www.getfrank.co.nz/how-to-perform-the-heimlich-maneuver/

As a girl who grew up in Korean culture, I was taught and seen people to keep their shoes near the front door. This is how all Korean homes are designed, so I thought she would be used to this concept of keeping her shoes somewhere near the front door. Or at least keeping them in one corner so no one else, namely me, can trip over them. She just seemed to not understand why I asked her several times to keep her shoes at one place please, even though she has watched me trip over them pretty badly a few times. I am the type of person who can trip over just about anything. I sometimes trip and look back wondering what I tripped over, and there's nothing, just flat concrete floor. So if there are big shoes on random places in the living room and in the bedroom, it can only be assumed that the results are not pretty.

I believe that how dirty the rest of the place is, the kitchen is the one place that should be kept relatively clean. Unfortunately, Ms. Northkorea didn't share this idea with me. She ate in a lot, both by cooking and ordering food. Whenever she cooks, I can later come in and tell exactly what she cooked, what ingredients and utensils she used, where she ate it, and approximately how long ago she cooked and ate. For takeouts, she usually doesn't finish her food, and just leaves the left overs out in the open for a few days until she finally decides that they are allowed in the trash. It's the same deal when she cooks, except worse. She would leave the leftovers in the plates for days, and when she finally throws the food away, the plates remain uncleaned for at least another week until they are washed. Also, I always had to question her understanding of the electric grinder. She enjoys eating shellfish such as mussels, and always specifically left the shells in the sink. I half believed that she was smart enough to understand that they belong in the trashcan, but the other half of me was afraid that she would try to grind them, which made me throw them away in the trash for her.


source: http://www.theprofessionalassistant.net/2008/02/co-workers-not-cleaning-up-after.html
Wasn't quite here (don't think we had enough plates and silverware to be this bad) but almost.

Also, one of the most interesting/weirdest/annoying habit she had was that she would throw away silverware after eating takeouts. For the first semester, we lived on only my source of silverware which consisted of two pairs of chopsticks, two spoons and a fork. Since she was the one who ate in all the time, she used them much more than I did. I had no problem with that, but I noticed one day that a pair of chopsticks was missing. I don't know what stimulated me to do it, perhaps the belief that Ms. Northkorea is actually that ignorant, I started looking in the trash for it...and there it was. My precious, one out of two pair of chopticks sitting in one of the takeout containers, tangled up in leftover noodles. I also soon noticed that my fork was missing, and assumed that it had suffered the unfortunate death.

I hope I am not so blind about my own weirdness as she was, and I have less quirks. I vow to my future roommates that I would fix whatever quirks they discover about me because, as I have learned this year, quirks could come in various shapes and sizes and you never know how they could effect the people around you.

The infamous roommate: Quirks

The In my opinion, everyone has their weird sides.
And since everyone's weird, no one can really say that others are weird unless an individual has an excessive number of weird qualities.
I understand that I am weird and I'm not offended when someone tells me I'm weird. But I feel like I have the right to declare that my roommate was truly a weird individual.
She had many quirks that I tried to understand but couldn't.

For instance, whenever she steps out of the room even just to get her laundry, she HAD to dress up into her jeans and not-so-bummy shirts. She hardly knows anyone in the building (actually I think she knew one person in the building), but her usual argument was "I don't want anyone I know to see me not dressed up..."

Source: http://www.goblintalk.co.za/2009/06/come-back-later-today-i-have-been-branded-useless/

As I am attending a school with greater male population, I felt that it's natural for people to have many guy friends. This is very not true for Ms. Northkorea. I don't know what about guys that always freaks her out, but something about them seems to make her think of them as extraterrestrial lives. That's the only thing that could explain her behavior towards them.
Rarely, I have the excuse to bring a guy up to the door to my room when Ms. Northkorea is up or in the room, usually my boyfriend sending me to bed or a friend helping me carry my groceries. I've promised her over and over again that I would never bring a guy into the room without letting her know, but whenever she hears a guy's voice near the door, she bolts into the bed room. I can hear this from the hallway and always wonder 'Why?? Am I really that untrustworthy? and she didn't seem to have problem with girls before when my female friends came over...' She seems to have no contact with the opposite sex, not because she can't have one, but she chooses not to.

She has many weird things when it comes to her habits in the bathroom. The oddest thing I thought she did was that she never flushed her toilet paper. Instead, she piled the used toilet paper in the trashcan. I'm pretty sure that's insanitary for both of us, and it just grossed me out for many reasons. Also, since I was the one who emptied out the bathroom trashcans, and most of the other trashcans for that matter, I had to ask her at one point in the year to take care of the bathroom trashes herself.

Oh yes, and when she was moving out, she threw away her hair dryer too... which I thought was a big waste.

I think that one dominant way how my ex-roommate expresses her anger is by slamming things. "Things" include doors, drawers, her laptop, books... basically everything she can slam. This occurs when she is trying to intimidate me out of the room when she feels like I have stayed in my room for too long, or she's upset about something else such as her lost tetris game. On of the things that always baffled me was how in the world she has so much time to bum around in school days. When everyone I knew was stressing out about their midterms the next day and deciding whether they should stay up all night, my roommate was watching dramas and playing tetris for hours before going to bed at 12 am.

I think Ms. Northkorea was much more Korean than I ever can comprehend, and more than she ever thought she was herself. Even though we are both Koreans, I feel like I have a choice of how white or Korean I wanted to be. She always demanded that I have to be more Korean for some reason, and she would get upset if I don't. She never understood why my Korean wasn't as good as hers just because I was Korean, and argued that ALL Koreans should be good at Korean. She obviously doesn't understand that people are made of their experiences instead of their how they are born, such as their ethnicity.

These are only the few of her weirdness, but I feel like I'm rambling and I don't want to bore whoever's reading this. I'll continue this on a later date :]

The infamous roommate: Pilot

I'm pretty sure I hit rock bottom with my roommate luck this year.
There are so many countless ridiculous things she has said and done that I'm just lost on what to say about her.
Many people have trouble understanding the fact that I am not kidding about the stories I tell them of what my roommate did or said, and I often also wish I was joking too. But I swear, all these stories are in fact, very true and actually happened.

Since I don't want to overload whoever is reading this with my weird roommate stories, I will prove my point that I have the worst roommate ever by sharing one of my stories everyday.
And let's give her a name... Let's call her Ms. Northkorea.


picture from: http://www.tdaxp.com/archives/tag/north-korea
And no, she's not even nearly attractive as these girls.

So, story #1:
Let's go back to the earlier days when I thought she was more normal.

I was in the middle of studying for my whatever class I was taking, not getting distracted or anything. Once I'm in the groove, I prefer to stay that way and really hate being bothered because the groove doesn't come often. I had my earphones on because Ms. Northkorea was either watching TV or laughing very loudly while watching something Korean. At one point, Ms. Northkorea stops watching and walks over to the kitchen, probably to grab a bite to eat. I suddenly heard a loud squeal, and her usual complaining out loud. I ignored it, mostly because I was barely able to hear anything, and I had work to do.

After a minute or so, I heard her yelling out for me through my music. I took one of my earplugs out, and she told me to come over to the kitchen with a grossed out face. I walked over, and saw what she was pointing at: a small pool of water behind the dish rack with a few wads of green molds floating around.
As an instinct, I ripped a big sheet of paper towel and started gathering the water, her on my side casually talking about how gross it was. And no, she wasn't even pretending to help. In my mind, I was thinking 'Wait, why am I suddenly doing this? If she's the one who found it and I was hard at work, doesn't she have enough sense to do this herself??'

Apparently not. For the days to come, I would realize how she was raised without doing any work around the house, causing her to expect those things to be done by someone else but her, and in many cases, me. But those stories are for the future