Even if dirty dishes don’t get on your nerves, roommate tension simply can’t be avoided.

If you are a college freshman, you’re finally getting the hang of things. Being in a dorm room gives the illusion that you are an adult, but not really. If actual adults lived in a boarding house nine months out of the year, it would be really similar to a dorm situation.

So being the “kind of” adult that you are now, you know pretty much how things go; it is time to concentrate on the one thing that you can’t fit into your routine; the daily sights and sounds of an annoying roommate. Don’t say that your roommate isn’t annoying.

Sure, he or she may still call you their “best friend” and even tries to eat every meal with you. It does not matter. Even if you and your roommate have been soul mates since long before birth, you can’t say you’re entirely happy with the current situation.

It could be the way that they eat. Cereal is usually the deciding factor on this one. Morning time is a difficult time to be around people anyway, but the way they eat their cereal could make or break the whole relationship.

The constant crunching, the slurping, the teeth scraping against the spoon thousands of times before the bowl is finished. Maybe they eat their cereal like they have way too much food in their mouth, or even worse, they talk with their mouth full.

You look at them, it’s hard to, still you can’t turn away, and the milk is just dribbling down their chin as they laugh hysterically at Regis and Kelly. A little piece of whatever falls out of their mouth and onto the chair. It’s enough to make me sick just thinking about it. At the end of the bowl, they slurp.

It is at this point that you start looking for someone else.

The dorm room magnifies these situations because everything is so crammed together. When you eat, sleep, surf the net and hang up your laundry in the same room, things can get a little crazy, and it’s understandable.

Then freshman year ends, and perhaps you make the leap of freedom to off-campus housing.

At first, things are great. Everything is wonderful, everyone sleeps a few feet away from each other, and there are multiple rooms to be in.

A few weeks into it, you realize that these people that you actually picked to live with are annoying you just as much as the person that the university picked for you. It’s hard to believe, but so true that you lose sleep over it. That’s when the roommate tension jumps in.

Assuming this is one of the situations where you picked the person that you live with, you still want to maintain this friendly roommate bond that you have going.

Anger starts building up, but you don’t know where to go with it. So you keep it in. At first, it’s just little things; foreign hairs in the sink, weird smells, cereal-eating habits.

Things get worse when they leave Chinese food out on the table all night or when the music is coming so loud from their room that you can’t stand it.

At this point in my roommate living situation, the fruit flies moved on in. The fruit flies loved every second of it. It wasn’t only my roommates’ food that was left out.

It was mine too. I would forget to throw away an occasional corn dog meal that I had eaten, and the fruit flies would be waiting for the second that I left my chair to move in on the situation.

Most reactions to these events are the snappy sarcastic remark to everything that they say:

Roommate #1: Wow, I really enjoyed that delicious meal that I defrosted for myself in the microwave last night.

Roommate #2: Oh really? That’s funny, because the fruit flies really seemed to be enjoying themselves all over it today, where it was left out so that they had plenty of time to just sink their teeth right into it.

Roommate#1: Whatever.

I have not yet found some way to solve this problem, and plan on not doing anything about it in the near future.

Speaking of the near future, if anyone you meet tells you that they would be a great roommate, or that they’re “really laid back and easy to get along with”, that’s fine, just make sure to buy them a box of the least crunchy cereal that you can find, and prepare yourself to start looking for someone else as soon as they set their moving boxes down.

Send comments to Stephanie at [email protected].