J.J. Jenkins is a journalism freshman and Mustang Daily freshman columnist.
How tired are you of your roommates? Do their late night — let’s call them “Hulu” watching marathons — keep you up at night?
Well, unless you found your long lost twin that was surely stolen from their crib as a child, you probably want to start anew.
Luckily, we, for the first time in our lives, get to choose who we live with next year. Yet that quantum of solace provides freshmen with a new set of issues to face as we sort through our friends to find the perfect roommates.
Chances are there are a few different situations you have found yourself in over the past few weeks or will find yourself in as the deadline ticks away and off-campus housing gets swooped up.
A fact of the housing process is that you will get your hands dirty and feelings will be hurt, because let’s face it, not everyone can room with someone as awesome as you.
But you’re going to have to let your sum of potential suitors down easy. Perhaps a simple, “I think we should start seeing other people,” would be the Hollywood way of summing up the conversation. A friend of mine faced a situation where she had to let one of her current roommates know that she had found other people to room with already.
Thinking the meeting had gone fairly well, it appeared that everything was somewhat in order. Until the scorned roommate took to Facebook.
Posting one status about not having friends to room with sent a strong enough signal, albeit a childish one. But then it escalated to openly bashing on the current roommate in subsequent statuses and comments.
I wrote in a previous column how awkward it was to walk by your faux Facebook friends after knowing about last night’s Four Loko hijinks, but when people you actually know start bashing you in social media, it’s is a new low.
I mean, Mark Zuckerburg did not even sell out your information to make you look like a fool. So, no matter how badly you wanted to room with the kid with the 86” plasma, stay classy Cal Poly.
In light of that predicament and several experiences I’ve come across in the past weeks, I thought that my readers should have the chance to benefit from my infinite frosh wisdom.
We have made plenty of friends freshman year and most of them are great. However, that does not mean you want to live with the crazy person that parties hard but can’t tie their own shoelaces, let alone do their dishes.
That person may think your friendship was divine providence, but if the possibility of sharing an apartment with them next year makes you shudder and curl in a fetal position, you have to find a way to let them down easy.
Forcing them to make the first move is a good option: Instead of telling them you already have roommates planned out and they are on the outs, ask them who they plan to live with.
Maybe it turns out that the tables have turned and you were the one on the outskirts, and in that case, problem solved. Go back to being their shoelace-tier in-chief.
On the other hand, there are hassle free ways of getting roommates, namely your best friends. You know, the friend that basically lives in your room anyway and the fact that their bed is somewhere else is only a minor inconvenience. In fact, if you live in Cerro Vista their mattress might already occupy a comfy spot in your living room that your other roommates have just come to accept.
Just kidding Community Advisors, we would not dare let people sleep over without first notifying you.
Then again, approaching the subject of tying the knot for your sophomore year can be fairly tricky, particularly for guys. We are not used to using the phrase, “Do you want to live together?” especially when we are talking to another bro.
I decided to bite the bullet, so I called a man-date to Einstein’s and popped the question.
Chances are your best friend will not have the heart to turn you down (like that girl at line dancing) and you no longer have to worry about being the awkward fifth roommate in a Poly Canyon Village (PCV) apartment next year — at the very least, you’ll be the fourth and fifth awkward roommates.
If all else fails, my friends and I have one more spot open in our place and are currently accepting applications. Candidates will be judged on how well they can quote “Tosh.0” episodes, how ferociously they detest “Jersey Shore” and the quality of their homemade cookies.
Bribes, in the form of gummy worms or sour spaghetti, are not only accepted but expected.