Perhaps life is all about gestures. My roommate seems to think so as he believes half-heartedly using toilet paper to wipe down the bathroom sink and smear whatever comes out of his body and onto the vanity mirror is the proper response to a request to: “clean the bathroom.” I’ve been meaning to ask him what part of the house he believes the toilet and bathtub seceded to. What ever territory they’ve joined forces with he had to have observed the poor state of the toilet as that high grade toilet cleaning paper had to be disposed somewhere.
Don’t worry, Adam, mommy will flush for you.
It was enough that he had to wipe down the sink and mirror, to have called him back into the bathroom just to flush the roll of toilet paper he had disposed of in the bowl would have been too much.
After realizing that he took my request to mop the bathroom floor to mean that he technically did not have to sweep the floor before he mopped it and that he could use the stale body wash that spilt behind the toilet as a tile cleaning agent, I decided that I better just clean the toilet and properly wipe down the mirror myself. As the bathroom floor now has clumps of hair in each corner and the tile itself has a sticky slippery consistency, there is no telling what he would transform the toilet into after he was done “cleaning” it.
Screwing up one’s responsibility is only cute as a child, and even then everyone only gets one. After that our parents usually instruct us on how to do things “properly”. To be sure, we hate them for it, but it usually bears fruit later on in life as by habit we’re clean, respectable members of society. But as what I can only estimate to be a “man”, riding the fence between being clinically overweight and plain obese, this sort of wanton ignorance and tragic sloth can only be considered a natural laxative, forcing me too look away after a certain amount of time lest I lose the calories that I work so hard to gain.
How am I handling it? I’m getting by, I suppose. Holding everything else in my life at the moment constant, this roommate situation is making me a very upset person. My first frustration of course is: “How can something like this exist?” One of my weaknesses is that when I meet people who do or act in a way that I didn’t think was possible I completely blank. I don’t know what to say. How can someone be that inconsiderate and dirty? He’s not doing it to spite me. He really believes that he cleaned the bathroom. That scares me.
Then I think: “How could his parents do this to me?” This is a crucial moment in my life. My first year of law school and I have been given this to live with. In essence I have been handicapped, forced to compete with others who live in 1 bedroom apartments, studio apartments, who live with people they get along with, people who can be properly classified as fully functional adults, and whose apartments get sunlight.
I wonder if my professors are worried about me. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard a knock on the door to find that one of them had dropped by to check on me, explaining that they could sense that I had been dealing with “trouble at home” just from the way I conduct myself in class. I would be lying if I didn’t say that my living situation was finally starting to affect my overall attitude and when I can’t even look forward to coming back to a clean, quiet home after a long day of feeling like a failure (which is pretty much the typical day for anyone at any law school) that I didn't feel a general sense of dissatisfaction with my life.
As Glinda The Good once said, these things are sent to try us.
As soon as I was given the opportunity I applied for a room transfer. I find out next week the status. It will be a terrible experience to move in the middle of the semester but it cannot be helped. And I eagerly await the day where I can savor the look on his face as I pack the T.V and surround sound system up-- he and his girlfriend (yes ladies, he’s taken) have grown quite fond of them.
We’ll see what happens. At the moment, I am very cranky and tired. I did not do as well as I thought I would last semester (even after adjusting for the unrealistic assumption that I was “special”). This semester is my chance to make it up but I am even more clueless in these classes than I was last semester. I have supplemental study material on its way. But as I wait for reinforcements, I grow more and more hopeless with every day that passes and I skip class to avoid being called on as I have not read and use the time to catch up. This, in turn, makes me feel even worse because I still haven’t shaken off the conditioning that “those who skip class are doomed to failure”. Irony, in a rare public comment, reported to have had nothing to do with the fact that I got my best grades in the two classes I deliberately skipped the most. That only leaves the mysterious comment left by Reality when questioned on how this could occur. His sole sentence was: “What do you think?”
I think class is useless.
I promised myself I will never look back on this moment of my life and romanticize it. I tend to do that once enough time has passed. But not with this. I will always refer to my 1L year of law school as objectively a terrible experience and one I wish to soon forget.
I have gleaned some gems this semester however. As a consequence of the massive amount of stress generated at school and at home I’ve been chased into the very bosom of my long time enemy-- the gym. I have developed a habit of going at 6am every morning on the weekdays and any time on the weekends. It is amazing. It’s so quiet in the mornings, no people, no cars. I love the people who are attracted to the gym at this time and we all seem to share the same sentiment as one another: they can’t get to us here.
Besides the quiet and serene of the waking up early, the gym also has given me an outlet for what I used to enjoy of school—control. I used to feel in total control of my school career. I put in hard work I got perfect grades back and just like that-- I felt sexy. Not anymore. I feel like no matter how little or how hard I try my grades will just be (no pun intended). But in the gym, the more hard work you put in the better your results. And you can watch the progress like a chia pet. I love it. It’s my own secret personal project. I look forward to it everyday, and I go no matter what the situation is in school.
I also found a pretty cool church. Much more comfortable than one I tried a month or so ago. I go with my friend Sam. The pastor preaches with a healthy balance of spirit and education, and it is packed full of happy, healthy families. I daydream that I'll have a family someday. And we will go to church every Sunday and get a treat afterwards, not a care in the world. I kind of skip all the work in between. It’s lovely, really.
Patience and faith are all that can get me through this most uncomfortable period in my life. I constantly remind myself that I’m merely making the payment for the joy that I will be experiencing in two and half short years. Until then I can only hope to grow further into myself. It’s true that hardship, if it doesn’t break you, makes you. At this point I’m too big too fail, so even though on a conscious level I feel like giving up, in fact I feel like if I didn’t give up I’d ultimately fail, on a subconscious level something tells me that I can handle this. Something tells me that while on the surface it doesn’t look pleasant; when the smoke clears I will be one of the people on top. Where do I conjure these ideas?
In any event, I’m about a week behind in every class, and the work that I have done so far I don’t understand any of it. I’m going to take the next couple of days to calm down and organize a strategy. By next week I hope to be caught up and able to see the big picture in the class. On top of that I want to write a good outline for my appellate brief, and pick a topic for my term paper.
I can’t lose here.
