Guitar Zero

The first two weeks of freshman year weren’t that bad with my roommate – let’s call him Emilio. It wasn’t until one day, as I walked out of my room, a group of floormates were sitting by the door and asked me when was the last time my roommate showered. From there, it was really a downhill spiral. Despite having all three RAs confront Emilio (they all got complaints from people passing by our open door), myself and my floor doing what they could, nothing helped (a firehose would’ve been nice, though). Eventually, Emilio was ostracised from our floor because we soon discovered that he didn’t do laundry and wore the same clothes for a week. Also, he never used bed sheets. On a gross, icky freshman bed mattress. The sweat stain outline he left there is forever burned into my brain.

After being excluded from most of the floor, Emilio’s sleep schedule reversed itself so he’d wake up at midnight and sleep at 3p.m.  I, actually having classes, went to bed at midnight so you can imagine how that went. What did not help was the guitar. This guy was legendary for not improving his guitar skills above that of a seizure-prone child over the entire year. His “guitar practice” was plucking, pulling and prodding on the guitar strings as much as possible until someone from down the hall would yell at him to shut up, no thanks to the electric guitar and amplifier his parents bought him over Christmas break. I don’t think anyone’s really lived until they get woken up at 3a.m. to what sounds like the cries of a thousand pygmies being beaten and tortured…followed by quieter cries of beating and torturing of pygmies after being told to stop. Repeatedly.