approaching vapid with periodic bouts of genius
2007-03-27 : 10:11 am
I need advice from all you level headed wonderful people out there. Under any normal circumstance I'd obviously ask Blaze, however I'd like several opinions on this one.
So I have this roommate, this hallucinatory, manipulative, out of his goddamn mind, crazy ass roommate, to whom I have alluded to on this diary but it's a subject into which I have not really delved, as of yet. I am not going to right now. I will say, however, that I met him at Emerson, we got along, became casual friends, and for the first oh, 5 or 6 months of my living in his apartment things went really well.
Sure, there were a few incidents that made me realize I couldn't trust him with money or the bills, like the time when he got a cable box for his room that he didn't want any of us to use, and yet insisted it was only fair that we all pay the monthly fee for it. Sure, there were times when she showed an almost incomprehensible lack of respect, like the time when he invited all of his friends to come over to party at 1 in the morning on a Tuesday, then went to bed before they got there and made me wake up to deal with them.
However, those first 5 or 6 months were largely without incident.
Then he just went bat-shit crazy.
This bat-shit crazy period lasted about a month and a half, in which he told these really insane lies (or did he? I still don't know), tried to pit his other 4 roommates against each other at every turn, tried to gather the troops to kick each one of us out of the apartment in turn (like the time he tried to kick me out it was because we had had an argument and he "didn't like the way I spoke to him." He told my other roommates that I hated them and was always talking about them, which I didn't, and was not. They fortunately didn't believe him and didn't even feel the need to tell me about it until the bat-shit crazy period was over.) He did damage to other people's property out of spite and then tried to blame it on someone else. I really could go on but I don't have the time or energy, and I'm sure you get the point.
One day, his bat-shit crazy period came to an all-time crescendo when he ran, screaming at my roommate Val and got right in her face, and then had to be pulled off of her and blocked by our other roommate Drew. They had a big, loud, crazy fight (Val is all the strong, spicy, fiery parts Latina and Italian that you could ever fit into a petite 5'3" frame, and she still broke down and sobbed when it was over) and finally they ended up getting it through his head that he'd been acting CUH-RAAAAZZZYYYYYY LOO LOO LOO LOO LOO LOO for over a month.
He then sat down and told them that a few months prior he had found out that he'd suffered brain damage from a possible combination of too many migraines and too much Add3rall. That his doctors took him off all of his medications (Add3rall, anti-depressants, I'm not sure what else, but there were at least 3), and told him he could no longer drink, smoke pot (he was a regular at that one) or drink caffeine of any sort, all of it cold turkey, starting that day.
Now, with this kid there will always be that little voice telling me to look out the window and see for myself if he came into the apartment soaking wet and said it was raining, but I'm choosing to believe him on this one.
I think if you were dependent on seven or so different substances and your doctors removed them all at once AND told you you have irreversable brain damage, it's reasonable to think you might have a bat-shit crazy period of your own.
Fine, however, he is still exhibiting manipulative, obnoxious tendencies from time to time which just go to prove that a lot of his behavior simply stems from a severe lack of maturity. If he thinks you're being too loud he won't ask you to be quiet, he'll SLAM the hallway door, and, swearing, stomp down the hall, then later tell everyone else that he asked you to be quiet and you ignored him and just got louder, then you opened the hallway door, all just to spite him.
He got mad at Val so he wrote a scathing email to her, Drew and me, but left our fifth roommate Nick out of it. In the email he referred to things Nick had done in the past that she hated, and reprimanded her for doing those same things now, and he pasted parts of an email she had sent to him complaining meanly about Nick, an email she sent before she and Nick had patched up their initial differences and become friends. Fine, so that's why he didn't include Nick.
It turns out, as Nick told us, that he blind copied Nick on this, so Nick would get mad at Val.
Okay so you're getting the point. I live with a 26 going on 12 year old.
Here is where I need advice: This roommate and I have a mutual friend named Kat. The three of us all met at the same time in class. Neither of us see Kat more than maybe once every two months. Kat is nice, she's not my favorite person, but she's nice. Val, Drew, Nick and I are all leaving the apartment sometime between May and September, so my bat-shit crazy period roommate is looking for 4 new people to take our rooms. I was just told that Kat is moving in.
I want to tell her how incredibly immature he can be, how freaky he can be, but at the same time my entire MO at this point is to just glide right through however long it is until I get to leave, without causing any trouble. It's a self-preservation kind of thing. See, if Kat backs out, crazy dude (see how I'm even scared to write his very common first name on this anonymous blog?!?) will wonder if maybe someone said something to her, and I'm the only one a) who knows her well enough and b) whose name isn't actually on the lease, meaning I don't have anything to LOSE if he doesn't find someone.
At the same time, I think it would be nice for him to have a friend in the apartment. I think a lot of this is because he feels very alone and scared right now. If he were just immature and hadn't gone through that crazy period it would have just been annoying. Given that the crazy period is over, maybe he'll just continue to be just annoying.
Should I say something to her? I mean, I'm already anticipating the call or email in a year, "Jenny? Yeah, this is Kat. Thanks for the heads up."
What do you think? Self-preservation or acquaintance-preservation?
