Despite all the follies of dorm life, I loved it–the cameraderie, the fact that there’s always a party somewhere, and that you can leave your door open and somebody you don’t know might wander by and you’ll make a new friend.
Unflushed turds are WAY better than piss all over the seat. Urine is sterile, you can wipe it off and you’ll be fine; and the smell isn’t that bad. Feces are both horrendously awful-smelling–many times more so than urine–and bacteria-ridden. I want to spend as little time with them as possible.
Aren’t a lot of young sailors just getting used to not having Mommy around, too? I saw a pretty good amount of that in the Air Force. There’s a higher proportion of older and more experienced people just starting out in the military, of course, but still…
Oh, and FWIW I had a randomly chosen roommate my first semester in college and he was great. The whole floor was, too–there were a couple people I was glad I didn’t share a room with, but they were generally pleasant as floormates and my roommate was, well, a better roommate to me than I was to him. I mean, I didn’t leave any unflushed turds, didn’t dump soup on anybody’s doorstep, use my roomie’s stuff without his offering it first, etc, and I bought all of my roommate’s food for him cause he didn’t have a meal plan.
Well, I ought to just tell you–I’m a porn fanatic, and pretty much every time he left the room I whipped it out and went at it. He never caught a glimpse of wang or anything but he learned to jiggle the keys loudly for a few seconds before opening the door. There was also the time that I decided that a bagged salad would be greatly improved with melted cheese–so I microwaved a bowl of cheese with lettuce in it. The room reeked and I sprayed my Glade and his Axe all over the place, but that did nothing. I didn’t have the guts to ever fess up to what the smell was.
Oh yeah, and there was the time I put a semen sample (for a study) in the fridge (talk about an awkward roommate conversation!), and another time when I put eight hits of LSD in the fridge. And I lost his bowl once–I spent a lot of time cooking rice and then someone came into the room and invited me to go get high with them, and I didn’t want to waste the rice so I put it in one of his bowls (he had agreed at the beginning of the semester that I could use his plasticware) and carried it with me. In the depths of my leafly intoxication, I completely forgot about the rice and the bowl and left them in the stadium for the next stoner. I fessed up immediately though and it wasn’t a big deal.
And I always played my music on his system while he listened to his music on headphones. He had a better opinion of my music than I had of his, and I let him freely borrow my music, my one DVD, etc. in return, but looking back I kind of took it for granted and he was a pretty agreeable guy to be cool with it.
I’ve done the full three years.