The Real "Hell's Kitchen"

To everything there is a season... a time to vent... isn't that one of them?

When I moved into my current apartment at the beginning of this last school year, I knew I was with an interesting group about two weeks in when one of my roommates took the dirty dishes from the sink and put them in cardboard boxes in the hallway. We had no idea they were even there until it stunk really badly and there were flies. When we finally discovered the where the stench was coming from, we all (the other 5) looked around suspiciously. Who on earth does that?!

My roommate does... apparently.

A week later there was a contract on the fridge door. The basic idea of the contract was that if we signed it, we were agreeing that we were responsible adults and we would clean up after ourselves. If we did NOT sign the contract then we had to pay her $40 to do the dishes.

I'll insert right here... our dishes were not bad. Any apartment where 6 girls are living there... is going to have dishes sometimes. No biggie...

When I walked in and saw the contract, I immediately took it down and put it in my closet. The next day she pushed all of my stuff off the table and got mad at Caitie about it my two books that she had pushed off. She said that some people don't need any space... but she needs one inch. Is that too much to ask? As I walked downstairs, I could hear the commotion and if anyone knows me, they know that if there is someone picking on a member of my family or a friend of mine, I will become very assertive, very quickly. I followed Chelsea into her room and we had our first discussion about her behavior. We left the conversation with, I respectfully disagree with almost everything you just said. We will just agree to disagree.

At that point there were still 7 months left to live all together. Time to let bygones be bygones. I determined that it was better for me to spend as little time with her as possible... so I did. It did help with the tension between her and I and for a few months things were all right.

3 weeks ago, the real trouble began. I was doing my homework in the living room and my roommate came in. She looked at the dishes, went into the hallway, dumped out my laundry basket, filled it with dirty dishes, then put the laundry basket of dirty dishes back into the hallway. I just sat there and watched in amazement. It didn't occur to me that she was using my laundry basket until the whole thing was over. While she was putting the dishes into the basket, I told her that it was funny she was spending just as much energy putting the dishes into the basket as she would if she put them into the dishwasher. Wrong move, I guess. Immediately my roommate started yelling at me. We had a somewhat heated discussion where she kept saying the same illogical things over and over again. I finally left while she was still yelling at me.

During the course of that week, she had very heated arguments with 3 other roommates. There was yelling involved in all of them. One of the roommates asked her why she was yelling and she yelled back that she wasn't yelling... the other roommate was. Ugh...

This last Monday trumps every other argument had in this apartment.

I have a roommate who is engaged to a man who was previously married and has a 1-year-old son. On Monday, my engaged roommate and her fiance were babysitting their little boy. "Dishes" roommate came home and started cooking and the fiance went into the kitchen and asked her to keep it down a little bit because they were trying to put the baby down for a nap. Immediately, Dishes Roommate yelled at the engaged couple saying that it's her apartment and she can do whatever she wants. She slammed the pan down on the stove and slammed the cupboard doors. Engaged Roommate went into the kitchen and told her that she was scaring the baby (the baby was screaming at this point because of all the noise) and could she please be quiet. Dishes Roommate pushed Engaged Roommate away. Engaged roommate went into the living room and told Dishes that she would stay in the living room and Dishes would stay in the kitchen and they wouldn't talk to each other. Everything would be fine. Dishes then opened and slammed the fridge door 6 times in a row staring Engaged Roommate down. She continued yelling that it was her apartment and she could do whatever she wanted. Engaged roommate had had enough and went and shoved Dishes back and told her to knock it off. Dishes threw her pitcher of orange juice onto the engaged couple and it got all over their laptop and all over them. Engaged Roommate then slapped Dishes in the face. Dishes then punched Engaged roommate and after the fiance broke them up, Dishes ran upstair yelling she would charge Engaged Roommate with battery and she was going to call the cops.

Funny words when she started the whole thing. Fiance went to tell the manager of the apartments what happened and she came over and talked to Engaged Roommate and then Dishes and told them both that one of them needs to move out. Another roommate told the manager that Dishes should move out because the entire apartment had issues with her. Dishes moved out and then around 9:30 that night, after Dishes had moved out...

I was doing homework in my bedroom and there was a knock on my bedroom door, "Hello, Provo Police. Can I ask you a few questions?" He asked me what had happened and was I aware that my roommates had an altercation in the apartment earlier. (To be honest I had never heard the word "altercation" before, but I figured it out from context :) ) I answered his questions until Engaged Roommate came home. He then asked her and her fiance to write statements about what happened and told them that Dishes Roommate had called the cops on them. Dishes was filling out a statement outside her new apartment. We ended up talking with the Officer until 12:00 that night.

I asked the Officer what might happen and he said that both roommates will probably be charged with a class B misdemeanor. Crazy!

Since that night, my apartment has been amazing! We have all gotten along and the apartment has stayed more clean than it ever was while Dishes lived here.

I guess the moral of the story is... Proverbs 21:19
"It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman"