I’d just gotten out of the shower when Samantha said she needed to talk to me and she’d wait until I was decent. After I finished yesterday’s entry, I took a shower to give my allergy medicine time to kick in before I started tackling my room. Plus, taking a shower or washing my face really helps to get whatever’s bothering me off my skin. But anyway, I was really unprepared for what she had to say.
My roommate, Tanner, turned out to be a heroin addict, which is probably why even though he lived right next door to me, we never met. Even when we passed in the hallway, he was silent… which makes sense now that I know what kind of opiates he was taking. Apparently, he and his girlfriend had pre-filled syringes and they’d shoot up while the rest of us were going about our lives. I kick myself for not noticing, but to be fair, as I have said before, when I have my headphones in (which is most of the time) a bear could rip off the side of the house and I’d never notice.
When I was at the Women’s March last week, Tanner overdosed (as far as I know, he’s okay now). When 911 was called, my other roommates, both nurses at Holy Cross, stayed with him until we had emergency vehicles up and down the street. We have a zero-tolerance policy with drugs around here, so Tanner was kicked out immediately. However, a nosy neighbor called the county on us, and next Tuesday, the police are going to inspect the whole house for drugs. When they came the day of Tanner’s OD, they searched his room for anything and everything, and apparently either all the drugs were used up or removed from the house before they got here. They told Samantha that the kind of opiates Tanner and his girlfriend were using could leave particles on bedclothes, furniture, etc. and the person breathing in the room could get high. So Samantha searched the room again and Hayat bought all new bedclothes, pillows, everything for that room. It’s no problem that the police are coming again. I have one hotel bottle of Stoli Orang that I’m keeping for a snow day when I just can’t get warm, because at Autumn and Dan’s Christmas party, a five-pack of hotel vodka bottles was my white elephant gift. I told the group that I didn’t drink much, and asked if anybody wanted one. I only had one taker, so I gave the raspberry to my friend Hyde and took the rest home. They’ve been invaluable on the nights when it was so cold I shivered violently, because one shot is enough to make all my capillaries dilate and the warmth starts to radiate from within…. which is why I still have one left. It just hasn’t been cold enough to justify drinking the last one… special to me because Stoli Orang was the shot we took to send Dan off to Russia.
So, the police can go through everything I own, and that’s fine. But “Gladys Kravitz” is a retired DC cop, and apparently got the wrong idea that this was an isolated incident and not normal for “our family.” Tanner didn’t even last a month, and Krystle lasted two or three days, because Edu and I both caught her smoking weed in the house, even though she was told up front that any drugs were a dealbreaker. I suppose that these things are par for the course when you advertise on Craig’s List, because everyone is nice in the beginning. Tanner lied to Hayat’s face and told her he was in recovery…. apparently, not so much. He didn’t have a relapse so much as never being in recovery in the first place. I was very lucky that I got a room here after only talking to Hayat on the phone for about an hour and a half, because I moved in sight unseen, and it was perfect. Just absolutely perfect, the place I needed to be at the time I needed to be here. It has worked out well, because despite the fact that sometimes my room is a wreck, I’m a great roommate in terms of keeping public spaces immaculate. As these two roommates have come and gone, I feel more and more sane all the time. #smallblessings
Samantha gave Hayat a good piece of advice…. that for the next roommate, make sure they have a job in a place where they piss test, because that makes it so much more unlikely that they’ll have any sort of problems with drugs. It’s been a weird road lately, but there was no way to prepare for the future until it arrived.
It gave me even more motivation to buzzsaw through my room, and I’m almost done. Yesterday was a bear, and I have muscle aches in places I didn’t know I had. There was more recycling than I thought, because I didn’t realize that empty cans and bottles had found their way under my dressers and bed. But like I said, Thursday is trash day, so I was able to carry everything down to the curb instead of letting it sit around. The only thing that’s left is laundry, including my bedclothes, and a good sweep. It feels really, really good to be so far along in the project, and I had the motivation before I found out about the police search. That was just an added bonus. My plan is to put my clothes back in my dresser and take them down to the laundry one basket at a time so I can wash my clothes for free, even though it would be far more efficient to put everything in garbage bags and wash it all at once in a laundromat. I just want my clothes to be out of the way in case I can’t finish my laundry by Tuesday, because today and Sunday are so busy, along with other people having to do their laundry as well. I will wash everything, but there’s a lot I need to give to Goodwill because I’ve lost weight and some of my clothes don’t fit anymore. I don’t like wearing over-sized clothes because there’s no sense in looking bigger than I really am.
So, I’m taking Marie Kondo’s advice and donating everything that doesn’t give me joy, as well as preparing all of the things I want to take on my trip. I think I’ve said this before, but I’m meeting my dad and my sister in Orlando to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I’m sure I’ll have some great pictures to post along the way, both for my Facebook feed and this web site, which does an excellent job with photo galleries. I think I’m going to bring my laptop along so that I have the ability to edit them before I post, because some of them will look cool with filters, etc. and some of them will need cropping. I can do most of that on my phone, but I truly rely on GIMP to give me the best outcome. It’s basically an open source version of Adobe PhotoShop, and there’s a version called GIMPShop if you’re so familiar with PhotoShop that you don’t want to learn everything fresh. Basically, it comes with a .bat file that changes all the keyboard shortcuts to what you would use if PhotoShop was installed.
I used to use Google Picasa extensively, but they’ve retired the program and I am extremely sad about it, because it was a great image organizer and basic retouching program. There weren’t any bells and whistles, but I didn’t need them. Taking out red eye, cropping, and sometimes adding filters or warmth to improve skin tone was enough. I also liked the fact that you could organize your photo library and have it sync with your Google Drive so that you never lost a photo. My photo stream automatically backs up to Google on my phone, but it’s just not the same.
Maybe fuming about it is how I’ll finish getting everything sorted about my room. Anger is a beautiful thing because nothing says venting like taking it out on innocent baseboards.
Because they are coming.
Stories That Are All True 