The Next Level Forum - Blogs - Frogacuda http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/blogs/703-Frogacuda Video game message board with news, humor, an arcade, and more. en Sun, 19 May 2013 01:01:23 GMT vBulletin 10 http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/images/tnl4/misc/rss.jpg The Next Level Forum - Blogs - Frogacuda http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/blogs/703-Frogacuda How to Get Rid of an Unwanted Roommate Part 2 http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/entries/173-How-to-Get-Rid-of-an-Unwanted-Roommate-Part-2 Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:24:00 GMT Continued from Part 1

The Five Stages of Grief

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined what she described as the five stages of grief. Jess, as if she had a checklist, went through each in cartoonishly exaggerated fashion.

The first stage of grief is denial. Jess arrived home that night at about 6:45 PM, to find the doors locked. I was on the other side of town at the time. She called me, threatened to call the police, and hung up. Immediately after, Charlene called me in what seemed like her best impression of a horror movie cliché, whispering and yelling at the same time, “She’s here! Come quickly! I’m scared!”

At this point, Jess sees the only obstacle to her continued residence at our abode as the door that is physically barring her entry. She begins by trying to break the doorknob off with a blunt object. Failing this, she proceeds to fling her tiny body into the door. I arrive on the scene as Jess has just finished splitting our door frame in half.



What is especially bizarre about this behavior is that Jess didn’t break the door with the intention of attacking anyone, claiming her possessions, or committing any act of vandalism. She broke the door down, because she actually thought that she’d be allowed to continue to live with us, barring that pesky door in her way. So deep was her denial that she even asked me for a key to the new locks the next morning.

The next two stages of grief are anger and bargaining, and Jess experienced both of these together. She tried every tactic she could to convince me it was ok to let her stay.

Jess, like most well-adjusted adults, has the ability to cry on command when convenient. This has proved useful countless times, including a recent incident in which she got caught driving the wrong way down a one-way street after about 12 drinks, and sobbed her way out of a DUI. She still drives drunk regularly.

After breaking the door down, Jess, of course, begins sobbing hysterically. “I wasn’t even in the house for two days!” she sobbed.

“What about those times you were in the house?” I asked, calling her bluff directly.

“Yeah, but I was only here [when I started the fight about the cat] and then the next morning at [exactly the time we know the fish were poisoned],” except she said actual times, leaving the deduction to me.

Jess would continue to alternate between claiming not to be here and placing herself exactly at the scene of the crime during every subsequent discussion on the matter, as if deliberately trying to undermine her own credibility.

“What else could have possibly happened, Jess?” I asked, trying to impart how obvious her crime was.

“Charlene probably did it herself to get back at me,” she said, spitballing wildly. I explained to her why this was impossible, since we knew how much the fish meant to her, and how relatively uninterested Charlene was in the fight with Jess.

“I bet Jake did it to frame me so you would kick me out of the house!” she said of another roommate, with whom she had been living for six years. “Everyone knows he’s been drinking again! You don’t know him, he’s a psychopath!” Jake is generally one of the mellower people you’re likely to meet and has been, with maybe one or two nights excepted, sober for the entire time I’ve known him. The wild conspiracy tale wasn’t working.

Throughout the course of the discussion, I caught Jess lying at least twenty times, most of which she admitted to when called on. I explained to her how this undermined her credibility, and I advised her that when she speaks with others in the house she try not to do this. I knew she wasn’t capable of heeding this advice, but I thought saying it advance might better help her to accept the reasons no one trusts her.

That night, Jess told us she needed to protect her cat from the “real killer.” We generally found this preferable to worrying that she would hurt him to spite her, but we recognized it was a blatant attempt to get at Charlene more than anything. We haven’t seen Rudy since, though I would assume he is safe.

The following day, I gathered the others in the house and called Jess down for a house meeting. She had her best “fuck you” scowl on, and seemed braced for combat. She vehemently denied everything, but wasn’t very convincing.

Now, if one had truly been framed for such a misdeed, or indeed if someone merely wanted to convince others she had been framed, it would seem reasonable that she might say something to the effect of “Charlene, I’m so sorry about what happened to your fish. I know this looks bad, and we’ve had our disagreements lately, but I would never let it come to this.” This is not how Jess rolls.

“Fuck you. If I wanted to kill your fish, I’d have put them on a skewer and left them on your door!” she shouted, as if to reinforce her insincerity and general insanity. She continued to insist on her innocence, and also to lie about everything she possibly could, including completely irrelevant matters. Charlene was having none of it, barking “Fuck you, we know you did it,” at every opportunity. While Charlene delivered the truth as bluntly as possible (to the quiet delight of the others present), I explained to Jess why it would be impossible to go on living with a person whom we could not trust to respect our property and well being.

Jess was still stuck in Stage 3, bargaining.

She insisted on talking to the landlord. We had already called the landlord, who was furious that I even let her sleep there the previous night and told us he’d give us our complete backing. Jess was also about eight months behind on her rent.

I called the landlord and handed Jess the phone. Her face transformed and she instantly began bawling. “I don’t know what’s going on!” she sobbed. “They broke into my room and messed everything up and they’re saying I killed fish but I wasn’t even here, and I picked the bottom lock and then just pushed the door in and it came open! I have no idea what’s happening!” The landlord reassured her and was momentarily convinced by the flurry of lies and tears.

I took the phone back and explained that exactly none of that was true, that she had used all of her might to damage the door for ten minutes straight, that no one knew anything about whatever “break in” she was talking about and that she was in fact home when the fish were killed. He groused at me for not getting the police involved and then I told him that the police were called and a report filed, but since it was his property, he would have to make the decision to press charges.

I gave the phone back to Jess, and he told her that if she didn’t leave, he would press charges. She said she understood, ran off, locked herself in her room, and refused to speak to anyone. Jess was entering the fourth stage: depression.

As self-pity and sadness set in, most of her rage subsided, except toward Charlene. She continued to seethe over how much she hated this woman who had been arguably her most loyal friend in recent years. She searched for ways to continue the fight, but didn’t find much. Jess asked me to tell Charlene she wanted three milk crates of dubious ownership returned to her. Charlene told me to tell Jess to get fucked.

Jess stormed down the stairs, screaming and threatening to call the police. “Don’t think I won’t do it over something so small!” she shouted through the door at Charlene, who was locked in her room. Jess did not appreciate the fact that the crates were stolen to begin with and marked as someone else’s property. When Charlene called her bluff, she said she’d give her until Monday before calling the authorities.

It’s been quiet since then. Jess finally reached the last stage, acceptance. No police were called to settle the milk crate custody battle. Jess overstayed her deadline by a day, and screaming ensued, but she left that night of her own accord and hasn’t returned. We were already able to fill her room for $100 more than she was paying, and went out and got two new cats from the shelter to fill the feline vacancy left by Rudy. Two days after, Jess was still delusional enough to ask if she could come to a house concert we were having, but I think she's finally moving on.

Jess has always spent about 95-100% of her breath talking about herself, and she is the hero of every story. This one is no different. After being fired from her job and thrown out of her home kicking and screaming, she posted this on her facebook: "Leave Tumulty's [her job]: Check. Move out of Townsend St: Check. Europe, here I come!" Where some see rock bottom, Jess sees opportunity. Bon voyage, Jess.
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]]> Frogacuda http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/entries/173-How-to-Get-Rid-of-an-Unwanted-Roommate-Part-2 How to Get Rid of an Unwanted Roommate Part 1 http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/entries/172-How-to-Get-Rid-of-an-Unwanted-Roommate-Part-1 Sun, 05 Dec 2010 15:21:58 GMT It’s been a trying couple of weeks.

For the last year and change, I’ve been living in a large six-bedroom house, with six other people, mostly musicians and other creative types, which I’ve generally found to be a great situation. One roommate in particular, a 28 year-old waitress and aspiring photographer named Jess, has slowly become a problem for the house, with more roommates finding themselves avoiding the common areas of our home on her account.

This began back in February when Jess broke up with her long-time boyfriend, a touring musician who also lived with us. Many of us, including the boyfriend, assumed after their breakup that Jess would leave the house and her boyfriend would stay. Instead, Jess insisted on staying. To secure this position, she filed charges against her boyfriend – charges which I know from her own admission to be at least partly false – and secured a restraining order against him.

Around this time, Jess was briefly hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation, and placed on powerful antipsychotic drugs. She took them for about a month and decided she didn’t like the side effects. To my untrained eye, Jess appears to show clear and consistent signs of pseudologia fantastica, which renders her emotionally incapable of telling the whole truth for more than a few minutes straight. Some of this is so bizarre it seems to suggest real delusion and much deeper problems connecting with reality, as well. In the last year, we’ve watched her condition worsen, fueled in part, perhaps, by major drinking problem, as well as a burgeoning cocaine habit that she tries to hide from those around her.

We knew Jess was something of a ticking time bomb, but we didn’t think it would come to this.

Blackout

A little less than two weeks ago, the power in our house was shut off, due primarily to Jess and another roommate owing close to $600 between the two of them. The rest of us could simply not cover this cost, so we were stuck without power for a time. To me, this meant an inability to complete and hand in an important assignment, and to most of the rest of us, it meant some spoiled food in the fridge, but to my roommate Charlene, it was a more pressing concern.

Charlene keeps several tanks of tropical fish, which are not only very expensive, but are very precious to their owner, who has had some of them for close to eight years. Charlene is a very sweet girl who has experienced a great deal of hardship and found the fish to be a constant in her life, and a comfort during dark times. The thought of losing her fish because they couldn’t get the oxygen they need without power was very upsetting.

As we sat around the fireplace that night, Charlene was expressing her concern for her pets, and said at one point that she felt Jess was taking the situation lightly, in an offhanded tone. Jess, who is in a permanent state of agitation, began yelling and talking over Charlene, just as she does in most conversations she has. Charlene just wasn’t in the mood to take it that night, and they got into a shouting match, which Jess seemed to process very little of. To punish us for not appreciating her greatness, she dumped water on the fire and stormed out of the house.

Charlene and Jess have been friends for about three years, so this fight was upsetting to Jess. A little while after the fight Jess sent a semi-apologetic text to Charlene about “money coming between friends” that may have missed the point, but showed concern. Charlene would have accepted this, except Jess came home shortly thereafter and began slandering Charlene to anyone that would listen, including calling her a pill-addict and other baseless untruths delivered without any appreciation for their irony. Charlene was fed up and simply avoided talking to Jess at all for the next five days.

Catnappers!

Now, when Jess is hurt by someone she cares about, she feels compelled to find a way to frame that person as a bad guy, so that she can be “better off without them.” The need for this sort of narrative was surely an important part of the drama surrounding her breakup, and has been demonstrated countless times since. Despite the fact that Charlene has long been one of her biggest supporters, Jess needed to find an excuse to make her a villain.

I get a text from Jess one night as I’m about to head home. What follows is the full word-for-word exchange, without corrections, and with comments provided in brackets.

Jess: Wheres rudy! [Rudy is Jess’s adorable cat, whose favorite person in the world is Charlene]

Me: He was in Charlene’s room when I left. [Rudy generally goes where he wants to, and usually spends most of his day with Charlene, as he has for the last three years without incident.]

Jess: Theres gonna be some new rules about him and charleme is not gonna like them [Already, Jess is lining up to create drama between Jess and Charlene]

Me: Why? Rudy’s never been happier. [This is true, Rudy, once very shy and not so social, has done nothing but cuddle and purr like a maniac in recent months]

Jess: Rudy has been happier. And she needs to know hes not her cat. I ve had it with this crap.

Me: She knows he’s not her cat. Rudy goes in there because he likes it in there, no one tells Rudy where to go. [This is not actually true. Jess chases Rudy around the house and drags him up to her room against his will. But no one else tells Rudy where to go.]

Jess: Well nox there will be a rule where hi lives upstairs. I’ve had it. He s my act and when I want him ill have him [Jess lives in the smallest room in the house, and wanted to lock him in there so that she can “have him when she wants him” despite not actually ever asking Charlene for him at all].

Me: That’s a selfish asshole move, frankly. He’s your cat, not your toothbrush. Respect his feelings. There’s no basis to be angry.

Jess: I’m not gonna text about this. We can talk about it later.

Me: There’s a reason he likes Charlene. Because she understands he’s a living creature and wouldn’t punish him to spite someone for an unrelated fight. Grow up.

Now, my words may have been blunt, but they weren’t angry. Jess was just being stupid and needed to be told there was nothing to fight about; that nothing had actually happened. Of course, this is not how she interpreted things.

“What Do You Do When…”

Now, despite the fact that nothing really happened and Jess had not, in fact, even spoken to Charlene or knocked on her door, she made a post on her Facebook that read, “What do you do when your housemates are trying to steal your cat?” I’m not sure what part of our exchange implied catnapping. It doesn’t particularly matter. Shortly after the post she deleted both me and Charlene from her Facebook, clearly indicating she was mad at us and that it wasn’t just a good-natured joke.

But that question was one she took seriously. “What do you do?” Jess felt like she had to take action, before someone else pet her kitty and made him happy. Time was of the essence.

The following morning we come down to see this:


Charlene’s fish tank was overflowing with suds. Clearly a large quantity of dish soap, or perhaps laundry detergent, had been dumped into the tank no more than a couple hours prior. Only the catfish survived (those things can live in the Schuykill, after all). The equipment, itself worth over $1,000, is likely permanently contaminated, at least for the purpose of housing sensitive tropical types.

Immediately, everyone in the house recognized what had been done. Jess was nowhere to be found, having taken off immediately following the incident. Fearful for what kind of vandalism or even assault could follow, we quickly called the landlord to get his blessing for an expedited eviction, and changed the locks on the house. Obviously we knew she’d be back for her stuff at some point, but we didn’t want her coming in unannounced. I called Jess and told her she wasn’t welcome here. She angrily proclaimed her innocence and then hung up on me.

Continued in Part 2...
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]]> Frogacuda http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/entries/172-How-to-Get-Rid-of-an-Unwanted-Roommate-Part-1