CHAPTER 9: HOW TO GET RID OF YOUR OBNOXIOUS HIPPIE COLLEGE ROOMMATE

CHAPTER 9: HOW TO GET RID OF YOUR OBNOXIOUS HIPPIE COLLEGE ROOMMATE

Hippies. Popular media would have you believe that they are gentle, creative souls who care about the Earth and political causes. Real life experience will teach you that they are a bunch of smelly, self-centered drug addicts who like shitty music, never actually get around to doing anything about the Earth and don't care about politics unless it involves the phrase "legalize it".

If you are considering going to college, you should be aware that if you live in a dorm, it is entirely probable that you will either share a room with a hippie or live within close proximity of one.

You may consider yourself an open-minded, tolerant individual. I certainly consider myself open-minded, and at one time I considered myself tolerant of others. Then I lived with a hippie for a month and a half. This experience has left me with absolutely no tolerance for "grooviness".

Do you like to constantly smell another person's body odor mixed with pot smoke, sandalwood and feet? Do you like hearing someone play the bongos at 1:30 am when you are trying to sleep and/or study for exams? Do you like hearing the phrase "Nah man, It's cool." in the place of "I am sorry for stealing your food. Here's five dollars for your trouble." Do you enjoy the uninvited company of freeloaders and shiftless crumb-bums? Do you like coming back to your dorm room after a weekend at home only to find that someone has not only slept in your bed, but has also left a semen covered gorilla mask under your covers? Do you like smelling of second hand weed and sandalwood because someone's unwashed ass has briefly been in contact with your property? No? Because that is what it's like to live with a hippie.

If you find yourself paired with or placed near a hippie, you have to get rid of them. This chapter will help you do so.

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

Despite their colorful appearance, hippies are not magical beings. They actually derive this garb from a dated and inherently racist, 1960s view of Gypsies.

Hippies are omnivorous scavengers, but some occasionally claim to be herbivores. Being relatively spineless, many of these self-proclaimed herbivores have trouble holding onto their convictions, especially while high, and revert to their carnivorous ways when no one is looking.

The hippie sleep cycle is neither diurnal nor nocturnal. Their typical active hours are from noon until their presence becomes too cloying, even for each other. While they tend to have a favored den, they will not necessarily sleep on their own bed while within this den. As such, if you are sharing a habitat with a hippie, it is advised that you keep a broom, squirt bottle or rolled-up newspaper near your bed in case the critter passes out on it by mistake.

Hippies can be repelled by the following things:

Soap, water and shampoo; responsibility; manual labor that does not culminate in the possession of narcotics; political discourse that does not involve the founding fathers growing marijuana; hard work; expectations; social contract theory; assault weapons, steel batons, tear gas and rubber bullets;

Hippies cannot be repelled by the following things;

Holy symbols with the exception of holy water (but not because it is holy, and only when used in conjunction with soap); garlic; wooden stakes; pentagrams and hexes; vans with wizards on the side of them; jam bands; marijuana; noodle dancing; import stores; colorful scarves and crocheted winter hats;

Hippies will not drink your blood. They will, however, drain you of the will to live with them.

BE PREPARED

It is absolutely vital that you prepare yourself for a hippie infestation if you are headed for college. Even if you luck out and end up living with a normal human being, I strongly advise you to prepare. Trust me, a hippie will end up in your room at some point and you will need to deal with them.

1. Quit Smoking or Don't Ever Start

While there are few things as hateful as smoking a big, fat fuckin' cigar, your need to establish control of your living situation trumps the benefits of spewing smoke at bystanders and laughing like a mad man.

By quitting smoking, you have both future moral high ground and a compelling story.

2. Quit Using recreational Drugs

Some people will tell you college is a time for experimentation and expansion of the mind. Those people probably have wealthy parents or do not understand the concept of student loans. Either your parents are paying thousands of dollars up front, or you will be in debt for the rest of your fucking life. Do you really want to be in debt for seven years of college, four of which were spent watching Thundercats while high?

If you don't want to be a victim, you need to grow up. You don't need to stop drinking, though it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, complete sobriety gives you more leverage and prevents your roommate from using the "well alcohol kills more people than weed, so I'm gonna smoke pot in the room" argument. On the other hand, drinking makes you more human to other people in the dorm and will help you cope with your living situation.

If you don't want to quit or you want to spend a few years partying after high school, do so. Spend a year or two working in a shitty, low paying job and do some growing up. When you are ready, get your shit together and then enroll in college. If you wait long enough, you wont even need to follow my instructions because you wont need to live in a dorm.

Being drug free gives you the right to establish that you will not tolerate drug use in your dorm room. This is like hippie kryptonite. They cannot abide by this rule, and when you catch them, you can narc them out to the RA and have them kicked out of the dorm.

Yes, I did just advocate being a narc. If you are still under the belief that being a narc is bad, you need to grow up and stop enabling people to fuck up their lives and walk all over you.

3. Get On a Normal Sleep Cycle

During your senior year of high school, you need to get yourself on a normal, adult sleep cycle and remain on it over the summer. This takes discipline, but it is crucial. Wake up at 6 am and go to bed at 10 most nights.

As established in the "Know Your Enemy" section, hippies do not have regular sleep patterns. They stay up late and sleep in until the last possible minute.

This will cause you two to clash, and when another party is called in to regulate, they will side with you because there is nothing more annoying to an adult than listening to some burnout complain about having to wake up at a reasonable time and being unable to play their bongos at 3 am.

4. Memorize These Useful Phrases

"No."

"No, it's not cool."

"No, I don't want to jam."

"No, its not okay to smoke in the room."

"No, it's not cool if you do."

"Yes, that includes pot and hash."

"No, I do not want to play hacky sack."

"No. This is not the dawning of the age of Aquarius."

"That's my bed. Please get your unwashed, sweaty ass off it."

"Nice crocks, ass."

"If you so much as look at those bongos again, I will castrate you."

"If your asshole friends eat any more of my food, I will gut the lot of you and use your skins as a slip-n-slide."

"Shut the fuck up, Spicoli."

"You make the room smell like alpo and ass, you filthy derelict fuck."

"Fuck you, hippie."

"This country needs a draft and soon."

5. Request a Non-Smoking Room

I speak from personal experience when I say that there's a good chance your roommate will lie about smoking on their housing application in order to avoid getting placed with someone who is a heavier smoker than they are. The first crunchy asshole I found myself living with did just that, and was completely shocked that I would think him a selfish prick for doing so.

Chances are, any dorm you live in will be smoke free at this point anyway. Regardless, your Trustafarian roommate will probably open a window and start puffing away. If they do, bust them.

6. Join a Wholesale Club

You will want to join a wholesale club. It's the only way you are going to be able to afford the amount of Lysol and Febreeze you will need to cover the hippie stink that permeates all hippie dorm rooms.

7. Arrive Before They Do.

This is critical. You need to move into the dorm before they do. If that dirty fuck drops his or her drug rug on your cot before you ever arrive, it marks you with their musk and legally makes you his or her willing victim in the drum circle of justice.

You need to be there when they arrive and you need to make it clear that you will not tolerate their Marlo Thomas enabled bullshit. When they come through the threshold, you need give them a five mile glare, making it clear without saying a word that you have boundaries, and if they cross those boundaries, you will cut them AND THEY WILL BLEED.

8. Establish Rules.

In general, hippies are not disciplined beings. They are self-centered and hedonistic and chafe when confronted by rules. As such, you need to regulate the fuck out of your living space.

As I mentioned above, you need to establish that you will not tolerate drug use or smoking in the dorm room. Even if you do not believe that smoking or drug use is wrong, you need this rule because they will not be able to follow it, and it can be a deal breaker because they are violating dorm policies.

You need to establish that your property is your property and yours alone. They, their friends and anyone that enters your room with their expressed or implied permission are not to touch your property without your permission. Make it clear that you will hold them accountable for anything that goes missing, and that you are perfectly fine with using "an eye for an eye" as a definition of justice. This especially holds true of your bed, because they will undoubtedly know people with scabies, crabs and other forms of bodily parasite due to their poor bathing habits and open attitudes towards sex.

If they throw a party in the room while you are away, they are responsible for cleaning up the mess before you get back.

They are not to burn candles or incense in the room in order to cover their stink and/or smoke. Even if you don't mind the smell of incense, lie. Tell them you find it repulsive. Like smoking, there will probably be a policy in place that prevents them from burning things anyway because its a fire hazard.

If you are trying to sleep, they need to listen to their music on a headset. If they don't own a headset, they need to fucking buy one or deal with it. If they attempt to play their drum, rain stick or some other form of hippie instrument while you are trying to sleep, let them know that you will break it and/or throw it out the window because they are being an asshole.

Beyond these basic rules, you need to establish others on the fly, after a problematic action happens. The rules need to be fairly reasonable. As tempting as it may be, you can't treat them like your prison bitch. While you can ask them to clean the shower in the unlikely event that they actually use it, you cannot tell them that they have to sit down when they pee. Don't tell them right off the bat to clean the toothpaste out of the sink after they brush their teeth, wait for them to leave a mess before bringing it up.

Regardless of how mundane and fair your rules are, your hippie roommate will regard you as a psycho and/or a nazi. If you follow my instructions, you should create an environment that is toxic to them, but perfectly reasonable to a rational adult, and this will force them to leave either by their own accord or with the aid of an RA.

9. If All Else Fails

If all else fails, beat the living shit out of them and sleep with their free love embracing hippie girl or boyfriend. Just be sure to wear a rubber and get tested regularly for the next two years, because hippies typically don't.

GO BACK TO BEING A HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING

Once you have driven off your hippie roommate, feel free to go back to being a horrible human being. Sleep in. Listen to Slayer at midnight. Binge drink. Enjoy temporarily having a single for the lower cost of a double. You've earned it and your non-hippie neighbors will appreciate the effort.