The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

One of the facts of life at a university is that you might have a great relationship with your roommates, or you might have a terrible one. For that, American University has this thing called the Roommate Agreement. And I’m sure that it’s very important, and in many cases, necessary. Fortunately, I don’t fall into that camp, as my roommate (his name is Marco Panessa, he’s from New York) and I have gotten along positively swimmingly.

Nevertheless, a Roommate Agreement is required to be filled out, signed by both of us, and turned in to our RA (Resident Assistant) upon completion, and then reviewed again within the next two weeks. (We thought about saying that we’d review it every 35 minutes, but that idea didn’t last too long.) And to make it weirder, that thing is quite cheesy, with tables for “pre-agreement planning,” three pages of “guided discussion to have with your roommate,” and then a list of pre-determined things for which you should establish a policy with your roommate, if you choose to. Of course the policy part is open-ended to you.

After laughing at the cheesiness of the process, we set out to “hash out” our Roommate Agreement, but found that we just couldn’t stay very serious doing it. And then when we got to the last two lines, where the policy for us to determine was a fill-in-the-blank, we just HAD to exploit that for all that it’s worth.

So here it is, after an hour of thoughtful writing and absolute cracking up to the point where we almost stopped breathing: our Roommate Agreement.
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