Addressing the unspoken rumors

So the last few posts have dealt with my roommate saying some slightly unconventional things (for a straight guy, at least), and it didn't help that he has an effeminate voice and is really sensitive about his feelings and stuff like that. And some of us quietly wondered whether he was gay.

And then one day he triumpantly entered the room with a Perfect 10 magazine.

SPC Ed - "Hey look at what I got!"
Me - "Hmm? Oh, porn. Ok cool."
SPC Ed - "Do you know what this means? This proves that I'm not gay! I'm leaving it on the coffee table."

Over the next few weeks, he made sure all the guests we had knew that it was his magazine and that he was a fan of boobs. Then one Saturday while we were cleaning up he said "well, this has served its purpose" and threw it away. Well ok then.

Note: I've since come to the conclusion that he's not gay. He just talks effeminately, and I don't think he grew up around any dudes whatsoever, so he's just kinda weird like that.

Raising eyebrows

And then there was the time SPC Ed enthusiastically went to go watch Brokeback Mountain opening weekend with a friend. A male friend.

Yeah I know that the existence of this blog is itself evidence that I was unnecessarily passive-aggressive (which I consider to be a character flaw I have since improved somewhat in the last 2 years), but I think it could have been worse - I could have done this:

Army girls

When we left basic training, I was disappointed but not shocked at the relative low quality of Army girls aesthetic qualities.

So I'm standing around and chatting with a buddy in the doorway of his barracks room; I'm standing in the hallway. SPC Ed passes by while I'm wondering aloud why most male soldiers are far fitter and more athletic than their civilian counterparts while it seems like so many female soldiers are far less fit and, uh, softer than their civilian counterparts to a friend of mine, and SPC Ed interrupts the conversation:

"YEAH! I know! It's so weird that the DUDES in the Army look so much better than the girls!"

Um, ok. My other friend couldn't hold in his laughter and just slammed the door in our faces to muffle his hysterical laughter.

Restored

Ok it's been long enough - I'm putting the site back up. I had a bunch of other entries written or outlined, but I'm not sure whether I'm going to put them up or not - I honestly don't remember quite as well since it's been a few years. But the site is back up because I figure nobody knows both me and him anymore, besides the people who already read the site.

The biggest promoter of this site

Is in fact my old roommate. Congratulations are in order to my old roommate, who has told many of his peers the url to this web page (albeit without password because he doesn't know it) in the context of trying to drum up sympathy, but is in fact leading those people who don't know me to ask me and my friends about the site. Usually I don't give them the password and instead give a condensed version of the story, usually touching on the XBOX story or the ending of public schools idea. Of course, when people here ask me about him I usually am more forthcoming about his professional shortcomings and his personal indiscretions, which I do not mention on this site.

Fashion

There was a guy with a unique sense of style (to put it as diplomatically as possible) who used to live across the hall from SPC Ed and me. We'll call him NiceGuy. He would wear clothes that didn't exactly conform to social norms; we would laugh it off and didn't think anything of it. One day, though, SPC Ed decided to correct the outfit NiceGuy had on, by telling him a bunch of stuff about how you can't wear X with Y, etc. I wasn't really paying attention. What caught my attention though, was when NiceGuy decided to disagree, and SPC Ed loudly proclaimed "No! You have no sense of fashion. Trust me, I grew up with older sisters who taught me everything there is to know about fashion."

From the opposite corner of the room, my hysterical laughter interrupted their conversation, and my roommate gave up. As much as I generally dislike when people appeal to authority in their arguments, I find it hilarious when a 25 year old appeals to the authority of his big sister on the virtue of her being a female.

Back up

Obviously I'm behind a password wall now. The password will last only as long as my old roommate and I are in the same company until early next year. And I will be putting up my saved material over the next few months until I run out of stuff. Then I might make it a blog about just living in the barracks. There is plenty of funny happening around me every day.

Links

Some of you have discovered this blog from the noise made when I had to move out. Some of you may have been confronted by Specialist Ed, my old roommate, and found out that way. Regardless, there are enough new people that I have to point them towards a good sample of what this site is about:

Bad Idea #2 - "Using an XBOX will break it" and Bad Idea #3 - "Will you buy a DVD player for the room"
Bad Idea #5 - Cleaning muddy boots in a bathtub that already has difficulty draining.
Bad Idea #7 - Let's charge $1000 a year for all students in public schools.
Note on Whiteboard
I have to convince him that bribery should be illegal.

Anyway, those are my personal favorites.

Spreading the word

I think it's a pretty bad idea to draw publicity to a site that lists your negative traits. But that's exactly what's been going on, and Specialist Ed won't stop talking about it. He has angry messages written on his whiteboard in his handwriting about this site, and he finds it necessary to continue confronting my friends about it, so I don't know what to do. I wanted to let it go, but he won't let the issue die.

So I will be posting the dozen or so stories that I had scribbled down notes for over the course of the next few weeks. In terms of content, this site still has some stuff left, so I'll be doing that. I will mostly be going back to crappy ideas that he had about society and public policy, rather than crappy roommate things he used to do. He was never a bad roommate. He was merely a bad friend and a bad soldier who happened to have terrible ideas for public policy.

Expectation of privacy

My next post will break down what happened to me as a result of maintaining this blog, what changes are coming, and what the future holds for this blog. As of right now, I am putting it back up for a simple reason - my former roommate finds it necessary to talk incessantly about this blog, and his largely inaccurate description of what I was doing deserves a rebuttal, namely the text of the blog itself.

This brings me to another point - because my former roommate won't let the issue die, more people who actually know him have discovered the blog through him than through me. Many found out when he made a big fuss and I had to abruptly change rooms amid much curiosity-arousing noise. Since he complained to others about the blog and is confronting everyone who we mutually knew about it (not very tactfully, I might add), I will let the blog speak for itself.

With that, those of you who read the blog and actually know who my roommate is, please don't aggravate the situation. Some of you have copied and redistributed the text of this site. While this is legally permissible (I publish this site under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license), I would prefer that you do not do this to spite my old roommate, which some of you have been doing. In addition, some have taken to openly taunting the former roommate - it is unacceptable and unnecessary to mock him by writing things on his door.

Now I'd also like to clarify - this blog's purpose is not to make fun of my roommate. While I did have real problems with my roommate's half-baked ideas on politics, law, and society, and I also have real problems with him professionally, our personal differences are nothing special. I regret letting him find out about the blog, since I had miscalculated the amount of damage it would cause. I'll post more on this later, as well as address concerns that were aired about OPSEC, PERSEC, breach of trust, and expectation of privacy. Most of what I posted on was unimportant, impersonal, and commonly available knowledge. If you say something to a group of your peers in the dining facility within earshot of dozens of others, it is not generally considered to be a private conversation.

I've also deleted any posts which could possibly be construed as too personal or too private.

He found it

Long story short, my roommate discovered the blog and became understandably upset. I don't think I explicitly called him any names, but he is upset that I gave information that could be used to paint him as a "loser" (his words, not mine).

So as of right now, I'm quitting this site and considering deleting all record of it. I probably won't make up my mind until the weekend.

More thoughts here.

Shiny new DVD player

My roommate bought a portable DVD player, with its own screen and everything. It is like an 11" screen and has a battery life of around 3 hours. I don't fault him for that purchase. Not that I would've bought it, but whatever - he can do what he wants with his money.

What puzzles me is that when he got it, he promptly sat on the couch and watched a few Star Wars movies on it. Instead of watching it on the 30" TV with much better sound and picture quality, that happened to be directly in front of him, he sat for several hours watching movies playing from a device sitting uncomfortably on his lap.

Self centered thinking

I'm done counting numbers with these bad ideas. I'm just going to post them.

My roommate went drinking last night and came home pretty late. I don't understand what he is thinking when he does things like this, but apparently he stopped by a friend's room at 3:30 AM asking for food. I don't know what kind of bum he thinks he is, but my friend is pretty pissed at my roommate. For good reason.

Then my roommate came home and started playing music while I was sleeping. WTF.

Of course, this is a long pattern of behavior in my roommate's behavior. He often does self-centered things, and I've catalogued many of them here - drinking my beer without realizing that I don't like that, asking me to buy a DVD player, as if that made any sense at all, or waking people up at 3:30 AM for no good reason at all.

The worst offense occurred the week after my father was murdered. My roommate called me the day we picked up my father's personal items and looked at his body for the first time, while I was on the way back home from seeing my father's stitched up, reconstructed face at the funeral home. He called me to get detailed tech support on the internet, when he fully knew that there were people he knew who knew how to reset the internet connection (unplug everything from the power cord, then plug it back in after a few seconds) living in the same hallway. To this day, I still consider that call to be the single greatest indicator of my roommate being a self-centered baby.

Elaboration on bad drug ideas

While it is fairly uncommon, my roommate's drug legalization ideas are not unheard of. Some libertarians believe that education is a better method of deterring harmful behavior than outright criminalization. I disagree, but that's not the point here. Apparently my roommate does not even subscribe to this opinion.

My roommate told me today that he thinks that drug education should not "focus on the negative aspects of drugs, and instead should teach people how to use drugs responsibly." Also, he doesn't think that "government should not advance any kind of agenda."

I am completely speechless. This guy is more retarded than I realized.

Big changes

You guys probably noticed a new appearance around here. I'm using a new template called Curves in Red by Bryan Buchs. I'll be tweaking font sizes and spacings over the next few days until I'm satisfied with the details. I also changed my blog description from "Adventures of a soldier living with another soldier who spews forth bad ideas about politics, economics, academics, relationships, and religion" to what it is now, because my possible coblogger is a law student and not a soldier.

Also, I'll be going back and retroactively editing my posts to differentiate between my posts and anyone else's posts. I'm thinking of maybe labeling them "Bad Barracks Idea #x" or something like that. Or maybe giving my current roommate some kind of pseudonym. Suggestions/comments are welcome.

Bad Idea #22 - Forgetting that it takes two to agree on a transaction

My roommate is getting rid of all his books, and he asks me if I want to read any of them. I ask about a few, and only one sounded interesting to me. I tell him I'm moderately interested in that one he mentioned, and then forget about the conversation.

The next day, I come back home to the book sitting on my desk. I think, cool, I'll check it out when I have time. The roommate peeks his head out and says

"Hey, it's sitting on your desk. I think you'd enjoy it."
"Cool, thanks."
"But the thing is...it's a textbook so..."
"Oh no worries. I don't have a problem with reading textbooks - I'm kinda a nerd like that."
"No, not that. It's just that it cost a lot, so..."
"Wait did you want me to buy it from you?"
"Uh...yeah."
"Oh well in that case, no, I'm not going to buy a book from you."

So he took it back. And I will probably never get a chance to read it. What a bitch.

My friends have roommates, too.

One of my college buddies (and a former roommate) just started law school in NY. The combination of me running out of material from my own roommate, and the fact that he started complaining about his roommates means that I think he's going to be posting here, too.

I'll have more details to follow, as I figure out how to incorporate new bloggers on this site. I may reformat my old posts so they don't get confusing as to who is talking about who.

Bad Idea #21 - Talking about Star Wars and expecting me not to make fun of him.

21. Talking about Star Wars trivia in my presence and getting offended when I call him out on it.

I was walking the other day, and noticed my roommate's voice was behind me, talking to someone else. He got closer, and I could start making out what he was saying:

Roommate - "What was...Ben Kenobi so impressed with the first time he met Anakin?"
Me (turning around) - "He was impressed with the fact that you're a huge freaking dork."
Roommate's friend - "Hey f--- you!"

And then silence.

Two hours later while we were quietly doing our own thing in our room, my roommate abruptly looked up from a comic book graphic novel to start this conversation-

Roommate - "Hey, you know, I would really appreciate it if you didn't call me a dork in front of other people."
Me - "Fine."
Roommate - "Well, do you think I'm a dork?"
Me - "I think it's ridiculously dorky to talk about Star Wars trivia in public and not expect to get called out on it."
Roommate - "Well I didn't think it was funny."

Great. Now he's easily offended. I wonder what he will think if he discovers this blog. Oh well, I'll deal with it then.

Bad Idea #20 - No consensual crime should be illegal.

20. Any action in which nobody is harmed against his own consent, should not be made illegal.

My roommate's worldview is fairly impractical. He believes that no law should make any action where people's freedom to harm themselves should be made illegal. He believes that all drugs, regardless of how they are used, should be made freely available to adults. Basically he doesn't believe that the government should punish us when we make decisions that the government believes is harmful - prostitution, drugs, not wearing seatbelts, and pornography should not be illegal.

He believes that the role of government is to protect each individual from the encroachment of rights by others, not to make things best for society at large. Actually, he's probably never thought it through, and thinks that these two ideas are the same thing. I'm not going to address that problem, though, and instead will focus on how behavior that generally is harmful should be illegal.

His view is simple - if it harms someone that has no choice in the matter, it should be illegal. Unfortunately, his definitions of "harm" and "choice" are poorly conceived. I have given him hypothetical scenarios in which someone does what he believes should be legal, and I explain why it still harms others. He probably has never thought about concepts like Cass Mastern's Spider Web theory, or the butterfly effect, or anything at all about unintended consequences.

This is a pretty standard dialogue between me and him.
Me - "So you think that if a man wants to smoke crack cocaine that should be perfectly legal?"
Him - "Yes. Absolutely, what right does someone have to tell someone else what to do?"
Me - "But don't you think that causes harm to others?"
Him - "No, I don't think so."
Me - "And who will take care of his children? Should his employer be able to collect damages for him not fulfilling his employment contract? Who pays for the task of cleaning up the mess he leaves behind, if his own estate has already been plundered by his drug habit?"
Him - "Uh...I don't know. I'll talk to you about it later."

I've had this conversation about workplace safety as well. I don't believe that profit-minded entities can be trusted to do the right thing and provide for workplace safety in a transparent and fair manner, when it would be easier to maintain the status quo.

The best part was when I got him to say that auctioning off citizen votes in an election should be legal. I led him down that path for a bit and ultimately got him to uncomfortably admit that outright bribery of politicians should be legal. His reasoning was that the rest of society was free to bribe the politician NOT to take the other bribe, if they wanted it enough. But finally he conceded that the stakes were too high and that it would ultimately be bad for a society to allow bribery to take place. Seriously, when someone has to debate and convince you that bribing politicians should be illegal, your ideas are probably terrible.

Bad Idea #19 - Really crappy study habits

Alright, my roommate and I are both students. We get GPAs and everything in our courses. My roommate has a B.A., which doesn't mean much except that I kinda expected him to know how to do well in school. I was wrong.

19. He has other people "tutor" him, or just basically do his homework while he pretends to understand each step.

That wouldn't in itself be a problem. That's ok, he's just good at covering up either his laziness or inability to learn (I suspect the truth is a bit of both). However, he comes home wondering why he has the worst grade in his class on tests, despite the fact that he's taking that exact test for the second time. That's right, he failed out of class before and started over, but he still can't really do much. He is on the cusp of getting his second "Lack of Ability" counseling statement. The LOA essentially is a document that says that the subject is too dumb to ever learn the course material effectively, and recommends that the subject do something else. Maybe pumping human waste from port-o-potties in Iraq. Or something.

Spontaneous blog post for a spontaneous bad idea.

My roommate wakes up early on Saturday (like 7AM) and then crashes hard in the late morning or early afternoon. Today he has decided to fall asleep on his couch in such a position that may very well make his neck hurt for a week. What's funny about this is that he didn't fall asleep doing something, because the television wasn't turned on, nor is there a book within arm's reach. What is in arm's reach, though, is his actual bed. That's right. My roommate chose to sleep uncomfortably on his couch, 4 feet away from his bed.

It could be worse, part 2

I just read this on craigslist:

Please don't use certain personal items of mine

While hilarious, it really does put everything back into perspective with my roommate. He doesn't do anything that comes remotely close to this. Of course, that would be terrible and I would not live with him anymore.

Bad Idea #16 - Figuratively cockblocking

My roommate went out with a group of friends this one weekend, and their group was mostly over 21. The problem is that one person in their group (incidentally, my roommate from several months ago) is under 21. They wanted to go to a club where someone was putting on a show, or something, and they decided that they would just try to get in by just walking through the door. The first few people in their group are waved in by the bouncer at the door, who only looks at the military ID's and doesn't check the DOB on the back. Unfortunately, my roommate decides for some inexplicable reason to say out loud and draw unnecessary negative attention:

15. "Actually, he's [pointing] not 21 yet. But it's ok. He's not going to drink."

Of course they are all forced to leave, and my roommate is lectured on why that was a bad idea. Thinking that he had learned from his mistake, they went out to a restaurant/bar later. When they order a bucket of beers, my roommate does the exact same thing - "Actually, he's under 21. But it's ok, because he's not going to drink." What a moron.

And I know I wasn't there. But this isn't a court of law, so hearsay goes. I will adapt and adjust this story if necessary, since I know pretty much all the people involved.

Bad Idea #15

In the Army, we generally know everyone else by last name. I know some of my friends by first name, but most of my acquaintances and coworkers I know mainly by their last name.

Back when we were in Basic Training, there was a whiteboard where we would write our names every time we got in trouble, and these people would get assigned a fireguard shift where they basically stay awake for an hour in the middle of the night, which sucked because nobody got enough sleep in Basic.

15. Writing your first name on the board when nobody in the platoon knows your first name.

When I was the one who had to wake him up for the shift, I realized that the next person on the fire guard list was someone with a Hispanic first name. I woke up every Hispanic person in my platoon (this being the U.S. Army, there were plenty of them) and the very last one I chose happened to be my future roommate. I guess technically he was my roommate then, too, in addition to the other 50 roommates I had.

That was my first interaction with this guy, and it left a very poor first impression. Later it was made worse when he would sing Tool songs in a tinny, squeaky, nasal voice towards the end of Basic Training.

And by the way, this week I will try to make like 5 posts, because my roommate has decided to feed me gold all month while I was too busy to really work on this site.

Bad Ideas #13 and #14 - Personal Hygiene habits

Relax. My roommate is not dirty, although he has some poor habits when it comes to keeping the bathtub drain clear.

I was once sitting in my room on a Saturday afternoon, minding my own business at around 2 pm, and my roommate was in the bathroom. I can't remember what I was actually doing, but I do know that my roommate decided to open the bathroom door to ask me a question:

13. "Now, if my toothbrush is already somewhat wet, is it possible that I didn't brush my teeth this morning and that it's still damp from using it last night?"

Wow. He has resorted to detective work to determine whether he had brushed his teeth yet. He told me that he can't feel/taste the difference before or after brushing his teeth, except for the minty aftertaste for a few minutes afterard. I'm wondering who has any doubt about his teeth have been brushed 6 hours after waking up.

This only happened once, so I kinda made fun of him and moved on. Then one day I realized something about his shower habits on the weekends. I normally sleep in on Saturdays while he decides to wake up at around 8AM.

14. I noticed several times that he takes showers in excess of 45 minutes and sometimes takes showers over an hour.

I noticed it early on but dismissed it, figuring that I had poor time judgment when I was half asleep on a Saturday morning. However, one day it was confirmed, when I woke up and needed to use the bathroom at 8:20. I waited until 9 AM before I decided to finally knock on the door and I hear "Oh you need to use the restroom? I'll be right out." He comes out wearing a towel, and I proceed to use the bathroom and come back out. He says to me "I wasn't finished so I'm just going to hop back in." Uh. Ok. I go back to bed and go to sleep. When he finally comes out of the bathroom, I check my watch and see that it is 9:30.

Update on ideas #10 and 11

Almost to drive the point home on my criticism that , my roommate does not understand the concept of barter, I came home to this sign:


So he spells my last name incorrectly with an 'o,' despite the fact that we've known each other for 9 months, and almost every time we see each other during the duty day we're wearing freaking uniforms with our last names on them. Secondly, he took a DVD of mine without asking first to another city. What the hell is the point of driving somewhere when you're just going to watch DVDs anyway? And finally, he makes sure to make clear that I am entitled to ONLY ONE drink, so that I don't take too many. I open the refrigerator hoping that it's not crappy beer, but alas, it is even worse than crappy beer - it's freaking regular old soda. NO THANKS, I DON'T WANT YOUR PEPSI. And he still owes me like 4 beers and a bag of cheetos. Finally, he decides to spell "tomorrow" wrong. I swear, any jackass with money can get a bachelor's degree.

EDIT: I forgot to write that I did take his last energy drink. And it was especially delicious for being the last one.

Bad Idea #12 - The causes of disease

I know my roommate is not a scientist or a mathematician. That's ok. I don't expect people to know much more than the basics in math or science. However, some forms of ignorance deserve harsh mockery.

While I mentioned someone named Stephen Wiltshire, who drew a picture of Rome entirely from memory, we talked briefly about autistics. My roommate asked me if people out there still believe that vaccines cause autism, and I told him that I believed so. He complained a bit about people who were dumb enough to believe the theories despite a lack of scientific evidence. I agreed, saying that even if the "vaccines cause autism" theory is true, vaccinations still cause more good than harm, since (my words) "we no longer have to worry about a lot of viruses anymore."

So he asks me, "What is a virus, anyway?" I don't know where to begin, so I ask him what he already knows. He tells me that he has no idea whatsoever, so I explain to him that viruses are tiny scraps of biological components that reproduce using the functions of cells in other organisms. Apparently this is too complicated for him, and he asks, "So...why does the word virus have a negative connotation? I mean, whenever I hear the word 'virus,' the tone of the sentence indicates that a virus is a bad thing."

I explain, "Well, this reproduction in many cases kills cells and interferes with normal cellular functions, and it can cause sickness in people. The cold, flu, herpes, AIDS, mumps, and a bunch of other diseases are caused by viruses."

My roommate, with a wild look of discovery in his eyes, like he's just discovered something really important for the first time ever, looks at me and asks -

12. "So is CANCER caused by a virus?"

I am utterly speechless. The answer is no, roommate. Cancer is not caused by viruses. And yes, I know the role of HPV in cervical cancer, but there is no justification for saying something like that.

Bad Ideas #10 and #11 - Completely misunderstanding the concept of barter.

Generally speaking, roommates will share some common furniture and household goods. My roommate moved in here before I did, and bought a lot of these common items - cleaning supplies, toilet paper, trash can, trash bags, etc. I'm guessing he spent like $30 for it all.

So I move in, and all this stuff is bought. I can't think of anything else to buy, so I make a mental note to myself to be courteous and buy the next round of toilet paper and trash bags. In the meantime, I buy some plastic cups for guests.

A week later, while he's asking me for advice on what kind of computer mouse to buy, I tell him to consider the one I had bought recently - I had bought one for around $30.

10. "I don't know what to look for in a computer mouse. Why don't you buy me one, since I bought the toilet paper."

No. That is incorrect. You are asking me to buy a $32 mouse in exchange for you buying $30 worth of stuff to be shared between you and me. In essence, I will be paying $32 for a 50% share of $30 worth of stuff. For those of you who are arithmetically challenged, I would be paying $32 for $15 of toilet paper and trash bags. I tell him no, and he doesn't pursue it further.

Besides, I end up spending like $10 on Drano over the next week because he kept clogging the drain with his boots.

I can't tell whether it's related to the above or not, but shortly afterward my roommate started drinking my beer. I would be buying various beers, usually costing around $7 to $9 for a 6 pack, on Friday nights, and he would inevitably be too lazy to buy his own and take a beer or two of mine. Of course, he's not a complete asshole, and he would offer me a few beers the next day out of whatever he bought.

11. Offering Bud Light in a trade for Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, various expensive microbrews, Franziskaner, etc.

First of all, these beers are not equivalent cost. Second of all, I would rather have $10 worth of good beer rather than $100 worth of brewed piss-water. Why the hell would you think that I find 50 cents worth of piss-water to be worth the same as $1.20 of real beer?

Fortunately for me, he has a 6 pack of Shiner Bock sitting in the refrigerator right now. If it weren't 11 AM on a Sunday morning, I'd probably be drinking it right now.

I can't believe this guy has taken graduate level courses in economics. What kind of crappy college is giving him credit? He admits that he has no knowledge in mathematics or statistics, and has demonstrated a complete lack of common sense in understanding economics (Bad Idea #7 is a prime example, and Bad Idea #3 is kind of similar to the above situation).

I can have bad ideas, too.

I make fun of my roommate's bad ideas. His ideas have nothing on my most recent bad idea, which was jumping on top of a parked car in front of cops.

Bad idea #9 - I can't wear contacts.

My roommate had come back in from a one hour ruckmarch, and we were discussing the topic of ruckmarches in general.

He complained, "The only thing I hate about ruckmarches is that my glasses always fog up."
I respond, "Yeah, that's what I hated most about basic. My glasses fogged up all the time. It's why I can't stand not wearing contacts for any physical activity, especially running or long marches. So why don't you wear contacts?"

9. "Oh, I can't wear contacts. Whenever I put something near my eyes, I close them."

So apparently my roommate thinks he's special. I guess he thinks everyone else in the world was born without the reflexive blinking when things move near your face. This is like saying, "I can't ever learn to ride bicycles because I fell off the first time I tried." If someone who wears contacts says that they never had any trouble putting on contacts the first few times, they are bold liars. If someone gives up this easily at something that most agree is worthwhile, he will always live his life as a quitter.

Bad Idea #8 - Give up a meal a day for Lent

8. "I'm going to stop eating dinner for Lent. Besides, I'll probably lose weight."

Let me remind everyone that we are soldiers who exercise nearly every day. If you go 18 hours every day without eating, and culminate this 18 hour fast with a 4 mile run, you're just asking for trouble.

Now about the second part - you will not lose weight by skipping meals. In fact, it's such a bad idea that I found a page titled "Skipping Meals: A Bad Idea."A Bad Idea, huh? Sounds like the name of this blog. Anyway, most studies on the topic have shown that skipping meals often leads to weight gain.

The best part was that this deep religious conviction he felt lasted a grand total of one day. Way to go, self-described future priest. I'm pretty sure he didn't even successfully stay off cigarettes during Lent either.

Bad Idea #7 - Let's charge $1000 a year for all students in public schools.

EDIT 5/7/06 - I forgot to mention that this was the bad idea that spawned the idea for this blog in the first place. After this, I came to the conclusion that most of my roommates ideas were freaking terrible.

While debating some immigration issues in a group of around 5 people, my roommate decided to drop this bombshell:

7. "We wouldn't have an illegal immigration problem if we stopped giving people free schooling."

Well, buddy, you may be onto something - let's make our country suck so bad that nobody wants to come to America anymore. That will definitely solve our problems. He proceeded (in his infinite wisdom) to set the amount of tuition at public schools to be $1000 a year per student, since that was an amount that (in his head) everyone could afford. I must share that my roommate grew up upper-middle class, that social class which spawns the most young people with bad ideas (to be fair, I'm from a similar social background).

He also explained that this would help all of America beyond the issue of illegal immigration because "poor people wouldn't want to have kids anymore." That was it, I had to berate him publicly. My friends and I explained that an additional cost of $12000 over the life of a child was going to discourage approximately zero children, because the cost of raising a child is already ridiculously expensive. To drive the point home, one of our friends at the table explained that he had his first child with his wife due to a birth control failure at a time when they couldn't afford a child.

There would probably be some increase in the number of children whose parents didn't want them - a surefire recipe for children with psychological baggage, which may cause an increase in crime and poverty. Not to mention the fact that by increasing the costs of basic education, you would have a less educated populace, which probably would compound the crime/poverty problem further. So this will increase the number of parasites on the economy - exactly the opposite of what this idea was "designed" (the better word probably would be "pulled-out-of-ass") to achieve.

Bad Idea #6 - You have to shake Gatorade because the electrolytes will settle to the bottom.

This one is courtesy of a mutual friend, who we shall call Encarta, who told me about this exchange during a drive:

Encarta - "Why do you shake your Gatorade every time you take a sip?"
Roommate -

6. "I shake Gatorade before I drink it because the electrolytes settle to the bottom."

Electrolyte: A substance which forms ions in an aqueous (water) solution (source).
Solution: A homogeneous mixture composed of evenly distributed solute particles in a solvent (source - scroll down to encyclopedia portion).

Bad ideas, meet poor understanding of basic chemistry.

Bad Idea #5 - Cleaning muddy boots in a bathtub that already has difficulty draining.

I mentioned before that my roommate was largely responsible for clogging up our shower drain. At first I considered the possibility that he was clogging it up with his body hair or something, and I didn't worry too much about it - I just bought Drano and unclogged it from time to time.

One Sunday, though, he turns to me and says "oh by the way, the drain was clogged again this weekend. There was even black oily stuff coming up." Puzzled an a little bit worried, I allow him to continue. He concludes, "I guess I shouldn't be scrubbing my boots in the bathtub anymore."

5. Cleaning boots in the bathtub, clogging the drain. Repeatedly.

I can understand clogging the bathtub exactly once with dirty runoff from cleaning boots. After the drain fails to clear, that's usually a sign to not do anything that may clog it up again. And then I realized that every time I was going outside to rinse mud off of boots, he was scrubbing chunks of mud off in the bathtub, DESPITE the fact that he knew our bathtub wasn't draining properly.

Sometimes I wonder what's going on in his mind.

Bad Idea #4 - I'm going to sleep at 8:30, and by the way, I'm a light sleeper

My roommate and I normally wake up at around 4:50 AM. This means that we generally go to sleep pretty early. But my roommate takes this to a pretty extreme level:

4. Trying to go to sleep every night at 8:30 PM

Wow. And I mean wow. To make things worse, he becomes irritable when I choose to stay up as late as, say 9:30PM, leaving the light on and doing things like opening/closing drawers, using the bathroom, and typing too loud for his comfort. Basically, he's just as annoyed at me for being up as I am annoyed at him for going to sleep that early. So it's even. Except for the tiny detail of how NOBODY sleeps this early, and it is reasonable for me to do stuff in my room until 9:30. And it wouldn't be so bad if he only did this once or twice a week, but he does it about 4 times a week on average.

Of course, there was the one night when I was just minding my own business, doing some work on my computer, when he just started giggling and laughing. I looked at the time on my computer - 9:50 PM. I give him a confused look to convey "what could be this funny?"

Him- "Oh, man, I can't believe I've been in bed for over an hour and haven't fallen asleep."
Me - "Maybe you should go to sleep when you're tired, you know, after the sun goes down."
Him - "No, I'm really tired. I just can't stop thinking about sex, though."
Me - "Uh, ok. I don't really know what to tell you. Show some discipline, I guess?"
Him - "You can't control your thoughts! Maybe if I were a Buddhist monk."

My conclusion from all this? I now worry a bit about his mental discipline in general, and his impulse control in particular.

It could be worse.

Before I get into other bad ideas by my roommate, I'm going to discuss things that other people have done, that I'm thankful are not things that my roommate will ever do:

I have a friend who got locked out of his own room two days in a row. The first time he got locked out for the entire night until around 11AM the next day because his roommate had a girl over and fell asleep. Because they argued about it during the day, the roommate locked my friend out AGAIN that evening out of spite.

Across the hall live two of my buddies. They bicker constantly, and wake each other up at night for the slightest of reasons. One of them makes weird sounds and faces, farting and belching all day. Also, he has no intention of ever getting a cell phone or computer, and yet he spends quite a bit of money on Alf, Fraggle Rock, and the Muppet Show DVDs.

Most of all, I'm glad my roommate isn't just plain crazy, like the guy who used to live down the hall from me, who would cry and shriek at anything and everything (from people to inanimate objects) whenever under the slightest bit of stress. My favorite quote from him that I happened to overhear, during one of his panic attacks, was "HOW AM I GOING TO LEARN IN CLASS WITHOUT MY ENTERTAINMENT? I NEED MY XBOX TO RELAX!" He may be the only person I've met in the last 5 years that truly scared the crap out of me. Plus he only seemed to find fat ugly Asian girls attractive. I couldn't understand this.

So, yeah, it could definitely be worse.

Bad Idea #2 - "Using an XBOX will break it" and Bad Idea #3 - "Will you buy a DVD player for the room"

My roommate purchased an Xbox 360 right before we moved in together. He then had the bad idea of only buying one Xbox 360 game, and then forgetting to actually bring it when he moved. But that is not one of the bad ideas featured in this blog post. Soon afterward, my roommate began asking me advice on what to look for in a DVD player. I inquired, "Why don't you just use your Xbox - it plays DVDs." His response was as follows:

2. Using an Xbox to play DVDs will shorten the life of the system

I could not understand this belief. I asked him where he read such a thing, and he responded that "that's how my old Xbox broke. I used it as a DVD player all the time and it stopped working in December. That's why I bought the Xbox 360 for Christmas."
Alright - it looks like my roommate has fallen for a classic logical fallacy Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. That is, he believes that because two events occur in sequence, the first event must be the cause of the second. Color me unconvinced. Besides, his sample size is exactly 1. He isn't exactly quoting scientific studies demonstrating that
the probability of console failure increases with hours of use, instead of just the age of system. After all, the Xbox 360, like all other consoles, probably has to pass a test in quality control that probably lets the system play a disc for thousands of hours straight without overheating. Granted, the Xbox does look like it has a few QA problems, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have a built in lifespan in hours, like where after 100,000 hours of operation, the console just stops working. This is roughly equivalent to buying a truck to move stuff on the weekends and then refusing to use the truck for daily commuting, opting instead to buy another compact car for passenger driving.
While it sometimes makes a little bit sense, it doesn't make enough sense to justify the added costs, including insurance and parking. He doesn't play his Xbox nearly as much the video game nerds do - I'd say he plays games on the Xbox about an hour per week. That's right. An hour per week. He barely uses it at all.
And also, what was he thinking anyway? Who cares if his Xbox 360 stops working properly 5 years from now? If there are any Xbox 360 games worth playing then (unlikely - how many PS1 games do you play on your PS2 anymore), he'll be playing them on the next generation Xbox anyway.
I gave my roommate advice on things to look for, and mentioned casually that I was considering buying a DVD player capable of playing burned data DVDs with DivX files on it. He looks at me, then says "oh ok, if you're going to buy one, I'm not going to buy one then." I thought the issue was dead, but a few weeks later he asks me a ridiculous question:

3. "So, can I ask you a favor? Can I ask you to buy the DVD player sooner rather than later? I kinda wanted to start watching DVDs on a dedicated DVD player."

You have got to be kidding me. Who the hell asks this? I looked at him, incredulous. I don't ask my friends to hurry up and buy a car so that I can start getting rides from them. It's not normal to ask someone to buy something on YOUR OWN schedule so that you can start leeching off of them right away. After all, I had used his Xbox a grand total of 3 times to watch 3 different DVDs the 3 months we had lived together. I didn't actually feel that I OWED him this favor, because I don't use his television or game consoles.
I don't know why I was so surprised. A month or so earlier, he had observed out loud that he bought all the cleaning solutions (bleach, etc) for the bathroom and bought all the toilet paper, as well as a trash can and trash bags for the room. He then tried to segue this into a recommendation that I buy a computer mouse for his computer. I responded with "you bought that stuff before I moved in. I'll just get that common use stuff the next time around. Plus it's ridiculous to make up for things you bought for the two of us with things that I buy for you. Plus this mouse you want is $30. I don't believe that toilet cleaner, bleach, trash bags, and toilet paper cost you that much." He backed down, of course, but I became wary of his poor sense of appropriate roommate roles. I ended up buying some stuff for the room a few days later, when our shower became completely clogged, probably because of him (more on this in the future).

Clarification

I've been asked the question, so I decided I would answer while this blog is still young.

Do you hate your roommate or something?

The answer is no. I like my roommate, and we get along just fine. I just like to criticize his worldview and way of thinking, that's all.

An Introduction, and Bad Idea #1: Drug legalization

I'd like to give some background. I am college-educated, and so is my roommate. My roommate is a bit older than me, which is why his bad ideas are so unforgivable.

I'm going to toy around with the format of this blog, but I think it will probably stay similar to what it is now. I'll give the terrible idea, and then break it down.

1. All drugs should be legalized and taxed.

Someone needs to explain to me in such a world, how we would prevent the crack cocaine corporations, no longer illicit and allowed to have advertising and marketing, from predatory marketing or something. I mean, look at the market penetration of Red Bull, with their advertising and their Red Bull girls giving away free drinks. Imagine walking into a club with a bunch of sexy girls handing out some new addictive drug protected by pharmaceutical patents, so that the club can start selling it at a ridiculous price the next week. Red Bull is the example - think about that 8 oz can that sells for $2 retail and like $8 in a club, and ask yourself why leisure drug companies wouldn't do the same thing. And then ask yourself if that hypothetical world would be better than ours. I highly doubt it.

Another thing - what happens to prescription drugs? There's no reason for Tylenol 3 to not be available over the counter when heroin is. Unless they're all available only with a prescription, but I don't think that it's what my roommate had in mind.

Basically, there are all sorts of kinks that need to be worked out before we can even call this idea anything other than ridiculously retarded. I don't doubt that most of my initial concerns can be addressed by 'solutions,' but the most annoying thing was that my roommate hadn't thought out ANY of these problems before vehemently arguing that this was a fantastic idea, and that you had to be a retard not to like it.

And this is the pattern - my roommate presents a sweeping, revolutionary idea without thinking about it past a superficial level, and then passionately argues with no evidence, only speculation (poorly reasoned speculation, at best) about what "would" or "should" happen. He ignores evidence against his ideas and openly embraces any supporting evidence.

This blog is inspired by my roommate, who shall henceforth be known as Specialist Ed, or SPC Ed.

I will post about him beginning tomorrow.