What's on my mind?

This post is going to begin the change in blog style for a while. Weekly events are repetitive, and relatively uninteresting to most of you I’m sure. Therefore I’m going to dump some things on you that have been on my mind the past few weeks. Most of it is commentary about the way things are done here, or the overall atmosphere. After last night though, this first one will be about Dave.

So my impression of Dave has wavered back and forth over the past few weeks after my initial impression last April. I must say I was a bit skeptical at the very beginning because when I looked him up on facebook I found out he was a mechanical engineer living in the Six Pack and into athletics. To me that equals wanabe engineer frat boy. The first time we met things went well, and I though that maybe he was an exception to the average person at the pack.

He has gone through stages here of showing his true colors of American college student. Last Wednesday him and Mark dragged people into trying a beer bong, but the rest of the week he was fine. Last night though was the last straw.

I came here to escape America, American mentality and American college students because quite frankly I’m tired and bored of it once again. The only problem is that not only did Dave bring it along, but he embodies everything that I hate about the stereotypical Six Pack resident/ American college student. It is apparently outside his realm of possibilities to have fun in a social atmosphere by just talking. He needs to get himself and everyone around him drunk to have a good time otherwise he is bored. If he organized his own parties I wouldn’t mind, but Dave is generally anti-social till you already know him or he is drunk. Thus considering I’ve made all the friends and introduced him to them, and invite them over for social gatherings were I cook and take care of all the preparations, it becomes extremely frustrating when he insists on playing music too loud for talking, drinking everyone into a stupor and making enough noise on the balcony to have the management yell at us for having parties that we are not supposed to have.

To top off the general problems in the apartment, I have to share a room with him. The overall cleanliness is not the problem. It is the alarm clock in the morning. He does the same crap Mike used to do as a freshman, set the alarm 30 minutes to an hour before he really wants to get up, then hits the snooze button every 10 minutes. I’ve talked to him about this already, and it has gotten me nowhere. In addition to the alarm, he has an issue with turning lights off. Even in the middle of a bright and sunny day he will use lights before opening the window shades, and then leave them on when he goes out. This is some combination of udder laziness and disregard for conserving energy because, “We have it, I’m going to use it” attitude.

Unfortunately I had no choice but to room with him because the room assignments are based on arrival dates, and out of courtesy to help Dave out initially I decided we should take the same flight. I thought it would be a nice gesture for me to help him through things the first few days because he had never been to Europe before. I regret it now, too much American in the apartment and too much English speaking. From now on I’m going to try and do things without Dave around, either in or out of the apartment even if that means making a new group of friends and leaving the current one. I don’t want to deal with him.