Who’s by far the strangest person you’ve ever met?

The Quirks and the Rejection

On the day my college roommate Tom and I met each other, he talked about how he likes to avoid the cracks on the sidewalk. This was not to avoid bad luck, but because he believed that each crack contains a tiny universe and stepping on them destroys that universe and all its inhabitance.

Tom also carried around a rubber stamp, and he’d approve or reject people’s outfits by stamping their hand, claiming to be the fashion police. Tom kept a lawn chair in his shower, claiming that sitting is the luxurious way to shower.

His oddest quirk, however, was using a small megaphone to order food at drive-throughs. In his words: “It ensured clear communication between the parties.”

Tom once asked me out by giving me a 3D printed model of a human heart. He then wheezed out the words: “You stole my heart,” before clutching his chest and collapsing on the floor.

I rejected him, and this rejection seemed to be some weird breaking point for him. It seems like overnight he went from a likable and odd guy to a messy slob who became a pain in the butt to deal with.

Tom was always clean, but recently he began keeping everything he owned in a chaotic pile in the corner of our living room. At first I thought it was just dirty laundry, but nope.

The chaotic corner continued growing until it was a mix of clean clothes, literal dirty dishes, old textbooks, and bizarrely enough, food wrappers with half-eaten food still inside. It wasn’t long before the smell became unbearable.

I tried to address it casually, hoping he’d take the hint, but Tom just shrugged it off. He said he was too caught up with his studies to clean.

But even on the weekends he would walk right past it and even add to the pile when the trash can was directly in the kitchen, which he didn’t help take out. He even dropped all of his goofy antics, something that I had learned to overtime actually appreciate about him as the semester progressed.