A Farewell to Phil (my gross roommate)

  Dear Phil,

There are so many things I would like to tell you, but will never tell you to your face because I will make you cry. So I am writing you this letter with the faint hope that you will come across it one day and know that it was intended for you.

In the five months you rented a room in my house we never so much as had a full conversation. I definitely tried, until I realized you weren’t listening and were prone to using generic, robotic responses. As evidenced by the time you were watching t.v. and I asked that use a coaster (instead of putting your drinks directly on the arm of my expensive leather couch) and I was so nice I actually handed the coaster to you to put the drink on. But instead, you just stared blankly as I stood there holding out a coaster to you. You clearly had not actually listened to a thing I had said, you just pretended to and, thus, had no idea why I was standing before you offering a coaster. You didn’t take the coaster from my outstretched hand, or take the drink off the couch, you just stared at me with an agreeable face, hoping it would be an appropriate enough response to whatever I had said.

Anyway, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your contributions the household:

                                                                                        In the bathroom

• Thank you for contributing a strange sweaty smell that may remain long after you are gone and may cause me to have to demolish the bathroom in order to get rid of it.
• Thank you for never washing your sweat-soaked towel and letting it get so putrid we all had to gang up on you and demand that you wash it and start keeping it in your room
• Thank you for disregarding our wishes and continuing to keep your disgusting towel in the bathroom until we all had to gang up on you again and demand that you towel be kept in your room
• Thank you for having a strange obsession with the bathroom and shower which I would complain about to my boyfriend who wouldn’t believe me.
• Thank you for confirming that I am always right when you made an ad on Craigslist for your room and you mentioned that we have the best shower you have ever used in your life.
• Thanks for spilling an unidentified substance all over the bathroom door and floor and not cleaning it up until I threatened to take money from your security deposit. Thanks for staining the door with that unidentified substance and making me ask you to repaint the door.
• Thanks for breaking BOTH towel rods in both bathrooms an instead of fixing them, just hanging them back up so they can fall off the second the next person touches them.

                                                                                  In the Kitchen

• Thanks for using the paper towels we generously supply free of charge as cutting boards instead of using the actual cutting boards we supply you with free of charge.
• Thank you for NEVER voluntarily taking out the trash or recycling once in the five months you lived here.
• Thanks for never cleaning out the toaster-oven you generously contributed crumbs to
• Thanks for going through our junk drawer in the kitchen repeatedly after I told you not to because those are OUR things and we are not your parents who should be supplying you with random things like permanent markers and tape.
• And a genuine thank you for accepting that you’re too lazy to wash/dry/put away dishes after using them and, thus, finally deciding to just buy fast food so you don’t have to clean up after yourself
• Thank you for eating in your room every single day when you signed a lease agreeing never to do that.

                                                                                    General

• Thanks for repeatedly leaving lint in the dryer and making everyone else have to clean it out for you.
• Thanks for pretending to “forget” the 2 loads of laundry per week max rule and letting me catch you repeatedly doing three loads of laundry a week.
• Thanks for helping yourself to our things in our garage such as our painting tape, hats, and packing tape.
• Thanks for failing to explain the house rules to your two dirty bum friends who I allowed to stay in my home for a week when they were visiting from out of town. I really appreciated when your buddy took the freshly brewed coffee I made for myself as if this were a hotel.
• Thanks for never bringing in the trash cans from off the sidewalk after trash day even though you walked by them several times.
• Thanks for never bringing in any packages left at the door even though you passed them several times.

And finally, thank you for lying to us when you signed the lease that you had a job. When in reality you occasionally, very occasionally, volunteer and your parents are paying 100% of your rent. We really enjoyed having an overgrown sloppy teenager living in our house for five months. It was nice to have someone living here that never leaves the house, ever, day in and day out (unless its to go get fast food).

I hope where ever you are moving to your perpetual filth is more appreciated. Have fun living in L.A. doing nothing for another few years so you can tell people back home you are a “freelance artist” working in L.A. I bet your mom can’t wait for your inevitable return to the cavernous mold of your ass on her couch.