Messy student amazed by dorm room stink
March 9, 2006

by Lydia Kautz
Crusader Staff

I have often believed myself to be the least organized, messiest person in the world. In my more lucid moments I know this can’t be true. I make an effort to clean my room at least twice a week, though for some reason I still have an old school, Southern Baptist style dust bunny revival going on atop my mini fridge no matter that I clean it as often as I do the rest of my room.

Recently, while walking by one of the boys’ dorm rooms on the way to class, I saw another thing to back up my reason to believe that I am, in fact, not the messiest individual on the planet. If you have ever had the dubious pleasure of watching a sci-fi flick from decades past, the sight of what lay within that room was akin to the sort of thing you’d expect to see in one of those movies. What I can only assume was a stack of dirty clothes up to my hip resembled from the brief glance that I got a blob of gelatinous goo that has no right to be moving much less sentient, something one would expect to see eating members of the cast of a bad Star Wars ripoff. I daresay it smelled like it, too, if the Sci-Fi channel had smell-o-vision.

I’ll admit, as would my parents, that I’ve got little room to talk. I’ve had times in the not-so-ancient past when no one who had seen my room would have been the least bit surprised to see a radioactive dirty sock and pizza monster crawl out from under my bed and start wrecking havoc on the general populace. This is, however, the reason I’m shocked to think there is a place so messy even I, the once-self-proclaimed Queen of Misplaced Papers, would fear to tread.

I mean nothing against people who can tolerate such living conditions, actually your stamina is a tribute to human endurance, you should be awarded medals and the special, cost free medical care given to Veterans who faced chemical weaponry in Vietnam and lived. I’m just blown away, no pun intended, by the fact that any human being can stand these living conditions, day after day.

So, let me in on your secret; have you got gas masks hidden under your mattresses that you drag out when there’s no need to impress people with the power of your manly stench? Do you, when your door is safely closed, break out the potpourri and candle warmers only to disguise the scent with essence of moldy pizza and dirty undershorts kept in reserve for when your friends come over for a farting contest or to watch TV? Or are your sinuses just dead? Really. Inquiring minds would like to know. Actually, this inquiring mind would mostly just like you to promise never, ever to lock her in your room without air freshener if any of the above applies to you.