But my other roommate experiences were a little more...interesting, shall we say?
I was 17 when I left home sweet home to head off for Fort Jackson, SC. Yes, my very first experience with roommates (besides sharing a room with my sisters) was sharing a bay with 64 other girls I would have otherwise never met in my life.
There were former strippers, prostitutes, moms, gang members, and of course people who had never heard of deodorant before. And there was Becky and Skylee, my life savers, the other "normal" girls. We were in Alpha Company and called ourselves "Alpha's Angels." We clung to each other and figured out how to live alongside these other girls with lives so very different from our good little girls straight out of high school and very unexposed to the real world.
Alpha's Angels (That's me on the upper right. Do you like my socks? I'm so cool!)
I managed to make it through the first day without showering. But by day two, I had to bite the bullet and wash the hot funk that 100 degree weather while wearing leather boots, pants and long sleeve uniforms can leave on you.
We didn't shower in high school PE. Heck, we hardly sweated. We learned the Macarena, Electric Slide and did the occasional Richard Simmon's Dancin' To The Oldies video.
But here, I had no choice but to strip down to nothing with a whole bunch of other girls and get all sudsy in front of them.
I was nervous the first couple of times but I quickly got over it. We had 8 shower heads, 65 girls, and 10 minutes to get ourselves clean. So Skylee, Becky another decent girl and I shared a shower, rotating in a small circle while lathering and rinsing.
You don't get much in the way of entertainment in Army Basic Training, so we made our own fun by having Sunday Shaving Parties. We'd line up at the bathroom sinks with the fanciest shaving foam we could find at the little Army store, and gossip about who cut corners on the obstacle course, which male soldier was looking the hottest in their tiny cotton workout shorts, and who was caught eating peanut butter packets in the shower stalls last night.
Those were my girls! Skylee helped me become a better runner and left sweet notes in the springs of my bunk when I was having a rough day. Becky was always cracking jokes to make our hours spent in mud fly by and she rescued me by smacking the huge blue spider out of my hair one day at the range.
What are your good roommate memories?
As for the not so good memories, including the time the girl with crabs SAT ON MY BUNK WITH HER CRABBY BUTT, I'll share those next week.
5 comments:
My favorite roomate was Chris. We lived really well together. We were bother really laid back. The only problem was that when he'd come home from work really late, he'd grab something to eat and eat it in his room. So once a week I'd have to ask him to clean out his closet of all the dishes and wash them. Yes he'd eat dinner and put the dishes in his closet. I forgave him for that because he was a really hot surfer who liked to walk around in a towel. He was dingy but he was sure pretty!
I've had roomates, good, bad, & indifferent. By far, my favorite, and best roomie was Art the Omnipotent. To this day she is my dearest friend. I moved in to her apartment the summer I came home from college with my first taste of freedom still fresh on my lips. We lauged more than humanly possible. We held each other up through horrible break-ups. We lived in a pig sty. We took up an entire row of washers at the laundromat when we decided to go.
Someday we'll be old ladies left alone in the world & we'll buy a huge house & a dozen cats & we'll live out our years scaring small children in the neighborhood. That's the plan, at anyrate.
I feel the same way about my college friends (and roommates)...love the socks by the way!
Awwww! I remember how mortified I was the Army took away my cute little DKNY glasses and replaced them with huge, ugly, brown, plastic glasses with the thick coke-bottle lens. I felt hideous all the time until I met you ladies. You two were definitely the best roommates I ever had and I will be forever grateful for your friendship! <3
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