Won't you NOT be my neighbor?

Remember this song by good old Mr. Rogers?

Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won't you be my neighbor?
 
Of course you do. It's a classic. But if I'm being honest, I think that my neighbors many years ago when I lived in a college dorm where NOT singing this tune. I'm going to come out and say it: I was a bad dorm neighbor. 

Let me explain.

My roommate in college was a very good friend from high school. We got coordinating bedding and extra long sheets. We got cute decorations. We went shopping on move in day with our moms and it was the first time that we learned the word "Berber". Our moms raved over a very nice Berber area rug that they ended up buying us for our dorm room. We were all set. Sounds promising. Right?

But here's the deal. Since my friend and I already knew each other and we also had many, many close friends on campus (being that we went to college in the state that we grew up), we weren't exactly making an effort to meet new friends. I mean, we were friendly enough. But we weren't forced to put ourselves out there and meet a whole new group of friends. So we didn't. And we, well mainly I,  possibly alienated the others as well.

You may be wondering how I did that? Well, sometimes it was on purpose...like when I drew penises on everyone's dry erase boards. Yep, that was me. Although I don't think they suspected me. I also wrote nice little messages like, "Stopped by to visit. Love, Steve." Although I didn't know a Steve and I'm not sure they did either. But "Steve" made many visits and left many, many notes for them.

But here's the all time best moment that most likely drove our neighbors to the brink of insanity. And it was actually an innocent mistake. It was a Friday and my friend and I were both heading home for the weekend. However, we forgot to turn the alarm clock off...and it was set for early in the morning since we both had 8 AM classes.

So picture this. Saturday morning the alarm clock goes off.  It must have been going off for close to an hour when the first message was left on our phone. It went something like, "Hey guys, can you turn off your alarm?" As the hours ticked by, the messages became more frequent...and extremely  vicious, if I might say. "Turn off your f*cking alarm!" "You suck!" "What the F*%&!!! Turn the alarm off! What is wrong with you?!"

As you can imagine, most people in our hall loathed us after the "Great Alarm Clock Incident of '97".

But honestly, I can't say that I'm sorry. I am proud of all of those penises I drew. And I am proud of my creativity when leaving short written messages on the doors of complete strangers. I am proud of "Steve".

Honestly, I hated dorm life. It hated me.

And so did my neighbors.