Partly Cloudy, 64°
Unlike some of the nut jobs that Brown welcomes onto campus, the only issues that not-even-remotely crazy freshman Lillian Janning '14 has are with the eight mentally deranged roommates she has been assigned since she arrived here in early September.
"All I wanted was a girl who understood the basics of cohabitation," Janning said. "One: no boys overnight without asking first. Two: get permission before you watch movies on my TV. Three: look me in the eyes and I'll fucking kill you."
Upon moving in to her first room, Jameson 327, Janning quickly discovered that her meager requirements would not be met. "My first roommate, Lauren Huxley ('14) - total psychopath," she remembers. "She used to use my iPod all the time and leave it lying on her desk. I confronted her about it, and she refused to admit that it wasn't hers. And to back up her lie, that crazy bitch had taken the time to upload all of her music, buy a different case and headphones for it, and get a message from her deceased grandfather engraved on the back."
Continued Janning, "Whatever, it didn't play music very well after she left it in a puddle outside Keeney, while she was away in Massachusetts visiting her boyfriend."
Huxley soon came to understand that subjecting the innocent Janning to her manias would be unfair, so she initiated a room change through the Office of Residential Life. However, far from having escaped Brown's apparently dominant schizoid contingent, Janning found herself paired with yet another raving lunatic. "The second girl was even crazier than the first one," said Janning, who behaves totally reasonably twenty- four hours a day. "She had this bizarre thing where she couldn't get to sleep to the sound of hysterical crying and screaming. I was like, it's Friday night, loosen up!"
Janning's subsequent roommates were a parade of increasingly whacked-out weirdoes, she said, a testament to the fact that everybody in the world is crazy except for her. "My seventh roommate, Alyssa, had major problems," Janning recalled. "I mean, I let her wear her shoes in the room; she should let me tear the sleeves off her sweaters and pour laundry detergent all over her face if I'm having a bad day."
Finding suitable roommates for students like Janning often proves challenging for ResLife. "People at the pinnacle of mental stability are notoriously difficult to accommodate," said Senior Associate Dean of Residential and Dining Services Richard Bova. "They hold people around them to a higher standard of behavior, so they don't respond well when their roommates do things that are irrational - ask to borrow a pencil, for example, or smile too much."
Bova continued, "As a matter of fact, we're lucky to have people like Ms. Janning at this school! To keep the rest of us sane! To keep things interesting! To tell us where our kids are being kept, because seriously, Lillian, I'm getting worried; those photos you sent me look pretty realistic and I can't get in touch with our babysitter. You want to live in the Leung Gallery with the Blue Room as your personal kitchen? I'll make it happen."
