The new roommate

Brian is leaving for Beijing on the 15th so I'm taking his sweet-ass room when he leaves. It will be just Dave and me until another American shows up on the 28th or 29th of May.

We had a party last night for Brian and Rachel Ching at Red Rock and it was the first time I've had a chance to see my new roommate in a social setting. He's quiet and weird, but so am I so I thought we were getting along fine.

It turns out he sucks.

And he hates me.

He over-dressed for the occassion in my opinion. I had on my Green Wave T-shirt but stopped short of wearing a bandana; he showed up like it was club night. Not really a problem, but I'm trying to paint a picture. He chatted to a few people and then settled down next to me. We chatted about some random pretentious things (he was an art major and everything that goes with that) and the conversation hovered around how lame the bar scene is in general. He mentioned that back home he prefered the more relaxed atmosphere of jazz bars where, I imagine, everyone looks gay in black berets and talks about really intellectual things like how George Bush is exactly like Hitler.

So after a few drinks he really starts to geek it up. He was just laughing too much at things that weren't funny and he had this big dopey smile on his face. With a few drinks it looked like he was really enjoying himself making everything he said before seem more like a cover for how awkward he is.

After we left the bar, we passed by a fire extinguisher in its case. I've been studying kanji like crazy and I told him that I could read the three kanji on it: extinguish, fire, and utensil. 'Thats a fire extinguisher' I alerted him. Now, this was meant to be funny (sort of) because I could see that it said fire extinguisher underneath the kanji in English. He told me that he could read it too and pointed out the English. We argued for a minute as I tried to defend the kanji I've learned. The last thing he said to me (and we haven't spoken since) was 'you have an ego.'

No shit I have an ego. Everyone who knows me knows I have an ego and I do some pretty pretentious shit. But THIS GUY doesn't know me. And he's the fucking pretentious one anyway. He's the one who always tries to talk about films and books and shit. He lost me a little bit when he started talking about metaphysic narratives in film but only because he was trying to like an asshole.

Fucking Tasmanian. Another Australian that I talked to helped me shed some light on the problem. He's from Tasmania. He's socially-awkward, probably has an inferiority comlex and definitely has something against Americans. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt because I feel like accusing someone of anti-Americanism is like, the lamest cop-out you can come up with. He is though. I actually know a lot of people here who are anti-American. A bunch of whiny bitches if you ask me.

'You have an ego.' He even said it like that. I am a robot from Tasmania.