Something smelled like a mix between a barn, the fertilizer in the barn, and gym socks.

I'm a Japanese major. Not too uncommon at UH, which boasts the best Asian Studies program in the nation. My friends are Japanese majors. I'm involved in the Japanese Culture Club, and basically anything else Japanese.

So you can imagine how I said "sure!" when one of my Japanese major friends suggested we live together after I came back from my study abroad. He was a serious student, clean freak, and generally diligent if not obsessive, albeit being morbidly obese and somewhat socially backward.

But at least I would be with a serious student and maybe be using Japanese around the house. He was moving out of his parents house for the first time, at 22 years old or something, and just super-excited. He got a job at the Starbucks in Waikiki, registered for the last classes he needed before graduation, and found an apartment. Well, he actually started searching after school started, making a hassle for everyone, but whatever.

So move-in day comes. Mr. Independent gets his step-daddy to rent a U-Haul and drive him to the house, and calls all his friends over to help him move. He assures everyone that he will have all the moving done by 8:00, since that's when his boyfriend is coming in from the Mainland.

We waited until he finally showed up sometime after midnight. The boyfriend had just come on a 13 hour flight from Ohio, and now had to help move boxes and boxes of old textbooks, 2 computers, and other junk. We were up until 4 am, and I had work, from 8 am the next day. The neat-freak was running around trying to unpack stuff while I was trying to sleep until I finally reminded him that other people have normal lives to live.

Then the actual living started. The unpacking was apparently abandoned midway, as after the one year lease was up there were still a few boxes that were completely as they were when we moved in. And even though it was obvious that he brought way too much for the crackerbox sized place we lived in, he did something else that was totally responsible and independent. He maxed out his credit card buying a brand-new living room set, big-screen television, 40 piece cooking set, ceramic dishware and silverware to serve 4, and oh, yes, a PS2 and a Blackberry.

And this is after the other 3 of us living there had paid most of the deposit for him...so it wasn't really a surprise to us when he told us he didn't have any money for rent that month, but it didn't piss us off any less.

And then classes started, although you wouldn't know it from him because he never went. Simply. never. went. And then he wondered why he failed them all and couldn't graduate. And then I learned it was his second time taking both the classes. These are Japanese classes that are required for graduation, it's advanced reading, which should have been a breeze for this obsessive studying bookworm who brought boxes and boxes full of dictionaries, books on Japanese grammar, and basically every textbook he had ever owned since freshman year.

He probably could have gotten a couple months rent if he sold all of them. But going to class? Obviously too advanced of a concept in itself to grasp for the fatass. But his Japanese did suck anyway, he couldn't even read the writing on a box of Japanese snacks, much less a newspaper.

Even though he didn't care about passing his classes, he did brag about how he practiced his Japanese for his barista job. Yes, because saying "arigato" and a few other phrases any local highschool kid or heritage kid could learn in 2 days takes so much practice that you had to take an F in newspaper reading.

The boyfriend was unemployed and apparently on welfare that whole year while he bitched about how he's discriminated against (he's half-black) and spent all his time either sleeping, watching Pokemon reruns on digital cable, or playing computer games while the other 3 people in the apartment worked, studied, or both.

The main fatass usually watched the cooking channel or his Family Guy DVD boxsets, instead of studying or doing anything productive when he wasn't being a coffee mixing monkey.

That thing I said about him being OCD clean freak? Well..between him and the boyfriend, and their laundry, the apartment soon smelled...something like a mix between a barn, the fertilizer in the barn, and gym socks. And when you add that to the fact that he would make lavish meals trying to imitate something he saw on the cooking show (spending all kinds of money on gourmet spices and sauces that he would use once, or never.) in huge quantity, and then end up throwing half of it away, or buy ingredients for something, decide not to make it, and let the vegetables rot, etc, and all the pots, pans, dishes, etc. used to make it would sit in the sink for days, weeks on end, sometimes being moved to the floor to make room for more dishes.

I felt bad for the people who had to buy coffee from him at Starbucks because his apron was always caked with something disgusting, and the living room was usually littered with crumbs, bits of meat, and other remnants from whatever he ate in there.

He spent most of his time in the living room actually, even though it was technically a bedroom for our 4th roommate. Even if that roommate was sleeping, trying to sleep, studying, not in the mood, whatever, he would come home, plop his fat ass on the couch or in the nearest chair, and proceed to go on and on about his day, his childhood "traumas" (usually consisted of normal stories of bullying, etc) anything he felt like whether anyone else wanted to listen or not.

Of course, while watching Adult Swim. On loud volume. And then talking over it. And then the rent. He spent money on every luxury imaginable, gourmet ingredients for his little cooking hobby, video games, DVDs, $200 haircuts, etc, and then oops! was short on the rent. Almost every month for the whole year we were there. He usually depended on one of us to put in his part of the rent. We asked him how much money he made, and he said he made over $700 at Starbucks, which was OVER $200 more than our rent.

So spring semester came, and just to keep you up to speed, our apartment smelled like manure, had the TV blaring either Pokemon, Cooking Network, or Family Guy at any given time, had an OCD Starbucks monkey and his unemployed boyfriend that were either talking, fighting, playing video games, watching TV, and doing anything except studying or cleaning 99% of the time, and the Starbucks monkey somehow spending all his Starbucks money on junk instead of even trying to put some aside for rent money.

And of course, he failed his classes for the 2nd time, and decided to go again for a 3rd time, telling everyone that he would do it right this time, save up money for a trip to Japan, get an A in his classes, and start working out to build up muscle.

Same story. Apartment still reeked, the rest of us still had to deal with his awkward whining and stories after work, still blaring the TV whether he was actually watching it or not, wouldn't pay rent in full ever, we started getting roaches and mice because of his neglect to clean, oh, and all the new shit he bought was basically getting ruined by all the abuse.

So then he and the boyfriend started getting angry at me, because I would complain about them. The boyfriend wrote death threats to me in his blog, and told me I should leave. I was planning to leave in summer vacation anyway to go back to Japan. So I did leave. And then they complained that I left and didn't pay rent for 4 months.

Like it was expected that I should help them when the one couldn't even pay his rent on time, in full, once. But the story does have a happy ending. He and the boyfriend broke up, after they agreed to live apart for a year to save up money. He failed the classes a third time and is now fully out of school, and even if he goes back his GPA and transcript are a total mess and he'll be lucky if he can ever graduate now.

So now he's a black-apron Starbucks Coffee Master, working full-time while living, of course, at home with mommy and stepdaddy again. Everyone in the Japanese department at UH sees him as a joke and are kind of ashamed to be associated with him as well.

Oh, and I just got a notice from the landlord. The deposit was used entirely to clean up the fatass's mess, as he was the last to move out after everybody cleaned up THEIR stuff and moved out independently. He also owes them over $1000 which has to be paid in 30 days, to cover him staying in the apartment after the lease was up. Maybe he needed somebody to tell him that you're required to be completely out of the apartment and the apartment should be in rentable condition before the lease is up. Oh wait, someone did, and he took two days off from work to clean but ended up watching TV instead.

Oh well. You have to pay for your own actions, and taking 9 years to accomplish what most people can do in 5 is just what he's going to have to pay, if he ever accomplishes the goal he set for himself by enrolling in college in the first place.