THE ROOMMATE FROM HELL
I rented two bedrooms last year to two separate ladies, women that I
did not even try to form any kind of closer friend****p other than a
'room mate' one, especially since as soon as I said I wanted to rent
out some rooms, and I might as well rent to females, MY FRIENDS jumped
in and warned me, "You'd better not have any idea in your mind that
you're going to develop this roommate situation into a personal
relation****p, 'cause that's not likely to happen, all you'll do is get
yourself in trouble," etc. So from the very start, I didn't even look
twice at these women, no matter how they cared to dress or prance
around the house or melt a little too comfortably, hugging the sofa
and loveseat like slices of processed cheese.
The one rental, to a vivacious woman in the music industry whose Venus-
Mars conjunction in Leo not only puts her on stage but trines my
Jupiter in Sagittarius, (amicable, financially successful, etc.,), has
gone well. The other one, a room adjacent to the first lady, plus also
having the 'run of the house' was rented to a talented artist, has not
gone well at all! I rented to the artist without looking at her
chart. In fact, I didn't even get her birthdate! We had some mutual
artistic and literary interests that came up during our first few
conversations that seemed good enough for me to just let her go ahead
and move into the house without even finding out when she was born.
NEVER WILL I MAKE THIS MISTAKE ... OF TRUSTING SOMEONE BASED ON MERE
APPEARANCES .. AGAIN!
The day she moved in, I helped move her stuff from the other side of
town. She asked for this help, which I was glad to provide, otherwise
she didn't have a way to move all her stuff into my place. Doggone
it, though... I couldn't get the rear 'gate' of my SUV open, it was
jammed. It had always been difficult to open, but now it was frozen
like 5 feet of ice. We needed to get it open to take some of her
bigger stuff... So after trying this and that, she got in the back of
the SUV on her back on the floor, and lay there and kicked, with both
feet, at the rear gate to try to pop it open. I was standing right
behind the door, pulling at the handle, just as she was kicking. About
the 3rd or 4th kick, the glass rear window shattered into a thousand
pieces and spattered flying blue-green tinted glass in all
directions. I was wearing a short-sleeve ****rt and got cut by broken
glass in 6 or 7 places. Over the next few days the process started of
getting estimates on fixing this glass. A glazier came out and was
about to put in a replacement, when, again, he couldn't (and I
couldn't) get the back door open. It turned out that in this
particular model SUV you could ONLY put in a new pane of glass IF the
locked door was unlocked, but the key would not open the lock... So
the glazier went back to his shop and took the pane of glass with him.
I ascertained that getting a locksmith to come out and get the lock
open would cost a minimum of $60, maybe $75 to $90, that's what
locksmiths charge now to come out to somebody's house. So, rather than
get into a stressful situation by putting this matter up to my
roommate for discussion, I put a sheet of plastic over the hole, held
down tight with duct tape, and put off the project until another day.
A few weeks later, this roommate had borrowed my computer to download
some art files from the Internet. She did not ask to use the
computer, I simply found her sitting there. "Oh, it's in a public
place, so I figured it was okay if I used it." She was right, the
computer table was a big metal affair with 2 computers and a printer
on it on one side of the living room, it was MY mistake for not moving
all my computer stuff into my room as soon as I rented the other two
rooms... Her downloading these art files made me feel very
uncomfortable when I realized she was loading 100+ megabyte art
programs, six or seven of them. She'd put them into a tem****ary file,
then from there onto her CD, to take back to her own (non-internet-
connected) computer. But I begged her NOT to do this, "Those files
are too big, Don't break my computer -- please?" but she sighed and
said, "Don't worry so much, it'll be okay." But it wasn't okay! She
logged off all her art stuff, and when I tried logging on again, I
couldn't get past the black DOS screen. Windows had crashed, and I
found out, so had the Hard Drive! All of my files and collected e-
mails and stories and book inventory and Kodak sofware program, and
much more, was gone, and when the "Nerds on Wheels" 'expert' came out
to the house, he swore on a Bible that he could retrieve my lost
files, but all that came back in exchange for my $400 cash was a new
186 gig harddrive, and bits and pieces of Windows-installed software I
never used anyway. All my personal files were gone. Now I did sit
down with m y Roommate from Hell and had a chat about this. She
refused to accept responsibility, claiming my computer was old, (it
was about 3 years old), and: "these things happen, goddamn it, stop
whining, grow up!"
There now began a simmering tension in the air. My car had a broken
window and my Sony PC loaded with its lovely XP Home Edition was
useless. About a week to ten days later, she claimed that somebody had
entered her room and stolen $40. She assumed that it had been ME that
stole from her, but I had no reason to steal $40 from her, I had, by
the way, just sold 8,000 books, my cheapest, least valuable books, to
a would-be dealer in California who had driven a 26-foot truck up to
my garage and paid me more than $3,000 cash for the worst-of-the-worst
of my books.. I reserved the good ones in my room and living room.
The point was, I was flush with cash, I had absolutely no need to
enter her room and take her $40. I thought this was nervy of her to
claim such a thing, in the face of the damage she had done to MY
stuff! This also began to affect our other roommate, because she was
implying it could just as easily have been HER who "stole her $40".
A few days later, relieving the awful tension in the air, the Roommate
from Hell disappeared for a couple of nights, and this was a striking
and most unusual event because she hadn't said anything, to the other
roommate, or myself, that she was planning to be away for a few days.
My other house-mate wondered out loud if I shouldn't call to re****t
her as a missing person. She had never failed to come home from work,
she kept the most regular hours imaginable; she seemed the dull,
careful, painstaking Saturnian kind of person who never varied her
schedule. Moreover, she hadn't left a note or phoned us (which she
could easily have done, since she had both our landbased as well as
cell-phone numbers) to say she wouldn't be coming home.
So, after another day went by, and a couple of California friends,
once I told them the story, DEMANDED that I call the police, I began
calling all the local hospitals to make sure she hadn't ended up in
the hospital. I then finally called the police and re****ted her as
missing. An officer called me back a couple of hours later. "This
woman is known to us, her license was suspended last year... was she
born 2/25/62 ?" I told him she'd never mentioned her birthdate. "Yep,
that's her!" So, in this roundabout and totally unexpected way, I
ended up with her date of birth! I had a note pad and wrote down the
date of birth as the officer mentioned it... Now I could cast her
chart, finally, to see what was really bothering me --- WHY had our
interactions been so damaging? WHY had she hurt both my car and my
computer? WHY was I exposed, like a sitting duck, and unable to
extract myself from this situation by either asking her to leave or
hunkering down in my room, tight as a drum, and avoiding contact of
any kind with her? After all, it takes "two to tango", or tangle.
I found out an amazing array of planetary information... First, her
PLUTO was in close conjunction to my MARS, so she and I shared some
negative potential energies. We would surely vie for space, vie for
dominance and supremacy, even as nothing but house-mates... But there
were OTHER aspects, and they were almost all negative, HIGHLY
negative:
* Her Mercury and Saturn were opposite my Moon, showing she would have
no sympathy (Saturn) to my feelings of being hurt by her (Moon). As
well, her mind (Mercury) would not easily understand my moods (Moon),
nor would I be able to understand how her mind (Mercury) worked.
* Her Mars was opposite my Saturn, which is traditionally one of the
WORST POSSIBLE configurations between two charts; Saturn destroys and
kills, and things which are my 'work', my possessions, are indicated
by Mars. So this specific inter-action is indicated in the natal
astrology for both of us. Meanwhile, the Martian side of my nature was
now beginning to eagerly criticize and berate her for being cold and
indifferent as well as malicious. but this never improved things, it
only made her more cold, indifferent, and malicious.
There are 3 or 4 other negative inter-aspects which I just don't have
time to go into here! But if you want to compare charts, mine is June
11, 1948, 5:20 a.m, Bamberg, Germany, born in a "D.P." (displaced
persons) camp, to Latvian parents who fled the Soviets during the
war. The family spent 1945--early 1950 in the camp, so I was,
literally, born in a kind of "prison" (12th House SUN conj URA, opp
JUP).
As it turned out, she showed up on the third night of being missing,
just HOURS after I re****ted her missing; and instead of apologizing
to us for leaving without posting a note or calling either of us on
the phone, she chattered to me and the other house-mate about what a
nice 3 days she'd had in Sedona with friends who'd invited her up and
taken her to a consciousness workshop of some kind.
"Gee, I kinda wish you'd called one of us to say where you went,
because Ed called the police today and filed a "missing persons"
re****t on you!"
"Oh, my god! You did WHAT?" She went ballistic--at me--for
re****ting her missing. She immediately inferred that I had "wanted to
f*ck with her", that I was stepping over the invisible line into the
area of her private life, that I was trying to MANAGE HER LIFE, as
well as GET HER IN TROUBLE, which, of course, infuriated me because my
only intention had been to do the right thing, the neighborly thing,
and CARE about SOMEONE WHO GOES MISSING. I'd tossed the situation
around with several good female friends and without exception they
said, "Ed, do not wait! Call the police NOW and see what you need to
do! She might be in danger! She might have been kidnapped! Every
moment counts!" After she came home, I, with my noble and often pig-
headed Jupiter in Sagittarius OPP Sun-Uranus, expected her to
apologize for not telling us she was taking off, and making us worry
about her. She didn't believe we were worried about her, she thought
we were "f*cking with her life!"
So, what do you do with a person like that? Strangely enough, I still
thought I had a ghost of a chance to ameliorate the situation by doing
a comparison of charts for her which would show her all these negative
and conflicting aspects between her chart and my own, and elevate
myself in her eyes through my ability in astrology. Now! Here is
where it gets pecuilar... Knowing I couldn't engage her in a
conversation because she would freak out and yell at me, I took one of
my best "Comparison of Charts" books, one written by Lynne Palmer, in
paperback, a $16.50 title that I'd bought new in an astrology shop,
and I did a chart-wheel for her, showing her chart and my chart with
planetary comparisons. Then I had a page of notes which referred to
pages in the Lynne Palmer book so she could see how 'right on' the
comparisons were.
I left the house at 7:00 o'clock at the same time as my other roomie
(the compatible one), and the Roommate from Hell was just starting to
get up. I got home at 2:20 that afternoon, and the book, the chart,
the references, were all gone. Clearly, she had taken them to read
and learn more about astrology. Right? Wrong! When I asked her how she
was enjoying the astrology book and all the related materials I'd left
for her to view, she said, "What book? I didn't see a book! I don't
believe in that stuff anyway." I never did get my book back. And that
same night, I realized with a shudder, that she had taken a CD Rom
from my computer tower which was marked "47 Stories by Ed Augusts", it
was the best collection I had of all the short stories I had written.
I had been working on it and had left it in the tower when I went to
work that day.
She had been in such a RAGE that I had dared to do her horoscope (!)
and compared my planets with hers, (!!) that she must have been
snarling and fuming, and the only suitable punishment she could think
for my 'trespassing' was to throw away the chart, the notes, the
astrology book -- AND she went over to my computer, which I STILL had
not put into MY ROOM and LOCKED the door behind me to keep it safe --
I STILL was living in a blissful unawareness that my stuff might get
trashed again --- and took out the CD, possibly thinking there might
be something on there about her chart, despite the "short story"
label. And on her way to work, because she takes the bus to work every
day, I believe she must have taken all my stuff and thrown it into one
of the dumpsters on the path to her bus-stop. I looked that night in
a number of dumpsters in the area, but they'd just been emptied by the
City, so no luck there.
So, the work of 3 or 4 years of writing, my 47 short stories, was no
more! I had carefully gotten together all my stories and put them on
that CD; soon after, she destroyed my hard-drive, so the original
database of stories was gone, I still had it on the CD; now, she stole
the CD as well! I was the most miserable person for three or four days
until I found an earlier CD that I'd done and then forgotten about
which had 34 of the collected stories, and then a friend in Canada
sent me copies of stories I'd sent her over the last couple of years,
which included more of the still-missing ones, so I finally was able
to breathe a sigh of relief that my database had not been completely
destroyed. There are still some fine stories missing, but I found
enough of the ones that I thought were gone forever so that my anger
passed. I do not hold long-term grudges, it is not in my chart to do
so. Mars ***tiles Venus and Mercury, there are no hard aspects to
Mars, that's how I interpret this comparative low level of anger and
resentment... although this roommate was sure giving me reasons to be
resentful...
This woman has now moved out of my life forever, and now that she's
gone I don't wish to ever hear of her or see her again. Knowing her
once was already too much! I wish her well in her art career, but I
wonder if she has any idea how much expense, pain and suffering she's
caused me because of her carelessness (in the case of the broken car
window and broken hard-drive, neither of which she ever offered to pay
me any compensation for), and wrong-thinking (blaming me for re****ting
her as a missing person, when we were all concerned about what had
happened to her), and then topping everything, stealing my book,
chart, and invaluable CD to punish me for trespassing into her privacy
to do her horoscope, I guess! As a guy with this Jupiter-opp-Sun
+Uranus, I easily cross over boundaries that others would not dare
cross over, that's why, once I found out her birthdate, I wanted to do
that chart and share the chart details with her. I never suspected
she would 'flip-out' as she did!
-----Ed
www.edaugusts.com
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