Now that I am housed (for the present), I find that my roommate is a clinical case of �fratboy�. He has an unnatural love of alcohol and other drugs, listens to unbearably pretentious music, talks and thinks about women insatiably, goes to parties explicitly for the sake of acting self-destructively and disrespectfully retarded, dates women with maturity issues, stays out and believes others can and should thrive on three hours of sleep or less, looks down upon anyone not in his immediate circle of friends, and will merrily leave his friends in a second if he thinks he can score with a �chick.� (Just because he lacks cool or jock cred does not exempt him from fratboy status. Indeed, one does not even have to be male to be a fratboy.)

This is not, in essence, a problem. I can deal with fratboys. In college I had a few fratboy friends. I enjoyed their company, for I am rather unattractive and shy and they saw me as no threat to their pick-up ratio. Admittedly, the fun moments were when they were supplying the alcohol and there were no women around for them to impress, but, still, in some circumstances I actually like having fratboy friends (when they aren�t making me sad with their predilection towards hate crimes).

The difficulty comes not with the fratboy, but the fratboy girlfriend. Fratboys have a fatally horrendous sense in choosing relationships, which is made more confusing when one considers the fact that occasionally fratboy girlfriends, when related to while single or distracted from their obsessive need to think about their fratboy, are actually decent human beings � not people I would normally want to spend any amount of time with, but on a limit basis somewhat respectable persons. But all of that changes when you take the fratboy and the fratboy girlfriend and put them in proximity of one another.

The fratboy, as one may expect from stereotypic displays in modern media, becomes arrogant and obsessed with showing off (oddly, not their natural state, but their natural mindset seems to be off-limits to the female portion of the population). The fratboy girlfriend, in her stead, becomes needy, whiny, and insists upon being pampered and doted on at all times. For a gay man, this behavior makes the fratboy girlfriend a truly horrible thing to experience.

A notable characteristic of the fratboy relationship is that both parties lose the ability to acknowledge the existence of others and real things, and use others as tools with which to display to their partner certain qualities they think are impressive. They become self-absorbed, and will speak in tones that belie their inability to notice anyone around them, shouting late at night, speaking over others, not making eye contact with anyone else. What is most bizarre, however, is when they decide to WHISPER. The most vile of their habits, and most inhumane, no matter how mature they are in a normal state, once they whisper to each other they read as if they were reciting rejected dialogue from Saved by the Bell � insipid high-school phrases, piecemeal and awkward and unintelligible sentences that to a scriptwriter are the most exquisite agony.

Oh, a pain that cannot be described! Whispered so as to be barely audible, still sensible but at a frequency that will not be ignored! Dialogue banned by the Geneva Convention and used by the U.S. on domestic terrorists! Not the absurd lines of one who does not wish to be taken seriously, but mewling, cooing verbs that rend the ear, for which there is ire for any who take them for the claptrap that they are! Childishness! Illiteracy! A crime against all that speak the English language! A criminal act, more criminal still when forced upon a helpless writer!

Assuredly this is a crime from which all fratboys must repent ere they can begin to be accepted as a part of society!

-ps