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There have only been two times in my life so far when I have tried to find God.

The first was about a year and a half ago, just after my jaw surgery, when I stopped taking this codeine my doctor had prescribed. I was having some horrible stomach pain, and during my day or so in the bathroom, all I wanted was for someone to make it stop.

The second was just a few nights ago. Besides me in my apartment, there’s Max, my roommate. Down the hall is Alea, a girl we met randomly over the Internet. We had a room to rent, she needed a place to stay. It’s only become more complicated from there. There was the cat episode, where she brought home a cat and then refused to take it away, despite my allergy. I ended up with another prescription, this one for steroids, and the cat eventually left.

More recently, she refused to pay her portion of the rent the day before it was due. We informed her that she would therefore need to find someplace else to pay rent, but that wasn’t good enough, and an argument ensued. Later that day she magically came up with the money, but she’ll be moving out at the end of the month.

Since then, she’s changed the lock on her bedroom door, and threatened to bring the cat back unless I write and sign a letter where I lie about why she’s moving out. I can evict her for changing the lock, and I can call the cops about the extortion.

The problem is that she’s completely unreasonable. For a student admitted to USC, it’s strange that she has no sense of reason, no ethics, and no concern for the health of others. Her moral boundaries are completely defined by what she thinks she can get away with in front of a judge. She would probably ask for a copy of my birth cirtificate before getting me a birthday present. She would probably ask a taxi driver for a copy of his driver’s license before climbing in the back seat.

It was the other night that I tried to find God. She made me so angry with her ranting, stone-faced denials of common sense — I hoped that at the end of our lives, there is some final arbiter whose decisions are undisputable, who decides the fate of our souls based on the actions of our lives. There are too many people in the world like Alea, who take advantage of the way our world works. It was my prayer that one day the balance sheets will come out, and people like her will have no choice but to admit that they were wrong. #