My Living Situation

I have four Italian flat mates. Three of them are awesome. I really enjoy living with them. When I arrived here, two of them were on vacation, and my roommate had yet to move in, so I only had one flat mate. I tried so hard to be friends with him that I didn't pay any attention to his flaws. It took me two weeks to realize how obnoxious he is. When I say something wrong in Italian, he repeats it for several days in an American accent, and asks me to repeat it to other people. He speaks fast to me in dialects I don't understand. He gives me shit for not getting enough action with Italian girls, and talks about it as if I have personally wronged him. I think this is some form of nationalism in which he always feels the need to prove that Italians are better than Americans. His name is Gaetano, but my American friends and I refer to him as "Dirty Ears Gae," which is a loose translation of his last name, Capobianco.

It was hard to get used to living with other people, because they insisted on conversing with me. I wanted to tell them "My Italian isn't that good. Perhaps it would be easier if you just gave me the death-stare for hours at a time, like Gaetano."

My roommate and I are both new here, but Gaetano has made absolutely no effort whatsoever to make us feel welcome. When I first met him, I told him I would be willing to introduce him to American girls if he would introduce me to Italian girls. He explained that he didn't need my help, and I wasn't going to get any help from him, and proceeded to never invite me out anywhere. Instead of trying to make us feel welcome, it seems like he has been doing everything in his power, short of showing us, to demonstrate that he is better endowed than the rest of us. I feel that that is the best definition I can come up with for a slew of words I don't feel like writing here.

I try to ignore him, and I'm usually fairly successful. The way I see it, he is a child, and I don't give any weight to what children say to me. This isn't arbitrary; he really acts like a baby. I was making matzo balls a few weeks ago, and he looked at them and said "Ma che schiffo!" (These are gross!). I learned when I was about four years old not to yuck somebody else's yum. Evidently, he has not learned that. Moreover, when he enters a room and sees me doing anything he'll yell "NO!" in an effort to make me flinch. He is literally the first person to try to make me flinch since I was in elementary school. I find it hard to care what he thinks about me.