By Skyler Ash
A girl is homeless after her roommates kicked her out for playing the same song on repeat for 34 days.
Kellie Ritter, a fourth-year philosophy major, had been playing Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe ever since she dropped her iPod on the ground and the automatic shuffle switched her playlist.
“The first time it came on I was just jamming, because what a throwback!” said Ritter. “Then I played it again, because it’s just so good.” It was so good that Ritter said she’s listened to the song 14,688 times in just over a month.
“You can’t put limitations on art,” said Ritter. Her roommates, Tanya Oliveri and Rebecca Joyce, disagree.
“You can put a limitation on art,” said Joyce. “We told her after the first five repeats that she could only listen to it five more times, but she just didn’t listen.”
Oliveri said that she shares a room with Ritter in their small, two-bedroom apartment at Carleton and Jarvis streets. “Hearing the song in our room was bad enough, but the walls in our place are really thin.”
Oliveri said that after two weeks of Ritter’s “sick obsession” continued, she just had to leave their apartment. She stayed with her parents in Brampton where she, “let the sweet relief of silence and white noise wash over my bleeding ears.”
“She [Kellie] has problems,” said Joyce. “She keeps running up to me and screaming about some deeper meaning, and muttering under her breath. It got to the point where Tanya [Oliveri] and I just had to take action.”
Oliveri and Joyce told Ritter that she had to either turn off the song or find a new home. “I chose the latter,” said Ritter.
“I can’t silence Carly [Rae Jepsen]. The song speaks to me, and if I have to lose my house over something that I love, then so be it.”
Ritter said the song makes her think of her ex-boyfriend, who she never called back. “It’s too late to call him, but the song gave me hope. Maybe, maybe I can call him.” Ritter hasn’t seen her ex in seven years, and said they dated for “nine beautiful days” that Ritter “will never forget and sometimes [still] fantasize about when I’m alone.”
Ritter stayed with her parents after she was forced out by her roommates, but after three days her parents also asked her to leave.
“I appreciate a good song, but this is just utter garbage,” said Ritter’s mother, Judy. “We told her to go somewhere else to listen to that so-called ‘music.’ Also, we’re moving to Florida in two weeks and we don’t want her to know, so she had to leave before the movers came.”
Ritter has been couch-surfing for the last week, and hasn’t been able to stay in one place for more than a day because of her music taste. Ritter is currently staying at a Holiday Inn in Toronto because none of her friends will take her in.
Ritter’s plan is to track down her ex-boyfriend and live with him. “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, you know? And I know we can rekindle that magic from all those years ago. We just have to. Because like Carly says ‘maybe,’ and I like those odds.”
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