Monday, April 02, 2012

Can't live with em, can't live without em

So, MinCat's roommate for the past 8 months is a wierdo. Seriously. she's cranky, has a foul expression on her face, keeps moving my stuff out of common areas, refuses to talk about anything that's not house related, and generally behaves like an annoying, entitled thakurain, which I hate. She yells at me for not dusting her large and HIDEOUS collection of knick knacks, when I am not allowed to have my own knick knacks. Never mind that [a] I don't really like knick knacks, especially thumbnail sized pigs or dead birds
and [b] If I HAD knick knacks, I'd have the maid dust them!
So I keep thinking I should move out.
But then I like the actual flat...

The thing is, she is a contributing, functioning adult, and that's GREAT. We leave each other alone and she's not psycho, or dirty, or particularly anything more than strange. If I weren't me, I'd probably love living with her.

But I am me.
I want to come home to someone who actually smiles at me. Who I can ask how their day was and make five minutes of pleasant conversation with. Who I can occasionally have a random chat with.
I hate, with a visceral hatred, going home when I know she'll be there. There are few things I hate more than going home to a home that doesn't feel like home. I hate that I am never comfortable having someone crash. I hate that I can't even work around her, because she will never tell me if she's going to be home on a give night, and takes offence if I ask.

Amma is visiting, and we were talking about this situation, and I realised something.

For whatever reason, for better or worse, the average individual is socially conditioned to move towards settling down. For girls, this means playing house--and that's where maybe Mungi and I had our friction for a while, because we were both trying to play house, and well one of us had to be the husband as it were.But now, more and more people are older and older and not settling down in the traditional sense. By this age, pretty much everyone is living on their own, or with someone they're in a relationship with. And here I am, nearly thirty, and sharing a house with a random person. There's no blueprint for how this goes. There are no simple roles we can fall into. And obviously each of us wants it be HER house, with the other person as lodger as it were.

I have wanted to settle into my own place for SO long. I waited ages to acquire furniture. I love having people over, and doing up the house. I love having people to stay. I have wanted, my whole adult life, to have my OWN house. And I still don't.

Which is maybe why I'm changing my mind every week about whether I should just throw caution to the winds and freaking move out on my own, even if I'm someone who likes having another person in the house. I could get a cat...