6 October 2003
Living with other people can be sheer hell.
Choosing to live with other people on the basis of a ten minute conversation and a quick squizz around a flat that's in an area you quite like can be one of the more insane things we do in this life.
Someone who seems like a reasonable person can suddenly change and turn into a complete nutcase, often without warning. Little things like teabags on the edge of the sink, or hairballs in the bath plughole can turn overnight from mere irritations to something that sends you into fits of boiling rage.
So, today is flatmate hell story day... you tell me yours and I'll tell you mine - like the story of the Geordie vegan performance art student D shared a student flat with.
As for the stories - the grosser the better please - I need to feel that the current psycho flatmate isn't so bad after all, to help me resist the urge to slap her repeatedly in the five days we have left living with her.
Having witnessed it myself, I'm not sure I can help you with your feelings about the flatmate discussed, however you can at least be thankful you're not sharing with a bunch of students who may or may not have inspired the Fat Slags cartoon strip. They found the idea of a tampon in a glass of water more hilarious than words can describe, so sophisticated was their sense of humour.
And I shared a room at uni with a girl who had to get up at 7 in order to have her hair right in time for a 9.15 lecture. Her alarm clock played a Mozart symphony in electronic beeps.
Dont get me started ....
2 words for you. Dreadlocks + Plugholes.
Still finding the bloody stuff to this day.
You want gross? When I lived in a large house-share, a friend of the house was stopping over briefly in the tiny attic bedroom. The room was accessible only by a very squeaky ladder. For two weeks we marvelled at how quiet he was, never making a sound on his night-time trips to the loo, an inconvenient two floors below. It was only when he left, and we investigated the smell in his room, and looked into the two bin-liners he'd left behind, that we realised he never actually used the bathroom…
I had a transsexual, lesbian, epileptic, sexually abused roommate once, who liked to skip her meds and hop herself up on epinephrine. At one point, her friends came over and removed all the knives from the house, including mine.
I once woke up to my housemate's bloodcurling screams and yells - turns out she was breaking her dry spell. With my ex. I can tell you this, he was NOT scream-worthy.
Finding out the next day that one of your housemates and his pull for the night had a naked cavorting romp around your house, including (old house) climbing in the walls.
Very scary.
Submitted for your amusement/perusal/sympathy/whatever — an account I wrote in July of last year of one of my all-time worst roommates. A sordid tale of weddings, drugs, stolen vans, and handcuffs.
http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2002/07/best_of_times_w.html
Erm, I think that I've probably been the nightmare housemate rather than the other way round.
I also note that I'm the only person to have admitted this so far.
Hmmm... what a perfect bunch of readers you have, Pix (excepting me, of course).
I lived with this hippy sort of older artsy photographer guy who owned the house and was all into "sharing" until a few weeks later I realized that he's what I call a 'Hippy Nazi,'--someone who acts very free-living until it actually comes down to a situation where he wants you to do what he wants you to do.
Case(s) in point: 1) I was on a diet, this was a few years ago, and he had made a big pot of mashed potatoes and I couldn't really eat them as I wasn't mixing my carbs with my meat at the time, and well he had a fit!I mean, he was so pissed that I wouldn't eat his damned potatoes that he was yelling at me. Add to that other creepy things, like 2) talking to my breasts.... and 3) forcing me to be his friend. Nothing annoys me more than when people impose their will on you to be friends. I'll be your friend, just don't rush me, ok? 4) My bathroom was off the kitchen. I used to come out from taking a bath and find him making a comment about me taking a bath...Ewww... 5)He said that if he were a few years younger he'd want to date me...gross... 6) I finally moved out in July of that year and got a call from him around November of that year describing, in detail, a wooden spoon that he claimed I had stolen from him and would I please return it because it's a very special wooden spoon. Oh there are so many other things I could tell you.
Never, never share an apartment, flat, whatever with the opposite sex unless you are going to marry that person. I made that mistake once and paid for it when I came in the door with my girlfriend and we caught my roommate and her boyfriend on the couch in the throes of passion and the boyfriend looks at us and says "Oh cool! An orgy!". It took many a dinner and many a dozens of roses to get my girlfriend back after that night.
Student house, second year of university. Three beer-swilling, football-loving, Adult Channel-watching ("phwoar! look at the knockers on that!") LADS - well, you can imagine, we got on like a house on fire - one of whom dealt Ecstasy from his downstairs room, one couple who had very loud sex in the evening and very loud arguments the following morning, the friend of the woman in this relationship who happened to fancy the guy in the relationship - and me, at the back of the house, in the tiniest, cheapest room, quietly going out of my mind (cos I wasn't perfect, I promise).
Well it's a rather long story, but pehaps someday I'll write about the seemingly "very normal" former beauty pagent winner and National Merit Scholar I (Platonically) lived with who developed a fetish for blokes who were just being released from prison and needed some place to stay until they "got on their feet" (ALONG with, often, their buddies who were also being released from "The Joint". Oh, they also decided all that coke they snorted was too expensive, so they decided to try and build a crystal meth lab in the spare room...Then, she had two cats who were not trained to pee properly in the litterbox, and decided the futon on which I slept was the perfect place to "make water" - oh yes, it is a long story, indeed.
I can save you the trouble of writing about her, I already did two years ago
I had two roommates in college who prepared an entire Thanksgiving dinner. They ate and then left everything on the table. I made no effort to pick up after.
The whole mess stayed on the table for two weeks.
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