Fifty-Seven: Why I Don't Want to Live with Other People

When I was in college, I had many a-roommate. I had clean roommates, dirty roommates, social roommates, and antisocial roommates. But no one ever compared to my roommates my senior year of college.

Let me preface by saying that I really liked the friends I lived with senior year. We had a lot of fun together, and we were all just the right amount of weird to mesh well together. My best friend and I had a "room of Ex-Stuff," which held all of the gifts/borrowed items from significant others we broke up with our senior year. It was adorned by a futon, a very large stuffed animal, some strange animal gifts, a weird free lamp my friend won from Ikea that was shaped like an ice cube, and I vaguely remember some sort of old mattress-like object. I remember fondly of our one friend and roommate spending hours dominating the television, sitting three feet from the screen building some sort of spaceship for Kingdom Hearts, and of the a giant plastic wall hanging of The King that greeted us in his Memphis glory when we walked in the door. It was a great year.

But not everything was peachy, that year. We all had our different ways of living, and they occasionally clashed dramatically. For example, I absolutely require that I wash most of the dishes from a meal before I sit down and eat it. I cannot eat if there's a huge mess waiting for my food-logged person to clean up in angst afterwards. My roommates, however, could happily leave piles of dishes in the sink for days, using the dishwasher mostly as a cabinet for storing clean dishes until it was emptied. Only then would the old ones be put into the dishwasher and washed and the process would start over again.

I also distinctly remember a time when I walked in the door to see my best friend with a look of foul disturbance on her face. "What's wrong?," I asked. It turns out a bag of potatoes that had held on for a very, very long time on top of the refrigerator had gone rancid, and we got to see what happens to a potato that is truly, truly past its prime. They leaked a foul-smelling liquid that ran liberally down the side of the refrigerator, causing a terrible mess and an absolutely abhorrent smell.

This, my dears, is why I do not want to live with other people.

I grew up in a house that was nothing short of immaculate most of the time. The carpets were almost always vacuumed, the tabletops dusted, and rarely a food spoiled before the expiration date was checked and the food was thrown away. While my standards are significantly lower than my mothers (I haven't dusted my room in too long to remember), I cannot tolerate rotten food or dishes in the sink. When I come home from work, I want to chill out and be myself, not worry about what has been destroyed in my absence, or what I'm going to get pissed about. For once in my life, I want to be responsible for myself and no one else.

If there's a dish in the sink, I want it to be mine. End of story.