I have wonderful housemates. I love them all. It’s a nice change from last year when I loathed my housemates with a passion.
I, however, hate my house.
I live on campus at UC Santa Cruz. I am on campus because I got houseing here and finding houseing in town is next to impossible. I wish I did not choose to live here. I especially wished I didn’t choose to live here after they called me up in the middle of the summer and said my peaceful double room was going to be turned into a chaotic triple. They asked if that was okay, and I replied “no, that is NOT okay”. They offered me a single, which I could not pay for at all. Paying for a triple would mean that my per-quarter money for food and living expenses would go from a luxerious $900.00 to an undoable $300.00. I had to decline the single, and here I am sharing a room with two strangers.
Bed is the center of my existance. My personal living space consists of a bed, a desk that is pushed up flush to the bed (I have to sit on my bed to use my computer) and a small dresser. My bed is pushed into my closet so that my clothes hang down on top of it. My bookshelf lives on the shelf on top of my closet. My art supplies, video supplies, and my small amount of personal items go under my bed. I also shove my dirty clothes there. I do not have any claim to any floorspace. In fact, the floorspace directly in front of my bed is messy-roomates dirty clothes pile.
Living with a roomate is bearable. Living with more than a roomate is a lot like bunks at summer camp. Privacy and personal space are thrown out the window. It is a strange experience for me, who, in pre-college times, shared a nice sized house with only my mother.
The experience is even stranger for messy-roomate. Messy roomate is apparently not used to living with anyone or anything. Perhaps it is just our clashing living styles that gets to me. I consider my room to be a haven. My favorite activity in the world is to curl up under warm cozy blankets and read. It gives me an oasis of peacefulness in my crazy life. Messy-roomate’s favorite thing to do is to turn on the glaring florescent lights, fling open the doors and windows to the mid winter freezeing cold outside, blast loud music and fling dirty clothes all over the room. She has no concept of “neat and clean”, which is cool with me in her personal space (which is much larger than mine). She, however, likes to put her backpack and shoes and dirty clothes right in the middle of the floor, so that anyone entering has to trip over a gauntlet of her stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I have almost fallen over her stuff when I come in at night to go to sleep. She certainly does have a lot of stuff. At least fourteen pairs of shoes, twice as many clothes as any one else, and box after box of random stuff. The worst part is, my bed (my ONLY personal space), is right by her closet area (when I step out of bed, I end up right in front of her clothes). That means she gets to keep her bed/desk/ dresser/bookshelf area on the other side of the room sparkling clean. She simply throws her giant piles of dirty clothes and assorted crap right by my bed, where I get to trip over and smell it.
Did I mention loud music? Messy-roomate’s playlist reads like a list of “music evensven hates”. It spans every genre I despise, from country to rap to really bad “alternative”. It tends the most towards really bad music from the 70’s. I once had to put up with “Sweet Home Alabama” twice in the same night. I made a gift of a pair of headphones to her once. She knows that everytime I am settling in the room I am gonna ask if she’ll wear them (I am only ever in my room to either read or do homework, two activities I cannot do with music on). She never puts on headphones volentarily, despite the fact that clean roomate and I ALWAYS put them on when people come in the room. If she does have headphones on, she will take them off the moment you leave the room, which makes me fearful to go to the bathroom at times. Oh yeah, she also has a magic ability. She can listen to music when she is not in the room! Every time I walk in the room, even if it is completely empty, there her music is! Amazeing.
So hey, my room is constantly annoying. Luckly for me I live in an apartment. That means I have a living room and kitchen. The only problem is that this apartment has eight people in it, six of which are REALLY messy. We have an agreement to do our own dishes. However myself and angel-housemate are the only ones that ever do. The rest of the people just let dishes pile up on every availible surface. Six messy people make a lot of dishes. One time, only six hours after the house was sparkling clean, there were magically THIRTEEN dirty glasses on the counter. This was the result of these six people’s everyday life, not the detrious of guests or parties. That means that every single of those people got out a glass, used it, did not wash it, then went and got ANOTHER GLASS, dirtied it, and did not wash that either! And at least one person did that with THREE glasses! In six hours! Since we are supposed to do our own dishes, no one does the dirty dishes that people just leave there. Often times every inch of food preperation space is covered in dirty dishes. Sometimes every single one of our at least thirty glasses is dirty. A lot of the time every single piece of our THREE sets of silverware are dirty. Many times the sink is so full of dishes it becomes impossible to get water. One time it got so bad that our sink began to CRAWL WITH MAGGOTS. This is all from people who claim to do their own dishes, mind you.
What do they do while they are so busy not washing dishes? They watch TV. In the begining of the year, we agreed to keep the TV in the living room on the condition that it was a machine for watching movies on. Then one house mate started watched Star Trek at One AM on it. That was cool. Then one started to watch a soap opera in daytime. I had to deal with that inane tripe every day while making lunch, but I didn’t let it bother me. Since then, however, the TV has become a literally twenty four hour deal. Since we have so many housemates, there is now literally ALWAYS someone watching TV. Did I mention how much I hate TV? It is as if there is a drunk annoying guest mouthing off in our living room at all times. I can’t have guests over anymore, because there is no where for them to sit in my room, and the living room is taken up by blank eyed people leering at the Sci-Fi channel at what seems like full volume (it isn’t, though, cos they always manage to pointedly turn it up even louder should you try to have an actual conversation with someone). I literally can’t hold a conversation in my home. Often times I have ended up talking for hours with someone in the bathroom, because that is the only room that is not taken up with TV, radio, or sleeping people.
One time angel-housemate had his best friend over from Georgetown, who he gets to see about twice a year. They got kicked out of my room and his room by sleeping people. They also got kicked out of the living room by TV people. They sat in the hall taking for a couple hour, expecting the TV people to eventually leave, so that the guest to go to sleep. The TV people, however, started a movie, leaveing guest to rot in the hall for a couple more hours. Angel roomate was forced to make his guest sleep at someone else’s house.
And it sucks. And I seriously wish I had chosen to forgo food and get a single instead. And I can’t wait to get off campus, even if it means I have to walk barefoot uphill in the snow to school and pay rent through my nose for a bed in a closet (don’t laugh, a bed in a literal closet rents for about $600.00 a month around here…one of my teachers lives in a storage shed in someone’s backyard…they call it “creative houseing”). And I can’t really stand it any more. I have often thought of scamming some lumber and building a house in the woods north of campus (there is a whole commmunity of homeless students secretly living in tents out there). It may be the only way I can get through this year. Anything but this house…