Tuesday, July 19, 2011

On hell, and other people.

Even worse than looking for a new sharehouse is looking for a new housemate. Instead of an afternoon filled with procrastination and the dog park, then dinner at mum’s and the family Masterchef viewing, last Sunday was filled with back to back interviews.

It’s not the interviews themselves, but the prospect of not finding someone that clicks and having to settle with someone who doesn’t outwardly appear to have a narcissistic personality disorder or prohibitively bad personal hygiene, but doesn’t feel right. I have lived with both of these, and with alcoholics of varying degrees of functionality, with self-important, socially inept recluses and people who are always gushing, smiling and painfully ‘on’. I have lived with people who slip instantly into an easy friendship, and with people that I still see and care about, years later. There’s no test for that, that can be performed in a 15 minute ‘here’s the room, it’s this much and we have great internet and everything works’.

I don’t care what music you listen to, what you are wearing, your education level, your parents’ socio-economic background or that you only watch Good Quality TV. I don’t care whether you have experienced hand-to-mouth poverty yourself or just read about it. I don’t care about any of these things, unless they’re defining features of your personality and sense of self – in which case, your desperation to impress (or perhaps one up me, because I can tell) is tiresome. We’re not fighting over a boy, competing for a job, or courting each other.

If you like to watch TV and have a job that you hate and that doesn’t define you as a person, that’s .. fine. You don’t have to prove your value as a person, and how well you’ll fit into Moreland. You don’t need to drop names of people and HBO and warehouse parties and yeah, man, RAD, yeah, rad. Rad.

You can be whoever you are, and I’ll be who I am, and that way we can both be relaxed around each other and have a smoothly functioning household. That’s what I’m really looking for. This is about a house, where we are both going to spend a lot of time, together. Your affectations exhaust me, on your behalf, and I don’t know whether to raise an eyebrow or actually worry about when you’ll snap.

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