House-sharing- When it is hell having a housemate
May 28, 2009
WHEN John Donne uttered his famous quip that no man is an island, it was only the alcohol talking. When one has been drinking prolifically, there is a certain point one reaches at which point one becomes very friendly.
By Ernest Bazanye
WHEN John Donne uttered his famous quip that no man is an island, it was only the alcohol talking. When one has been drinking prolifically, there is a certain point one reaches at which point one becomes very friendly.
One begins to believe in universal love and brotherhood. A oneness with all. One then becomes a nuisance to everybody else and that is the first reason I do not want roommates.
There was this chap who caused his roommate untold agony because of his fondness for the bottle’s contents.
He would go back home late, spend eons outside the door fumbling with the keys, rattling louder with each failed attempt to get the right key into the right hole.
When he finally made it into the house, he would decide, in what he thought was the spirit of proper manners, to leave the lights off and try to find his way around in the dark.
Of course, being blind drunk, he would end up making a lot more noise than he would if he had just flicked the switch on for a second.
The drunko would then curse the other dwellers of the house the next morning when every slight sound they made sounded like grenades going off in his head.
I learnt my lesson from the short time I spent living in a hostel room with those guys. The suffering I caused them when I would come back from Kaos and Rock Gardens was something I would not want to go through.
So the next chance I had to choose a housemate, I looked keenly for a teetotaler. And was soon to learn that they can be pains in the backsides, too.
This was during my Makerere days. I was through with university, but still lived in the hostels because they afforded me one advantage I did not have at home: The chance to come in way past 11:00pm.
One of our roommates had a taste for classical music and, even though he pronounced Chopin as “chopping†and Mozart with a “zzzz†sound, he still felt confident enough to turn the stereo on at 2:00am when he came back from studying.
Then he would mop the floor of our hostel room, while wailing along to Chopin’s violins.
We could have talked to him about it, but we kind of liked waking up and finding that the room had been cleaned. We ended up pulling a cunning trick: We would disconnect the speakers before we went to sleep.
But the damage had already been done. By the time I left the hostel to make it on my own in the world, I had already come to the obvious conclusion — room-mates are a pain.
In the several years since then, I have lived alone in about eight different homes and in that time have only had a room-mate for two months.
It was dear friend of mine but even though she was the model roomie: Clean, quiet and often brought takeaway, in two months I was quite ready to go back to being alone. I miss her.
The problem with you misguided people is you believe in the lie that the human soul needs contact with other humans in order to forestall a terrible condition called loneliness.
This may be true, but even though drinking boiled water is good for your health, it still is not a good idea to spill five scalding litres down your throat.
A complete dearth of human contact can cause this loneliness of which you speak, but an excess of human contact brings about an even worse condition.
A condition we call People Being All Up In Your Face All The Damn Time.
There is something called personal space. For some people, it is larger than it is with others.
You see it in bank queues — when you do not really feel comfortable unless the next person in line is at least a foot behind you.
Some people need the whole house to themselves before they can exhale and relax.
A house where everything conforms to their own whims, where the mess is all yours, where the unfinished cleaning is all yours, where the cracks and the stains are all yours and there is no one to blame, but yourself.
And where the improvements and the decorations and the health of the plants, if any, are all yours too, and were all made to suit the needs and wants of no one, but you.
It can be the one place in the whole world where everything truly does revolve around you.
Once you get settled into that, it is hard to let go of it.
Especially, not for people who come home and start blasting Chopping and Mozzzart on the radio at 2:00am.
WHEN John Donne uttered his famous quip that no man is an island, it was only the alcohol talking. When one has been drinking prolifically, there is a certain point one reaches at which point one becomes very friendly.
One begins to believe in universal love and brotherhood. A oneness with all. One then becomes a nuisance to everybody else and that is the first reason I do not want roommates.
There was this chap who caused his roommate untold agony because of his fondness for the bottle’s contents.
He would go back home late, spend eons outside the door fumbling with the keys, rattling louder with each failed attempt to get the right key into the right hole.
When he finally made it into the house, he would decide, in what he thought was the spirit of proper manners, to leave the lights off and try to find his way around in the dark.
Of course, being blind drunk, he would end up making a lot more noise than he would if he had just flicked the switch on for a second.
The drunko would then curse the other dwellers of the house the next morning when every slight sound they made sounded like grenades going off in his head.
I learnt my lesson from the short time I spent living in a hostel room with those guys. The suffering I caused them when I would come back from Kaos and Rock Gardens was something I would not want to go through.
So the next chance I had to choose a housemate, I looked keenly for a teetotaler. And was soon to learn that they can be pains in the backsides, too.
This was during my Makerere days. I was through with university, but still lived in the hostels because they afforded me one advantage I did not have at home: The chance to come in way past 11:00pm.
One of our roommates had a taste for classical music and, even though he pronounced Chopin as “chopping†and Mozart with a “zzzz†sound, he still felt confident enough to turn the stereo on at 2:00am when he came back from studying.
Then he would mop the floor of our hostel room, while wailing along to Chopin’s violins.
We could have talked to him about it, but we kind of liked waking up and finding that the room had been cleaned. We ended up pulling a cunning trick: We would disconnect the speakers before we went to sleep.
But the damage had already been done. By the time I left the hostel to make it on my own in the world, I had already come to the obvious conclusion — room-mates are a pain.
In the several years since then, I have lived alone in about eight different homes and in that time have only had a room-mate for two months.
It was dear friend of mine but even though she was the model roomie: Clean, quiet and often brought takeaway, in two months I was quite ready to go back to being alone. I miss her.
The problem with you misguided people is you believe in the lie that the human soul needs contact with other humans in order to forestall a terrible condition called loneliness.
This may be true, but even though drinking boiled water is good for your health, it still is not a good idea to spill five scalding litres down your throat.
A complete dearth of human contact can cause this loneliness of which you speak, but an excess of human contact brings about an even worse condition.
A condition we call People Being All Up In Your Face All The Damn Time.
There is something called personal space. For some people, it is larger than it is with others.
You see it in bank queues — when you do not really feel comfortable unless the next person in line is at least a foot behind you.
Some people need the whole house to themselves before they can exhale and relax.
A house where everything conforms to their own whims, where the mess is all yours, where the unfinished cleaning is all yours, where the cracks and the stains are all yours and there is no one to blame, but yourself.
And where the improvements and the decorations and the health of the plants, if any, are all yours too, and were all made to suit the needs and wants of no one, but you.
It can be the one place in the whole world where everything truly does revolve around you.
Once you get settled into that, it is hard to let go of it.
Especially, not for people who come home and start blasting Chopping and Mozzzart on the radio at 2:00am.