Becoming an adult is sort of like abortive RNA Polymerase initiation (Yes, I’ve had a good think, and those are indeed the words I want to begin my blog with). It stops, it starts again, it sputters backward and gets things wrong and one day I expect it’ll hurl me forward into grownuphood proper, just when I least expect it. Also, it's often kick-started by the process of kissing, and that's the nerdiest joke I'm allowed all month.
When I left home for University I moved into residence, which really just meant I swapped fixing my own lunches for doing my own laundry. I no longer need to be chauffeured around because I live within spitting distance of everything important.
When I left home for University I moved into residence, which really just meant I swapped fixing my own lunches for doing my own laundry. I no longer need to be chauffeured around because I live within spitting distance of everything important.
I’ve always thought independence started for real when you got your own apartment. Maybe when I actually get one I’ll be certain it’s when you own a house, but that’s not the point. I wanted to get an apartment by second year. But I’ve always been terrible at organizing these things and even worse at asking people awkward questions like ‘HEY DO YOU WANT TO LIVE WITH MEE’. And there are a lot of people who I like but couldn’t live with. I was sure I’d lose the roommate lottery and unsure where to begin looking, so I resigned myself to another twelvemonth in residence eating rubbery caf eggs and putting towels under my door to block out the sounds of drunken 3.00 AM conversations:
Thing 1: Dude, where's your shirt?
Thing 2: My shirt... oh, right, I had one of those. I, I, I think I left it at somewhere. The pizza place.
Thing 1: You got pizza without me?
Thing 2: I dunno, man. you weren't there. You know? You weren't there. When I needed you. For pizza.
Enter M, a friend and housemate of mine. She’s one of those quietly, understatedly hilarious people who say witty things in such a throwaway manner that you almost miss them. She had only just convinced me I had to watch BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ – which subsequently became my life, but I’ll talk about that another time – and we got onto the topic of housing plans for next year, both of us probably wishing subconsciously we had a Mike Stamford around. She was considering an apartment but didn’t know who she’d share with. And we both sort of came to the same conclusion at the same moment.
Thing 1: Dude, where's your shirt?
Thing 2: My shirt... oh, right, I had one of those. I, I, I think I left it at somewhere. The pizza place.
Thing 1: You got pizza without me?
Thing 2: I dunno, man. you weren't there. You know? You weren't there. When I needed you. For pizza.
Enter M, a friend and housemate of mine. She’s one of those quietly, understatedly hilarious people who say witty things in such a throwaway manner that you almost miss them. She had only just convinced me I had to watch BBC’s ‘Sherlock’ – which subsequently became my life, but I’ll talk about that another time – and we got onto the topic of housing plans for next year, both of us probably wishing subconsciously we had a Mike Stamford around. She was considering an apartment but didn’t know who she’d share with. And we both sort of came to the same conclusion at the same moment.
Huge relief.
We’re looking at a handful of places within walking distance of our school now. One of them has a pool. My mother, who was against me getting an apartment in second year because I’m her youngest and the moment I get an apartment she doesn’t have kids anymore (and, you know, actual concern for my wellbeing, but good parenting has never been fun to read about), heard about the pool and went ‘Oh, well then go for it!’, but I can’t help thinking that if I’m a second-year undergrad student at one of the two best universities in Canada, with good health and great friends and a bloody pool in my building, karma is eventually going to open up a hole in the crust of the earth and drag me all the way to Detroit. I might go for the pool anyway.
The plan is to nickname the apartment ‘221B Baker Street’, no matter what the actual address is. ‘Baker Street’ or just ‘Sherlock’ for short. There probably won’t be bullet holes in the wall (although given our area of study there could well be experiments in the fridge). I’m hoping my dad will make us whatever furniture we don’t acquire through the Niflheimr, er, I mean Ikea - My dad is an erudite and delightfully professorial fellow half the time and an insane hermitic woodsman the other half. Whenever he’s not lecturing me about ancient Rome he’s in his workroom cutting up bits of wood and yelling along to loud classic rock. At some point soon I’ll recount my dad’s Adventures in the Canadian North. He is the best dad.
Anyway, the apartment. I’ve had plenty of time to build up an impressive poster collection and I know both of us have lots of books. Homes without books are not really homes; they are like a cell without a genome, dry and sterile and too tidy by half. For the brief period when we were looking for a prospective third roommate, I had the half-joking idea that we could set up a Passive-Aggressive Board, on which to write our grievances. Here is what it might look like:
The only problem with the passive-aggressive board is that eventually it would degenerate into a bunch of badly-drawn trollfaces and I would spend too much time drawing trollfaces to actually deal with any of the complaints on it, so this might bear some rethinking. Today I will be calling landlords and asking them how they feel about having trollfaces tattooed into their walls with bullets, because it’s always a good thing to make sure your landlord know what’s a joke and what isn’t.
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