I’m interviewing potential roommates all week, and a dilemma this has raised is: how much do I want to portray a better version of myself that someone might actually want to live with, vs. portraying myself accurately so I find someone who actually wants to live with me?
Specifically, this dilemma has come up around cleaning my house, because I am a mess, but attempting to reform, and I know from experience that if I live with another messy person, it’s all over. I need to live with someone who has a culture of putting things away so that I learn how to do it, too. But if I live with someone who’s deeply bothered by mess and clutter… well, we’ll kill each other within the month.
So it’s a delicate balance. With house cleaning, I found — I think — a middle ground involving presenting myself as I realistically aspire to be: the place is neat, but you can kind of tell that the person who lives here doesn’t totally have her shit together.
But anyway, especially now that the place is cleaned up, it strikes me how much the books are the dominating feature of the space. Piles and piles and piles of books. Books about politics and history (the vast majority), books about writing and statistics, and oh so many children’s books.*
I actually mentioned in my Craigslist ad that I bring to the roommate relationship an outstanding collection of classic teen television on DVD. Now maybe I’ll find a roommate who walks in and gets excited by my Sarah Dessen collection. Or the Ramonas. I would definitely trust a roommate who still felt strongly about Ramona.
* The last all live together; I have a case that’s just for my books — my books on things my boyfriend doesn’t care about, that is — which has all the kids’ books, the stats and math books, and the books on teen TV, all living together happily. (The political books, we read each other’s.)
This is possible only because the overwhelming preponderance of my children’s books still reside in New York. Some of these are at my parents’ house, and I cycle some of these back and some of those here when I visit; I should just have them all shipped to me. More of my old favorites, my mom tells me, are “in storage,” and all I can say is that I sincerely hope that’s not a euphemism in the vein of, “Furrball is so happy out on the dairy farm in Westchester!”
-->Feed me text
June 29, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Totally agree with the Ramona comment. Cleary and the Little House books were my favorites.
June 29, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Heh. I feel the same way except maybe with Judy Blume for the Ramona books. And of course, the BSC. Actually in college, I had a suitemate just like this. We would order BSC books on eBay for way cheap all the time and our other two “normal” suitemates would just kind of look on in shock and awe and a vague sense of, “Are you two insane?” Sigh. MEMORIES!
June 29, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I know what you mean with the cleaning situation. I lived with two roommates who drove me crazy because one had this thing about the floor being cleaned but she’d leave coffee stains all over the counter. Naturally the other had to have clean counters but didn’t care about the floor….
June 29, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Hee. Like Lenore’s two former roommates, I am a funny mix of crazy messy (in a way that drives others nuts) and oddly fussy about some things. The boyfriend and I fight about this because I’ll try to enforce him taking his shoes off or dealing with the recycling appropriately or what have you, but it won’t occur to me that I could hang up my coat or put a book back on the shelf instead of leaving them both on the couch…
I told a professor of mine that I had conceptual problems with cleaning, which is totally true (I recently hired a housecleaner and was so startled by some of the things she thought to do!), only to realize slightly too late (when I witnessed the prof’s alarm at this evidence of my lack of intellectual prowess) that this is the kind of thing one keeps to oneself in grad school.
June 29, 2009 at 7:21 pm
I definitely think you want a roommate who is well aware of your book-love. She doesn’t have to love the same things you do, she just needs to respect them.
You are also on-target with the cleaning thing. It’s deadly for someone with messy tendencies to be with another messy-type. We need the pressure of a clean roommate to keep us working towards a more orderly space.
I am the worst type of messy: I like things to be neat, but I suck at keeping them that way. Thus, I am always annoyed at both myself and others for being messy. That goes over really well with roommates!
Good luck in the roommate search!
June 29, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Well, I did meet two potential roommates today. I meant to be really honest with them about my status as a messy-in-the-process-of-reforming person (even while I have cleaned the apartment so its intrinsic niceness is not disguised beneath all of my crappy detritus), but with one I forgot to bring it up. I find these whole interactions super hard and awkward. I don’t know what kinds of questions to ask to figure out if I’d live well with someone. Why don’t I have better social skills???
Perhaps I should read more books set in boarding schools for possible roommate-relevant scenarios to inquire about… there is a new Gallagher Girls book out now. (I refuse to buy that series, but enjoy reading them in the Borders cafe.) “You seem nice enough and unlikely to invade my personal space… but will you help me engineer an elaborate scheme involving sophisticated spy technology to find out if a boy might want to ask me out?”
June 29, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Oh yeah, and: the person who just left here was indeed startled by the numerosity of my books. What can I say? I’m a book fetishist. The greatest thing about my boyfriend having begun working in publishing is that sometimes I can pretend that I do, too.