I tend to have a very difficult time living with people. This is because it is exceptionally rare that my roommate and I operate at the same level of consideration. That is to say, either my roommate is sloppy and inconsiderate, in which case I am alternately annoyed and disgusted with him, or he is immaculate and unimpeachable, in which case I am mortified by the slips in my behavior. I'm not terribly bad, I think, but I am slightly lazy about cleaning up. Messes tend to slowly accumulate in my room, and dishes gradually pile up in the sink. I do my chores, but often not with sufficient vim and vigor.
My current roommate is of the immaculate sort, and this makes me far more uncomfortable than if he were messy. I'd much rather be annoyed but self-righteous, the suffering roommate rather than the offendor. Thus my reaction when I went into the common room yesterday morning and found three half-drunk 40s of Olde English malt liquor, along with assorted plastic cups and crushed beer cans, was not anger but relief. Finally! A crack in the facade! Something to make me feel less guilty about my own transgressions!
And speaking of my transgressions, I've absolutely ruined our refrigerator. You see, I was making braised cabbage. Now, the recipe was for braised cabbage with white wine and nutmeg. I'm out of nutmeg, so I decided, as I tend to decide, to make it a spicy dish. I chopped up a serrano pepper, for flavor, and a habanero, for spice, sauteed them and braised the cabbage in that. And why not add a few cloves of garlic while I'm at it? Also, I was fresh out of white wine, so I figured some white wine vinegar would be just as good. Very well. It came out fine, though rather different, I imagine, than what the author of the recipe envisioned. What I realized, when I tasted it, was that it was not so much braised cabbage as a quick version of kim chee. Well, I like kim chee. I ate about half of it, then decided to put the rest away for later. I'm without tupperware at the moment, must remember to get some next time I'm at the houseware store. So I threw it into a large serving bowl and stuffed it into the fridge. No need to wrap it in serran wrap, I'll probably eat it tomorrow, and it shouldn't dry out too badly by then.
Two days later it's still there; I hadn't anticipated all the eating out I'd be doing with visitors. And now, not surprisingly, the refrigerator smells of sour cabbage and garlic. Which I don't mind, but might raise the roommate's hackles.
UPDATE: Another thing my roommate makes me feel bad about: He's MUCH better at feigning an interest in my activities than I am in his. He sat and watched me play an RPG for an hour tonight. An hour! And it's a well-known fact that console RPGs, regardless of how you feel about actually playing them, are the most boring kind of video game to watch. They're repetitive and consist of long periods of nothing much happening, interspersed with brief periods of bad dialogue. Plus I was at the start of the game, and there wasn't even a real narrative hook yet. Hell, I was bored by what I was doing! But he watched me play in silence for an hour. It puts my vague attempts to ascertain what he does when he's not around me to shame.
