Roomate Conflicts

It’s common to hear female students complain about how messy their roommates are. They don’t do the dishes, they don’t clean the common areas, they’re so flaky – oh, they hate them so much.

At which point, the only word in my head is, “Bitch.”

I live in that situation. Except I’m not the one complaining about it – I’m the messy roommate. And to those people, I say: Stop being a spoiled brat and learn to live with a little mess.

Guess what, you are not living with mommy and daddy any more. Your roommates have better things to do than to ensure the house is magazine clean. They probably hate you too for making their life so much more stressful when they already have to juggle classes, school, work, extracurricular activities, and the thing that seems to keep getting smaller and smaller – a social life and time to relax. They may even wonder what your parents taught you to believe that scrubbing dishes is more important than getting good grades or that cleaning the floors is more important than that precious hour that you have to realize that the world may not be an absolutely horrible place since you can put your feet up for an hour. Did they just teach you that women were only good for scrubbing floors and making babies?

No, it’s probably just that your parents kept the house so clean that you came to expect it. And it’s alright that you actually make the effort to keep your space clean too. What’s not alright is that you try to drag the rest of us (whose parents taught us that living in a bit of mess won’t kill or mutilate us horribly) into your frankly delusional world. We will get pissed off at you.

Look outside. There’s garbage on the streets, the rivers are most likely toxic, and the air seems to be half carbon monoxide. The world is messy. Corporations are making them messier. Harper’s “Made in Canada” plan lets our corporate roommates make their own minimal reductions, if at all (it’s like how if you leave us horrible roommates to clean up the house, it’s just not going to get done).

So go bug them about it. Put all of those “the-house-must-be-sparkly-clean-or-I’ll-have-an-aneurysm” feelings into cleaning up the environment. Remind Conservative MPs what it was like growing up in their own sparkly white homes, and how much better off the world would be if all of outdoors could be like that too (although, do try to remember that the Earth will always have dirt in it – you can’t sweep that away, and will actually have a stroke trying).

And once you have that completed, well, maybe then you’ll realize that you’d rather put up your feet instead of cleaning the house. What’s a little dirt now? After all, you just completed a task that will save hundreds of generations after you, and made a real difference in the world. And we’ll love you all the more for it.

Or even if you’re still fed up with the mess, at least you hold the higher ground in the conflict. Really, who among us would even dare to argue with She Who Single Handedly Saved the World Through Cleanliness?