Better living through housemates?

So for those who never tire of hearing the sad ballad of my housing woes, I am now moving to a new apartment.  The apartment is not technically new, but it is new to me.  The main privileges of this new place will be that I will no longer wake up with mold, and I will be able to avoid exchanges like the following.

Me: (hyperventilating over the phone slightly, 11 at night):  I think someone just tried to break into my apartment.

Landlord:  I told the girls downstairs not to invite their boyfriends over!

Me:  What?  They don't even have boyfriends!!

Landlord: Then you must be mistaken.

Or the following:

Me:  Maybe we should put a lock on the gate at night.  Yesterday I had to scare a strange drunken man away from the door.  It was almost midnight.  I was scared.

Landlord:  I keep asking the company to send me a guard but no one ever comes.

Me:  A lock might solve this problem.

Landlord: *drives away in his car*

Actually, as far as landlords go, mine are the nicest.  I'll be sorry to see the last of them.

One of the reasons I'm so fired up to move is that I want roommates.  Living alone these past few months has made me imagine the lives of the roommate-d as ones of endless bliss, punctuated by carefree joint shopping trips, afternoon junk TV marathons accompanied by homemade ethnic snacks and wild rooftop parties.

But it is slowly dawning on me that this is not, in fact, entirely the case.  When thinking back on my roommate-d life, I remember only the positives.  The four amazing women I once lived with in Manhattan.  The friend I traveled to the tropics with in senior year of college.  Here's what I deliberately blocked: the crazy roommate who went on romantic weekend getaways with her married pastor (who still owes me $150).  Or the more benign: the diehard studying vegetarian roommate who was much cleaner than me and couldn't stand the smell of foods with meat in them (now one of my best friends, though, as we have both matured.)

I haven't had terrible experiences, but my sister once had to evict two of her roommates because they put on impromptu drunk tap dances in the hallways at night, and in addition had a nasty habit of bringing home stray cats, tricycles and sailors.

All of this brings me to the two biggest sources of roommate strife - dirt and men.  (In fact, dirt and men are really the root causes of most of society's problems.  Think about it.  Famine and pestilence are caused by dirt.  War is caused by men.  Open and shut.)

Nothing spoils roommate-d bliss like one party's sudden acquisition of a male friend.  Suddenly those afternoon TV marathons turn into solo nacho-munching sessions, and as your rooomate and her boyfried try and fail to keep the noise down in the room next door, both your Doritos and Gossip Girl slowly lose their flavor.  Tormented not just by sound but by the fact that you, the loser roommate, are hanging out ALONE on a weekend, you flee to the mall, where you spend hundreds of dollars on clothes that the salesgirl pityingly tells you make you look sexy enough to attract a man.  Later on, at the club, you realize the salesgirl was wrong.

And this doesn't take into account the reality of the boyfriend himself - either he'll move into your place, taking it upon himself to use your towels and your dishes, or your roommate will virtually disappear to his place, showing up once every few months, like a tax collector or an unfortunate rash, and manage to annoy you with her blithe and cheery tone.

Then there's dirt.  People have different levels of tolerance for dirt.  The Kama Sutra emphasizes the importance of partners having the same level of desire.  The Roommate Sutra (a book I will eventually write, I swear) argues with the same fervor that housemates should have the same level of cleanliness.  Unfortunately, there's no such thing as The One, and the idea that two people can have the exact same level of anything is a wonderful dream, something that (along with knee socks and a belief that your vote matters) everyone must outgrow on the journey from child to adult. 

I have lived with people who were compulsively neat, always making their beds and straightening their curtains before leaving for the day.  I've lived with another roommate, who, faced with a massive milk spill all over the kitchen floor, decided the best approach would be to drop paper towels over the offensive mess and leave (when I returned later that afternoon, the towels and the milk had congealed like some obscene Pangaea, and I was forced to get on my hands and knees and take a butter knife to the tiles.)

At last, I have to admit.  I'm a bit nervous about the transition back to peopled living.

I was a late convert to the idea of living alone.  After I'd been in Delhi for about a year, inspired by a horrible incident with a landlady who may have (in retrospect) been a procuress, I steeled my metaphorical loins and decided to live alone.  I told myself it would be a character building experience, much the way I'd resigned myself to the required meningitis vaccination before leaving home for college  I imagine this is how Inuit boys must think of their first whale-hunt - with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, an acknowledgment that in some mysterious way this ritual will transform them from happy boys to confused men.

But living alone turned out to be much more pleasant than a getting a vaccine or going whaling.  I quickly came to relish living alone.  I could come home at midnight, invent tuna-noodle omelette recipes, stay in bed until noon.

I unlocked the key to having an active social life - accepting invitations!  I've been an unwilling hermit and a misanthrope all my life.  When invited to a party, my first reaction is to come up with an elaborate and complex reason NOT to attend, often involving exotic fevers, burst plumbing or errant firefighters.  (I'm sure there are friends of mine from middle school who think my parents spent their entire lives on safaris in Africa, leaving me to care for my sister entirely by myself)  Alone in Delhi, I resolved for the first time to always accept.  Sooner than I expected this new way of thinking became a habit, and for the frist time in my life I had what I could refer to as an active social life.

And now I plan to move in with roommates.  To become roommate-d.  Since I plan on living and dying alone (as far as my life goals go, this is the one I am currently closest to achieving), having roommates is the closest I might ever come to a voluntary human living commitment.  With roommates, there are no secrets.  You can't blame your poor eating habits on a busted sink, because they will know.  You can't claim to be unable to take out the trash because of a broken ankle, because they will know you didn't go rock-climbing last weekend but instead stayed home watching Curb Your Enthusiasm and dreaming of the day you'd host your own reality show. 

Most importantly, you can't come up with bogus excuses for being and staying alone.