The Valley of Decision

It all began with a text message.

Well actually, it didn't, it began long before that, but it went up a gear when I got the message on Saturday.

"Holy crap!!! I just bought a house!!!"

Yep, L has finally found her dream home and managed to buy it on the first try. And when she stopped shaking like a leaf and reality set in, she repeated an offer that was made a long time ago, way back in London, in fact. She asked if I'd consider sharing with her again.

I considered it. I weighed it against my other options. One one side, there's my current flatmate, the bane of my existence and the reason that I now understand the difference between being messy and being dirty. For anyone who's confused, I'm the first one, and she's the second. I never knew how frustrating it must have been for the OCD L to share with my messiness, until I was confronted with someone who was fine with leaving chunks of food in random places in the kitchen, who has yet to learn that bathroom basins need the occasional clean, and that floors don't mop themselves; until I found myself turning into my mother and bitching about doors left wide open and letting the heat out. From another angle, I could scrape together the cash to live alone once more. It would mean writing off my travel plans for the next while, and probably putting off all sorts of other plans as well, but it could probably be done. And then there's sharing with L, someone that I know both can and will drive me nuts on occasion, but will also let me raid both her bookshelves and her DVD collection, will clean up after me in a most considerate way, and will make me laugh.

In the end, the decision was a no brainer, so I called up the property managers of my flat to find out about the logistics of extending my lease long enough to allow L to settle on her house and get herself organised. After a brief misunderstanding where they thought I was wanting to renew for another 12 months - panic stations - it's all organised. All except telling my flatmate.

In a twist, she's been the perfect flatmate since I made the decision. She's emptied bins, replaced toilet rolls and chatted away like she hasn't since I first met her way back in February. And I have to go and spoil all of that. It's going to be awkward, if only because when I go I'm taking all of my furniture with me, and that includes the bed she sleeps in. But what can I do? What else would I want to do?

Now to screw up the courage for the big conversation...Yep. Decisions. They can really make me stressed.

Philanthropic romance

It was lunchtime and, for a change, I was working in the city. I decided to brave the gale force winds blowing up Collins St and headed out to buy my lunch. I'm on a sushi binge at the moment, so that meant heading to the Purple Peanut, near Spencer St. It's a tiny little cafe that is always crammed come lunchtime thanks to their fantastic authentic Japanese fare. Heading over the bridge across Wurrundjeri Way, I noticed a man standing unobtrusively off the side of the pavement and holding out a cup for money.

"Spare change, miss?" he asked. I looked at him as I shook my head, and saw that he wasn't that old. He had startling blue green eyes and a plaintive facial expression. I genuinely didn't have any change but felt bad about following my usual rule of not giving cash to beggars. But it also reminded me of a couple of things. The last time I gave money to a beggar was on the first date with the Talker. We both delved deep and the Talker engaged him in conversation. Based on what I later learnt about him, I'd say this was not his usual practice. I think it was done to impress me, to show how compassionate and giving he was, and that he had enough cash to be able to splash out and help the homeless pay for a night in a hostel somewhere. A guy I went out with in London tried the same trick.

And it worked. Each time I've seen this done, I've respected the guy a little more than I otherwise might have. Something about seeing a philanthropic side to my dates makes me weak kneed. I like a man with a social conscience. Or maybe I just like the idea that he can empathise, but still has spare cash. So why is it that, while I admire this trait in my men, I never actually follow through with the donations myself, unless I'm also on a date? I'm sure I'm trying to show exactly the same things as the men are, but I'm always that half a step behind because I don't normally give. Perhaps what I'm really seeing in these men is the hope that he'll take me under his wing and give me everything I want - obviously, alcohol plays a part in the delusion that this will ever happen. And in the end, if it's a false act, what do you really achieve?

In the case of the Talker, it was another two dates before I woke up to myself and realised that he was not really the gentlemanly empathetic philanthropist, but was instead a misogynist who would quite happily chain me to either the kitchen sink or the bedpost, depending upon his mood. So perhaps it's time I reversed things. I might have to start donating to beggars when I'm walking alone, and keep my coin to myself when I'm on a date. Given the way things have worked out in the past in this respect, it might be the safer course.

It all ends

Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock would know that the eighth and final Harry Potter movie was released last week. The press has covered it exhaustively, from both a "Thank |God it's over" standpoint to a "wow, it's all so brilliant, you simply must see it" perspective. I've always been a fan, first of the books and then of the films. I was out at the cinemas last Tuesday night, watching the Deathly Hallows Part 1 in preparation for the latest movie. I was hardly alone. I think it would be rare to find a full cinema for a movie that's about a year old, without it having become a cult classic. Even more rare would be the look of the audience.

I know there are certain films shown in certain cinemas where people go along to participate and dress up. The Westgarth used to run the Blues Brothers regularly; the Moonlight Cinema showings of Grease end up attracting a huge crowd of fans. Rocky Horror Picture Show, in particular, is known for audiences in costumes not normally seen on the streets. Harry Potter seems to be in the same category. The hard core fans were out and about on Tuesday night, complete with robes (or rather, academic gowns, most often), hats, wigs, brooms and scars. My friends and I all felt very old as we got our money's worth out of the ticket just in watching our fellow audience stream in. We certainly felt a strange combination of under-dressed and old, sitting in our tame street clothes. There again, we weren't going to be backing up our 9pm session of the old movie with the midnight first screening of the new one. Part of what made us feel old was the realisation that, before we became mature adults and had to turn up in a reasonable state for work on a regular basis, we would have been in the midnight show. Sure, we wouldn't have dressed up, but we would have been there.

There's been a whole lot written about how many of the fans have grown up with the characters. They started out the same age as Harry when they read the first book, and have reached adulthood and maturity at the same time as him. Little has been noted about the generation of fans who measure their adult life in comparison of Harry, as well. Close reading of the novels will show that Harry, the character, should be about my age. The headstone on his parents' grave puts their death in 1982, meaning he was born in 1981. He, like me, should fall into the awkward gap between Gen X and Gen Y, forever feeling just slightly out of place with those on either side of the generation gap. We're too young to have children in tow when we go to these films, but too old to feel comfortable walking through Crown Casino dressed up as a death eater. But at the same time, the Harry films, at least, have coincided with some big things in my own life.

The first Harry film came out when I was 21. I was legally an adult everywhere, and taking my first steps into a properly grown up world. It was the year that they kicked us out of university to go and work for a while, to learn just how much we didn't know about being architects. I used at least part of my year to take my first overseas trip without adults - actually, my first since a trip to New Zealand as a three year old. I saw the movie alone, sitting in a late afternoon session on a miserable day in Cork, Ireland. I felt like a complete outsider as I sat there waiting for the lights to go down - although in Ireland, like the UK, they never go down completely the way they do in Australia, so it felt even more strange. Then, for a couple of hours, I was transported to places that had suddenly taken on a new meaning for me, given that I'd just experienced the wonders of Kings Cross Station, of London for the first time. The sense of wonder Harry felt when he arrived at Hogwarts for the first time was nothing compared to the awe I felt as I stood in a London phone booth (this was in the dark ages, before Skype, before everybody travelled with a mobile phone, hell, before my parents had worked out how to email) and told Mum that I'd arrived safely. She still remembers how excited I sounded, even after not having slept for almost 36 hours. I may have been ten years older than the fictional character, but I could relate.

Since then, the world has grown increasingly dark for both the fictional wizards and the real life me. We aren't threatened by an evil dark lord, but the rise of terrorism following September 11, less than a month before I made that first trip, and the current financial woes have cast a shadow over the adulthood of my in-between generation. We emerged from childhood into a world where we were told we could have everything, much like Harry discovering the wizarding world. The first years of the rest of our lives were bright, with sudden explosions of doom, until about four years ago when the first rumblings began. Around the time of Order of the Phoenix, actually.

So here we are, and Harry has saved Hogwarts once and for all. There's no doubting now that I'm all growed up, even if I do still have a liking for kiddie tales. Here's hoping that the lighter side of the final scenes of Deathly Hallows Part 2 will presage brighter times ahead for my age group, a lighter future for the Gen Yers who went to so much trouble with their costumes. One can only hope.

The road more travelled

It's been hard to avoid a sense of being left behind lately. Everyone seems to be sorted out, whether it's in relation to their careers, their finances, their relationships, or their families. Everyone, that is, except me, stuck in a place where I feel that I've never completely grown up.

Of course, there are advantages to not growing up. You can get away with star fishing in a massive bed, because you're not sharing it with anyone. You can spend your time however you want to; if there's a TV show you want to watch, the only thing that might stop you is another equally appealing show being on at the same time. Your sleep is undisturbed, and you never have to fight for the bathroom. You owe nothing to anybody, unless of course you've borrowed it first. If you want to take off to the other side of the world, the only thing stopping you is your bank balance. Yes, there are definite good points.

But the bad seems to be out weighing the good recently. In my family, I still feel like the little kid. I'm the only one left who is not partnered up, one of the only two without children and a marriage. Even my younger cousins are now all married. My younger sister-in-law is due to pop out her second child sometime in the next couple of weeks; the cousin a year younger than me is not far behind her with her first. My boss earns twice the cash that I do, owns two houses and has a partner that she is planning a family with; she's three years older than me. My closest friends either own homes or are looking to buy. They are in jobs that they enjoy, and they're well paid. Many of them are also in relationships.

And then there's me.

I'm single, with no prospects on the horizon. I am extremely badly paid in a job that, on a good day, I tolerate but never love. I have no idea what to do with my life, and have been drifting along without hope of improvement for years now, dabbling around the edges of the problems but too chicken to actually do something that will decide one way or another for me. I tried living on my own, and found that I could barely keep my nose above the financial waters, so had to go back to sharing a house. Although I am older than at least half of my female relatives, I do not have a family of my own; wanting does not bring anything into effect in that area, and my existence is too precarious to risk a solo effort. While everybody else seems to have progressed in at least one area of their life, I have comprehensively wallowed.

It's tough being alone in this world, too. Everything is geared towards couples, from travel to restaurants, to advertising, to radio competitions. Couples and families. The assumption was always that I would have been married and settled by now, a couple of kids in tow. It hasn't happened - not just for me, but for many women I know. Failing that, I was going to have dazzled literary circles with my writing, designed award winning houses, done something to have an impact on the world, rather than becoming the person who holds up people's dream homes because their design is 10cm too close to a boundary. I was supposed to at least make enough cash that I would be able to afford my own place, somewhere to hide my miserable self. It seems that I have failed comprehensively.

I usually try not to get down about things beyond my control; if I did, I'd be in a permanent state of misery. But today, for some reason, I have succumbed to the temptations of chocolate and junk food, to misery, fear, and loneliness. Tonight, it seems too hard to keep up the smiling face of the fat person, the cliche of crying within is ringing a little too true. Tonight, I feel that everybody else is moving forwards, and I'm going backwards. About the only signs of increasing maturity are the soft laughter lines around my eyes, and what I'm starting to believe are silver, rather than golden, strands that occasionally reveal themselves in the thick mass of my hair. I'm tired of pretending that I don't care, that it doesn't hurt to see someone with the life I pictured for myself.

Tonight, of not on other nights, the walls can come down a little, and I can say, with complete honesty, that family functions are a bitter pill to swallow. I may gripe about them a little at other times, but the reason never really comes out. The truth is, that when my outspoken, bitter and twisted grandmother comes out with her barbed comments about weight, about the idea that I have ruined my life by travelling instead of settling down, there are times when I almost believe that she's right. There are times when I look at the life of my cousin, my oldest and probably closest friend, and, whatever I think of her husband, I wonder why that never comes to me. When I look around the table of coupled up people, and find myself seated opposite Nana, as the only other single around the table, and I wonder if this is what life will be like for always, the sense that everybody else is happy, and I alone am not. And you have to wonder, where did it all go wrong? Was it in wanting things that were never meant for me? Or was it in trying too hard to do everything, to be everything? Perhaps it was in wanting it all, and not narrowing my focus. Or maybe it was just never the right thing for me and I'm pining for things that would never make me any happier than I am right now.

Or maybe it was in disappearing down a worm hole of 'What if?'

Criminal Mastermind

I was having a conversation with my brother last week, and it came out that he was at a community function in Glenroy earlier that day. Glenroy, and neighbouring suburbs of Coolooroo an Jacana, have been in the news a lot lately thanks to a series of fire bombings and shootings. The Police had decided to try and get the community a bit settled down by hosting an afternoon tea in a local park. It seems that the smallest member of the police air wing stopped in to impress the kiddies, and my brother overheard an interesting conversation that I feel compelled to report.

A local wandered over to where the helicopter pilots were standing by their bird.

"Oh mate, she is fully sick, huh," he observed. Somehow the local accent doesn't come through when typing. The police smiled and nodded.

"So, you got the keys? We take her for a spin?" The pilot laughed.

"Nah, mate, this one doesn't start with keys. It's a button."

The eyes of the local light up.

"So she would be easy to steal, then, huh."

As the title says: criminal mastermind.

Two strikes

It's been one of those days. It started with allergies, cleared up in the middle, and is ending with some sort of nightmarish sequence of stupid events and unhealthy levels of failure at anger management. Perhaps I should just start with some of the good bits, and let it progress from there.

Today is my sister-in-law's birthday, an occasion that my mother used as an excuse to test the waters of my brothers' new tolerance for each other. It's a long time since they would be able to be in the same room with each other, let alone the slight thawing of their demeanour which has seen them both participating in the same conversation - although still not talking directly to each other. Between them cracking jokes at either end of the table, and my two year old whirlwind of a niece playing up for her audience, the night was going pretty well. Some quiet chat with Mum and Dad afterwards - yes, I know, it's sad, but when you're single and broke you have to make the most of all interaction, not to mention the free food that comes with one of Mum's cooking spectaculars - and I was ready to head home and throw my phone on the charge. A bit of light reading before bed while I got some juice back into the batteries, to make sure it would last the night and wake me up in the morning. It just flashed at me with a battery warning light when I tried to make it do something. Note to self: leaving the MSN app running in the background all day chews through batteries like nothing else.

So I packed my many bags of goodies and headed homewards, feeling pretty safe in the knowledge that the flatmate would have arrived home before me and, if not warmed the flat, at least put the bins out. Sadly, no. As I parked my car, I drove past both of the bins which should have been on the nature strip. A quick check of the letterbox revealed that it was also not as it should have been. Thinking flatmate mustn't be home yet, I trudged up the stairs and rummaged in my bag for my keys.

Not there.

A vision came to me of throwing them on my desk at work, and another, later vision, of them being under a pile of papers. Still. And my phone was dead. But when I reached the top of the stairs, thinking to have another good rummage in my Tardis of a handbag, I noticed that the security door was ajar. Flatmate must be home, thank god, I thought, willing to overlook transgressions of bin and letterbox maintenance in return for being let in. I pushed the button for the doorbell, and waited.

Fine, I thought, when two more pushes had failed to yield a flatmate. She's probably in her room - where else would she be, actually? - so I'll just knock. Now I have a truly fearsome rap when I'm trying to get in somewhere. Not only has it terrified schoolies into quietude in beachside hotels, it has brought the rowdiest of neighbours to turn down their stereos. It's a knock worthy of the old ladies who live downstairs and sit in judgement on the goings on of the flats. A truly fantastic weapon to have in your arsenal when you're locked out and your apparently partially deaf flatmate is inside. Make that completely deaf. She didn't come to the door. OK, I told myself. It's 10:30, she might just be security conscious. I called out. Nothing. I thought I could hear running water inside, so I waited for it to stop and then tried again. Nada.

By this point I was fuming. Not only had she not put out the bins, but she was leaving me locked out on a bloody cold night. And this following hard on the heels of the Great Cooking Mess of 2011. Not going well at all, here. I knew what I had to do, but I was dreading doing it. Finally getting angry enough, I stormed downstairs and back to my car, bag of leftovers over my wrist. Throwing the car into gear and speeding onto the roads, I headed back to Mum and Dad's to pick up my spare keys, just hoping that they hadn't gone to bed yet, and that a knock on the door at 10:45 wouldn't give them heart failure.

An angry rant and a serious risk of speeding fines later, and my spare keys let me into the flat. The only sign that flatmate had been home, other than the unlocked wire door, was the firmly closed bedroom door, as opposed to the slightly ajar state that it gets left in when she's not home.

Banging and clattering around for a bit to get my own back, I decided to open the mail. One of the letters was a warning about an outstanding amount of rent, which I had tried without success to chase up before. This time it was different, and I felt like screaming. The amount listed as the rent we should be paying is $4 a month more than the weekly calculation suggests it should be. That's the difference in the rent that they are chasing. If they really want the extra 84 cents a week, the bastards can fight for it. I'm in no mood to be trifled with, and, based on the mounting headache, it's a mood that will linger through until morning. That this is the second time they've attempted to extract the cash from me has made me think that, as much as I love the flat, I may be moving on come September when the lease is up. Heaven help them if they fight back against the logical arguments I will attempt to make. Because I sure as hell won't.

Domestic Bliss

It's a few months now since the decision to get a flatmate. She moved in, and nothing has really been quite the same since. You'd hope I meant that in a good way, but really, no. It's not that we hate each other, or bicker, or anything drastic, really. But there is a chronic incompatibility looming on the horizon, and I don't think she's even noticed it.

She's a nice enough person, I suppose. Quite friendly, not hugely annoying, and keeps very much to herself. In fact most of the time, I'm not entirely sure if she's home or not. I have to peek through cracks or look for light shining under doors to get a sense of whether I'm alone or potentially have company. The general consensus is that it's an odd relationship in the flat. And that was before she started eating all of her meals in her room, as well spending the rest of her time holed up in there. In some respects, I guess she's the perfect flatmate. She pays bills on time, she's quiet, and she never hogs the couch or forces me to watch TV shows I don't like. But although I'm never sure of her current presence or absence, I can usually tell when she's been around.

Now I'm not the greatest with all things housekeeping. I vacuum the carpets once a month if I'm lucky, and do the shower once a quarter. Dishes are washed only when the pile on the sink gets too precarious, or there's a danger of being so many that need washing that they won't fit on the dish drainer. If I remember to change my sheets regularly, and actually have them washed by the time it occurs to me to change them again, I'm doing pretty well. But there are some things that I figure it's only fair to keep on top of when you're sharing. I think it would have been even more important if that sharing involved the use of someone else's things. But no, apparently not.

When I moved into this flat, everything I owned was new. Except my couch. And my kitchen table. And the antique bits and pieces. But you get the picture. The plates had never been eaten off. The sheets had never been slept on. The towels had never been used. The saucepans had never cooked anything. It was all still in quite good shape when she moved in. That can no longer be said about some things. It's to the point where, after helping me out while I was laid up with my back, my mother has been forced to offer me advice on how to get the saucepans back into something like a good condition, after months of things being cooked onto the sides. You can pick which pans she uses most often; they're the ones which are the most filthy outside, to the point that I can't get them clean even with steel wool, and have a soap scum residue inside them. You're supposed to wash pans AFTER cooking, not before.

And I could write it off if it was just pans, even if my pointed scrubbing of pans I haven't used has failed to have an effect (passive aggressive behaviour? perhaps, but direct suggestions for a cleaning roster have failed to have any impact). But being flat out with back pain and seeing your flatmate take the vacuum out for the first time ever, only to do her own room, having never cleaned the shower, never mopped any of the floors, it's getting a little much. I think the final straw came this weekend.

I haven't been using the cooktop much recently, at least partly because of the depressing state of my pans. But it drove me to the point of action on Saturday. I tried to clean the cooktop, because it was beginning to look like a bio-hazard; baked on sauce, overspill, actual chunks of food. But it wouldn't just wipe down. It required an actual cleaning product. I've never had to use a product to clean a cooktop before, I've always been able to manage it along the way. When I picked up the metal grate that covers the jets and found it was sticky and coated in a thick layer of baked on sludge, I was fuming. It drove me mad, to the point where I actually finished a cleaning job and looked for more - an unheard of phenomenon. I vacuumed. I spot cleaned the carpet. I swept. I mopped. By the time my sister-in-law popped in for a visit, the place was worthy of my mother's stamp of approval. I even changed the tea towels on the kitchen rail - yet another something that seems to fall into my area of responsibility. The flat was gleaming. The stove looked brand new. It was pristine. Then I headed out for dinner.

I was out again tonight. When I got home, there were once again unwashed saucepan lids on the stove. There was also cooked on sauce and a chunk of unidentifiable vegetable. There was also a load of washing that had been sitting in the washing machine all afternoon. Too bad if I needed to use it.

Individually, most of the problems I'm having with this girl aren't major. But the whole package, from the way she acts like she is responsible for inspiring any physical activity I take up - hello, woman, I have 2 prolapsed discs, you think I'm going to be taking up marathon running right now? But you're the only reason I might decide to start an activity? Or wait, you're the one who "inspired" me to take regular walks all summer until my back got screwed up, even though you didn't move in until February? Genius - to her complete inability to realise that you need to clean the kitchen floor when you spill stuff on it, or that pasta sauce will stain white cupboards if you leave it caked on dribbling down the front of them for a week or more, it all adds up and it's all driving me completely insane right now. And I'm at a loss for how to approach the problem in a way that won't blow up in my face, because clearly just leaving it until she notices have absolutely no impact at all.

How do you tell someone that you think they're a slob and that if they don't pull their finger out you're not going to be letting them use your stuff anymore? How do you suggest to a flatmate that the experiment isn't working, and that they should find somewhere else to live when the lease is up for renewal? And how do you bitch and moan to a friend who is about to buy a 4 bedroom house, without any intention of accepting the invitation to share that house?

Because L is about to take the plunge into the real estate market. She wants someone to share her mini-mansion, and I fit the bill quite nicely. She knows I'm fed up with my current living arrangement, she knows we rub along well enough as flat mates - or at least she knows she can put up with my more annoying habits, and that I won't kill her for hers. But I don't think I'm ready to go and live in her house, and that's another conversation that I don't know how to have. That said, I think I have more clues on that one than I do on how to kick out my current flat mate. If I could re-negotiate my rent, I'd be happy enough to stay here on my own. But dear god, something better change soon.