My reply

I put this on her door after I cleaned the rest of my dishes and put away and organized anything in the way.

Luccie

I know that you and I have different notions of how clean our apartment should be, and I realize that I haven’t been able to do much cleaning recently for one reason or another. I know that it took you a lot of time to clean up this morning and I apologize that you did all that work because of me, and I will definitely not leave such a mess again. I also will do more regular cleaning and try not to get the living room that dirty again either.

We both like to wash our dishes in a different way, and I’ll try to be more timely and organized about leaving dirty dishes out on the counter. I apologize also for eating the chocolates you left out; I’ll try to remember to replace them once we come back for next term. My behavior in that has been unacceptable and I know that you wouldn’t have felt the need to leave me a note had there not been so much of a reason to do so, and I feel bad that you were put in that situation and I’ll be careful not to be so careless in my cleaning from now on.

However, that being said, I also feel that I need to tell you, without making excuses for my behavior that, this probably wasn’t the best way for us to have come to this point. I realize that sometimes you take it upon yourself to organize and clean up after me and I think that this hasn’t been the best thing for us as roommates. I realize that you have younger siblings and that you don’t want to have to look after me like I was one. But instead of organizing my dishes, or put my part of the pantry in order, you have to realize that since those sort of things don’t bother me, I’m not going to do so myself – unless you ask me to.

From now on instead of letting me blithely ignore the organization that is important to you, it would be better if you left me a note or confronted me about it, because I would be perfectly happy to clean up whatever is bothering you. I realize that by asking you to do something like that might not be something that you would like, but I honestly cannot see how my behavior would infuriate you, so I am always blissfully unaware of what annoys you.

Because we only have a term left, I feel that we could come to a resolution in our relationship that would work for both you and me. I hope that you can forgive my behavior and I will strive to be a better roommate to you from now on.

Shannon

Tradition

On Friday nights, it's become almost a tradition that a group of us go over to Sarah's apartment and watch movies. Yesterday, I offered t make dinner for people, and Sarah wanted it to be agt my apartment since we always go over to her house, and I thought that was fine, so I fixed the stuff at my place and we ate and hung out here.

We had awesome food, I made a cheese-stuffed chicken that if i were to ever make again I would marinate it for sure (it was kind of tasteless except for the cheese in the middle). I also made this gorgonzola-artichoke tortellini that turned out really really well. Plus an odd smattering of side dishes and appetizers. Anyway, we hung out, talked really loud, played music, got martinelli's on eeeverrrything. And made lot of general mess.

Of course since I had spent from 2 in the afternoon until about 6 30 making the dinner, I didn't want to look at the dishes at all, and I only loaded a few into the dishwasher. Meaning that I of course did what any normal hostess would do, I left the dishes and the kitchen in general disarray, to be cleaned the next morning after I would wake up.

So, the thing about my roommate is, well, she doesn't have a good opinion of me, at all. I am completely passive towards her because I don't like confrontation (but then again, who does?). She has a lot of rules, and likes things to be clean and organized, and above all, she treats me like I were a kid.

Whenever I am loud, she doesn't hesitate to text me about it, but because I don't want to make her mad, when she is too loud too late, I try to ignore it, or if I'm writing an essay and she's too loud, I'll put on my headphones and listen to music that general hurts my concentration more than t helps, but, I'm not about to do anything else, so I just suck it up and deal with it.

But that's just noise, what really bothers my roommate is the cleanliness. In our kitchen-living room area I have nothing, I do not decorate, I don't put pictures out, or anything, but she has decorated it with many many many things of hers, which is okay with me, just leave no indication that I live here. awesome.

There are a lot of examples of her taking her own initiative, and organizing my stuff, which is pretty aggravating to me, but not as much as the fact that she never ever warns me, or says 'Shannon could you please clean up your side of the pantry' or 'Shannon could you do something with your PS2, it's bugging me'. No. Instead what she will do is clean it for me. Which I'm sure that she gets no pleasure out of and thinks to herself 'I wish she would do this' - oh wait, I never know that it's bothering her, so how am I supposed to read her mind and do it myself?

So we generally don't ever see each other because we run on different schedules and I try to go over to Sarah's as much as possible so don't have to feel unwelcome in my own home. But to get back to last night' 'party', I left that mess so I could deal with it later since I was exhausted, and this morning I woke up the sounds of cleaning and my thoughts can basically be summed up in one word

'shit.'

I pretended I wasn't awake until she stopped and got ready in her room, and I opened the door to check and see what had been done, and I was relieved to see that she hadn't, well, washed my dishes. But in front of my door was the shoes I had left in the living room, the chair I had brought out for someone to sit on, and, a note.

Oh dear lord, a note. Now I have to admit that I did leave the kitchen quite messy, but I was planning on cleaning it up, not leaving it to her to do. Of course, she put the chairs back, washed the floor, cleaned the counters, cleaned the stove and did - everything that I was going to do if she had just given me time to do it, or, asked me.

But back to the note, it basically said "I'm tired of cleaning up after you, clean more, you're being really messy, and I always have to clean up after you, and that's not my job"

awesome.