The perils of flatmates

I love my flatmates. One is probably my best UK bud (and is completely blameless for the tirade I am about to unleash); I get on well with all of them. Nevertheless, I am slowly remembering why I elected to live alone for three years of college, and I need to curb the mounting desire to post my reasons on the kitchen wall:

1. If you wait for the compost box to evolve into a sentient, bipedal creature that can walk itself to the bins outside, the smell will bloody well kill us all. I realize that you don't live next to the kitchen -- that, of course, would be my unfortunate lot in life -- but can't you hear the mold spores plotting their takeover at night?? Any day now, they're going to start an assault on the front hallway. Once that advance starts, we're doomed.

I'd continue to chuck your eggshells, pork chops, teabags and miscellaneous green fuzzy things myself, but I'd have to have my sense of smell removed first. Wanna pay for the surgery? Then we can talk about it. In the meantime, don't strike a righteous, hand-on-hip pose in front of the sink and complain about how the box stinks up the house at night. Is it not your food stinking it up? You are a student at one of the world's top universities. You are capable of picking up a small box of food scraps and carting it nine freaking feet to the door.

2. You, upstairs, the one who feels the urge to do calisthentics at 11:45 pm (and I know you have a boyfriend and that's all I want to know so for god's sake oil the damn bedsprings)...someday I am going to snap, probably during April's Hell Week when all of my papers are due on the same day, and then I'll charge upstairs at 3am with a large wooden mallet and smack the wall next to your bed until I can hear you cowering underneath the armoire. If you're going to have guests over after 11:00, they'd better learn how to levitate in midair.

Oh, and your speakers? Those new special bass boosting ones? THEY ARE EVIL INCARNATE. Please actually do something about them when I complain, instead of explaining blithely for the thousandth time that you used to have these terrible computer speakers, and now you have better ones and it's probably the bass. I KNOW IT'S THE FREAKING BASS. It permeates earplugs that are supposed to silence chainsaws cutting old-growth cedar! If your speakers "accidentally" plunge from the second story window someday, you'd better not purchase replacements.

3. One of grad school's perks is the absence of a regular daily schedule. Some of us, however, didn't receive this perk in our entry packets and have to get out of bed before the sun sets. So stop clattering about in the kitchen at 2am! Hungry? Should have thought of that before you decided not to eat a normal dinner, shouldn't you? At least suppress the urge to start blending things and mixing things and getting out giant metal cookware that you manage to knock into every blessed piece of cutlery in the room. I know some of that food in the fridge is a bit old, but if you have to throw pots and pans across the kitchen to keep it from skittering across the floor to bite your ankles, perhaps you should throw it in the bin outside. Oh, wait! No one does that, either!

4. About that fridge. It, too, has developed a...scent. This scent is now assuming a physical shape and may start demanding a bedroom of its own before too long. I have my own fridge, and my food is behaving as food should: like quiet, inanimate objects. Once again, the girl near the kitchen pleads for you to find and destroy the offending materials. Better yet, just throw out the whole fridge at this point and purchase a replacement. It will probably be easier.

5. If anyone else's boyfriend or mother (!) spits in or near the bloody sink, I am going to make the perpetrator lick it up with the sheer power of my murderous glare. Bigger men -- and mums -- than yours have quailed before it, lassies.

6. If you throw a house dinner and don't tell anyone, we won't come. If you sulk about it afterwards, we probably won't come next time, either.

And they wonder why I spend so much time hiding in my room...