New roommate

Erika and I are expecting our 2nd roommate: Candace. She is a nice, bubbly graduate student chic that we both know all the way back in my freshman year at Tech. She needed a place to live for a semester, and I offered her to stay with us.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure if I am happy with an addition of her. It's not her personality that influences my perception but the idea having three girls living under the same roof. In a perfect life, we should have three bathrooms and a big enough garage to fit three cars. But life always provide challenge - the need of compromise and negotiation.

It's not going to be simple than what we perceive, I believe. Foremost, two girls sharing a limited size of bathroom is going to be challenging. I take that back. It's not the size that matters to me, it's the sanitation. I have a tendency to be very anal about the cleanness of the bathroom: no hairballs in the tub, no shedding hair on the floor, and no chaos around the sink. The same idea applies to kitchen. Not surprisingly however, I know I'm going to be the one who maintains the common area. Always has and always will.

Another issue rises with the garage. Our new roommate wants to somehow be part of the garage sharing. Specifically she wants mine and her car to rotate space each week. How complicated does it have to be. As much as my roommate's mother (Erika's mom: the landowner) insists that I continue to claim the spot, I don't have the heart to say no. Since I am the conflict-avoider in nature, this will be discussed in later time.

So it all comes down to this conclusion. All of us are being selfish. That has always been the bottom-line moral of all horribly-gone-wrong roommate stories. I still believe that each of us have an equal responsibility of respect and maintenance, which in many cases fail. It already gives me a headache thinking about the things that need to be addressed in advance. And most likely, sharing the bathroom is not going to be all that easy (and garage). Like I mentioned, I'm going to have to be more flexible and laid-back on future given situations.

I just hope that fall semester, the most important and busiest semester of my college career, goes smoothly. Help me not regret this decision.