I'm looking for a new roommate, so I had to spend a few days cleaning and arranging the apartment to look like a normal person lives there. I'm not just talking about being messy (although I am), but also about all of the ...slightly odd stuff I have going on. Like, piles of nettle drying everywhere, newspapers with seeds drying on every desk, herbs hanging from odd places, my pumpkins, apples, and zuchinni on the floor, my balcony being a drying station, odd plants growing in pots that are absolutely not balcony plants, and then all the tools and resources for my various projects, like bunch of branches on the balcony for making baskets, bags of clay under the desk for my next clay project, bunch of fabric and used clothing meant for sewing.
It's screaming 'odd weirdo lives here' and I have to look at every of these situations and go 'okay, what would a normal person do', so I sigh, gather all my apples and put them in a fruit bowl. Even though I'm absolutely not going to keep my apples in a fruit bowl, are you serious? They're rotting faster in there, they're crushing each other, and I can't see each one individually to know which one to eat first because its going bad. It's colder on the floor so they stay fresh faster! And they're not touching each other there so they can't spread the bacteria if one of them starts being sick.
I put my pumpkins on the counter, put a purple blanket over the couch and my new halloween pillow, put all of my seeds into little envelopes and mark them, store all my jars with preserves in the basement, take the compost to the garden, tell fruit fleas to go elsewhere, change my sheets, wash all the windows and curtains, put up fall decorations, so the apartment looks like an aesthetic and pleasant space where nothing ever gets done except sleeping.
So, I do all that, and I'm supposed to show it to a woman, and I got a call from a 65 year old woman who wondered if I would mind to live with someone her age. And I don't mind! I immediately tell her that age is a non issue and she's welcome to move in if she likes the place. So she comes by train, and I go meet her at the train station to show her around.
I could tell immediately she's of poor health; she's walking slowly and very careful with the stairs, she tells me about her hips problems (which by now I understand all women get), she tells me about various therapies she's been in, how she has heart issues as well, and will maybe get a pacemaker. I'm patient and careful to not walk too fast, I express concern and sympathy for her health issues. She's not particularly listening to me when I speak, she interrupts me to say something else. She tells me she's gotten divorced a few years ago, and I express approval.
She loves the apartment, and assures me she's going to move in. I explain that in order to have the place reserved for her specifically, I'd need her to leave any kind of small deposit of her choice, which I had to feature because lots of people say they're going to move in, and then disappear forever, and I'm in financial trouble if I kept the place reserved. She's irritated that I'm suspicious of her, and I explain I am not at liberty to trust someone's word, because I could get in trouble that way. She combats this by saying this thing is 100% certain because she says so, and I'm insistent on 'we'll see'.
So then I ask, if you are moving in, for how long would you stay? And she looks at me and hesitates, and then tells me she has this boyfriend in America, and they've been talking for 4 years, and he will maybe come for her in a month or so, and then if he decides that she's up to his standards, he might take her back with her. I'm frozen for a second, because that is ... degrading (up to his standards?!) so I go 'okay, so what you're saying is that the future is uncertain' and she realizes that I don't like this entire thing, so she goes 'oh he's 100% not going to come' and now I'm even more confused, because I know that if it was 100%, she wouldn't have even mentioned it. She kept pressing me to believe her word again, but I stayed firm on 'uncertain'.
And I'm just disappointed. I expect women who have lived and struggled and divorced to be wise and sure in themselves! Whenever I get a chance to find a roommate older than me, I dream of the possibilities of learning from her, of asking her about her life and experience and skills and wisdom, but I never manage to find that. Usually women I do try to win over are tangled in some male drama that don't allow them to move forward, and keep them pressed on the idea that the male will resolve their life situations, if only they manage to 'fit his standards', and I know it's not the truth, I know it's not reality. How is the society capable of taking wisdom out of women like this? And their self worth? I can't imagine contemplating if I'm fitting some male standards. Insane that women can be fooled into thinking like this!
So I don't know if the woman will move in or not, but I am worried about having to listen about the ill-mannered american male instead of having her tell me stories about her life and her perspective on it.
