Switching Up

Right after we all got back from Christmas and New Year’s my very lovely flattie gave us some simultaneously awesome and awful news: she was moving out. Awesome: she’s moving in with her fantastic boyfriend! Awful: she’s leaving us! I had a couple days to wrap my mind around that, thinking about the hassle of getting a new flattie in and switching things around in general, when my other lovely flattie also announced that she was moving out too. That was about four weeks ago, and since then…well, since then things have been in a bit of a muddle.

The first thing I thought was that since the two of them were leaving, I would leave too. I’ve been wanting to have my own place for a while now, after living in shared housing of some description for something like six years. I generally have done very well living with other people and the houses I’ve shared have been a lot of fun, and it certainly saves money, but…I don’t know. I’m almost thirty-five, and I sort of think it’s just more age-appropriate to have my own place at this point in my life. The older I get the more I want things just the way I want them, and of course sharing housing with other people doesn’t really work that way.

Financially, of course, it makes no sense. Housing is expensive here, and wages are famously low, and when almost a third of one’s income goes to one’s overseas-currency student loan it’s difficult to sort out where exactly that extra rent money would come from. Also, when they say “unfurnished,” in New Zealand, they very often mean “unfurnished” as in “does not come with a fridge or anything else except curtains, which, weirdly, landlords are required to provide,” so people will rent things like clothes washers and fridges by the week. And of course I don’t really own anything except my bed and a secondhand chest of drawers—and I didn’t even have those things when I moved into this house, I moved in with just my orange suitcase and a new set of sheets that I hadn’t even unwrapped from the store. I still don’t have a car so I would have to make sure that wherever I lived would be close enough either to work or to a bus route to be viable, which narrows the field even further.

But I was still excited at the thought of my own place, even though I couldn’t quiiiiiite make the math work out, no matter how many times I recalculated. I started looking on TradeMe and proceeded to tour some of the dirtiest, grimiest, physically unhealthiest abodes I have ever had the misfortune to see, with horrible stained carpets and mold on the walls and just a pervading sense of grim despair. I spent one horrible day waiting in the bus in some pouring down rain after having seen a place that gave me the actual shivers, thinking mournfully of all my grown up friends who have made better financial decisions than I have and who, as a result, own houses and don’t have to worry about this sort of thing ever again, and wondering where it’d all gone wrong for me.

After that bus trip I chose against spending a lot of money on a cold and miserable flat—where I would have to spend all my time, as I would have no money to travel or go out for dinner or do anything other than pay rent on a cold and miserable flat—and, with something of a resigned sigh, set about hunting for yet another flatshare. The other times I’ve done this I’ve had very good luck very quickly, but this time…I don’t know, I don’t know if it was my just being super nervous or overly picky or what but I was not feeling my usual housing karma that has served me so well before. I saw some very nice places with very nice people but I couldn’t shake the sense of anxiety I got every time I would go visit another flat and make small talk and ask about their internet limit (internet in New Zealand is basically on tap, and it can run dry if you watch too many YouTube kitten videos in a month) and try to sort out what the commute would be like and where I’d get groceries. I would just rush back to Hataitai and throw myself on my bed and look around at all my little pictures and decorations and fervently wish I didn’t have to move for the sixth time in six years, not counting backpacking or staying with various friends and family when I was back in the States in 2008. I would lay there and sigh and get up to make a cup of tea and moodily dunk my ginger nut and wish that things didn’t have to change.

So I just decided to stay, one day, when it was sunny and gorgeous and the bay was calm and clean outside our deck, and I could not bear the idea of picking up and moving again. I decided to stay and to climb the 748642 steps up to the house every night, to be wakened by the tuis every single morning in the summer, to look out through the trees at the water from my bed. I decided to stay, and get two new flatmates, and buy some furniture, and take over the flat account, and make plans to get the year’s supply of wood from the street up the aforementioned 9459573975973 steps to the woodpile. It’s been a long time since I had to do anything like that, since I had any domestic responsibility more enervating than setting up a direct deposit and putting my dishes away and sitting around commenting disparagingly on lifestyle programming with various friendly be-pajama-ed flatmates.

Yesterday I stayed home all afternoon and basically speed-dated for new people to live with. I made cups of tea and asked and answered the same questions over and over and tried to make snap judgments without actually being judgy, which turns out to be sort of hard. I tried to just sort of magically intuit what it would be like to live with each person: their policy on kitchen tidiness, their thoughts on the octopus and jellyfish pictures currently on display in the lounge, their expectations about interpersonal flatmate harmony re: pajamas and silly television. It’s so hard to tell after just a half an hour on the soon-to-be-replaced couch.

I was pretty exhausted by the end of the day, thinking about coming and going, the old and the new. It’s going to be all on, pretty soon, and I haven’t made any decisions yet, although I do have a sense of how it might go. I still don’t know what will happen, of course—with housing or in any other part of my life, if I’m honest. But something I said I was going to try to do in 2010 was to be more open and to let the walls down a little, to be curious and not anxious, as someone once suggested I do. I don’t know if switching up one’s probably-age-inappropriate living situation can help with that sort of thing, but I will find out soon enough.