Two guys and a girl

Update on my Krrish survey - 195 responses so far. I'm so thrilled about my dissertation now. I think that about 150 of the responses came from my blog buddies and their friends. Just wanna thank you guys and gals for helping out someone you've never met. :)

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I am moving again.

And cliched as it may sound, it does feel like yesterday when I moved into this house.

When I started my master's last year, I was going for classes after work. My classes were in the west and I was living in the east. By the time I got home, it was so late that it was almost time to get up to go to work the next day. The lease for my last house had expired. And to avoid the crazy lifestyle I was leading, I had finally decided that it would be better for me to move to the west.

And move I did. But now it's that time of the year again. And I am so glad I am moving back to the east. Yeay! Though I still have one more semester of travelling to the west for classes, I am going back to my beach and everything else that I missed about the east.

And as I think of the million things that I must throw before I move into my new apartment, I wonder if there's anything about the west I will miss. Not much.

Maybe the two blokes I live with. Just a little bit.

When you're fresh out of university, everyone someone manages to find someone or the other of the same gender, to be flatmates with. It's easy. But a few years down the lane? Not so easy anymore.

Okay, what do you do when all the girls you know are either getting married or leaving Singapore for an MBA?

It was official - I'd run out of single girls to live with.

Days of frustration and desperation led to the only solution I had. Answer an online ad. I found the ad and the flatmates. Everything was fine. Except for one little thing.

The flatmates were both guys.

So I called up my parents and asked them if they'd be okay with me living with two random guys. (Actually, they were not that random, they were my juniors from uni. And although I'd never really spoken to them, I'd seen them in uni a couple of times.)

Dad freaked out a bit at first.

"Live with guys?? Why?? What happened to the girls??"

"I'm out of them, Dad!"

"Out of them?"

"Yeah, most are going abroad for their MBAs and a few are getting married."

(Truth was - most were getting married, and a few were going abroad for their MBAs. But I could not tell him that otherwise I'd put myself in a "If your batchmates are getting married, why aren't you??" situation. And other than "Errr... uhhh... ummm...." I had no answer to that question.)

"Achha... hmmm... guess you have no choice then... you will be careful, yes?" He asked.

"Don't worry Dad, I'll keep three knives in my room and a water pistol under my pillow." I tried to joke my way out of it.

(Come to think of it - I do have three knives in my room - one for sharpening my writing pencils, one for sharpening my eyebrow pencil, and one for cutting fruits and stuff -- general bhaigiri-practice.)

Anyway, my parents agreed and I went ahead and signed up for the flat. Contrary to my hopes, neither of them turned out to be gay. It's now been almost a year since I have lived with these guys, and I must say it has been a strangely interesting experience.

I believe that after having seen both sides, now I am in a position to collate the differences between living with gals and living with guys.

Living with guys - the cons

• You can't just wear whatever you want when at home.
• To avoid embarrassing them, you gotta dry your clothes in two lots - the mentionables in the main drying area and the unmentionables inside your room.
  
• There is always a pile of clothes in the washing machine that someone forgot to pick up.
• The couches always have a pile of clothes taken off the drying rack by someone who wanted to dry his own clothes.
• When your flatmate wants to ask you something, he will not knock on your door for fear of disturbing you. He will sms you or worse, call your mobile from the house phone.
• You can't decorate the house for fear of making it too girly. I have not had my favourite pink gerberas in my house for almost a year now. :'(
• "But we must have one hindi channel yaar!" is not a good enough reason to get Zee/Sony tv connection, especially since you have no time to watch TV. (In the last year, I have watched TV only thrice. I don't even know my way around the remote control.)
• You feel like a worthless failure when a yummy smell creeps out of the kitchen as your male flatmate whips up a fancy meal.
• You can't walk around with a multani mitti mask on your face - you may cause a heart-attack in the house.
• You can't play Shania Twain too loud.
• You can't have an inhouse pedicure/manicure session.
• You can't experiment with your flatmates' hair.
  
• You can't get opinions from your flatmates on silly things such as whether your ankles look fat in those shoes, before you go out partying.
  

Living with guys - the pros

• They will agree to let you have the big room with the attached bathroom without any rona-dhona and nautanki. (Of course, I pay 75 dollars extra per month for it, but it was still nice of them.)
• You will never have a situation where all the inhabitants of the flat are PMS-ing at the same time.
• It's no big deal if you see your housemates only in the weekend. (When I leave for office, it's dark and they're still asleep. When I come back from class, it's dark and they're asleep.)
• Your room can be as messy as you like - no one's gonna drop by at a weird time to talk about boyfriend problems.
• You work out for longer durations, especially if you bump into your flatmates at the gym.
• You can all be sitting in the same living room, and you don't necessarily have to talk.
  
• The kitchen belongs to only one person, without interference from the others. (In my case, it happens to belong to my housemate, since I stopped cooking a year ago.)
• Your flatmates will never borrow your precious hair straightener.
• Of the two shoeracks in the apartment, you can have one and a half to yourself. Sometimes more.

But my top favourite one is this.

• You enjoy hearing the shock in the voice of the person on the phone to whom you just coolly said, "I'm sorry, ____ is not at home. I'm his flatmate, can I take a message?"

:D