I'm Mr Vain

[luckycanuck]

I got the idea yesterday that instead of poking around looking for a share house to move into, I might create my own.  There are quite a few houses within walking distance from work (that is becoming a key criterion) being rented out, and if I had some friends who were also looking, I might be able to set up a new house.  I even looked at a house this morning about two streets away from where I am now.  It was fine and I even took an application, but the problem remains that I haven't lined up anyone else to move with, and I haven't got the core of household things I would need.  No sofa, no tv, no pots and pans, no plates or knives or forks.  After living in share house after share house I have accumulated things for a bedroom, but no other householdy things.  At the very least this has opened up another avenue for me.  I may be able to locate friends who are also on the lookout for a place to live and we might be able to work something out.

I spent the afternoon spent in the office doing mostly non work things, but just happy to shut myself into my space.  (I seem to like being at work after hours having locked myself in.  I know the phone won't ring, I know nobody else will come by, and for some reason I like being alone in a big building.  Walking down the halls late at night when nobody else is around and it's very quiet is somehow cool.)

Afterwards I went to visit Choir Bikie in her new place.  Choir Bikie is someone I met at church three years ago, who met a guy about two years ago who is an avid biker (minus that tattoos and attitude and crime) and he seems to have converted her, though she still sings.  The two of them who are now quite relationshippy (they have been together for almost exactly as long as I've been single) and they have bought a place together.

Some people (like my parents) have suggested that perhaps my current residential situation could be solved by me buying a place.  (As it happens, I am going to look at a unit tomorrow that is for sale and is quite close to work.)  I've easilly got a down payment saved up with plenty of room to spare, but looking around a fully equipped house with a mortgage inhabited by a friend of mine who once lived in share houses like me but who now has a home, I felt it was all very foreign.  I really have gotten accustomed to living like this.  Since I left my parents house years ago, I have spent almost all of my time living in share houses.  Korea, Canada, London, Sydney, Canberra, everywhere was one sharehouse after another.  (Living in the Collaroy Castle was an exception, but I haven't really lived there for long, and it's not the same as living in my own place.)

This is not to say I definitely won't end up renting a place on my own, or buying, eventually (though I've wondered if I will ever have a mortgage will all the questions and complications that go along with that) but my instinct is still to live in a share house.  It doesn't bother me that someone else owns the dishes I eat off of or the sofa I sit on.  I'm 32, and it doesn't bother me at all.  (Perhaps the parents see it as me not being grown up at 32.)

Anyway, I left when all the Canberra riders (as they were calling themselves) were the only ones aside from me left, and the conversation veered in the direction of the merits of various bikes and tires and other subjects to which I could not intelligently comment.  Also, apparently I had a dazed expression on my face.

By the way, the subject title for today's post is not a reference to the early 90's song, but something that struck me on the way home.  That's a subject for another day.  Tomorrow perhaps.