So this morning I was unceremoniously evicted via text with the brief accusation that I was disrespectful. I politely responded that I was fine with moving out but could she please elaborate on what she meant by disrespectful. I sent this text twice today and got no reply. I had to wait till I got home late tonight from a colleague’s engagement party to speak to her and find out what in the world she meant.
And lo and behold, what is she angry at me about? The fact that she didn’t receive a reply to a text she sent me last night, among other things. Hello, pot?
And! Just to make it all even more aggravating for me, I had sent her a reply. The situation last night was – it was lateish, and she texted me asking where I was and if I was ok, and I replied to let her know I was still at work and staying to watch a show. She then asked me what time the show was and if she could swing by. I replied to say it was starting now and apologies, but I’d let her know far in advance in future if I was going to see anything. This is the text she never received.
So I show it to her in my “Sent Items” folder, where you can see clear as day that I had sent it at 7:32pm last night. However! This is not good enough for the crazy flatmate. She laboriously checks to see if our phone times match (they don’t. I’m one minute slower. She’s like, “why is that so?” I am so flabbergasted by the stupidity of this query that I immediately say “why not?” a little snappily). She checks to see what time I sent the first reply. She reads the lost text again. She checks the message details and sent time again. I explain, repeatedly, that sometimes texts get lost in the network. It happens. I’ve sometimes not received texts from others, and others haven’t received texts from me. As she can see, however, I had indeed replied her last night. But no! The evidence on my phone is not to be trusted. She says she will contact 3 tomorrow morning to check that this text is, indeed, lost in the ether. If they say it is and verify that, yes, my number attempted to send her a text at 19:32 hours on 11 Feb, then I can stay, she says magnanimously.
At this point I am thinking she is actually certifiably insane, and even if she pays me to stay, I’m leaving. And then she has a hissyfit over the fact that the “I’ll be back late tonight” post-it note I left her this morning was 1) addressed “To Mona” instead of “Hi Mona” or “Dear Mona”, because on her whacked out planet, leaving notes with “To [recipient]” is rude, and 2) stuck on my door instead of hers (our rooms are next to each other and I was 100% sure she would see a note on my door so who cares where it was stuck?!). She also has a go at me about the fact that I went straight to my room and to bed last night without knocking on her door to say hi, since I knew she’d been worried about my whereabouts. I explain that I was zonked, and since she knew I’d been at a show, and I was under the impression she had received and not responded to my “the show is starting now!” text, that all was fine and dandy. I don’t think this was unreasonable of me AT ALL. Nevertheless, she is pissed off.
My colleague is convinced that she’s actually made up all the flatmates she’s lived harmoniously with before and they only exist in her head because no one could actually live harmoniously with someone like this. I am beginning to think she may have had a point there! Thank GOODNESS I have been evicted.
This is ridiculous. I don’t have the energy to rant about it anymore. I don’t even feel like being particularly charitable to my flatmate anymore, nice and normal as she is in all other ways if you’re not living with her, as she managed to be while we had tea during my houseviewing – she must be the MOST anal person in the world to live with.
So after even more increasingly heated back-and-forth about electricity (she now objects to my electric blanket, which is, in fact, an eco-friendly model that uses less electricity than normal), and me constantly trying to call a ceasefire by just repeatedly offering to pay as much extra as she thinks is fair once the bills come, and her constantly responding with “but why do you want to pay more if you can just be careful and use less heating? i only use the heater for 20 minutes a day! my room is always cold!” (turns out when I said she didn’t object to me keeping warm, her idea of keeping warm is decidedly not the same as mine), and me trying to explain, quite unsuccessfully, that I would rather pay more and, y’know, NOT BE COLD – she was like, this is upsetting me, I have exams in two weeks, and I don’t want to talk to you about electricity anymore, this is the last time!
I was so steamed up that I actually gave some serious consideration to moving out, something that my colleagues have been urging me to do, as they are convinced I live with a total mental nutcase. So I asked her, if I were to move out, how much notice she would want me to give. And to my enormous surprise she’s suddenly all – “no, no, this isn’t about moving out, you don’t have to worry that I will order you to move out, you’re okay with everything else, you’re quiet, and I like you” (really?? I’m thinking, because you could’ve fooled me).
I’m wondering how to get my point across to her properly, because her English isn’t very good and she doesn’t seem to understand that I might want to move out regardless of whether she wants me to. I repeat my question again – if I want to move, how much notice do I need to give? And again I get the same oh-no-you-don’t-need-to-move response.
This is aggravating and I don’t want to snap and start being rude, so I give up and retire to my room.
I guess I’ll try and stick it out for a bit more, since I appear to be, you know, stuck. If this really is the last time we’re going to discuss electricity, and I can placate her and keep warm by paying more, I think I can live with that. I dearly hope these are merely teething problems. To be honest, the bar has been greatly lowered for me now; I am so irritated that I don’t now actually care if we get to be friends or not, I just want to be able to coexist in a somewhat civilised and harmonious manner and not get on each other’s nerves too much. Whether that’s doable – well, we’ll see.
I feel like I am living in a guidebook entitled “The Flatmate from Hell – Who Not to Move in With” or something. Did I mention there are two sponges in the kitchen sink, one for cups and one for dishes, and they are not interchangeable? Who does that? (I went out and bought my own sponges today. It just seemed easier.)
it’s been a long, long time since i’ve been smacked down this badly.
so today in the spirit of reconciliation and friendliness i made the mistake (or possibly wise move. i have yet to decide) of asking the flatmate if she had any particular concerns so far about my electricity usage, living habits etc that she wanted to talk to me about… and got an impassioned earful about how, when i bake, i not only take up electricity with the oven, but also take up all the space in the kitchen, which meant that she can’t cook, and that last night she really wanted to cook something for herself for today, and now had to eat a marks and sparks ready meal because she didn’t get the chance to cook last night. because of me.
if it had been anyone else, she said, she might have thrown them out right there and then, but she thinks i’m just having trouble adjusting to living with someone again after living alone so long, which results in me forgetting to consider her kitchen needs, which is a habit that can be inculcated with time.
well. if last night had me almost in tears, this conversation had me so utterly shocked that i was too stunned to cry; there was a lump in my throat but my eyes stayed mercifully dry. i protested that she should’ve just told me she wanted to cook and i would then have shifted all my stuff to accommodate her (for i am, usually, nothing if not accommodating), but she said she felt it was i who should’ve thought about her, who should’ve considered that she might need the kitchen, and make allowances for this, and she was being polite by not insisting on using the kitchen last night.
have i really grown so inconsiderate of others in my year of living alone that i don’t realise it? is it really the done, normal thing to warn your flatmates when you’re using the kitchen…?
and then there was this whole kerfuffle about how much stuff i had brought with me. but i’m just going to ignore that, or try my best to, because i definitely feel that i am in the right here; if you’re going to limit storage space, you should say so to your tenant before they move in. and you shouldn’t seem all okay with it and then suddenly bring it up out of the blue while having a go at her about something else. i actually feel i have not been given the storage space i deserve because i have about 1/4 of the kitchen cupboards and half of the wardrobe in my own room.
sigh. how do i make this right? i never thought i was a hard person to live with. i always thought i had really easy, tolerable, pleasant habits. but apparently i’m rude. and unthoughtful. and just. sigh. okay. i think i can have that cry now.
Where to start?
Maybe, in the spirit of fairness, I should begin by saying upfront that my flatmate Mona is not a horrid person. Neither is she grossly unreasonable. She is actually quite agreeable and understanding. She doesn’t object to me blasting the heating because she thinks it’s unfair to make me live in cold conditions in the name of electricity-saving, and she doesn’t object to me using the kitchen and cooking at all sorts of odd hours, or frying bacon in the morning and smelling up the whole flat.
We have, however, had oven issues, which came to a head today. She walked in on me making muffins and immediately objected to my use of the oven, very firmly, albeit politely, and explained that the oven ate electricity like a black hole, and that she never used it herself for this reason. Therefore, she said, if I were to keep using the oven, I would have to fork out extra for electricity.
Feeling extremely put-upon I protested (probably weakly, as assertiveness is not my strong suit) that this had not been made clear to me before I moved in, and that I had never ever had problems with using the oven elsewhere before, and that I felt it was a given in ads that said “all bills included, use of kitchen” to mean that I was free to use the oven as I liked. Whereupon I was told that in Mona’s 5 years of flatsharing she had never shared with anyone who used the oven regularly, if at all, and that she had in fact lived in a flat once where her landlord expressly forbade use of the oven because it was expensive.
This rather flabbergasted me so I was kind of speechless for a while. It seemed impossible, and ridiculous, to me to restrict oven use in this flagrant manner, and more importantly, to just assume that I would know about it without making it clear from the start. I pointed out that my frustration in this matter stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t informed of this upfront, and Mona’s (again, apologetic, but firm) counter-argument was that had I told her upfront that I liked baking, and used the oven lots, she would have quoted me a different rent. The oven, she said, cost ten times as much as the gas stove, and she didn’t think it was fair on her to be paying for it since she doesn’t use the oven at all, and she is charging me very cheap rent anyway.
Again, maybe this is just me, but is oven usage really the sort of thing one needs to be clear about when negotiating tenancy?? Maybe I’m naive, maybe I’m just… ignorant, and stupid, but I felt (and still feel) so much that the onus should have been on her to tell me about the oven policy, rather than on me to tell her about my oven habits. Who discusses oven usage when meeting prospective housemates/landlords? For that matter, who has draconian oven policies like this anyway? The most bizarre thing about it all to me was that while Mona seemed to think it was entirely normal, I just… couldn’t (and still can’t) quite wrap my mind about it.
It was pretty clear to me anyway at that point that we were at an icky deadlock; while we both understood where the other person was coming from, we both felt that it was the other who should’ve been upfront about this matter from the start. I was close to tears and I didn’t want to argue anymore, so I told her I would pay the extra during billing periods when I had used the oven, and not when I hadn’t. We had some semi-reconciliatory banter about muffins, and she left me to finish up.
The thing is, financially, I don’t mind paying more, since it is true that my rent is incredibly cheap. I suppose ultimately what really bothers me is that I wasn’t told about this right off the bat. I suppose, at the end of the day, it is one of those frustrating, annoying, hair-tearing matters of principle; whatever principles of fair play I have are screaming out against my capitulation and telling me I have been very unfairly dealt with, that I should fight for the right to use the the oven, as it was on that assumption that I moved in, that I should at the very least stand firm and refuse to pay extra for this month (but do so for future months now that I have been informed).
I don’t know what to do. I tried not to cry about this while baking, though the heart had gone out of me; it was in a very dour and joyless fashion that i finished baking my muffins. I don’t even particularly feel like eating them now (which is good news for my office I guess). I don’t know if I am just being a whiny baby. I don’t know if I should feel as upset and ill-treated as I do. I just… sigh. And I don’t want to write this off as a bad flatshare and go out of my way to keep to myself. I want to try and make this work. We’re both civil and polite people with similar interests, so it must be possible to reach some kind of equilibrium, right?
I went to see Up in 3D tonight, one day earlier than expected due to a rare burst of spontaneity, and it was wicked awesome, but I will write more about that (and the other animated films I have seen/will see this week) another time.
What I really wanted to say was – the Barbican cinema, which is where we saw it, is 2 storeys underground and has no reception.
I can’t be the only one who thinks this is a genius way of terminating phone-pest behaviour during movies? Because it really bothers me. Texting and that buzzy vibrating noise are massive annoyances (let’s not even get started on actual phone ringing, and worse still, people picking it up and going “I’m in a movie!!” in what they think is a hushed tone but actually isn’t). I just think that unless you are a massively important VIP, in which case you can afford a private viewing of said film, there is no reason why anyone needs to use their phone during a movie.
So why is it not more common to just build cinemas with no reception? Singapore, take note!
It has been a truly stressful week at work so far for everyone and I have been arriving and leaving nearly an hour early/late every day so far this week (and it’s only Wednesday!) just to make a dent in my workload, so tonight in an omg-i-need-to-destress! moment I chopped up six apples into tiny pieces. And then I made an apple cake. Which is this very moment in the oven as I type, making my little room smell absolutely delicious (thanks, Smitten Kitchen!) and making me very hungry.
Yesterday it struck me all over again, en route to Waterloo to meet Debbie, how placidly British people put up with the craptastic public transport system: the train in front of ours on the Northern line broke down and after being trapped in between Mornington Crescent and Euston for positively ages, we pulled very slowly into Euston, whereupon our driver mumbled sheepishly that, erm, the train at Warren Street was broken and, erm, wasn’t going anywhere, and he reckoned our best bet was to get off here and hop onto the Victoria line instead, because “this train will be here for quite a while”.
And of course with the mass exodus of people from the Northern line onto the Victoria at Euston, human traffic slowed to an epic, molasses-like crawl. Everyone was inching onwards step by step, like a zombie horde, I was pushing 20 minutes late, really hungry, knew there wouldn’t be enough time anymore to grab dinner before having to leg it over to the National Theatre for All’s Well, still stressed from work, and quite cranky as a result; of the innumerable times I have been inconvenienced by the Tube and by TfL as an organisation, this was probably the first time I had seriously considered filing a complaint.
As I occupied myself through the zombie shuffle by wording a polite yet suitably annoyed email in my head, I heard an announcement that there were “minor delays on the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line” and nearly laughed out loud. Suddenly it all struck me as absurdly ridiculous – honestly, if TfL considers a train breaking down and having to throw all their passengers off a bunch of subsequent trains “minor delays”… what complaint can I make that would possibly register? And why is TfL like this? And what’s going to happen in 2012 when the Olympics come here and whole masses of sports fans are trapped on a stuck train together?! /rant
Anyway, I did thankfully make it on time for the play, though Deb and I had no time for dinner and had to grab some Krispy Kremes instead (not the healthiest of substitutions but yummy nonetheless). I’ve never seen one of Shakespeare’s problem plays before, and after seeing All’s Well that Ends Well… yeah, I can understand the “problem” tag. It struck me as oddly jarring in critical parts, especially in the portrayals of Helena and Bertram; I can’t decide if I’m supposed to like them, or why Helena likes Bertram at all, as he is sort of a useless prat, or whether it’s misogynistic or positive towards women, there seems to be a bit of both (but then again that vacillation is so Shakespearean, isn’t it – it ended on a really ambiguous, unresolved note too, as Debbie pointed out afterwards). It’s pretty rare that I don’t take to a Shakespeare play right away, the only others I can think of are Taming of the Shrew and Romeo & Juliet (but really, who likes R&J??), but I found it difficult to outrightly enjoy All’s Well and I suspect it has to do most with the play itself rather than the production, which was beautifully staged and generally well-acted. I’m glad I saw it though and did much prefer the conciliatory second half to the first half, but I so much entirely prefer The Winter’s Tale, which is the most recent other Shakespeare I’ve seen.
And to my horror, going to the theatre is starting to remind me of work instead of being a respite from it – perusing the National’s brochure, and looking round their posters and spaces, all these subconscious assessments and comparisons kept popping up in my head, and a never-ending litany of work tasks I needed to accomplish looped nonstop in my thoughts! Yikes.
I can’t believe I actually did manage to redesign after all, not to mention whip up something I rather like, though the process was probably made easier by the fact that I knew for sure I wanted this layout to
1) have dark text on a light background
2) be very simple
3) contain the colour red
4) have a swirly embellishment
5) not be based on a lyric
the latter since most of my previous layouts so far have had some element of a song in them, whether inspired by one or with lyrics in the design. So my favourite line from King Lear supplied the textual decoration this time – you can never go wrong with Shakespeare – and the rest of it, given the above conditions, kind of wrote itself very quickly.
After getting this done and dusted, I was going to have a rant, triggered by a mildly traumatic night out yesterday, about the drinking culture here and how I will never ever understand it, nor the practice of clubbing, and/or making friends with strangers at pubs and bars and similar establishments, or thinking it is okay to make out with people you’ve just met just because you’re both unattached. In fairness to the friend who dragged me along on this ill-advised jaunt last night, she is an exceedingly warm-hearted and intelligent person, I know she didn’t mean any harm, and my frustration is no doubt down entirely to cultural and personal differences of opinion. But I just feel like… this is a world I will never get, and so much of England is that world. Especially the drinking. There are a lot of good things I can say about this country, but it has its really ugly sides, like all other countries. This is one of them. The hour, however, compels me to keep this brief and go to sleep, and so this has to be the extent of my rant – which is probably a good thing, as I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning.
Red Velvet Cake is one of life’s great mysteries (to me). It has an unpinpointable taste that makes it impossible to describe what kind of cake it is. I don’t think it’s chocolatey enough to be chocolate, and it’s not a butter cake, nor a sponge cake, nor a pound cake. Also, it owes its renown pretty much entirely to red food colouring, which is ridiculous considering that you could red-food-colour almost any other cake you want. You could even have a red cheesecake if that floats your scarlet-loving boat. And as Deb of Smitten Kitchen (where I got this recipe) points out, red velvet cake could be any other colour you want, so this red thing is really kind of mindboggling.
But, as is also observed by Deb, people loooove red velvet cake. I freely admit to feeling an inexplicable attraction towards it, even when I know that this is an attraction borne entirely of artificial colouring. People especially love it when it is baked in cupcake form. Here in the UK, I suspect this is due to the famed Hummingbird Bakery’s version of it (they do do a cake form but I far more often hear people talk about their red velvet cupcakes). And as I was after an impressive dessert recipe for my colleagues to commemorate my last days of work at my current theatre, I decided I should finally give red velvet cake a go. I shan’t reproduce the recipe here because I pretty much used the one from Smitten Kitchen word for word (except for some quanitity adjustments for a smaller cake), but I shall have a good long rant about the painstaking process that is cake-baking…
Which segues nicely to how not to bake a cake, point 1: when a recipe tells you to lump some butter in the bottom of your pan and place pan in oven “for a few minutes until butter melts”, don’t let your butter burn, as I rather stupidly did! If you, like me, associate the smell of burnt butter with popcorn and movies, this will make your cake smell of popcorn and movies. And taste a little like it too (the bits of it that came into contact with the burnt butter bottom, anyway). Point 2: when the recipe says to line your pan with parchment paper, there’s probably a reason for it… it would’ve made my cake NOT taste like popcorn, at the very least >__>
I also struggled almightily with the components of the recipe itself. Who has 3 cake tins lying around? Seriously? Well I don’t… and on top of that, the UK doesn’t contain cake flour, canola oil or white vinegar. Cake flour I can understand because I’ve never heard of it in my life, but canola oil and white vinegar definitely exist in Singapore (the oil at least I’m sure of!), so what gives, London? I wound up reducing the recipe by one-third and making it one fat layer instead of a few, then slapping all the frosting on top of my one fat layer, and using vegetable oil in place of canola, the latter of which turned out to be an icky mistake :/ it’s not as disastrous as it could’ve been. But there’s definitely a strange, lingering, oily aftertaste to the cake. Argh! Next time I shall try it with rapeseed oil instead, which is apparently the closest thing the UK has to canola (and I didn’t bother doing this research before going out grocery shopping, because I had no idea canola oil didn’t exist here… annoying country differences).
In the absence of a standing electric mixer with a bowl that the recipe called for, I had to make do with a handheld mixer instead. I don’t think it really made a difference in the end, but I did find myself having to juggle a lot more things at one go. Oh and I had no white vinegar. Did I mention that already? I highly doubted that malt vinegar would be quite the same, so I substituted lemon juice, which… I suspect wasn’t strong enough because the expected tangy taste is barely there at all. I suppose it is quite possible that my lemon juice, being Tesco house brand, is of substandard quality.
And then! After all was done and the cake was in the oven, and I had washed up and wiped the table and was feeling good about it all, I realised to my horror that I had forgotten to add vanilla to the cake. Cue panic removal of the cake pan from oven, throwing in vanilla, and mixing it up in the pan itself, totally ignoring the fact that it had started to bake and bits of crusty top were forming. Alas. I don’t know if this really affected the cake much, but I would rather advise that you not do it if possible to avoid…!
Happily, it didn’t turn out all disastrously – the middle of the cake (i.e. everywhere that didn’t touch the popcorny burnt-butter sides and bottom) actually tastes pretty good. If you, erm, try to ignore the faint oily aftertaste. And the cream cheese frosting is golden. This is hands down the best frosting I have ever made in my life. Not that I’m very experienced at frosting, but this is really, really good, and so easy; I’m definitely nicking the same frosting for other cakes!
My last day of work at the current place isn’t till next week. I had deliberately made an early trial run of this cake with the idea in mind that I would definitely screw up and need a second run to perfect it for my colleagues T____T I can’t decide whether I’m happy or not to have been proven right. But at least it doesn’t taste so terrible that I can’t eat it. And now that you all know what not to do when making red velvet cake, you can all have a good laugh at me and hopefully go off and make lots of lovely red velvet cake yourselves with Smitten Kitchen’s fantastic recipe, which I can sample in future ♥
Questions/things I am thoroughly sick and tired of hearing from other people:
In conclusion: if you secretly think I’m a good-for-nothing layabout who’s being exploited as free labour within an inch of her useless, penniless, mooching life, please sod off, I have got no more patience for the likes of you, and right now I feel like I could bite.
sq
cui
LcT