Roots and Rooms

So it's Friday night, and the... let's see... it's nearly four days and a half since I moved into this new place, and of those four I've only spent one full day in the house; every other day I've gone walking out to explore or get stuff done; my schedule of living hasn't changed, much, though.

I suppose I should introduce the people I'll be living with for the next year, barring giant surprises that send me off to goodness knows where and force me to forfeit the month's deposit... so first off I'll start by saying that I don't live alone. It's a small unit: two bedrooms, one living room, one kitchen-cum-dining room, one storeroom; both bedrooms are rented out, and I (and the roommate) occupy the one nearer the kitchen. It's very clean--the landlady has a thing about germs--and most of the furniture is pretty old. There's piles of stuff around the kitchen and store room, apart from the space on the ground where the landlady sleeps.

The landlady is 67 years old by her own admission--and before you ask, I didn't ask her; she revealed it to me during the first meeting, when I was viewing the room--indirectly, of course, but at any rate she is 67 years old, apparently single (I haven't quite had the gall to ask where her husband is), Buddhist, and very much an animal lover; the cat was brought in about ten years ago from off the street when she saw him eating grass, and she feeds stray cats in the nights and stray birds in the mornings. She has strong views about many things, and expresses those views without any apparent stimulus--sometimes it's about how much she prefers the taste of salt over the taste of sugar, sometimes it's about her sons' exercise routines (apparently they jog and go to the gym), and this morning it was about politics in Singapore, Malaysia, and China--I suspect I haven't yet exhausted her supply of topics to opine about. My view of her is that she's rather bound by fear--she always locks the door because she's worried that somebody might drop in unexpectedly, she prefers to cook because she's afraid of the hygiene standards outside, she always keeps at most two lights on in the house--and pretty much never any fans--because she's afraid of the constantly-rising cost of public utilities, and she wants tenants like myself because, in her own words, "Malaysian Chinese tenants are safer". She's quite proud of her family, though; I know most of their educational pedigrees by now, and their job histories to boot. But no mention of the father of the children, not even a plaque or photo of him--the walls are bare except for the electric meter and the occasional wall-mounted fan.

The housemate is 18 years old, from Jakarta; he's studying animation at the local academy of fine arts, and at the moment he's away visiting family for a month--apparently it's school holidays for him. He's quite a friendly young fellow, cheerful and very cat-friendly--splats himself on the floor to rub the cat under its chin and all that. He also reads a fair amount of manga, which I found out on the night I moved in when he asked me what I was reading and I said "fanfic" in an embarrassed tone--only to have him ask what series it was of, and then we were off to a good start and I completely spoiled the ending of Mirai Nikki for him. (He didn't believe me at first and then went to read the ending for himself, and I knew I had been vindicated when he screeched in rage.) As it turns out he speaks Hokkien and English and Chinese, in decreasing fluency... Bahasa Indonesia is not one of the things he speaks, apparently due to a private education when growing up. He can't play the organ.

The roommate... found me off EasyRoommate, which indicates a fair amount of self-drivenness, borne out by his hiring of an agent to help in the room-searching. He appears to be relatively easy-going, though somewhat private--at least, I assume such because he needs a room due to not making it past the hostel cutoff. He's relatively tall, and quite skinny, and has a definite sense of obligations, which is good... I know almost nothing else about him apart from his name, because he hasn't actually moved in yet. He moves in tomorrow, and then I'll know more about him.

The cat is at least ten years old--according to the landlady he was taken in from outside ten years ago, when she found him eating grass. To this day he maintains a habit of eating grass, which he prefers to dried sunfish (which the landlady feeds him as regular meals). He is, like all cats, relatively inscrutable; there is no scratching-post in the house, so he uses the plush sofa for that, and often interrupts TV programmes by the sound of claws-in-plush, which (given that the landlady has a penchant for soaps) is sometimes actually a good thing. He seems to like small, confined spaces--when I first met him he was between two cupboards, and now likes to stay in the corner of the sofa or the space between the TV and the window or the space between the door and the wall. I'm not exactly sure why. I don't know what he makes of me, though; he accepts backrubs and scratches under the chin, but will not leap on things I toss at him, and once hissed at me when he encountered me on the stairs (the landlady sometimes lets him roam the apartment building).

My room is small, with one window and one wall-mounted fan and one ceiling lamp; the two beds occupy almost all the floor space, and there are two floor-to-ceiling wooden wardrobes; the landlady uses one, and the other is shared between the roommate and myself. I occupy the bed nearer the door, and my stuff occupies the entirety of the space under my bed as well as part of the floor at the foot of the bed and my share of the wardrobe and my computer is put on a table outside and... yeah, I have a lot of stuff. But at least the landlady put in a router--which I'm connected to by LAN and everybody else uses wireless to connect to--and that is how I'm staying online.

...the job hunt continues its fruitless way; the parents are already busy telling me to pack up and get out and uproot myself again, and go off where the grass might be greener.