[Redway]

Especially when you don’t particularly like/know/vibe with the other people who happen to share a space with you.

Treating the kitchen like a family home (by not only cooking and eating but staying there to chill, snort lines/party and do projects as if the other residents mightn’t want to just slip in to pattern their meals and slip out without being cornered into an awkward small-talk corner with random faces and having them following you around the kitchen asking what you’re cooking - unless I’m blatantly cool with/enabling that kind of curiosity, I don’t want to take the time and energy to explain what it is I’m cooking or talk to people I wouldn’t actually initiate any form of sustained interaction with on my own terms).

That and people who disturb the serenity/silence and carry on day-and-night.

I did used to have a lot more tolerance for these things when I was much younger (fresher days) because the people I were living with at that point in my life were a lot more compatible with me and being out in those situations no matter how much you’d naturally want to keep to yourself (or not) is an invaluable experience any 19-year-old needs so it wasn’t like I minded sharing space with four or five other people. But at this age and point in my life I like to play the role of the individualistic people-watcher (in nichely-lay terms) so I’m going to need something of an actual good reason or personal connection to make allowances for random people I don’t know from a can of Peak milk filling the air with empty white noise just for the sake of ecstatic, boundary-and-appropriety-oblivious gregariousness and getting in the way of whatever it is I might be wanting to do around the place (cooking, cleaning or whatever).

I feel like after a certain point in your early 20s it’s a lot to ask for (unless you’re that right with them), especially if you’re quite the social introvert and value that solitude and serenity. It’s just what people with more boujee taste have to make do with and tolerate until they can afford a studio flat but either way coming home after a long day (or just being that heads-on, mature guy/chick who happens to work/study from home in relative serenity) coming home to a group of overgrown 30-year-olds treating the kitchen like a perpetual audition-ground for “most A.D.H.D.-riddled, over-gregarious school mandem” gets pretty jarring after a while. Especially when they don’t even bother to clean up after themselves (another point).