On Living Alone
 
Most young folks dream of the day they can finally have a place all to themselves. How great it will be to not have to deal with parents or roommates! All of a sudden you can do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. And of course the dishes will get done when you want them to get done. No one will mind if you finally fall into bed at 5 am after a long night out with friends either. Those things are indeed great, but there are also some drawbacks to living all alone.

Chris:  I think the most annoying part to living alone is how much it costs. People are always forgetting that I have to pay for my apartment all by myself. I tend to pay almost twice as much as all of my friends for rent, so I don't have as much cash to go out and do as much stuff as everyone else. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I have to explain why I can't afford to pay for some extras that they think I just have to have.
 
Elizabeth:  Rent has to be one of the biggest necessary evils of being an adult.  (Followed closely by having to spend your hard earned money on toilet paper.  Little pieces of nothing that you basically flush down the toilet... but worth every penny for that two-ply.)  The cost of my rent is all on my shoulders and I have no one to fall back on.  If I can't make the rent, it is life on the street or moving back home to my parents.  Two very scary prospects.  But it is doable since it is one of those static expenses every month and easy to fit into a budget, not often you get any surprises from the rent man.  
 
I don't live in the most perfect apartment: it isn't in the best neighbourhood, has thin walls and not exactly the type of place I like inviting people over to see.  But on the plus side, it is very close to work and relatively cheap.  You have no idea how many of my friends have given me grief about not moving into someplace nicer.  Any of the other apartments I have looked at were always smaller and more expensive than what I am paying right now.  If I moved out of the neighbourhood, I would have to get a car to travel back and forth to work and that would be a whole new added expense (monthly payments, insurance, gas...) Since I'm not ready for the suburbs and until I find that Sugar Daddy, it is the cheap ass student apartment for me. 
 
The other thing I find hard about living alone is the food issue.  Any food I buy, it is only going to be eaten by me.  So if it doesn't get eaten by me, it will wither and die and get my fridge all smelly.  You have no idea how much food I have thrown out because I had good intentions at the grocery store but once it goes into the crisper, it will never see the light of day again until it has transformed itself into something only a bimolecular scientist would be able to identify.
 
Chris:  Don't even get me started on food. Forget the difficulties of cooking for one person, the shear amounts of spoilage is what gets to me. I can't seem to consistently get through all of the food that I buy. People keep saying to freeze stuff, but when you have a tiny freezer, freezing leftovers is not as easy as it sounds. And bread. I just stopped buying it altogether cause I never used it all.
 
Eliz:  Bread, oh how I have missed thee!  And I’m not even on a carbs diet.  It is just easier not to bother bringing it into a home to go all mouldy.  My other food issue is food that won’t go away.  I’ve bought it, it won’t die and it looks like it has a longer life expectancy than I have.  In my cupboard, I’m sure that dried pasta has to be a product of the 90’s and it just won’t go away.  I keep hoping it will just someday pick up stakes and run away from home.
 
Chris: Ha! I think I got you beat there. I have a can of tomato sauce that I got way back during my Masters. How do I know? Well, it has a smiley face pasted on it. Why do I still have it? I think that it has now become a good luck charm for my pantry. Oh the lies we tell ourselves to excuse our laziness.
 
Eliz:  My lie was a chicken named Fred.  My mother talked me into buying a frozen little roasting chicken.  She knows I don't cook and I’m not sure why I gave in but I bought the chicken and placed it in my freezer.  And there it stayed for at least two years, if not more.  Periodically, my mother would ask me if I had cooked the chicken yet and my response would be shock over her asking me to cook my roommate Fred, very insensitive she was... Then one day, Fred got smelly and had to be relocated to a new home.  I was told that it was a nice farm with lots of seagulls. 
 
Anywho, we've talked food and the cost.  Any other problems we should talk about concerning the wonderful world of living on your own?
 
Chris:  Time to go for the obvious. You live alone. There is no one there in the morning to talk to, no one to help you do things when you get a little swamped, and also no one to cover rent for you if you ever fall on hard times and need a few days to pay rent. Like you said earlier, if you get into trouble, you could be stuck having to move back in with your parents, and who wants to do that? I mean I love my parents and they love it when I visit, but I don't think that any of us could handle the idea of me moving back in.
 
Eliz:  Ah, Chris, I’m sure your parents would love to have you back home.  It would be very, very cozy.  But I agree with all that… not to mention, if you live alone, you have no one to blame for stuff that is completely totally your fault anyway.  If you find toothpaste in the sink, you were the only one around to put it there.  Hair on the floor, yep all yours.  Garbage not taken out, your oversight.  Sometimes having a fall guy to focus your frustration is very handy.
 
So in conclusion, this column is dedicated to all our friends, family, coworkers, acquaintances, strangers who ever looked at us with a little bit of envy because we lived alone.  The grass on this side of the pasture might look a little greener, but in fact, it is just another pasture and the green you see is just slightly mouldy food. 
 
Bio:  Chris and Eliz are the hosts of the weekly Two Girls and a Podcast where they talk a little bit about everything and not much about anything.  Although they are two sci-fi fangirls, they like to keep to a variety of topics, as they would get easily bored.  As of publication, Chris has since moved in with a boy and has lost her fortress of solitude.  She may be revisiting her stance in the months to come.