House-hunting

The Great Property Hunt of 2008 is going somewhat disastrously. Despite having numerous agents searching for me, none are able to come up with anything. Many of them just blatantly don't call back after saying they will. Admittedly I do have two guys out there hunting who seem to genuinely want to help me which is lovely. That said, I'm beginning to feel that I may in fact have to resort to that most dreaded of options - sharehousing.

Now I have been in sharehouses in Wakayama, Shizuoka and Melbourne. The Melbourne experience was the only positive one and that was largely due to me living with a good (and very chilled out) friend. The two Japan experiences have ranged from average to horrendous. There was one guy I lived with that was a devout Christian and quite possibly the most boring individual I'd ever met. The one nice thing about being an ex-pat is that you get to have opinions and people want to listen. The result of this is that you also listen to other people's opinions, disagree boisterously and then laugh and buy one another a beer. Even though people disagree there's still a mutual respect for where someone is coming from and what their life experience has entailed. Of course I have my rose-coloured glasses firmly in place and am ignoring all the gigantic assholes who are unable to accept any opinion that is not their own. By and large though the life of an ex-pat is a fascinating one because you interact daily with people from all over the world. This particular housemate though was something else. Utterly unable to accept any other kind of lifestyle or opinion our relationship was handicapped from the start because I got *that feeling*.

I may not be very bright and I may make some very poor decisions in my life, but the one thing I can, and have always been able to, rely on is my initial instincts when I meet people. They rarely fail me and when I met this housemate I just knew there was something "off" about him. I had to be taken from the room by a friend one night when he entered into a conversation about porn in Japan that I was having with some friends. He told us very seriously that porn was adultery. While I would definitely argue this point I also knew there was little point with a guy like him. And fair enough anyway, as a religious pundit he's entitled to that opinion - after all, it's not really one that hurts anyone. He then went on to expand his idea to include the very notion of thinking about another woman was adultery. Yes, you read right. By this logic one is committing adultery every time they see a hot girl on the street and their imagination kicks in for a few seconds before the mundaneness of everyday takes hold once more. My friend knew me quite well and could see the anger in my cheeks after he had said this so I was taken to the balcony to cool off and have a cigarette. Mission accomplished.

A postscript to all this is that directly after I left Japan, and I'm talking less than a week, he was found to have a Japanese girl stay over in his room. The girl was one of our students, no less! I have very strict ethical rules about dating students (I teach adults btw) and they basically amount to : UH UH, NO WAY, NOT EVER. Besides which it was actually a fireable offense with our employer at the time. To cap all of this off, he had a girlfriend in the States the entire time (I think they were engaged, iirc, despite her only being 19). So my instincts about that particular one were correct.

The point of all this? Wish me the biggest luck because housesharing is just so much pot luck and I never want to be in a situation again where the thought of going to my own home turns my stomach.