Tao of Gabe: On Illusions

Tao of Gabe

Gabe the Noumenal Beaver here to give you a lesson in coping. See, this semester I lost all government help for my education so I moved in with a trio of loveable, if flawed, human beings.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a Russian, an Irishman, and a blonde share a wooden flat with a beaver for four months. There were no survivors.

The problem with sharing an apartment with strangers is getting used to the differences in values that come between people of different origins. For instance, in the time I’ve lived here, there’s been nude midnight aerobics, incessant Irish whistling, sabotaged Russian Roulette, and enough hair in any given drain to make Bruce Willis look like Howard Stern.

The roommates claim that every one of those started when I got here but who can say? All I know is that someone here is disgusting, and he’s about three feet tall and shaped like an overly ripe mango.

The problem, and as a trained psychologist I can tell you what it is, is that none of my flatmates will do every single thing I say. Furthermore, none of them can compromise to each other’s needs. For instance, nobody seems to enjoy being on the receiving end of my psychological experiments.

(Here’s a fun one: set up your musical playlist to play the saddest, most suicide-inducing songs on low to moderate volume. Then fix it so that nobody can change the volume or settings and leave for the weekend. Repeat as necessary until everyone in your flat is depressed but you. There’s another experiment involving alarm clocks and early morning power surges, but some of the more anti-social readers–that is, Parking Aides– might actually try this so I won’t expand on it.)

The secret to enjoying living with strangers is communication and compromise. Or so I hear from people who now live alone.

In the end, all roommate relationships diverge into two spheres: friendship and tolerance. If you are lucky enough to enjoy your flatmates and have enough in common with them to become their friends, you’ll love your life and enjoy coming home.

If, however, you only tolerate your flatmates or they only tolerate you, then you will hate coming home and they will hate having you come home. The solution will inevitably be either avoidance in that you’ll spend all of your time away and come home only to sleep, dominance in that you’ll spend all of your time at home and invite friends over so as to make it seem more pleasurable, stubborness in which you refuse to change your lifestyle because of your situation, or subvertiveness which is a Passive-Aggressive art and my personal pick. In essence, subvertiveness is lessening the amount of work you do, maximizing theirs, concealing the discrepancy, and deriving enjoyment from this.

It’s what we in the writing end of the media do to our editors.

Love, I mean tolerance,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: Nobody loves you and some of us actually hate you.”

Tao of Gabe Gabe the Noumenal Beaver here to give you a lesson in coping. See, this semester I lost all government help for my education so I moved in with a trio of loveable, if flawed, human beings. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a Russian, an Irishman, and a blonde share a…