Dear Roommate

I should not be made to feel guilty whenever I ask you to clean your mess up out of public spaces or inquire as to why the messes have not been cleaned up after a reasonable amount of time.  I think I have been fair by not yelling or getting snippy, as you have, but even so I believe that its not just my years of maturity that separate us in this situation.

You may not have had to do chores when you lived with your mother, in fact I remember hearing how you would yell at her and make her cry when she tried to get you to clean your room.  So naturally, you must see me as you would your mother trying to get you to clean up after yourself in the kitchen or bathroom.

We have different definitions of clean, what it means to clean something, and expectations about cleaning.  Wiping the sink and top of the toilet does not mean cleaning the bathroom.  I don't care if you wiped the mirror too.  Your hair is shed all over the floor, clogged on and off in the tub, and the trash does not take itself out.  Do not get mad at me for holding you to the same cleaning standards I exhibit on my weeks.  Its simply not fair to have only me taking out the bathroom trash and cleaning the floor and tub.

And the recycling.  If its past overflowing, and its your week to take it out, take it out.  Usually, you are better at this, but when you get busy you forget.  Far be it from me to remind you and have you roll your eyes, give me the cold shoulder, and stalk around me for days after.

The way I am being treated is unfair.  It does not matter to me that we have less than a month until graduation.  When you go off into the real world, I hope you will have learned the errors of your ways from this situation just as I will have learned mine.  Something new about me is revealed every time I live with someone and this time I realized that I need to not only define what clean is to me, but agree on the mutual definition as well as timeline.  I shouldn't wait until you hair is on my toothbrush and its been two and a half weeks before I say something to you about finally cleaning the bathroom.  And then when I also mention the recycling that hasn't been taken out because you also had not done that in those weeks as well and I let it pile up thinking you would surely get around to it...well you see where I am going.

I don't want to spend these last few weeks of my senior year avoiding you in my own apartment, or looking at your bf's bloody tp in our bathroom trashcan.  It is better to win than be right, I once heard, and in this instance to win is to have a clean bathroom and the recycling taken out.  I have in the past picked up on your slack but I don't want to coddle or enable you.

So.  Clean it.  We are all busy.  If you don't like it, live alone when you go to Harvard.