Rule #3

Rule #3: Develop An Interest In Bad Music

Bad Flatmate – Bad Music. Sounds pretty straightforward and accurate, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, it’s also true. The biggest cliché known to man, a flatmate who plays their music all day and all night and always too loud. And it’s always horrible, something that you can’t stand. Without exceptions. Have you ever heard of a flatmate with a good taste in music? Thought not.

And of course, it had to happen to me. It’s not as bad as it could be – I have experience of techno lovers living upstairs – but I can’ help hearing it. It always has to be something I hate.

Flatmate loves to listen to her music early in the morning, when I’m usually still in bed, it’s really lovely. She’s so nice. As you know the walls in student houses are always like paper, so I can pretty much hear all that she does anyway. Not that I would want to.
As it seems difficult to get in contact with Flatmate (and I do need to talk to her sometimes! ‘Go buy more toilet paper’, for example), I found that pretending to like her music helped. The one time I saw her going past the kitchen I quickly stopped her, pretending to be interested in what she was listening.

“You know, that music you listen to, I couldn’t help hearing it, it’s really good! What is it, I really like it!”

A bit of that and then a bit more chit-chat, and she thinks I’m nice and I can ask her to do boring things without being annoying and demanding. It’s like a nice warm-up! I’m not big on telling people what to do anyway, but sometimes it needs to be done.

“Yeah, I totally agree, that song is awesome!.. But hey, I just realised, there’s this one little thing, it‘s nothing really…”

But music. It’s such a uniting force – and then sometimes, it can be horrible. I consider myself pretty tolerant towards all kinds of music, but her music – it’s not the absolute worst I’ve heard, but it’s not very good either. I’ve no idea what it is, but it sounds like a weird mixture of country and Indian music. But good for her. Eclectic music taste and so on.

Flatmate seems to like me now that she thinks I like similar music. Things are going a bit better so I’m happier.