Top Ten Reasons I Love Living Alone

I was never very good at being alone, until quite recently. I always had a boyfriend or a roommate, sometimes both and sometimes both who are the same thing, but I’ve lived alone for three years now and never been really good at it. Well, scratch that, I let a boyfriend move in, for six months, that was a bad idea. OK anyway, so, I’ve never been good at living alone. Lately though I can’t imagine life with anyone else in it. OK, well, not everyday life, definitely.

So here it is, the big top ten reasons I love living alone:

1) Nobody can complain about my cooking, except for my cat. And she doesn’t.
2) If the place is a mess, it’s my mess. I’ve had an unusual amount of people over to my house recently, which has become cause for some embarrassment, but nothing I’ve been horribly ashamed of (yet).
3) Eating, sleeping, reading, cooking, watching TV, surfing the web, surfing Match, returning emails, writing, relaxing…in a bathrobe, pajamas, or naked. Who’s gonna stop me, huh? (Yes, I keep the shades drawn, much to my neighbors’ relief.)
4) Roo. My little cat, who greets me at the door when I come in with leg rubs and tiny little squeaky meows. Not to mention that my favorite animal to sleep with, spoon with, and hang out with, has been for the last five years, and always will be, my cat.
5) Absolute self-sufficiency. Anything I fuck up, I’m accountable for…but only to myself.
6) My toilet seat remains exactly where it is supposed to…down, with the cover on top of it.
7) This is hard to describe, but the place is entirely mine. Everything here belongs to me, from the painting given to me by one of my college friends to the last stick of furniture to the cheesy “Mocha Latte” relief print I have hung in my kitchen. Everything here speaks something about who I am, even if it’s just stating: “poor former college student still living the impoverished lifestyle”.
8) Singing along with Jimmy Eat World or…anyone I want to…anytime I want to…without worrying about disturbing the peace (I got lucky; my living room backs up to a dead wall).
9) Writing whenever I want, without a guilty complex about the potential for waking my partner.
10) My peanut-butter-and-cheddar-Goldfish habit. I love to get a small plate full of cheddar Goldfish and a tablespoon overloaded with peanut butter and scoop up some peanut butter with one Goldfish and stick it to another and shovel it into my mouth.

My ex hates peanut butter. Go figure.