The picture that begins this article is amazing.

Every morning wages tiny war. This morning I get up and bake a croissant, a fresh one from dough that rises overnight, the flakiest buttery things I've ever tasted short of a place friends sent me in Paris. As the tea brews she gets up and I cringe because I know my morning space with everything as it should be is about to be interrupted. The serenity of news, warm croissant, and tea looking out over a gray skyline.

She intrudes on my morning with a string of complaints. About some rash she has (which is probably a good case for psychosomatics), about the wifi, about how stressful her life is. There are things she doesn't tell me. The continued job interviews. That her father is going to be her official mentor, which is incredibly embarrassing and would probably give anyone a rash. It's like the rest of the company saying "we'll hire her but she's your problem." She used to do summers there. They know her. And they have partly, apparently, decided on her behalf that her career begins as a farce.

I hate the negativity. I hate how it starts my day that way and saps energy, just a little. I don't like the promulgation of negativity, the way it hangs in the air and fills up the space, poisoning everything around it. Five years of roommates, I've never gotten better at dealing with this, and sometimes I think the difficulty is me, but then I review who I lived with, long term:

-K, whose husband left her after I moved out and there was no diversion for their dysfunctional relationship
-H, whose roommates (some of the nicest guys I know) have quasi forced him out of his house after two years, and publicly can't stand him anymore
-S, currently, who wonders a lot why she lacks substantial friends and any romantic prospects but who is widely disliked by anyone I've introduced her to

A lot of my other friends live with crazy and are far more patient. One is a virtual psychotherapist to her secretly bulimic cutter roommate. Another has lived with two social rejects, both long term. I don't have a problem with people, as a rule, until they start interfering with my life. With K, it was turfing me without real notice after forcing me to move all my stuff during paper season. For H, it was his semi-abusive blaming when anything in his life went wrong, Napoleonic screaming and threats. With S, it's harder to pinpoint, other than her general presence being totally oppressive and negative.

When I'm having problems with someone, I shift into ignoring. Part of this is a result of living with crazy growing up; eventually learning I couldn't win with crazy in any way short of withdrawing, and that the only peace in my life would be solitude self created. There was no conflict resolution, only conflict avoidance. It's unproductive, inadvisable, and somewhat juvenile...