I'm recalling why it is I never usually give a piece of my mind to someone who upsets me. Although bottling things up or being a doormat isn't the way forward, venting on someone makes me feel ten times worse.

One of my housemates moved out last weekend. He's a friendly guy but he's pretty lazy and has very low standards of cleanliness. Despite his affable nature I was kind of relieved to see him go, and even more relieved that his thoughtless negligence would not now threaten to push me into saying something I might regret. That was that, I thought.
Unfortunately his carelessness continued to affect the house even a week after he'd left. Upon leaving, not only did he leave his room dirty and with an unfinished paint job (which I had to complete), but stuffed our wheelie bin full of detritus from his room. Where I live the council only empties the wheelie bins every second week, with recycling boxes on the alternating weeks. As he'd filled our wheelie bin just a few days after it had been emptied, this now meant that we'd have to wait nearly a fortnight for it to be emptied again, and leave our garbage bags pilling up outside. The council operates a policy of not taking any black bags that are not in the bin, so this means I'm going to have rubbish outside my house for weeks, festering in the hot summer sun. Various old biddies from my street are already shaking their heads disapprovingly at the sight as they walk past the house.

So quite obviously, all this annoyed me. It also annoyed me that I was somehow having to arrange the return of his deposit for him, even though that's really his problem. Also, although I didn't really mind this part so much, it was left to me to find a new housemate (which is why I had to clean the room). Even with all that though, I kept my silence, as ever not wanting to casue any upset.
Yesterday night though, as I was watching TV, I saw out the window a seedy looking man's head bob up from over by the bins. He clocked me looking at him, and hurried off. When I came outside I found that he'd ripped open one of the bin bags of my housemate's rubbish, one that he hadn't been able to fit in the bin, and spilled half it's contents over the path.
Picking up the trash, sodden and stinking, something snapped in my mind.

Ostensibly to warn him that some junkie might have run off with his bank details (I found statements in the rubbish) I emailed him, and decided to vent my spleen a little. Unfortunately I got carried away, and went on a legnthy rant about his inconsiderate nature, and what a lousy housemate he'd been, and how it looked like he'd slopped food or excrement into his bin bags of rubbish...and so on. It felt pretty good too. I was pretty pleased with myself for how witty and cutting the rant had been, and pictured his face glowing hot with humiliation as I listed his transgressions in withering, purple prose. I even sent a copy to another former housemate who had shared my frustration with the guy, and he found it pretty funny too.

As you can expect, the guy didn't take it very well. When he wrote me back, he sounded pretty sullen and hurt-- not the gushing torrent of remorse for all his shortcomings that I had desired. He pointed out that his room hadn't been in great shape when he'd originally moved in (true), that his wardrobe had always been broken and it wasn't his fault, and that it was unfair of me to say that he shouldn't get his deposit back when it had been me that suggested he should attempt to in the first place. At the end he wished me well, and said he hoped I'd enjoy the computer game of his he'd let me keep.

So I felt like about two feet tall. And I read back through my email, the one I had vaingloriously assumed to be a work of such biting and brilliant sarcasm, and found that it actually made me sound like a petty and arrogant dick. My first instinct was to write a fairly grovelling and desperate retraction of my first email-- ridiculous considering I'll probably never see the guy again anyway.
Then I realised that, although I was wrong to be nasty about it, the points I was making in my spleen-venting email were basically correct. This guy's habits WERE really disgusting. Stuffing the bin full of his crap WAS a big problem for me. Not cleaning his room properly and failing to make the proper arrangements with his sucessor WASN'T a cool thing to do. So I wrote him back, apologised for saying horrible things to him, but stood firm on all my grievences with him. He wrote me back to accept my apology, and profusely apologised in turn for not clogging up my bin. Which, really, was all I had ever really wanted from him.

So really I suppose I've learned that it's never a good thing to play tit for tat on any level. Responding to an ill deed with spite and vitriol never really undoes the deed, and just leads to more bad feeling. However I guess you have to let people know when they've upset you.

Anyway, sorry to bother you with the vagueries of my humdrum existence-- just needed a place to vent.