Monthly Archives: October 2006

Perhaps I should just keep my own personal chamber pot

I’d like to start out by saying that I like my new roommate, and I’m glad that we chose to live with him. He’s quiet, nice, funny, etc. I just want to get that out of the way before I say the following:

WHAT THE FUCK?

I got back Sunday night from a frisbee tournament in eastern Washington. Natch, because it was a long drive and travelling is a lot for a dog who is very much a proponent of her regular routine—eat, sleep, poop, eat, sleep, poop—I knocked 25 bucks off of Roomie’s rent in exchange for a little pet-sitting for the weekend. He had Chelsea for two nights and like one and a half days. No big deal, right?

Right. She’s still alive and well and from most accounts he took perfectly fine care of her. Except for one little thing.

Chelsea has a tendency to get stuck. She’s lost her ability to go in reverse, and as a result she wrangles herself into tight spots and cannot figure out how to free herself. Really, she shouldn’t be left home alone for very long and thanks to our collective schedules it hardly ever happens. But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so when we go out we’ve taken to dog-proofing the house as best as possible. We close doors, rearrange furniture and erect blockades, because if there is a crevasse left open, she will find it.

When she gets stuck, she gets upset. When she gets upset, she wails. It’s not a bark so much as a weepy, moaning cry—it’s the same sound she makes when I bathe her, and trust me, it’s awful, which is in part the reason she stinks so much. It’s hard to justify cleaning a dog when it sounds like pure torture.

Now, I don’t blame Roomie for forgetting to shut the bathroom door, because Lord knows I have, too. My neighbors, upon hearing Chelsea wailing, have had to crawl in through our window to free her at least four or five times over the past couple months. And even if he had remembered to close the door, there’s no guarantee that she wouldn’t have gotten stuck elsewhere. In fact, between the last two sentences I got up to use the bathroom and by the time I was done, Chelsea had already managed to get her head stuck in a bar stool. And I pee quickly.

So really the blame goes to me, for not making better arrangements, or for not finding someone who can be home with her as much as I usually am, or, even, for allowing her to live as long as she has. But I digress.

Because the thing that bothers me most about the whole scenario is not the fact that Chelsea got stuck between the toilet and the bathtub. Nope. It’s the fact that she did, and was clearly stuck there for longer than she has ever before, and that in the time that she was stuck there she got so worked up that she made a huge mess. HUGE. Somehow, she managed to get fur all over the toilet. And we’re not talking strands—we’re talking huge clumps of fur stuck to the back of the toilet, the sides, the seat, the lid, heck, even the top. I don’t know how on Earth this could have happened, but it did, and it was plain disgusting.

Disgusting because it is physical evidence of how much trauma she endured while being stuck. Disgusting because the toilet looked more like a Springer Spaniel when I got home that night than it did a bathroom fixture. Disgusting because after a four-hour drive, the last thing I wanted to do was spend fifteen minutes scraping dried fur off of the toilet seat.

“Um, Laura?” Asa called from the bathroom. “It looks like Chelsea made a bit of a mess in here.”

“What do you mean, mess? Did she poop?” I asked.

“Um, no, it’s just a mess. You’ll see.”

Roomie emerged from his cave. “Oh, yeah, I was wondering where that came from,” he said.

Wondering?

What is there to wonder about? You leave for work and the toilet is clean. You return home and it’s not. The only one who could’ve wiped clumps of fur all over it is, you guessed it, the dog that you happen to be taking care of. To be fair, a neighbor heard Chelsea wailing and climbed through the bathroom window to rescue her, and had called me to tell me about it but had not shared the news with Roomie. So Roomie had no idea that anything notable had occurred while he was out, but had evidently not been clued in by the telltale footprints in the tub underneath the window and matted fur adorning the toilet.

What’s worse, even, is that Roomie proceeded to use the toilet for 24 hours until I returned home and cleaned it off. Now maybe it’s just me and my germaphobic tendencies but I use two gauges to decide when it is time to clean the bathroom: odor and visible grossness. With three people sharing a tiny bathroom, and with two of them being men, no offense, the toilet needs fairly constant attention. If the bowl stinks, or if the seat looks dirty, I clean. Because I don’t like feeling like I’m using a Port-o-Potty when I’m in my own bathroom.

Evidently this is not the case for Roomie, who noticed the fur and yet made no effort to clean it off. I know I should’ve said something to him, and perhaps I still should, but the thing is this: it is particularly difficult for me to tell a grown man—if you consider 27 to be grown—to clean up after himself. I have trouble knocking on his door and telling him that, by the way, would you mind wiping off the kitchen counter when you’re done cooking? Would you mind not leaving your dishes in the sink for a week? Would mind not putting your muddy shoes on the toilet seat cover when you shower? Would you mind not leaving disposable razors all over the bathroom? Would you mind cleaning Chelsea’s fur off the toilet, considering that I paid you to watch her for the weekend?

I don’t want to nitpick, and thanks to effective birth control I am nobody’s mother. I don’t want to clean up after anyone just as much as I don’t want to scold anyone, but for the love of all things clean WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO RECOGNIZE A GROSS SITUATION AS SUCH AND THEN TAKE APPROPRIATE STEPS TO ALLEVIATE THE PROBLEM?

I am not, nor will I ever pretend to be, a tidy person. As I type, for instance, clothes are strewn on the floor around me. Two empty mugs sit on my desk, and piles of papers are gathered around the room. Meanwhile, in the living room, newspaper upon newspaper crowds the coffeetable, and Asa’s ever-growing pile of crap consumes a good portion of the floor near the couch. And, admittedly, the floor is way overdue for a mopping and I will hopefully get to that this week. So this is not a neat apartment and for that, I apologize to Roomie. But there are certain things that make me draw the line, and this, my friends, is one of them.

So, because I’m too chicken-shit to tell him myself, because I don’t want to be the ever-hovering, constantly-critical mother that hides within me, I will say it here and then just let it go:

SOMETIMES IT’S YOUR TURN TO CLEAN THE GODDAMN TOILET.

PS, Happy Halloween!

You can’t always be perfect at everything

Note: I actually wrote a different post than this, but I will probably post it tomorrow instead. Because today is October 30, 2006, which means that my father died exactly fifteen years ago. So, I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to post this story, which I originally wrote for submission to a website that publishes personal essays. It didn’t get accepted, probably for its fatal flaw of being a bit over-dramatic, but, hey, you can’t always be perfect at everything.

October is a strange month for me. It’s the month my father passed away, 15 years ago. And every year, when the leaves begin to turn and the Halloween decorations emerge, I remember.

I was nine years old and was carving a pumpkin when it happened. My brother and I were up to our elbows in pumpkin pulp; seeds were splattered across the newspapers lining the floor. Things hadn’t been going so well that fall for us, we knew that much, but we had no idea what was about to come.

It took me a while to catch on. I suppose it should have sent up a little red flag in my head when Daddy began to spend a lot of time at home with us during the hot days of July and August, but since I was on summer vacation, naturally I assumed that he was, too. Never mind that, normally, if he wasn’t slaving away at the magazine he was busying himself in his workshop, teaching my brother and I how to properly sand wood while he worked on whatever project he was in the midst of completing. Instead, that summer, the three of us spent most days on the couch watching Matlock reruns.

But then school started up and he didn’t go back to work. And, now, instead of watching Matlock, he seemed to just lie there with the TV on, staring quietly off into the distance but not actually looking at the television. Finally, when the hospital bed arrived and my mother started sleeping in the living room, she clued us in.

“Your father has cancer,” she said.

I looked over at my brother, who was just as boisterous and giddy as he was before this conversation began, and I could tell that the words hadn’t meant a thing to him. He was too young to know their power. But I wasn’t, and I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Then I started crying and my brother followed suit. “Is he going to die?” I asked, and my mother said she didn’t know yet.

She did, though. In fact, she had known about his illness for about six months, and it wasn’t until it they knew it was terminal that they decided to tell us.

A week or so later, my mother turned 43 years old. My father was completely bedridden by then, but never to be outdone on her birthday he’d managed to order her a beautiful piece of jewelry via catalog. This became a source of laughter and joking in the apartment for the next week or so, because even on his deathbed Daddy had his priorities straight.

He had become too weak to shave, but he wasn’t about to put up with stubble. My mother, whose shaving experience was limited to legs and armpits, had difficulty doing it for him and after too many nicks Daddy finally fired her and asked his childhood friend Damian to do it for him. Damian was much more adept at the art of facial hair removal, we found out, because when we was done my father looked in the handheld mirror and whispered, “I’ll give it a five and a half.”

So October wasn’t all bad. My father’s humor hung with him until the end, and even though the house was quiet and unfamiliar, there was hope to speak of.

I had just begun the fourth grade, which meant that I had also started learning how to play the trumpet. If you’ve ever heard a child learning to play a very loud brass instrument, you will know the pain my sick father felt as I eked out a high C—or some variant thereof—while waiting for the school bus to arrive one morning.

“Laura.”

It was very faint and I didn’t hear it over the sound of my elephant trunk of an instrument.

My mother stopped me. “Laura, I think your father is calling you. Go up there and see what he wants.”

I had been avoiding his room ever since I found out about the illness, and even with all the jokes and high spirits, I was terrified. Cautiously, I tiptoed up the stairs and into his room. His face was pale and his hair, which only a few months ago still clung to its natural dark brown hue, had faded well beyond the salt-and-pepper stage into old-man gray. He gestured me over to his bed.

“Laura.” He looked at me, and for the first time in a few weeks, I looked into his eyes. They were sparkling, and I could tell he was happy, if slightly annoyed by my very loud, very early musical endeavors.

“You know, you can’t always be perfect at everything all of the time.”

I didn’t understand it at the time, of course, but that was his sense of humor speaking.

And then it was time for Halloween. My brother and I picked out our pumpkins—his was small and stout, mine tall and stately—and etched our jack-o-lantern patterns on their soon-to-be faces. Our costumes were all set and our minds were focused on the gobs of candy that would soon be ours.

We laid newspaper on the kitchen floor and removed the pumpkin tops. We dug out the insides, and our babysitter transformed the slimy seeds into salty morsels. My mother had just gotten home from work and was settling into dinner as my brother and I prodded our giant orange vegetables with sharp knives.

And then:

“Elaine.”

The Hospice nurse called my mother into the bedroom. Even then, even in the middle of pumpkin carving, my brother and I knew there was something wrong with the nurse’s tone. My mother went upstairs and shut the bedroom door.

Ten minutes later, October would never be the same again.

UPDATE: Laundry debacle has been neatly folded and put to rest

I just found out that my neighbor’s guilt about replacing the sign got the best of her. Late last night, she went down to the basement, began fishing out the crumpled one she’d removed, and tried to rehang it next hers.

Suddenly, she heard footsteps on the basement stairs. Along came my other neighbor, poster of the original sign.

“I have a confession to make,” she said. “I took down your sign and but up a new one. I’m sorry, I was mad, it was rude of me to do it, but I just didn’t know what else to do.”

My neighbor didn’t mind. He explained that he’d been gone for awhile and he was sorry to tie up the laundry facility and everything would be A-okay.

Sounds like a Sesame Street plot, doesn’t it?

Unrelated: I planted two tomatoes very late in the season, and now that it’s late October, they’re dangling with green fruit. Due to the location of my garden, the changing of the seasons, the lowering of the sun in the sky and the impending time change, these little guys will not see anymore sunlight this year. I fear that they will never ripen, and given that the other night I watched my breath cut through the crisp air, the first frost is well on its way.

What to do with all of these pounds of green tomatoes? Sure, I can fry them, but I’d much rather they be red. Then I got this tip from the mother of my landlady:

Supposedly, you can wrap a green tomato in newspaper and leave in a windowsill for 24 hours and it will turn red.

Sounds like an old wives’ tale to me, but I’m giving it ago. Tomorrow at 4 pm Pacific time I will post the result of my little experiment.

Ahh. It’s a beautiful day overcast as all hell in the neighborhood.

BREAKING: Laundry saga continues

Yesterday I inspected the infamous sign on the dryer and discovered that it wasn’t Scotch-taped. It was clear-packing-taped. That’s the kind of tape that sticks, you know. Forever.

But tonight the sign was missing. And we know the sign couldn’t have fallen down, because gravity just isn’t that strong.

But wait—what’s that? A crumpled-up ball of paper in the garbage? Something’s going on here.

Look—it wasn’t me and I have proof. A confession, even, from a neighbor.

“I’m sick of tip-toeing around other people’s laundry,” she said. “I don’t want to wait until 11 pm for people to get home and move their laundry so I can finish mine. I’m tired and I’d like to go to bed, but now I can’t, because I’ve been waiting around all night to do my laundry. So I took down the note. And then put up a new one of my own.”

Really? And what does it say?

“It says: ‘Your laundry is your responsibility and if you do not take care of it within a reasonable length of time it will be removed for you.’”

To my other neighbor’s credit, he admitted to slightly overreacting the other day when my roommate moved his clothes out of the washer. He even told me that he’s making an effort to only do his laundry when he’s around to deal with it, because he knows he’s a pain in the ass about it (his words, not mine).

But a new sign? This might cause more problems than it solves. Here’s hoping World War IV doesn’t break out in our apartment complex.

SIGH. We’ll see how this goes—I like both of my neighbors very much, but these two have had a history of altercations over things like dog/pig poop, previous laundry debacles, the pig eating the garden, the dog terrorizing the cats, etc., and I fear that this new sign may be a backwards step on the road to a peacemaking agreement.

Anyway, I saw Borat tonight at a free screening. Pretty hilarious shit, although it was slightly difficult to hear the movie over the running commentary of the guy behind me. For instance:

[Borat does something outrageous]
Man behind me: NO WAY! Is he really?! Yes, HE REALLY IS!

[Borat runs naked through a hotel]
MBM: HE’S RUNNING NAKED THROUGH A HOTEL!

[Subtitle says "(enter whatever it said here)"]
MBM: (ENTER WHATEVER IT SAID HERE)!

[Something happens; appropriate response is laughter]
MBM: THAT’S HILARIOUS!! ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS??

[Borat offends someone and gets kicked out of wherever he is]
MBM: Uh-oh. THEY’RE GOING TO KICK HIM OUT!

WTF? I mean, I’ll have the occasional exchange of whispers with my fellow movie-going friends, but only once or twice throughout the film and usually for things like, “PSST—I’m going to get some popcorn, want anything?” or “PSST—did you catch that last line? I didn’t get it.” So thank you, Captain Obvious, thank you for your full-volume play-by-play. Because without you, I wouldn’t have known when to laugh.

Anyway, it’s late. Goodnight.

Pictures from the summer—now that it really is over

The nose knows

Click here for the larger version.

My fern... and a 40 cap

I planted a fern outside of my apartment.

Classy.

Look what I found in the soil.

Big pink rose

There is a pink rose bush in the front yard. Girdie shat out a plum tomato plant behind it, but we didn’t give it a stake in time and it collapsed from its own weight. Girdie also shat out a pair of sunflower plants. Impressive little gardener, that pig.

One little piggy sits on the stoop

Oink, oink

Chilling on the stoop.

Stink on the beach

When daydreaming backfires

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRG!

You know when you interview for a job you really, really want, and the interview seems to go fairly well and you start imagining yourself commuting to the new job every morning and wondering whether the office coffee will be decent and picturing what your desk will look like?

You know how disappointing it is when you call to follow up with said future employer only to find out that they’ve decided to hire someone else?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRG!

That’s all I have to say about that.

Kind of like the Safety Dance except without safety and not much dancing

Today my student fed me a dish called “Ukraine Food.”

Basically, it was a bunch of cut-up spaghetti topped with two large meatball-type-things, although they in no way resembled the pork/beef hunks that my Italian grandmother can craft—these were lighter, softer and mushier. Sofiya told me that they were made of turkey, beef and sour cream, which is decidedly against my diet, but you know what? It actually tasted quite good.

I think the positive flavor had something to do with the fact that I am getting sick, as I woke up this morning feeling like a heavy brick was resting on my chest and conditions haven’t improved since. So when I arrived at my student’s apartment, I was not only cold and achy, but I was secretly wanting chicken soup and Ukraine Food turned out to be a good stand-in.

Ick. I feel awful. I want to crawl into bed and sleep for the rest of the afternoon. No, actually, I want to pull out my sleeping bag, crawl inside of that, and then get under the covers for added heat. Speaking of sleeping bags, have I told you my dancing sleeping bag story?

I don’t think I have. Here goes:

So rewind to a few summers ago, when I was a sailing counselor at a girls’ sleepaway camp in Vermont. Every Sunday night was the all-camp variety/talent show, during which campers and counselors alike would perform Macarena-esque dances, skits, magic tricks, juggling, songs, etc. One particularly funny group of male counselors (yes, there were male counselors at a girls’ camp) orchestrated a series of random, meaningless skits—for instance, one week they dressed up as Snood-like creatures and ambled around on stage for a while, and the next week they got into their sleeping bags head first, wriggled out onto stage, and all at the same moment in the song playing overhead, they stood up on their knees, waved back and forth, and then continued crawling off stage.

Okay, so fast forward about a month. It is now alumnae camp, a weekend extravaganza for former campers and counselors to relive the incredibly awesome summers of their youth. The sleeping bag guys have decided that they want to reenact their skit for the alumnae talent show, except that a few of them had already headed back to the Real World and they will need some stand-ins to make the deal work. They ask me to participate, and I gladly accept.

But what I didn’t realize is that everyone else who would be on stage with me had a mummy sleeping bag with a two-way zipper. My bag at the time was a cheap fleece-lined rectangle with a single direction zipper, which meant that I would have no peep-hole when I was on stage.

No problem, right? I’d just worm across the stage, stand up and wave when it was time, and then worm right off. Well! Turns out, when your head is at the foot end of a dark sleeping bag it isn’t exactly easy to figure out which way is forward. Or sideways. Or backwards. So while my friends inched across the stage in a very calculated manner, going straight across from one side to the other, I was zig-zagging back and forth, crashing into everyone, trying to figure out where the hell I was.

It had worked smoothly in our dress rehearsal, but this was the real thing. The heat of the stage lights pierced through the fleece of my sleeping bag, and the audience roared at the sight of it all. To add to the hoopla, I got totally confused about the choreography and stood up to wave at entirely the wrong point in the song (more laughs ensued) and then continued inching my way backstage.

Or was I backstage? I was so worked up and freaked out at this point that I had no idea where in the hell I actually was, and the whole pitch-dark-sleeping-bag element was not helping. Now, believe you me, I am not one to get embarrassed in situations like this one. In fact, especially at camp, I live for the glory moments—and there are many—when I get to make a complete ass out of myself in the spotlight. This moment would have been no exception, but for the fact that I was legitimately concerned that I might inch my way off the edge of the stage entirely and that, I knew, would hurt.

Panicked and sweaty, I tried to worm my way out of my blindfolded cacoon. Unfortunately, my frenzied escape efforts were leading nowhere and the result was a kicking, wriggling, flailing giant gray lump in the middle of the stage yelling for help. This, of course, is the point where I figured out that I was definitely NOT backstage. Because the audience was laughing. Uncontrollably. At me. And who could blame them? It must have been quite the sight.

Finally, my friends, who had completed their worm-crawl across the stage and had been watching me publicly struggle for probably a full minute, came to my rescue. They unzipped my bag; I stood up, red-faced, overheated and hysterical—but laughing, of course, because even blindfolded glory moments are funny—and took a bow.

Someone later asked me if it was planned.

Yeah, right. Even cast as a frenzied sleeping bag I don’t have the acting skills to pull of that kind of stunt. It was a genuine mistake.