Dear Ants Who Live In My House,
May I first start out by acknowledging that you are magnificent creatures. Yes, you're tiny and your existence is fraught with hazards as you traverse my countertops, but I've got to give respect to an animal who manages to live with insides that aren't much more than goop. You cart your own skeleton around on your back, and that's cool. Your muscles are inside of your skeleton and somehow fit into your tiny legs to give you the ability to walk, and walk fast. I get it. You're cool.
I also acknowledge that you have been living here longer than I. You take priority, and you were invited here by the family's lack of cleaning skills. By leaving crumbs out on the counter, they laid out for you a giant Welcome banner that you gladly accepted and so moved in and set up house. I respect your initiative.
However, I am the one who pays rent. I am the one who was given a key. I am the one who gets queasy when I see one of you walking over a cutting board or my clean dishes. I am the one who was given verbal permission to move in, and I don't see me being squished by the house owners. That would be you and your fragile chitinous exoskeletons. I am safe and you are not.
As a science major, I feel that I am somewhat obligated to like you, and I do. I like whatever job it is that you do in the outdoor ecosystem, because that's what you're supposed to do and you do it well. But you're not supposed to do it in my house. That I will not stand for. Especially since I have found you not only in my kitchen, but in my living room, my bathroom, and even crawling on my bed. I'm sure you're not aware how disturbing it is to find an insect in your bed, but let me assure you, it is discomfiting to say the least.
It is finding that you've been lulled into a false sense of security that nothing could get into your bed unless you gave it permission, only to have that ripped from you. I would prefer monsters in my closet to seeing you in my bed. It is finding your sleep may be interrupted by things crawling on you, and honestly, if that's not the most uncomfortable feeling, then I don't know what is.
My discomfort at finding you in the same area where I keep my food has driven me to ask you to leave. Apparently killing you at every opportunity and cleaning everything with chemicals that the internet assured me would prove distasteful to you was not sufficient. The poison traps have not deterred you, you still scurry about the counters, looking for food that may have been left behind. While I admire your tenacity, I still must ask that you leave.
I don't want you here, as the deaths dealt to your kinsmen must indicate. Please leave before I visit genocide upon your race. That is not what I want for our relationship. I would prefer a peaceful parting of the ways. You find a new home, I keep mine, and I do not rain fire upon your residence and make a pyre of mutilated heads as a warning to the survivors.
Thank you for your time, I hope that you will consider and accept my generous offer to allow the rest of your clan to live.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Tales of a vigilante cleaner
I have a strange living situation.
It started out when I couldn't find a place to live near my school campus. I refused to move back home and wanted to stay in my area. But I happen to live in a very popular location, meaning prices are impossibly high and completely unfeasible for someone who makes minimum wage working 20 hours a week in a cafeteria.
I was just about desperate when my friend Rebecca let me know that her parents were trying to figure out what to do with her grandmother's house, and they were thinking about renting it out. I asked her to let them know I was interested and they came back with a ridiculously cheap price that I was more than willing to pay. I moved in the night after graduation.
The house is old and creaks at night. There's probably a poltergeist or two: things go missing and then turn up again in random places. The dishwasher doesn't do a very good job, but I don't generate that many dirty dishes anyway.
It's three bedroom, two bath, with a decent sized kitchen, already furnished, has a piano, a fabulous back yard, back porch, and a huuuuge basement.
The neighborhood is quiet, there's a grocery store two blocks from my house, and I live no more than fifteen minutes away from anything except for my job, which is 35 to 40 minutes away, depending on traffic.
The catch is that the family I rent from uses my kitchen daily because they don't have one. I've heard the long story of how theirs is being renovated but the contractor stopped working or they ran out of money or the stove is possessed and the fridge eats souls but I've forgotten. All I know is that they use mine.
Every afternoon, Rebecca's mother comes to my house, fixes herself lunch, putters around the house doing I don't even know what, and then occasionally fixes dinner. Her husband comes, and so does Rebecca, so I have this gathering of people in my house just about every night. It's like having my own family around, except I'm the child who doesn't like anybody and hides in the bedroom and hisses at people.
On Sundays, they invite family over for a Sunday dinner and sit around talking all afternoon. They usually all head out around 7 or so after spending all day monopolizing the kitchen and food source. They've offered to feed me, but I usually hide in my room because there's only so much socializing I can take, and being social with older Southern country people is extremely taxing. They talk about family, about who's got what disease, and what medication they're taking, and who's died, and who's had kids and how this new recipe is really good except it needs more salt and I just can't handle it. I'd rather hide in my room and starve.
Last week, Rebecca moved in with me, so though I'm technically the resident, I have my friend in here with me, and I can't say much because she's the daughter of the people I'm renting from. This is her grandmother's house so all I can do is smile politely when she gushes about how excited she is that we get to live together and how fun this summer is going to be.
All of this I don't mind. My friend is quiet and leaves me alone for the most part, and on the days I work, I just leave, come back, hide in my room and then crash.
What I can't stand is that this family is a horde of pack-rats that never learned how to clean. They cook and wash dishes but somehow they fail to realize that in the process the counters, stovetop, and floor get dirty. It's like they ascribe to some Neanderthal philosophy that dirt is healthy and absence of dirt brings on the plague. Sometimes I imagine that they're genetically blind to dirt and fail to notice these things because they're handicapped in some way. That makes me feel a little bit better because it causes me to pity them because they can't help their shortcomings.
They also can't throw anything away. This I understand. The grandmother, who used to own this house, grew up during the Depression, so naturally she would keep everything and teach her daughter the same thing. But there are some things that I simply cannot comprehend why it would make sense to keep for any reason.
Food in the refrigerator, for example. In the house that I grew up in, we cleaned out the fridge once a week, and the shelves were kept meticulously clean.
In this house, food is kept in the fridge until it fossilizes and archaeologists dig it up two hundred years from now and wonder at the horrible living conditions their ancestors had. Their conversation would go something like this:
"It seems that this bowl of pudding was kept and venerated even after it molded over and fermented."
"Bit strange...Perhaps it was a special dish?"
"Maybe so, maybe so. The conclusion I've drawn is that they were blind and unable to smell and so did not notice when it went bad."
"What? That's ridiculous! Any fool can tell when pudding goes bad. I tell you, they kept it on purpose. Maybe as a delicacy, or an offering to their gods."
"What, those mechanical devices they call 'phones' and 'computers'?"
"Yes, exactly!"
"Oh maybe you're right. I may write my next dissertation on this."
In a desperate effort to make room for my food in the fridge and rid myself of all the outdated Tupperware, I took it upon myself to clean out the fridge one day while Rebecca's mother was around and she kept hovering and informing me that "that's still good yet" when it was clearly out of date and shriveled and slimy and half covered in mold. I waited until she was out of the room and then threw it away anyhow.
So after that I learned my lesson. Don't clean while the lady is around. Instead, since I'm a night owl anyway and don't have to be at work until 5, I wait until everybody has left and Rebecca is asleep to creep out of my room and clean things.
I throw things out and then take out the trash to hide the evidence. Last night I decided to mop the floor, which hasn't been cleaned since I was in elementary school, so I pulled out a bucket and mopping detergent (which I bought because there wasn't such a thing in the house) and went in search of a mop. The cabinet of cleaning things hasn't been updated since the 70's at least and the logic of its contents escapes me. There is a mop about as old as my mother (one of those mop types that's gray and stringy and has to be wrung out by hand), and five dust mops that have probably never been used. There are various other cleaning things like gloves and sponges and things I don't recognize, so I leave them alone.
The water coming off of the mop when I rinsed it reminded me of a mud puddle, so today I'm going to buy a new mop and mop again tonight. I may also buy a mask for myself. Perhaps even a cape. I'm doing good work as a cleaner in the night and I deserve some recognition as The Cleaning Lady. Lock up your doors, people of the world. Otherwise Cleaning Lady will sneak into your kitchens, wipe off your counters, and scrub your floors.
And if you're incredibly unobservant, you may not even know that I was there.
It started out when I couldn't find a place to live near my school campus. I refused to move back home and wanted to stay in my area. But I happen to live in a very popular location, meaning prices are impossibly high and completely unfeasible for someone who makes minimum wage working 20 hours a week in a cafeteria.
I was just about desperate when my friend Rebecca let me know that her parents were trying to figure out what to do with her grandmother's house, and they were thinking about renting it out. I asked her to let them know I was interested and they came back with a ridiculously cheap price that I was more than willing to pay. I moved in the night after graduation.
The house is old and creaks at night. There's probably a poltergeist or two: things go missing and then turn up again in random places. The dishwasher doesn't do a very good job, but I don't generate that many dirty dishes anyway.
It's three bedroom, two bath, with a decent sized kitchen, already furnished, has a piano, a fabulous back yard, back porch, and a huuuuge basement.
The neighborhood is quiet, there's a grocery store two blocks from my house, and I live no more than fifteen minutes away from anything except for my job, which is 35 to 40 minutes away, depending on traffic.
The catch is that the family I rent from uses my kitchen daily because they don't have one. I've heard the long story of how theirs is being renovated but the contractor stopped working or they ran out of money or the stove is possessed and the fridge eats souls but I've forgotten. All I know is that they use mine.
Every afternoon, Rebecca's mother comes to my house, fixes herself lunch, putters around the house doing I don't even know what, and then occasionally fixes dinner. Her husband comes, and so does Rebecca, so I have this gathering of people in my house just about every night. It's like having my own family around, except I'm the child who doesn't like anybody and hides in the bedroom and hisses at people.
On Sundays, they invite family over for a Sunday dinner and sit around talking all afternoon. They usually all head out around 7 or so after spending all day monopolizing the kitchen and food source. They've offered to feed me, but I usually hide in my room because there's only so much socializing I can take, and being social with older Southern country people is extremely taxing. They talk about family, about who's got what disease, and what medication they're taking, and who's died, and who's had kids and how this new recipe is really good except it needs more salt and I just can't handle it. I'd rather hide in my room and starve.
Last week, Rebecca moved in with me, so though I'm technically the resident, I have my friend in here with me, and I can't say much because she's the daughter of the people I'm renting from. This is her grandmother's house so all I can do is smile politely when she gushes about how excited she is that we get to live together and how fun this summer is going to be.
All of this I don't mind. My friend is quiet and leaves me alone for the most part, and on the days I work, I just leave, come back, hide in my room and then crash.
What I can't stand is that this family is a horde of pack-rats that never learned how to clean. They cook and wash dishes but somehow they fail to realize that in the process the counters, stovetop, and floor get dirty. It's like they ascribe to some Neanderthal philosophy that dirt is healthy and absence of dirt brings on the plague. Sometimes I imagine that they're genetically blind to dirt and fail to notice these things because they're handicapped in some way. That makes me feel a little bit better because it causes me to pity them because they can't help their shortcomings.
They also can't throw anything away. This I understand. The grandmother, who used to own this house, grew up during the Depression, so naturally she would keep everything and teach her daughter the same thing. But there are some things that I simply cannot comprehend why it would make sense to keep for any reason.
Food in the refrigerator, for example. In the house that I grew up in, we cleaned out the fridge once a week, and the shelves were kept meticulously clean.
In this house, food is kept in the fridge until it fossilizes and archaeologists dig it up two hundred years from now and wonder at the horrible living conditions their ancestors had. Their conversation would go something like this:
"It seems that this bowl of pudding was kept and venerated even after it molded over and fermented."
"Bit strange...Perhaps it was a special dish?"
"Maybe so, maybe so. The conclusion I've drawn is that they were blind and unable to smell and so did not notice when it went bad."
"What? That's ridiculous! Any fool can tell when pudding goes bad. I tell you, they kept it on purpose. Maybe as a delicacy, or an offering to their gods."
"What, those mechanical devices they call 'phones' and 'computers'?"
"Yes, exactly!"
"Oh maybe you're right. I may write my next dissertation on this."
In a desperate effort to make room for my food in the fridge and rid myself of all the outdated Tupperware, I took it upon myself to clean out the fridge one day while Rebecca's mother was around and she kept hovering and informing me that "that's still good yet" when it was clearly out of date and shriveled and slimy and half covered in mold. I waited until she was out of the room and then threw it away anyhow.
So after that I learned my lesson. Don't clean while the lady is around. Instead, since I'm a night owl anyway and don't have to be at work until 5, I wait until everybody has left and Rebecca is asleep to creep out of my room and clean things.
I throw things out and then take out the trash to hide the evidence. Last night I decided to mop the floor, which hasn't been cleaned since I was in elementary school, so I pulled out a bucket and mopping detergent (which I bought because there wasn't such a thing in the house) and went in search of a mop. The cabinet of cleaning things hasn't been updated since the 70's at least and the logic of its contents escapes me. There is a mop about as old as my mother (one of those mop types that's gray and stringy and has to be wrung out by hand), and five dust mops that have probably never been used. There are various other cleaning things like gloves and sponges and things I don't recognize, so I leave them alone.
The water coming off of the mop when I rinsed it reminded me of a mud puddle, so today I'm going to buy a new mop and mop again tonight. I may also buy a mask for myself. Perhaps even a cape. I'm doing good work as a cleaner in the night and I deserve some recognition as The Cleaning Lady. Lock up your doors, people of the world. Otherwise Cleaning Lady will sneak into your kitchens, wipe off your counters, and scrub your floors.
And if you're incredibly unobservant, you may not even know that I was there.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Adventures at the DMV
Three years ago, my parents bought a car. It was officially my dad's car, but because his job takes him out of the country for extended periods of time, it became technically my car.
For reasons unknown to me, I was deemed responsible enough to take the car with me to college (a four hour drive from my parents' house) and keep it for my sophomore, junior and senior years at school. Even further not understandable, they signed it over to my name, so I now officially own a car.
All that I had to do was take the title to the government car-registering place (commonly known as the DMV), sign a few papers, and tell them it was mine.
I went to the bank because I swear the government charges you for everything, even breathing. You can't even set foot in one of their offices without someone tapping you on the shoulder and saying "Excuse me, but you got dirt on the entry rug, which is the property of the government. That will be one hundred dollars and your firstborn child please."
Once you're in the DMV office, (in my town at least) you go to the desk which is at the end of a long waiting-line area, tell the person at the desk who responds in robot-tones what it is that you hope to accomplish in this building of dream-crushing, and he takes your license, prints off a number, gives you back your license and the number, and tells you to go sit down and wait.
So you go sit down in the rows and rows of chairs with the other obedient government mind-slaves who have been conditioned to bow to the need to wait in line without blinking an eye.
First order of business was to get my new address on my license. That was relatively easy. I gave it to the grandfatherly old man who typed it out, had me sign five separate documents, three of which I'm pretty sure I signed the last time I had to venture to this place, forked over ten dollars, and then smiled for the always-awful drivers license photo. It must be a law that all photos taken for identification must make you look like a sleep-deprived soul-sucker. One of these days I'll remember to put on makeup for those pictures and then I'll look like a pretty sleep-deprived soul-sucker.
After I got the easy part sorted out, I had to go to another office that I didn't even know existed until the robot at the desk told me to go to one of two locations that were nowhere near where I was. By consulting the ever-useful Google maps, I found that one was easy to get to and I knew the street, while the other was down some back country road and looked like an abandoned and dilapidated general store/moonshine distillery. I wasn't about to risk getting caught in the backwoods, so I chose the one that turned out to be very well-hidden in a shopping center.
To get there, you turn at the sign for what has been optimistically termed a "mall" and is instead a collection of chain stores and shops (including a biological testing lab, which is not at all disturbing to see next to an Office Depot). Then you drive all around the parking lot, looking for anything that resembles an official looking doorway, but such a thing does not exist. Instead, you have to consult the map to find that the office is hidden through an unobtrusive and unlabeled doorway, up an escalator, and down a hallway.
This is the mall. It is an eerily abandoned building that is creepy at day and would be terrifying at night. Out of the twenty areas that there are for stores, about five are occupied. A tax agency that wasn't open, a cosmetology school, the DMV tag office, and two others that I had never heard of and didn't feel brave enough to venture in and identify. Nobody is there except for DMV line and three people working in the school. All it needed was flickering lights and scratchy plinky music playing over the PA system, for me to write it off as the scene of ghost infestations and murders and then taken my chances with the moonshine distillery.
I got in line behind a group of depressed soul-sucked people and an almost-creepy friendly person who randomly started talking to people, was dressed in really dirty painter's clothes, and said his name was "Boogie". He answered his phone with "This is Boog" and bounced everywhere while he talked like a cross between a kangaroo and a bobble-head.
After Boogie got his business taken care of in front of me, it was my turn to be told that I was in the wrong line and that I had to go stand behind the line of old men who all told me that they would have their next birthday here. I laughed politely and hoped for a nice DMV person to help me because I had no idea what I was doing. There was also someone behind the desk who looked like a Vogon and I desperately did not want have her. Vogons should not work at the DMV.
Fortunately I did not get the Vogon lady, and instead found myself handing my paperwork to a sour-looking female who frowned even deeper and informed me that my forms were filled out wrong. At first, it sounded like my parents had signed their forms wrong, which sent me into a near-crying panic because I live four hours from home and my dad had left the week before to fly halfway around the world and when he does that, you never know when he'll be back. There's no way you can get a man to sign something when he's more than five time zones ahead of you. I made that lady explain it to me three times before I understood that all she needed was my signature and then I was sent away.
I was told that I needed to go back, sign a few more things, put the mileage of my car on forms that I hadn't seen yet, and then I could try again. That being done, I went to stand back in line in the ghosty murder mall, went back to the same sour-faced lady, who took my money and made me sign so many forms that may or may not have related to getting a vehicle put in my name.
She then pulled a license plate out of nowhere, handed me a few more pieces of paper and told me that I owned a car.
I took that car to buy groceries as a celebration.
For reasons unknown to me, I was deemed responsible enough to take the car with me to college (a four hour drive from my parents' house) and keep it for my sophomore, junior and senior years at school. Even further not understandable, they signed it over to my name, so I now officially own a car.
All that I had to do was take the title to the government car-registering place (commonly known as the DMV), sign a few papers, and tell them it was mine.
I went to the bank because I swear the government charges you for everything, even breathing. You can't even set foot in one of their offices without someone tapping you on the shoulder and saying "Excuse me, but you got dirt on the entry rug, which is the property of the government. That will be one hundred dollars and your firstborn child please."
Once you're in the DMV office, (in my town at least) you go to the desk which is at the end of a long waiting-line area, tell the person at the desk who responds in robot-tones what it is that you hope to accomplish in this building of dream-crushing, and he takes your license, prints off a number, gives you back your license and the number, and tells you to go sit down and wait.
So you go sit down in the rows and rows of chairs with the other obedient government mind-slaves who have been conditioned to bow to the need to wait in line without blinking an eye.
First order of business was to get my new address on my license. That was relatively easy. I gave it to the grandfatherly old man who typed it out, had me sign five separate documents, three of which I'm pretty sure I signed the last time I had to venture to this place, forked over ten dollars, and then smiled for the always-awful drivers license photo. It must be a law that all photos taken for identification must make you look like a sleep-deprived soul-sucker. One of these days I'll remember to put on makeup for those pictures and then I'll look like a pretty sleep-deprived soul-sucker.
After I got the easy part sorted out, I had to go to another office that I didn't even know existed until the robot at the desk told me to go to one of two locations that were nowhere near where I was. By consulting the ever-useful Google maps, I found that one was easy to get to and I knew the street, while the other was down some back country road and looked like an abandoned and dilapidated general store/moonshine distillery. I wasn't about to risk getting caught in the backwoods, so I chose the one that turned out to be very well-hidden in a shopping center.
To get there, you turn at the sign for what has been optimistically termed a "mall" and is instead a collection of chain stores and shops (including a biological testing lab, which is not at all disturbing to see next to an Office Depot). Then you drive all around the parking lot, looking for anything that resembles an official looking doorway, but such a thing does not exist. Instead, you have to consult the map to find that the office is hidden through an unobtrusive and unlabeled doorway, up an escalator, and down a hallway.
This is the mall. It is an eerily abandoned building that is creepy at day and would be terrifying at night. Out of the twenty areas that there are for stores, about five are occupied. A tax agency that wasn't open, a cosmetology school, the DMV tag office, and two others that I had never heard of and didn't feel brave enough to venture in and identify. Nobody is there except for DMV line and three people working in the school. All it needed was flickering lights and scratchy plinky music playing over the PA system, for me to write it off as the scene of ghost infestations and murders and then taken my chances with the moonshine distillery.
I got in line behind a group of depressed soul-sucked people and an almost-creepy friendly person who randomly started talking to people, was dressed in really dirty painter's clothes, and said his name was "Boogie". He answered his phone with "This is Boog" and bounced everywhere while he talked like a cross between a kangaroo and a bobble-head.
After Boogie got his business taken care of in front of me, it was my turn to be told that I was in the wrong line and that I had to go stand behind the line of old men who all told me that they would have their next birthday here. I laughed politely and hoped for a nice DMV person to help me because I had no idea what I was doing. There was also someone behind the desk who looked like a Vogon and I desperately did not want have her. Vogons should not work at the DMV.
Fortunately I did not get the Vogon lady, and instead found myself handing my paperwork to a sour-looking female who frowned even deeper and informed me that my forms were filled out wrong. At first, it sounded like my parents had signed their forms wrong, which sent me into a near-crying panic because I live four hours from home and my dad had left the week before to fly halfway around the world and when he does that, you never know when he'll be back. There's no way you can get a man to sign something when he's more than five time zones ahead of you. I made that lady explain it to me three times before I understood that all she needed was my signature and then I was sent away.
I was told that I needed to go back, sign a few more things, put the mileage of my car on forms that I hadn't seen yet, and then I could try again. That being done, I went to stand back in line in the ghosty murder mall, went back to the same sour-faced lady, who took my money and made me sign so many forms that may or may not have related to getting a vehicle put in my name.
She then pulled a license plate out of nowhere, handed me a few more pieces of paper and told me that I owned a car.
I took that car to buy groceries as a celebration.
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