Jam smears and toast crumbs and the knife stuck to the counter.

So here’s the setup: the roommate and I share a one-bedroom basement suite where the ‘living room’ and ‘kitchen’ spaces are actually the front and back halves of a converted garage.

This arrangement isn’t atypical of the area I currently call home (or occasionally other four-letter words beginning with H). I live right near a university, so of course the only sensible and lucrative (so rarely do those two words go together) thing to do with a garage in this mild West Coast island climate is to turn the damn thing into student housing and rent the hell out of it.

My roommate lives in the living room, poor sod. In consequence of which, we spend all day and also all night getting under each others’ feet.

Every single minute idiosyncratic tic or weird habit only enhances this proximity-driven hypersensitivity. Previous posts have featured my insanely overblown reactions to minor ills, and this one will be no different.

It started out like any other day in Reading Week: I rolled out of bed at 8.30ish a.m. in a leisurely fashion, and padded into the kitchen in my underwear.

Only to find that my roommate (who had earlier left with a group of VERY NOISY friends- the first time I woke up), in the process of making his morning jam with toast, had made the toast right over the counter and not wiped up the crumbs. To add injury to minor insult (everyone makes toast over the counter. It’s toast: its main function is as plate replacement for gooey/sticky/wet things, like tuna fish and peanut butter), the bastard smeared jam in globs, absolute globs, all over the counter.

By the time I rose, he was long gone. The toast-crumb-and-jam mixture had hardened and set into something I can only compare to the time bubble-gum got stuck into my two-foot-long hair, and then forgotten for a while.

THEN, to add near-fatal injury to already-motive-for-murder injury (I told you how things get blown out of proportion here), he left the jam knife, encrusted in reddish goo from pointy end to dull one, stuck in the middle of the mess.

I’m not even going to mention how the first thing I noticed about all this was that he was spreading jam with a steak knife instead of a butter knife. There are some things I don’t want the world to know about me.

Adventures in spending money.

Know those months where everything runs out? Those dire months where, some late evening after everything is closed, you find yourself forlornly gazing at the last scoop of dried red lentils and the Final Onion Half wondering what exact form breakfast will take? When you have to buy every single staple in the kitchen?

I remember when I did my first shopping trip after moving here from my parents’ house in the Terminally Rainy City.  A friend helped me move, although all that came with were two backpacks, a bicycle, and panniers. We’d been travelling all day: I hadn’t been sleeping much that week, and my eyes were sticking to my eyelids in such a way as to imply that they WEREN’T going to look at anything else for a while. But CJ, bless him, hauled my forlorn ass out of the tiny basement suite and made me buy some food. One hundred and twenty (ish) dollars later, we left carrying three bags of groceries.

“It won’t always cost that much,” he promised. Didn’t cheer me any.

Anyways, he was right. It doesn’t always cost that much. Normally I can make it through a week on about $20 in grocery bills.

This month has just sucked in that respect. Not only have I replaced pretty much every major staple food in the kitchen, from oatmeal upwards, every single other goddamn cost of any kind, new glasses to chiropractic.

Of course, I probably could have done a lot of this a little earlier, when I was working more, but, hey, paradoxically, Reading Week is both a week where I’m unemployed AND the only week I have to get my shit together. Great.

On a less whiny sidenote, this is a picture of the apartment building at which I dropped MORE money on a recorder, being as I needed one because the office one was repossessed by my editor. Is it just me, or… ?

Morning fuss.

At 7.15 in the A.M., I was standing before the stove in my underwear, wondering there was any oatmeal left.

As it turned out, there wasn’t. But it took a while to come to that conclusion, because it was at this point, less than five minutes after I oozed out of bed, that my roommate chose to ask me why I never did dishes.

“I’m sorry, but I do dishes all the time when you’re out, like the other night, I was studying for a midterm,” here his face becomes saintlike, “and I stopped for half an hour and I, like, did all the dishes.”

I’m sure everyone with more than ten brain cells to their name can spot this dread move a mile away. Poking the bear. It’s the first thing you gotta learn in life. Don’t poke the bear. Don’t poke the bear.

Don’t poke the bear don’t poke the bear don’t poke the bear. But he did poke the bear, poor bastard.

And, worse, it was on hypocritical grounds. Here’s how dishes actually go down at my place:

[A large suburban house at night. Three cars are parked in front of it. All the lights are out, except for a hellish glow from one of the ground floor windows. Silence. Cut to WS IN HOUSE. A tall girl wearing a ratty blue bathrobe glowers over her glasses at a harassed looking young man, hunched before his computer screen.]

TALL GIRL

There are things crawling in the sink! The dishes are walking on their own! They’re forming a union. First demand: cleaner working conditions. Come on, dishwashing, stat.

YOUNG MAN

Fine.

[Fadeout.]

He does the dishes occasionally, sure. But as far as I’m concerned, the fact that he dumps food bits in with the dirty dishes the rest of the time far outweighs this fact. And he leaves the soggy sponge in the sink to get moldy. And when he never wipes the counter before starting dishes, so when he puts a tea towel down to dry dishes ontop of, it gets covered in kitchen detritus and jam smears, because he ALSO works right on the countertop when he’s cooking.

And he puts the tea towel down all wrinkly, and he LEAVES it there when he’s done doing the dishes, a damp wrinkly detritus-encrusted pile which I will pick up later that day and put in the wash, because he never washes the kitchen linens either.

It might be apparent that we don’t really get along.

Anyways, the punchline is that I promptly started doing the dishes and wouldn’t let him help (a little trick I learned from my mother), he started apologizing and then got mad at me, and from there we moved through usual argument motions, which culminated in the Slammed Door, harbinger of Peace and Quiet.

Then I skipped all my classes and went back to bed.

A new theme.

Maybe this one will work.