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.
