|
2004-09-25 - 8:55 p.m.
home is anywhere you hang your head
The Nine Greatest Songs of All Time (Right Now)
1. Journey
"Lights"2. Memphis Bleek
"Yes" 3. Ken Stringfellow
"Any Love (Cassandra et Lune)" 4. Lloyd
"Hey Young Girl" 5. Montgomery Gentry
"My Town" 6. Blink 182
"The Fallen Interlude" 7. Nicole Wray
"If I Was Your Girlfriend" 8. Boston
"Foreplay / Long Time" 9. Weird Al Yankovic
"Money For Nothing / Beverly Hillbillies" |
It’s been almost a month now since my new roommate Landon moved in. And let me tell you, it’s been quite a tumultuous month in good old Apartment K. The first couple times he came up to check out the apartment and move some things in, he expressed some disdain at the state of cleanliness in the apartment. But within the first week of him living here, cleanliness quickly became a pretty major issue. In fact, it was pretty much the subject of every single conversation we had. I had previously kind of assumed that Landon, being an underachieving college-age guy, probably wasn’t very big on cleaning. But he spent a couple years in the military, and so organization and cleanliness are very big with him. After my last roommate Jace was kind of a slob and left the place in an even worse state than I would’ve had it otherwise, I was ready to have a clean roommate. But the cleaning itself was such a constant talking point with Landon that I really just got sick of hearing about it, and feeling the need to defend myself about it. He’d be cleaning something and telling me how disgusting it is and telling me how he can’t be comfortable living here until he’s cleaned it and I keep explaining, oh, that’s Jace’s, Jace left that like that, Jace didn’t clean up after he shaved, Jace didn’t clean up after he cooked. After a while I felt like I was pointing the finger at some invisible scapegoat, even though for the most part I was telling the truth. Jace left a lot of messes when he lived here and after a while I just got tired of cleaning them up. It was kind of nice to have the apartment clean, though. Landon was content to do a lot of it himself, although I helped out in the kitchen, especially with the arduous task of identifying and throwing out Jace’s food. He let a lot of stuff go bad in the refrigerator, stuff that had been cluttering up the fridge for weeks but was his so I couldn’t throw out. But now that he was gone, I could get rid of it all. There was some really foul stuff in there, too. The kitchen had been smelling a little nasty for months and I was never really sure where it was coming from. The worst thing, I found, though, was in a small cabinet over the oven that I never use because it’s too small and up too high to reach conveniently. So as I was reorganizing the dishes, I opened up the cabinet to put something in there, and was confronted with this amazingly foul odor and little flies came buzzing out. It was a sack of potatoes that had been sitting in there rotting for so long they were practically liquified. I asked Mike and it turns out he left them there before he moved out, so they have to be at least 8 months old. It was the most disgusting thing ever. When Jace moved out a few days before the first of the month while I was away for the weekend, I hadn’t gotten around to getting money from him for the last month of bills. Our rent here is paid ahead, so he had already paid for his last month of rent, but the bills are paid back from the previous month, so he still had to owed me money for the cable and electricity he used. But by the time I got home at the end of the weekend, he was long gone. He left a couple things, including his wok, so I figured I had some leverage if I wanted him to come back and write me a check. The only contact info I had for Jace was his cell phone number, so I called him up and asked him to come by and get the stuff he left and write me a check. And in a 2-minute phone conversation, I swear, the only phrase he ever uttered was “ok”. That was something that drove me nuts about him, he was so hard to talk to. I’d be saying complete sentences, he’d say “ok”. So of course, a few days go by, I don’t hear anything else from him. It’s been a few weeks now, it’s pretty clear I’ll never hear from him again. Good riddance. But the joke’s on him, because he evidently didn’t realize that he should get back his half of the security deposit when he moved out. So he won’t get the $300 that Landon owes him. Of course, at the time that I called Jace, I was broke and really really needed that money. So I was pretty stressed. And when I proposed to Landon that he pay me the $90 that Jace owed me instead of me telling Jace that Landon owed him $300, Landon brushed off my idea (which, admittedly, was kind of like polite blackmail) and basically said “that’s not my problem, and if Jace wants his security deposit he’ll have to get it from you because you’re the reason this apartment is a mess”. So that really pissed me off. Around that point, less than a week after him moving in, I was starting to have serious misgivings about letting Landon move in. I felt trapped, we already did the paperwork, there was no getting rid of him. I felt very uncomfortable in my own home. I found myself hiding away in my room and avoiding Landon. I was just so sick of talking about cleaning, getting guilt trips about cleaning. I sent Mike angry e-mails about how he should’ve warned me about Landon, bitched to everyone I knew about him, it was a stressful time. The next day, Landon decided to be a nice guy and write me a check for the bills, I guess he decided that it just made sense for him to start paying the bills right off and not put it on Jace. So that was kind of a turning point, and in the last couple weeks, things have settled down and I’m pretty comfortable with the situation. Landon is pretty much done cleaning, and all he asks of me is to maintain the cleanliness in the apartment, which isn’t hard. My room is still the last frontier of messiness in the apartment, though; I just have way too much stuff and nowhere to put it. My closet is full. My drawers are full. I’m a packrat, it’s hard for me to throw anything away. Last week my dad gave me one of his old Persian rugs, a really nice rug that was in my grandmother’s house when I was little. Last year it got soaked when Dad’s house was flooded from Hurricane Isabel, but they dried it out and cleaned it. But he finally got the floors redone recently, so he didn’t need the rug anymore, and I was happy to take it. But Landon decided that it smells and needed to be cleaned. He’d rented a rug shampoo-er, so he took that to it, but it still didn’t smell right to him. I don’t have the sharpest sense of smell in the world, but I can’t smell a thing. And anyway, anytime I’m near it my nose is 6 feet above it, so I can’t smell anything. But ever since I got it, Landon is obsessed with making it smell good But I don’t care. It’s my rug, and it was a nice gift and kind of a family heirloom, so I’m keeping it no matter what he thinks it smells like, he can clean it all he wants. I’m taking a hands off approach to Landon’s neuroses at this point just to keep my sanity. -al
previous - next
|
