Anyone want to take in a family of three?

Revenge: A Haiku.
Just cleaned the kitchen
Scrubbed up his big, greasy mess
Then peed on his shoes

- a. grizzle


Okay, fine, I didn't really pee on his shoes. But I certainly should have. Let's just add it to the list of things that I am tempted to do to our roommate on a daily basis. Also on the list: Pee in his closet, pee in the pile of dirty laundry he's left in the laundry room for the past three weeks, pee on his car, pee in his car... and it goes on like this for another three pages. Besides my bizarre obsession with soaking his things in my urine, I'm seriously troubled by the behavior of our thoughtless-inconsiderate-good-for-nothing-lying-cheating-toilet-paper-snatching-
son-of-a-bitch roommate. Now, granted, I've never had the extreme displeasure of having a roommate before, but I'm pretty sure that the number one rule in The Common Sense Guide to Peaceful Coexistence is something along the lines of "Thou shalt not maketh thy roommate want piss all over thy stuff." Or in other words, don't be a douche bag.

I guess Ty (that would be his name) has not yet cracked open his copy. So, instead, a good portion of my day is devoted to coming up with clever solutions to deal with his increasingly obnoxious behavior. When I first moved in, this meant just sucking it up and washing one more sink full of slimy dishes, folding one more dryer full of clothes, or learning one more dirty ho's name when she knocked on the door at one am for an impromptu booty call. My logic was, he'll notice my stepping in to handle his shit, appreciate it, and then make an effort to pick up his slack. HA! Not exactly. Instead, Ty simply chose to believe that if he came home to find a stack of neatly folded shirts on his bed, or found the onions that he'd left in the fridge for three months (a study on micro-organisms?) disposed of and the goopy puddle they left on the shelf cleaned up, it was the work of magical helper fairies. Or maybe a troupe of bored forest gnomes. I don't know if thinks he's the second coming of Snow White or what, but the one thing he sure as hell didn't think was that it was necessary to toss so much as a thank you in my direction. So after a couple weeks of that masochism, I moved on to Strategy no. Two: Just let it go.

Okay, you've got to figure that any rational person will only wallow in their own filth for so long before they start to gross themselves out (or run out of clean undies) and have to do something about it. So I figured I'd just wait him out. Maybe, in my neurotic, lysol obsessed haste to keep things up to my particular standards, I had simply been beating him to the punch and cleaning up after him before he had the chance. So, the next time he made a big dinner for him and one of the skanks and couldn't be bothered to clean up after himself, I didn't fret, and assumed he'd get to it in the morning. Jump ahead four days. The stove is still a Jackson Pollock of splattered grease and hot sauce, all but two forks and a wine glass are piled into a tepid pool of dishwater in the sink, and various pots and pans full of that dinner's leftovers are sitting abandoned on their burners (and the counter tops, and lidless in the middle of the refrigerator...). Four. Days. Later. Who knows, maybe his gross out epiphany would've come at day five. But there's a good chance that it might have actually come at day thirteen, and quite frankly, I didn't feel like waiting around to find out. My personal gross out point had long passed, and I was terrified that left there any longer, the whole kitchen would become a bio-hazard and be taken over by the Mold Creatures of the deep. Or something. So, I rolled up my sleeves, pulled on my gloves, and scrubbed the hell out of that kitchen. Then I sat down and attempted Strategy no. Three: The Passive-Aggressive Note.

this note is for visitors and residents alike:
THIS KITCHEN IS CLEAN,
LET'S TRY AND KEEP IT THAT WAY.

If you make a mess, clean it up. If you use it, put it away.

I promise that it will save us all a lot of time and frustration.
Thanks!

Now that worked. In fact, it worked so well that Ty stopped using the kitchen for more than two minutes at a clip altogether. Sure he may have been extra surly with me for the next few weeks and one of the hos gave me the stank eye whenever she came over... but it was worth it. For about a month I could use the fridge without having to shove past entire pizza boxes that held only one slice of pizza and half a container of garlic sauce (hand to God, that was in there once), my dishes were as clean and usable as I'd left them, and the whole apartment stopped smelling like a garbage can. Mostly. But go flippin figure, eventually Ty stopped giving a rat's ass and now I'm back at the start, grouchy and forever slipping on little puddles of raw chicken juice (helloooo salmonella!) So now what, you ask? With a baby on the way and but a teensy scrap of patience left in me? Well I took a page from the Brady Bunch book of space sharing and have started up with the whole "line-down-the-middle-of-the-room" thing. (Didn't Marsha and Jan do that at some point?) The only thing missing from this increasingly elaborate scheme (which has grown to include separate couches, dish drying racks, silverware, dishes, hidden supplies of paper towels and toilet paper... oh yeah, it's gone there) is the actual tape line running through the apartment. But, alas, I know that this too is only a temporary solution. Eventually I'm going to get tired of hiding my lotion (he once snatched a bottle right off our bathroom counter top and decided it would be better off in his room. No, seriously.), and a kitchen that's only half clean is still kind of grody. But until the mister sits him down for the talk that we should've had back when I first moved in about what we expect of each other as roommates, besides a check for the rent, it will have to do.

Well, it's either that or I start getting used to living with the smell of my own stale urine.


With love and a leak,
a.