This delightful, delicious, de-lovely month of May for the year 2002 begins at the bottom of the page, so make your way down there
for all of the sapid details.
May 31st, 2002: It's my sister's birthday. Happy 19th, Jo-ho.
There's a girl named Holly who lives on my floor of the dorm. All of her roommates hate her. All of her roommates think that she's a lesbian because she has a nudie picture of Madonna on the desktop of her computer. But she's not a lesbian. She just thinks that Madonna's attractive. I went a few months without ever saying a word to Holly. But one day, I saw her in a beautiful vintage faux-fur coat and got to talking about thrifting with her. We agreed that we would check out Columbus's thrifting scene together. Months later, we attempted to go out together one Saturday but discovered that almost everything thrift-y is closed on the weekend. So finally we made it out again yesterday after class. I drove us downtown to Broad Street where a line of thrift stores has been linked together to form one huge orgy of cheap old man pants and little boy shirts.
We walked past the rooms full of baby clothes and what the store had labeled nicer clothes into the room of men's stuff and odds and ends. Holly made a beeline for the piles of records in the back, while I carefully waded through the polyester mudhole of trousers. A man in the back began conversing with a child about the fact that he comes to the thrift store to buy plastic toys, which he apparently collects. I thought it odd until I noticed the way in which the child was talking to the man, almost as if the man was younger than he, and figured that the men must have been mentally handicapped in some way. This thought was proven true when the man picked up a small, plastic crocodile from a shelf and ran at me with it, using it to nip at my elbows. I only encouraged him by faking a scream, so Holly had to pull him off of me to show me her record finds. I avoided the Streisand and went for a copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. No, it doesn't matter that I already own a copy of the CD. No, it doesn't matter that I don't own a record player. It's all about the cool value. Holly picked out Peter and the Wolf and some Boston for her dad, and then we went into the women's room to mock people who buy lingerie at thrift stores. After I picked out a bunch of random t-shirts with sayings like PUMP IT UP! on them, I walked back into the nicer clothes room to look at bags and jewelry. The Crocodile Man was talking to the cashier about the fact that he would never, ever steal anything from the thrift store, because he had $9 in his pocket, all to spend on plastic toys. The woman wasn't the least bit interested in what he had to say and only nodded her head in reply, so he kept repeating himself, evidently hoping for some sort of commendation. A grotesquely overweight 8 year-old sat by the door, switching his glance from The Crocodile Man to the cashier to me, giving us all looks of disapproval as the twelve hot dogs he had for lunch all slid down to his hips.
Having tried on all of her clothes, Holly joined me at the cash register and asked the boy if he had finished his homework. Holly's so funny that way. We ran to the car as it began to rain and decided to take a trip to Taco Bell for some quesadillas. In the ten minutes it took me to get to the Bell, water fell from the clouds like nothing I'd ever seen, causing me to fear for our lives and the life of my car. Holly ordered her tacos, but I refrained, unable to eat with the cat urine stench of thrift store wafting up from the bags in my back seat. As we continued up the road from Taco Bell, the rain pounded on my windshield, almost obstructing my view completely. But then the rain subsided for a moment, and in the calm we saw a large, brown opaque sphere floating down in a waterslide where the road meets the sidewalk. Holly was fascinated by the object, which we believed to be a glass lamppost covering, and asked me to pull over so that she could grab it. I parked us for a moment and she hopped out and began chasing the ball down the street, losing her sandals at one point and picking them up to continue running barefoot. The waterslide turned a corner, and a man stopped Holly to see what she was running from. I followed in my car and picked her up beside Chipotle, where she had to take a flying leap over the stream to make it into my car.
The chase was over. And what was our reward? A Budweiser party ball. A plastic orb that can be filled with our favourite malted beverage. It was a shocking disappointment. Holly took it home nonetheless and decided to use it as a hanging light cover. A place for everything and everything in its place, I tell you.
May 26th, 2002: I am a very cluttered person. I like to have all of my stuff at arm's reach, which leaves my desk covered in little piles of CDs, books, pictures, etc. My roommate, however, has been labeled a slob by everyone who comes into our dorm room. She is very stereotypically boy messy, so people always ask if I'm living with a man. And it wouldn't be so bad except that she has absolutely no regard for me. If I wake up after Elaine in the morning, I find her books, her food, and her dirty underwear kicked to my side of the room, her clothes draped over my desk chair. I don't mind it too much. I grew up sharing a room a sister who thought that the entire room was available to store her crap, so I'm used to just removing things from my side of the room without any fuss.
And I can't complain too much, because I've been a less-than-pleasant roommate in certain ways. At the beginning of the year, Elaine and I shared the microwave/refrigerator that the university provides, and one time, something of mine leaked from the top shelf to the bottom, causing some stickiness. I didn't think that it was bothering anything and was perfectly content with leaving it in there until I felt good and ready to clean it. However, Elaine got sick of looking at the clear gel-like substance that had formed and took it upon herself to mop it up. I thanked her, of course. Then, when we left for Christmas Break, I left our refrigerator plugged in with food still inside, though everything is supposed to be cleaned out and unplugged during major breaks. I had no idea that someone would be entering my room to see that everything was as it should have been and that that person would take it upon himself to unplug the refrigerator, causing everything in it to mold and melt and rot. When I came back and discovered the mess, I just plugged the thing back in and propped the refrigerator and freezer doors open to remind myself that I needed to take care of the mess. However, when Elaine came back, she closed the doors without my knowing, so everything in the freezer refroze, leaving a layer of ice made out of once-melted ice cream mixed with veggie chicken patties and juice. So, for a week, we just used the freezer as it was with no problems. However, one morning, we realised that there was a mysterious smell being emitted from the freezer, so I said that I would take care of it after I got home from work. But while I was gone, Elaine cleaned it. I was, of course, very thankful, but you know, I hadn't asked her to do it or anything, and I had even made the promise that I would do it upon my return. And finally, a few weeks after Easter, my cousin Bethany gave me a Tupperware container that I had left over at her house on Easter day. There were some rolls left in it that were showing the slightest signs of The World's Grossest Mold™, so I left them on top of the microwave inside their container in order to observe the molding process. Elaine complained and complained about them, but she was only doing it for the sake of complaining, so I ignored her. When she offered to throw them out, I wouldn't let her. Then she started talking about the fact that the rolls smelled awful, and when I claimed (truthfully) that one can't smell anything like mold through Tupperware, she began holding the container near my face and opening it at me so that I could smell the air inside. It had no smell that I could detect, so I didn't give it a second thought and left the container right where it had been.
And then I made the mistake of complaining about Elaine's side of the room last weekend. See, she planned to leave on Friday for Memorial Day weekend, so I asked if she could tidy things up before she left so that I could entertain friends in the room. People are afraid to come into our room because of her mess, you see. I made a joke of the whole thing and thought that she took it pretty well. But she didn't, apparently. Because yesterday, while I was gone, she had the following one-sided conversation with my Instant Messenger:
lynnaine: Katie
I was angry when I read those messages. I was very angry, in fact. First, she claims that she needed to clean up the mold, which I never asked her to do and told her exactly when I planned to do it. Second, she insinuates that when I accidentally broke the glass plate that spins in our microwave, I didn't clean up the mess. Evidently I didn't get some of the pieces, but I certainly didn't purposely leave them there. And finally, the spilled stuff had been there for a couple of weeks, and the spilled stuff could not have possibly been mine. I now have my own refrigerator, so the only stuff of mine that goes anywhere near the other refrigerator are the fake meat items that I keep in the freezer due to lack of space in mine. And the spilled stuff was reddish like barbeque sauce, which I have never bought. Now, Elaine and I have dealt with spilled stuff before. Last quarter, I watched her absentmindedly (as everything with Elaine is) throw a small container of pizza sauce onto my side of the room one night. Weeks later, it had spilled onto the floor and started to mold, but I wasn't about to clean it up, because I knew very well that she had no idea that it was hers and wouldn't notice at all if I did her dirty work for her. Finally, she complained about it to me and I reminded her that it was her mess, so she said, "If it's on your side, it's yours." I retorted, "So, these shoes, these books, these dirty underwear--they're mine, too?" She answered in the affirmative, but the sauce was cleaned up a day or two later.
Yesterday was a bad day for my relationship with Elaine, anyway. It was Memorial Day, and I had neither class nor work to worry about. So, I planned to sleep until 9:30 or so, at which time a certain boy planned to give me a wake-up call. However, at 7:03 AM, Elaine's alarm sounded, so I trekked across the room to beat it violently and then went back to bed. Then, at 8, Elaine's sister called. Except that I didn't know that it was Elaine's sister at first, because she's terribly ill and has lost her voice. I thought that it was a prank call and was incredibly rude to the person until she revealed her identity. So, I told Liz that I didn't know of Elaine's whereabouts and then went back to bed. At 9, Elaine's mom called to ask if Elaine was in the room, so I gave her all of the information that I had and went back to bed. Then, the boy called at 9:30, so I talked to him for a few moments and told him that I was going to sleep for a few more hours. But then Elaine's mom called twice more between 10 and 11:30, so I finally got up for good after her last call. I was only mildly upset about all of the interruptions, but then Elaine came home and was just a little too obnoxious for me to handle. She was to page her dad as soon as she arrived home, but her phone card evidently wasn't working correctly, because she kept slamming our phone down and screaming the word bastard. I deal pretty well with her irrational behavior, but after being without Elaine all weekend, I didn't want our first moments together to be quite so unpleasant. She spent most of the afternoon with her parents, but right as I was leaving for home around 5 PM, she came back and said, "What's that stuff that you spilled on the floor?" I was in a hurry to go and simply said, "Ohhh, no, no, no." I wasn't about to have another pizza sauce argument with her. She called after me, "Don't no, no, no me." But I had no, no, noed her, and I would do it again if provoked.
Yes, I realise that this is a very minor thing, and really, I'm not terribly worked up about it. I'm totally cool with cleaning up my messes, but I'm not cool with Elaine cleaning up my messes and then talking to me as if I'm a child. The problem is that we only have two more weeks of living together, and I don't want to be fighting with her the entire time, so I'm unwilling to tell her what's up. Don't you feel lucky that you, my dear friends, get to read my cathartic ramblings? Yeah, you should.
lynnaine: Today, I spend a while cleaning up whatever that spilled stuff was.
lynnaine: It was much more difficult when it had been left to sit for a few days because it was molding and such.
lynnaine: I had to move the fridge and ended up cutting my hand on broken glass that you never cleaned up from the broken microwave plate
lynnaine: It is very disgusting to clean up such moldy mess, and this is at least third or fourth time I have needed to do so.
lynnaine: For the remainder of the year, if you spill some food item, can you please clean it up immediatly
lynnaine: And can you keep food from rotting and causing the room to smell, such as the rolls that have been rotting for over two weeks.
lynnaine: Thank you