I’d Rather Have You Do Your Share, Thanks

My glorious week of maintaining an empty apartment came to an abrupt end when the door opened with a loud crash yesterday. Sarah walked through the living room with an overstuffed suitcase and several bags.

“Hey, you’re back!” I greeted her with a forced smile. Inwardly, I groaned.

“Yeah… my mom’s outside with more stuff,” Sarah responded. No greeting necessary for her.

“Okay, I’ll go out to say hi and help bring in your things,” I offered.

I found her mom’s humongous black SUV parked illegally blocking our building’s driveway.

“Hi, Mrs. Y! How was your trip? Can I help carry anything in?”

“Hi, Roommate. You can grab something from the trunk,” Mrs. Y answered from the driver seat.

As soon as Sarah and I finished several trips back and forth from the car, Mrs. Y drove off. Sarah promptly opened her huge rolling suitcase and dumped its contents on the floor of her room. Apparently, she hates unpacking and lives out of the pile until it gradually disappears. At least the disaster will be contained in her room.

In an unexpected move, Sarah pulled out an eyelash curler and some plastic soup spoons that she bought for me. It was actually really nice of her to think of me while she was on vacation. Maybe that means that she’s becoming more thoughtful and will start pulling her weight around here!

Probably not.

God Made Dirt, and Dirt Don’t Hurt

Something incredible has happened. Sarah’s conservation courses (and let’s be honest–her hipster friends) introduced her to a garden where she can pick her own fruit and vegetables.

Pros
- She has actually let her dainty “surgeon” hands touch dirt!
- She gets off her normally sedentary ass to go to the garden.
- She brought home some baby spinach, onions, and berries.

Cons
- She must exhaust all her energy getting to the garden because she’s still lazy with the chores.
- She just threw all the fruit and vegetables on the kitchen table–dirt, roots, and all–for several days.

The best part of my day is when I come home from work to see shriveled/moldy fruit and grimy vegetables swimming in dirt on my kitchen table.

The second best part is that Sarah has left on a family vacation and won’t be back until next week, so guess who is cleaning up her crap.

Tree Hugging Gas Guzzler

Sarah’s student action organization just hosted an event on campus to promote alternative energy. It was pretty creative: they rented out solar panels, used them to power blenders, and charged $2 for a “solar smoothie”. I loved the idea and enthusiastically plugged it to all my friends. A bunch of us went to their table during our lunch break to support the cause. I must commend Sarah’s dedication to raising awareness about the environmental issues that will affect our future.

However, sometimes I get a little confused by her lifestyle. Perhaps it is no fault of her own, since she comes from a state where driving huge SUVs are encouraged, but I figured that after preaching to everyone the importance of conserving energy and reducing greenhouse gasses, Sarah would give up her SUV and other wasteful activities.

She hasn’t. In fact, when her family moved here, they brought along their three cars (all huge gas guzzlers that don’t really fit in driveways). Sarah also neglects to turn off the lights when she leaves a room, and many times I have come home to the TV blaring in an empty apartment.

On the other hand, she encouraged our house to start composting, which we quickly agreed to do. Sarah brought home a little compost bucket that we put our food scraps into, and a composter is supposed to come pick it up along with the trash every week. Unfortunately, she forgot to mention that she hadn’t signed our apartment up for this weekly pickup… so our compost bucket has been rotting out on the street for two weeks now. And of course, she refuses to get her perfect hands dirty by emptying it out. I’ll let you know when someone (and I flat out refuse to do it for her this time) gets on it.

The Shame Game

After the last term, the Sara(h)s doing fewer chores than I do, regardless of the fact that they make messes just as often (if not more), really got to me.

For instance, we all cook several times a week and the result is a huge stack of dishes each night. I found myself washing my dishes and theirs after they had cooked and neglected to clean up after themselves. I won’t lie–sometimes I get so overwhelmed with how many plates and pots and utensils that we have that I just let the dishes sit there until I absolutely have to wash them because no one else has.

Obviously I resent picking up after my roommates, so this term, I started a list to record who has done the dishes. I put our names at the top of each column in order to compare the number of times we each wash dishes, hoping to shame them into doing this chore more often.

“Oh, Roommate, thank you so much for starting this system!” Sarah noted sarcastically when discovering that I had called her out on her shorter list. “I can see that you’ve already painstakingly recorded who has done what in the last month. Thanks for that.”

Sara, who is more concerned with her standing as a reputable member of society when we have guests over, took the hint and her numbers began to catch up to my much longer column.

Sarah, however, has still only washed the dishes four times in the last four months… and she purposely signed in in larger handwriting to make her list look longer. How I love her honest efforts.

Pick Your Cancer

“I am never going to be like my mother!” — a line we’ve all repeated to ourselves (feel free to substitute “mother” with another family member or guardian or whoever) over and over again, each time this particular person displayed a rather irritating characteristic.

As the child of a nurse, I lived in an immaculately kept household. My mother noticed every single speck of dust and “misplaced” item. I spent years mumbling expletives under my breath every time I had to stack papers into a neat pile or dust my dresser top. That’s why I swore I would never be an OCD nag if I kept house. And then I realized that the line between my mother’s housekeeping and maintaining a sanitary household was a lot finer than I had thought while growing up.

After having to wipe out the stained microwave every time someone didn’t cover their curry or pad thai myself, I reminded Sarah to put the microwave-safe cover on top of her sure-to-splatter dish.

“Microwaving that thing will give you cancer, you know,” she responded haughtily, punching in the timer.

“Sarah, you chain smoke,” I pointed out.

“Oh… oh yeah. Okay, I’ll use the cover next time.”

Cleaning Up is Crime

Ugh. I just took a midterm today, and I got killed. I studied all yesterday for it, so I thought I’d be prepared, but it wasn’t enough. It would’ve helped if Sarah hadn’t been her lazy, disgusting self though.

Yesterday, around 4 PM, I came home from class and work to a disaster. Sarah had had some friends from her hometown over to our apartment for lunch, and the remnants of their meal were all over the kitchen. From the beans slopped on the counter, the shredded cheese mashed all over the table, and the spots of hot sauce staining the white stove, I surmised that they had made enchiladas (“They were delicious!”, I later found out).

“Sarah, could you please clean up the mess before my friends come over to study this evening?” I explained about the upcoming midterm.

“Oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ll clean it up after I take a nap,” she responded reassuringly.

So I decided that she had the right idea–a nap to recharge before a long study session sounded very good. Two hours later, I woke up to find the kitchen in the same disastrous state that Sarah had left it in since lunch. And she was nowhere to be found.

Are you kidding me? I could feel my blood starting to boil. Extremely irritated, I began to clean up the mess myself. It took forever and a half to scrape off all the dried bits encrusted on every kitchen surface. I am not the type of person to physically show that I am upset, but I was so pissed off that I had to let out my anger and disgust by slamming cabinets and throwing sponges around with a heavy hand, as the house was empty and my fourth roommate, Victoria, was not home to sympathize.

Eventually I got too frustrated, and I decided to meet my friends at a cafe to study so that I wouldn’t have to see Sarah when she got home.
Around midnight, we gave up studying and I came home to find Sarah fuming in the kitchen.

“Why did you clean up the kitchen?” she demanded angrily.

“As I told you earlier, I needed the table to study for my midterm tomorrow.” I was unaware that I needed the Grime Queen’s permission to clean.

“I can’t believe you did that!” She glared at me. “It’s like you didn’t think I’d actually do it myself!”

“Well, Sarah, you didn’t,” I snapped back. I went into my room and shut the door.

Later, when Sara came home, I heard Sarah bitching to her about what happened.

“God, she wouldn’t let me clean the kitchen, and then she ended up studying at a cafe anyway!”

“Wow, she has got some nerve to be angry at you,” Sara agreed.

“Yeah! I just woke up late from my nap and had to go to my night class. I mean, I was totally going to clean it later!”

…Right. And how much later? 10, 11 PM? After my midterm? The worst part is that she was indignant about me doing it myself, as if I had offended her by doing her a favor in some way. I hope we don’t speak for the next few days. That’d be glorious.

Do I have "maid" written on my forehead?

I should’ve known what to expect of my new roommates based on the first question Sarah asked me before we moved in together: “Do you have a lot of clothing? Because I do, so I’m going to need a lot of closet space.”

She meant it. Perhaps it is due to my indifference to changing fashion trends (I will always be a cute-top-and-jacket-with-jeans girl), but the volume of her clothing was four times the size of my wardrobe. And those were just the items she brought to college.The other girl turned out to be no different. Both named Sara (one will have an “h” in these stories to help differentiate), both from the same high school, and both shoe-sized 7.5.

Crap. I had been third-wheeled. Stuck with the two best-friends-since-2nd-grade girls.

It was clear that I was not an equal in their eyes, with my middle-class background, lower SAT score, and lack of brand name clothing (as they were quick to point out: “Ohhh, the house you grew up in is totally cute; it’s so small!”, “You never took an SAT course?! Everyone from where we’re from does!”, “Are your D&G reading glasses the only brand you own?”). Though I tried to make the best of it, I couldn’t help but find myself disagreeing with them sometimes, especially over apartment chores. They initially seemed to be open-minded enough, as we did spend a lot of time getting to know each other, talking about TV shows and other chit-chat type things. But then I overheard Sarah on the phone discussing how I often had to ask her to pick up after herself.

“She bitched at me about the messiness of our house and how I drag rocks into the kitchen! She, like, resents me because I have superior taste in fashion or something.”

Yep. I definitely resent Sarah because she wears expensive jeans, and not because of the dialog we exchanged earlier:

“Sarah, are these yours?” I had asked, gesturing toward candy wrappers strewn over the table.

“Um, no,” she said after a long pause.

I tried to laugh off her unconvincing response, “Can you please throw them away?”

“No,” she continued pointedly, “because I know you’ll just do it for me.”

Awesome. I love playing maid to girls from states where throwing away one’s own trash is not encouraged.