Learning about blogging has been way more complicated and time-consuming than I had ever previously anticipated. Granted, the Blogger folks make it pretty much a no-brainer, but then again I just spent 45 minutes trying to figure out why my font changed midway through the draft of my most-recent post (turns out when I went to edit the HTML the font size had been reduced to 85%. Oh, obviously!
So for the moment, all my fun and creative ideas, as well as ideas I've borrowed from other blogs in regards to format, fun and function will have to wait. At least I got the font size uniform...right?
I also want to mention that I have a really, really hard time being succinct (I know, you're shocked). One of the goals in having this blog is for me to learn to tell part of the story without beating people over the head with every little detail (or, worse, having people not read the posts because they're just WAY too long!
So my apologies for the lack of brevity, and if you know how to do it better, please feel free to enlighten me...I can use all the help I can get!
June 15, 2006
June 11, 2006
"It Smells Like a Fish Tank in Here!"
I currently rent a room in a small rowhouse in an "up and coming" neighborhood in the wonderful city of Washington, DC. As this is my first year in DC/out of college/finding my own housing, there have been some bumps along the way, mostly having to do with the little nuances of day-to-day life that I just never had to deal with while living in on-campus housing.
I would say, however, that overall I have had terrific luck with housing hereabouts, including finding my three fabulous housemates via Craigslist (keywords: progressive, activists, students - that's all it took!), and renting my furnished room in our beautiful rowhouse for a not-too-bad $650 a month.
Of course, living in a rowhouse, even a recently renovated rowhouse, has its pitfalls. One of the problems with DC's booming housing market is that lots of folks decide to invest in property, buy rundown homes, and "flip" them in a rapid renovation process, such that it's not too unusual for the externalities to look fabulous (in our case, lofted ceilings and shiny wood floors), while the insulation or heating system or other super-important-yet-not-immediately-apparent internal components get neglected.
Case in point: our second floor toilet, which is overly sensitive to just about everything that gets sent its way...and after having the fabulous and funny plumber come and lift the entire toilet off the floor for "snaking" not once but twice in one month(!), we finally realized/were told that the plumbing had not been installed at the correct(universal toilet-plumbing) angle, and that in order to prevent him from continuously showing up at the house and putting our toilet on plastic bags out in the upstairs hallway, it was our mission to prevent any and all female visitors from flushing sanitary products, and to prevent everybody else from flushing just about anything else.
::sigh::
With this in mind, funky smells, sounds, and/or bubbling wallpaper in our little Failed State are not that unusual...
But this week was an exception to the norm.
For the last week or so, my room has had this vaguely funky ...odor to it. We only recently put the Central Air on, AND my room is the smallest, AND I didn't have a fan, AND I was away for the weekend with the door shut the entire time...so at first, I didn't quite freak out. I just assumed that something in my room was musty, that I had gotten rain in the room and that when the weather warmed up a bit it got a tad funky, etc, etc. I made up excuses. Eventually, though, the funk was getting a tad overpowering. I'd open my door or walk into my room, and I'd want to close it again, so I started poking around. My room is about 10 x 14 sq ft (and I'm probably being generous), and I generally am over the top about keeping it clean (not tidy)...but I wondered if I had left food in the bottom of my trashcan (which I never do), or something of that nature.
But it got so bad last week that I called my housemate, N, into the room, and asked him to take a deep breath, and tell me if he thought it smelled funny. Now there are good stories about N and I and an ongoing discussion as to whether there are squirrels on our roof or whether I'm imagining things...but we'll save that for the "Squirrels" blog entry.
So my housemate comes in and I have my newly-acquired-$52-that-was-supposed-to-be-$30-on-sale fan blowing, and he says it's a little funky, but not too bad. I protest that that's because of the fan, but then he looks pointedly at my soccer bag with a little smile on his face, and speculates that the funkage might be originating therein. It wasn't, but it inspired enough doubt that I gave up on trying to persuade him...maybe I was imagining both funk and squirrels.
In the days that followed I became increasingly antagonized by the smell, and left my fan on constantly. I'd get home at night and move things around, sniffing all the while, probably looking like a complete nut to all the world outside my windows (and indeed, a good percentage of the neighborhood can see in my windows, as my room is off the back alley/backyards). I sniffed up and down, sniffed my mattress, my carpet, my pillows...everything. No dice. Everything smelled but nothing smelled like a legitimate source of the funk in question.
The other day I finally couldn't take it anymore, and I had my other housemate (the owner of our house), M, come into my room to take a whiff. He and I sat on the bed just breathing, giggling and looking at each other as he wrinkled his face in disgust. "It smells like a fishtank in here!"
We proceeded to take turns poking around some more, sniffed, speculated on the air conditioning vent, the old heating grate, the storage space in the ceiling. He offered to hire a contractor (M is notorious for calling a contractor to do anything from the most basic weather-stripping to installing a complex new wrought-iron fence...he's big on the calling of the contractors, but it's very endearing)...and yet he made the astute point that he couldn't exactly call and say, "Yeah, hello, Ahmed? FLAG's room smells like a fish tank...can you come over???" So he shrugged, we laughed, and ten minutes later he brought me in his little bowl of aesthetically-pleasing but completely useless potpourri. Right.
Ultimately, this weekend, after a long Friday night out playing and barhopping in Adam's Morgan, a good guy friend of mine stayed over, and the two of us crammed into my twin bed (a blog post waiting to happen)...and before I opened the door to my room I apologized profusely for the stinkage. Then I opened the door, and we were both knocked out by the stench. He couldn't help but comment on it, I was embarrassed, swore it wasn't me(!)...and I resolved to fix the stench this weekend, even if I had to open the wall grate. Luckily for me my friend was polite nonetheless, and let's just say we toughed it out...and found other distractions to pass the time.
Today, however, was the day. I was going to find the source of the stink. I figured I'd vacuum the hell out of my room, I'd move everything around, I'd dust, I'd wipe the surfaces...and even though my room was already pretty clean.no stone would go unturned.
So I took off the sheets, and I vacuumed, and I moved everything around and I was mostly ready for everything and anything (or so I thought). I live in DC - it's a city, there are roaches, spiders, all kinds of fun creepy crawlies, and I'm finally getting used to just pulling out the Raid and moving on with my dad. But today in the midst of cleaning I grabbed my suitcase, which was previously wedged between my desk and my dresser (my room is tiny), and I haul it out of the way without a thought, put it behind me, grab the vacuum, and turn around to see that there is a Dead Mouse, curled up into a fetal position as it was when it died, rotting under the spot where the suitcase was located, up again my desk. And I can't help myself - I scream. I scream, I jump onto the bed, I do what I would generously call the "Ewwwy" dance, wherein my knees come up and I prance around the room wringing my hands, whining "ew ew ew ew" over the whine of the vacuum cleaner, which is still on in the corner. I was, to generalize my reaction along society's traditional gender lines, "such a girl." (I hate this saying, but it's what I'm trying to get at in this long-winded intro).
At first, I couldn't bring myself to look at it, I couldn't bring myself to try and move it, because for all I knew, it was still alive and dying. I just didn't want to look at it. Generally a "tough" girl, generally not phased, and someone who likes to look out for the well-being of the people I love, there I went, running into the hallway where I found N, and I couldn't get a word out.
"Blah-blah-blah-MOUSE-blah-blah blah!" came out...no sense, nonsense, and just that one actual word, mouse. N and Z, my third housemate, came out into the hallway then, where I was intermittently doing my "ewwwwy" dance and whining. Grossss! I kept yelling, as if that was going to scare the poor (dead) thing off. They laughed a little (who could help it), and gave me pitying looks, but did not go in to scope the deceased. Z expressed some concern about a new challenge for our Failed State, then headed back down to the World Cup, while N struggled to hide his smile as I continued to shriek "Ew!" and wring my hands. Almost immediately, however, N offers an escape hatch.
"Do you want me to pick it up?" he says, with the most sympathetic smile ever.
"Do I want him to pick it up????"
"YES!!!" I want to yell. "Oh please do!!!! " The very idea that he will just go in there, my mouse-removing knight-in-shining-armor, without screaming or shrieking or hand wringing, and make that disgusting little decomposing critter disappear without me ever having to see it again...is almost too lovely to contemplate. "Yes!!!!" I yell inwardly. "Please!!! Take it away!!"
But outwardly, I don't say anything. I can't quite bring myself to say no, exactly, but I just stand there wide-eyed and stricken, kicking myself inwardly for my stubborn insistence on my own independence. I know I have to be the one to clean up this mouse. For me. For my own self-respect. I mean, I want someone to clean up the mouse for me - it's true (who wouldn't?). I want to just have someone to make it go away, and am inwardly somewhat willing to be desperately grateful to any of the three men I live with for saving my poor, shrieking, pseudo-feminist-self from the dead mouse goo. But I can't.
I think most people would say here that it's either a) not necessarily unfeminist of me to not want to clean up a dead mouse (as I've just said, very few people probably ever want to clean up dead mice), and that in a truly egalitarian community/house/co-op the idea is to rely on one another's strengths, such as N removing the mouse (something I don't want to do) and me doing the dishes (something he doesn't want to do). I also can anticipate the obvious argument b) that not everything has to be politicized or about feminism. But, I would argue, this example is. N isn't offering for the fun of it, or because he particularly doesn't care (I don't think) - he's offering because he's a man and men have been taught to do these things, and in particular to do these things for women. Our socialization within our genders is tripping wires that involve boys dealing with mouses and girls screaming and doing the "ewwwy" dance. And yet, as much as I hate my "oh, save me" response, I can't seem to repress it. Plus, my pride just won't let me have him do it!
So instead I grab the paper towels, turn towards my room, and stand over the remnants of our furry rodent friend as I repeatedly try to bring myself to grab him and flip him into the trash can. But I can't. I've never been good with dead critters. I swerve to avoid toads, have never knowingly killed anything, and can't come to terms with the fact that this little dead mouse needs to be transported in my paper towel swathed hands. SHIT.
I ended up taking two strong pieces of cardboard and literally scraping the little sucker off the carpet. It turns out that as he bestowed his fishy dead-mouse-body smell on me, he was also gooily decomposing on my (inconveniently white) carpet. So I find myself using the cardboard to scrape him off, hoping he won't pop into some kind of horror story decomposing mush, and yet do so so vehemently that all of a sudden with a final scrape the little corpse pops up into the air like some manner of fetid dead-mouse-popcorn-popping, and lands on my cardboard. Oh, ew...
Needless to say, I tossed him, ran outside to throw out my trash ("ewwww-ing" all the way), and then Simple Greened the Bejesus out of my carpet to get the brown stains out. Then I perfume-bathed the entire room, and left it, doors open-wide, as I relocated to Sparky's Cafe for a much needed-caffeine jolt and some blog-based escapeism.
And you know, now that I know the smell should be dissipating, and that I cleaned up my own mucky mess, all I can think is I'm really glad I cleaned it up, myself.
Even if I only did it to prove that I could.
I would say, however, that overall I have had terrific luck with housing hereabouts, including finding my three fabulous housemates via Craigslist (keywords: progressive, activists, students - that's all it took!), and renting my furnished room in our beautiful rowhouse for a not-too-bad $650 a month.
Of course, living in a rowhouse, even a recently renovated rowhouse, has its pitfalls. One of the problems with DC's booming housing market is that lots of folks decide to invest in property, buy rundown homes, and "flip" them in a rapid renovation process, such that it's not too unusual for the externalities to look fabulous (in our case, lofted ceilings and shiny wood floors), while the insulation or heating system or other super-important-yet-not-immediately-apparent internal components get neglected.
Case in point: our second floor toilet, which is overly sensitive to just about everything that gets sent its way...and after having the fabulous and funny plumber come and lift the entire toilet off the floor for "snaking" not once but twice in one month(!), we finally realized/were told that the plumbing had not been installed at the correct(universal toilet-plumbing) angle, and that in order to prevent him from continuously showing up at the house and putting our toilet on plastic bags out in the upstairs hallway, it was our mission to prevent any and all female visitors from flushing sanitary products, and to prevent everybody else from flushing just about anything else.
::sigh::
With this in mind, funky smells, sounds, and/or bubbling wallpaper in our little Failed State are not that unusual...
But this week was an exception to the norm.
For the last week or so, my room has had this vaguely funky ...odor to it. We only recently put the Central Air on, AND my room is the smallest, AND I didn't have a fan, AND I was away for the weekend with the door shut the entire time...so at first, I didn't quite freak out. I just assumed that something in my room was musty, that I had gotten rain in the room and that when the weather warmed up a bit it got a tad funky, etc, etc. I made up excuses. Eventually, though, the funk was getting a tad overpowering. I'd open my door or walk into my room, and I'd want to close it again, so I started poking around. My room is about 10 x 14 sq ft (and I'm probably being generous), and I generally am over the top about keeping it clean (not tidy)...but I wondered if I had left food in the bottom of my trashcan (which I never do), or something of that nature.
But it got so bad last week that I called my housemate, N, into the room, and asked him to take a deep breath, and tell me if he thought it smelled funny. Now there are good stories about N and I and an ongoing discussion as to whether there are squirrels on our roof or whether I'm imagining things...but we'll save that for the "Squirrels" blog entry.
So my housemate comes in and I have my newly-acquired-$52-that-was-supposed-to-be-$30-on-sale fan blowing, and he says it's a little funky, but not too bad. I protest that that's because of the fan, but then he looks pointedly at my soccer bag with a little smile on his face, and speculates that the funkage might be originating therein. It wasn't, but it inspired enough doubt that I gave up on trying to persuade him...maybe I was imagining both funk and squirrels.
In the days that followed I became increasingly antagonized by the smell, and left my fan on constantly. I'd get home at night and move things around, sniffing all the while, probably looking like a complete nut to all the world outside my windows (and indeed, a good percentage of the neighborhood can see in my windows, as my room is off the back alley/backyards). I sniffed up and down, sniffed my mattress, my carpet, my pillows...everything. No dice. Everything smelled but nothing smelled like a legitimate source of the funk in question.
The other day I finally couldn't take it anymore, and I had my other housemate (the owner of our house), M, come into my room to take a whiff. He and I sat on the bed just breathing, giggling and looking at each other as he wrinkled his face in disgust. "It smells like a fishtank in here!"
We proceeded to take turns poking around some more, sniffed, speculated on the air conditioning vent, the old heating grate, the storage space in the ceiling. He offered to hire a contractor (M is notorious for calling a contractor to do anything from the most basic weather-stripping to installing a complex new wrought-iron fence...he's big on the calling of the contractors, but it's very endearing)...and yet he made the astute point that he couldn't exactly call and say, "Yeah, hello, Ahmed? FLAG's room smells like a fish tank...can you come over???" So he shrugged, we laughed, and ten minutes later he brought me in his little bowl of aesthetically-pleasing but completely useless potpourri. Right.
Ultimately, this weekend, after a long Friday night out playing and barhopping in Adam's Morgan, a good guy friend of mine stayed over, and the two of us crammed into my twin bed (a blog post waiting to happen)...and before I opened the door to my room I apologized profusely for the stinkage. Then I opened the door, and we were both knocked out by the stench. He couldn't help but comment on it, I was embarrassed, swore it wasn't me(!)...and I resolved to fix the stench this weekend, even if I had to open the wall grate. Luckily for me my friend was polite nonetheless, and let's just say we toughed it out...and found other distractions to pass the time.
Today, however, was the day. I was going to find the source of the stink. I figured I'd vacuum the hell out of my room, I'd move everything around, I'd dust, I'd wipe the surfaces...and even though my room was already pretty clean.no stone would go unturned.
So I took off the sheets, and I vacuumed, and I moved everything around and I was mostly ready for everything and anything (or so I thought). I live in DC - it's a city, there are roaches, spiders, all kinds of fun creepy crawlies, and I'm finally getting used to just pulling out the Raid and moving on with my dad. But today in the midst of cleaning I grabbed my suitcase, which was previously wedged between my desk and my dresser (my room is tiny), and I haul it out of the way without a thought, put it behind me, grab the vacuum, and turn around to see that there is a Dead Mouse, curled up into a fetal position as it was when it died, rotting under the spot where the suitcase was located, up again my desk. And I can't help myself - I scream. I scream, I jump onto the bed, I do what I would generously call the "Ewwwy" dance, wherein my knees come up and I prance around the room wringing my hands, whining "ew ew ew ew" over the whine of the vacuum cleaner, which is still on in the corner. I was, to generalize my reaction along society's traditional gender lines, "such a girl." (I hate this saying, but it's what I'm trying to get at in this long-winded intro).
At first, I couldn't bring myself to look at it, I couldn't bring myself to try and move it, because for all I knew, it was still alive and dying. I just didn't want to look at it. Generally a "tough" girl, generally not phased, and someone who likes to look out for the well-being of the people I love, there I went, running into the hallway where I found N, and I couldn't get a word out.
"Blah-blah-blah-MOUSE-blah-blah blah!" came out...no sense, nonsense, and just that one actual word, mouse. N and Z, my third housemate, came out into the hallway then, where I was intermittently doing my "ewwwwy" dance and whining. Grossss! I kept yelling, as if that was going to scare the poor (dead) thing off. They laughed a little (who could help it), and gave me pitying looks, but did not go in to scope the deceased. Z expressed some concern about a new challenge for our Failed State, then headed back down to the World Cup, while N struggled to hide his smile as I continued to shriek "Ew!" and wring my hands. Almost immediately, however, N offers an escape hatch.
"Do you want me to pick it up?" he says, with the most sympathetic smile ever.
"Do I want him to pick it up????"
"YES!!!" I want to yell. "Oh please do!!!! " The very idea that he will just go in there, my mouse-removing knight-in-shining-armor, without screaming or shrieking or hand wringing, and make that disgusting little decomposing critter disappear without me ever having to see it again...is almost too lovely to contemplate. "Yes!!!!" I yell inwardly. "Please!!! Take it away!!"
But outwardly, I don't say anything. I can't quite bring myself to say no, exactly, but I just stand there wide-eyed and stricken, kicking myself inwardly for my stubborn insistence on my own independence. I know I have to be the one to clean up this mouse. For me. For my own self-respect. I mean, I want someone to clean up the mouse for me - it's true (who wouldn't?). I want to just have someone to make it go away, and am inwardly somewhat willing to be desperately grateful to any of the three men I live with for saving my poor, shrieking, pseudo-feminist-self from the dead mouse goo. But I can't.
I think most people would say here that it's either a) not necessarily unfeminist of me to not want to clean up a dead mouse (as I've just said, very few people probably ever want to clean up dead mice), and that in a truly egalitarian community/house/co-op the idea is to rely on one another's strengths, such as N removing the mouse (something I don't want to do) and me doing the dishes (something he doesn't want to do). I also can anticipate the obvious argument b) that not everything has to be politicized or about feminism. But, I would argue, this example is. N isn't offering for the fun of it, or because he particularly doesn't care (I don't think) - he's offering because he's a man and men have been taught to do these things, and in particular to do these things for women. Our socialization within our genders is tripping wires that involve boys dealing with mouses and girls screaming and doing the "ewwwy" dance. And yet, as much as I hate my "oh, save me" response, I can't seem to repress it. Plus, my pride just won't let me have him do it!
So instead I grab the paper towels, turn towards my room, and stand over the remnants of our furry rodent friend as I repeatedly try to bring myself to grab him and flip him into the trash can. But I can't. I've never been good with dead critters. I swerve to avoid toads, have never knowingly killed anything, and can't come to terms with the fact that this little dead mouse needs to be transported in my paper towel swathed hands. SHIT.
I ended up taking two strong pieces of cardboard and literally scraping the little sucker off the carpet. It turns out that as he bestowed his fishy dead-mouse-body smell on me, he was also gooily decomposing on my (inconveniently white) carpet. So I find myself using the cardboard to scrape him off, hoping he won't pop into some kind of horror story decomposing mush, and yet do so so vehemently that all of a sudden with a final scrape the little corpse pops up into the air like some manner of fetid dead-mouse-popcorn-popping, and lands on my cardboard. Oh, ew...
Needless to say, I tossed him, ran outside to throw out my trash ("ewwww-ing" all the way), and then Simple Greened the Bejesus out of my carpet to get the brown stains out. Then I perfume-bathed the entire room, and left it, doors open-wide, as I relocated to Sparky's Cafe for a much needed-caffeine jolt and some blog-based escapeism.
And you know, now that I know the smell should be dissipating, and that I cleaned up my own mucky mess, all I can think is I'm really glad I cleaned it up, myself.
Even if I only did it to prove that I could.
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