Throwing Poo

I’ll admit that I can be a little particular.  Clutter makes me irritable and I like things to be in their specific place when I go to retrieve them.  But despite what Nerdy Squirrel, Esq. likes to tell people, I’m no Felix Unger.  I have never followed her around the house with a Dustbuster and a can of Lysol, nor do I wear an apron and frequent gay bathhouses. 

She has a motive: by making me seem obsessive, she can justify her slovenly ways.  You see, a brilliant and sexy woman, Nerdy Squirrel, Esq. is also a disgusting slob of a roommate. This is a person who did not know that vacuum cleaners have to be emptied (I assume from never having used one), frequently unloads dirty dishes from the dishwasher into our cabinets, and has never met the flat space upon which she did not feel compelled to pile shit.
 
While I am happily married and love my wife, she is at risk of joining the ranks of the worst roommates with whom I’ve ever had the severe misfortune of sharing living space. 

College was the beginning of the roommate hell through which I drifted for the next decade.  In the dorms there was Lon, the smelly pothead who covered our walls with blacklight posters and hippie paraphernalia, Jim the artsy-fartsy punk-rocker who was predisposed to urinating in the closet when he was drunk, (which was always), and Ken the thoughtless hockey hooligan from Toledo who never attended his 7:30AM class yet insisted on setting his alarm every day and pounding away at the snooze button until well after 8:00AM. 

After moving off-campus, I spent a year in a ramshackle house where after months of dirty dished being piled in the sink – everyone survived by just removing what they needed from the filthy mound and washing it for their immediate purpose – the kitchen became infested with flies.  Instead of cleaning, we “invented” protective hats from aluminum foil roaster pans and some string that we would tie to our heads to defend against the kamikaze maggots that regularly fell from the tiles in the rotting drop-ceiling.

Finishing college, some other friends and I got together and rented a place, but calling it a house would be an exaggeration.  Walking too heavily through the kitchen would cause the lightbulbs in the basement to blow out.   It also wasn’t unusual to wake up roasting in the middle of night during winter with the furnace blazing because the front door had blown open and snow was drifting in.  We won’t even talk about the mice.

My point is that I’ve lived in my share of dumps.  Now that I own a home, I just want it to be nice.  Not perfect, not spotless, but also not with several days worth of crumbs on the kitchen counter and dried cat food caked on the backsplash just begging the maggots to come and find me again.

Hence our enduring quarrel: Which one of us is the normal one?  I argue that not wanting her to use my nose-hair clippers to remove matted poop from the cat’s butt fur is not being fussy.  She argues that brushing food crumbs off her shirt onto the floor is fine because they will get vacuumed up in a few days anyway.  The good thing is that at least she has stopped ending her points by ripping a fart and exclaiming, “And that’s all I have to say about that.”
 
All of this brings me to my theme for next few posts (unless I think of something better or, more importantly, easier).  Years ago the one boss I had who I sort of admired told me that relationships are easy if you just remember one thing: women are crazy and men are stupid.  Women are crazy because they won’t listen to logic, and men are stupid because they know this yet still never stop trying to use it to make their point.