the three little pigs

i'm not sure where to begin... i guess starting somewhere in the middle might make the most amount of sense and the least amount of confusion.

this weekend i spoke to someone i only remotely know for the first time ever. it was one of those people that your friends seem to know, but you don't. it was one those people you ignore while grocery shopping. it's not that i'm terribly shy or too quiet. mostly it's just that i'm not a fan of chit chat or small talk. i'm convinced i'm incapable of a forced smile- my facial muscles tighten and refuse to cooperate. it's almost like a form of MS. my brain tries to send my mouth the message, but somewhere along the line of communication the command gets lost. instead i'm left speechless and motionless, looking through the person rather than at them, with absolutely no facial expression whatsoever. if i don't know someone, it generally means i have no opinion of him or her. with no opinion, it generally means no response. and hence, i ignore them.

so there i was, somehow standing alone with this person in her own home. her things, her walls, her dishes, her possessions surrounded me. it made me nervous. upon arriving, i was already nervous. i was nervous for more reasons than i care to explain. but mostly, i was nervous because she was a female and i don't know how to act around females despite my being one. at first, the conversation was a polite question and answer period. often, these periods are the most difficult for me. my reaction is to talk too much, babbling on about anything and everything. sometimes i end up talking to myself or muttering something under my breath. and as if it wasn't bad enough, i usually follow up the babble with numerous apologies for my behaviour while calling even more attention to my awkwardness (as if it hadn't shown already).

after a few minutes of this, i was feeling a little more comfortable. i guess you could say i was letting my guard down a bit, 'opening' up a little... or maybe i just became more focused on what i was knitting. for whatever the reason, i was starting to settle down and i was slowly perspiring less. i tend to sweat more than the average person... or at least i think i do.

like i said, i was feeling better. until of course, she made a statement regarding an old apartment i used to live in. i guess she knew the people who took the apartment over after my roommates and i moved out. she ended up saying something like "they said it was the dirtiest apartment they've ever seen!".

now, for anyone who knows me... they know i'm extremely obsessive compulsive about my cleaning. i vacuum once every three or four days. i use only bleach and comet as cleaners, allowing the harsh scrub to sit on the surface for at least 20 minutes in order to eat any surface dirt and work its way through right to the enamel. i scrub my bathtub, sink and toilet with an extra firm brush and i get out a toothbrush to get the 'hard to get to' areas- even under the toilet bowl. i take the harsh chemicals and i wash doorknobs, light switches and telephones. i clean areas that others don't even think twice about! i use comet on my tiled floors, getting down on all fours to scrub. i change dishcloths, hand towels and rugs after only a couple days of use. i truly am obsessive compulsive when it comes to a clean house.

after she said what she did, and i took a brief second to think it through, i decided against explaining the whole truth of the situation.

the truth being that i lived with someone who was as dirty as his pet rat. this person once left a carton of milk on his bookshelf for months until it turned from a liquid to a solid. this same person once spilled orange crush on his floor right at his bedroom entrance and left it there for what i believe was roughly 4 or 5 weeks walking around it or jumping over it to get into his room. he collected mugs that had started forming mold from old coffee so that he could start using them as ashtrays for his pack-a-day bedroom smoking habit. he said that the contents of the mug (mold, hardened coffee and cigarette ash) would turn into some sort of concrete that he felt was a far safer ashtray then the rest of the garbage he left lying around his bedroom. garbage was something he liked, often surrounding himself around it. he lived by the saying that "one person's garbage is another person's treasure". he once woke me up at 3 am to have me look at him all dressed up in a batman outfit he had found lying in the garbage somewhere. although it was at least 5 sizes too small, he loved it just the same. he was also plagued with laziness (something i also suffer from). however, after a shower he used to think it was too much of a chore to run his worn briefs up to his bedroom before leaving for work. after cheryl (my other roommate) and i would hassle him for leaving them on the washroom floor, he started to hide them in the dining room or living room. sometimes he'd put them behind the couch or under the dining room table. we never really wanted to touch them so they'd usually have to stay put until we asked him a couple of times to move them.

needless to say, while i was living in korea cheryl went on strike with the house cleaning. it was far too hard for her to keep on top of him. upon my arrival home we had all come to the decision that we'd move. i couldn't live in the filth and i didn't want to keep cleaning it. put simply, it wasn't working out. so... we packed our things and we left the apartment in the poorest shape i ever had seen it in.

it was true. our apartment truly was filthy. but i didn't know how to explain, nor did i want to. i wasn't sure that bragging about being obsessive compulsive would make me look like a better person. did i want to tell her about how i clean saltshakers at restaurants before using them? or how i won't fiddle with change in my pocket in fear that i'll forget to wash my hands before putting them close to my mouth? or how about when someone takes their shoes off in my home and i quickly scan the area looking for the most suitable place that i can neatly put them away so they're tidy and out of sight? these qualities don't make me any better. in fact, they might make me worse.

with all this said and done, i decided not to give a shit. what do i care what this person thinks? rather, i decided to tell a few funny stories about how dirty we really were. i told her about the time shiraz brought home an old fire extinguisher he had found and liked. and how after days of smelling shit in our apartment, cheryl and i searched high and low for the cause only to find a bag of dog shit had been tied around the handle of it ready to be picked up by waste collectors. the ladies laughed and i tried not to think about what they'd say about me after i left. in fact, i'm still trying hard not to imagine what they might be saying right now.

for some reason... i'd rather be dirty than crazy.