Shit, I haven’t sat down for days. I just declared myself done for the day.
Like magic, about an hour or so ago, I wrote the sentence above, and M. walked through the door with pizza. Well, he called it pizza, and the box said pizza, but they do things different here in California. One of them was mooshu duck, you know, like them Chinese eat.
I have dishes and assorted kitchen shit put away, and I began a shrine to my lapsed Catholicism in the kitschy, mirrored built-in china cabinet. Right now the shrine includes a slightly tattered blessed virgin Hummel, a Lenox China plate view of the Vatican and the old extreme unction crucifix that I still feel guilty whenever I touch, even though Pat isn’t around to chide me. What M. suspects and may not embrace is the shrine’s growth potential.
Other than unpacking, I spent today dealing with the new landlord, Nick the Greek. I suspect Nick’s control-freakishness will either become so annoying we end up moving or a deep fountain of character-based tales.
Today we walked through the apartment, so we could agree on important checkpoints, like there are five cracks in the tiles around the kitchen sink. The potential flashpoints were his attempts to control, oh, I dunno, normal behavior.
Like when he started to wipe strands of long hair off the bathroom counter while clucking about needing to keep everything clean and warning about long hair and drains. Clearly, he was assessing my hirsutism and trying to educate me on how to avoid plumbing disasters. Only, as he rolled the strands from finger to palm to show me, he realized they were the long, thick, luxuriant locks of an Asian man.
The low point for me would be the tampon wrapper. First, you need to know, I’m a hippie chick at heart, so I tend toward recycling and making sure my feminine hygiene needs don’t become the turrets on some poor, unsuspecting kid’s sand castle downstream from a water treatment plant.
I go for completely biodegradeable paper and cardboard.
So, old Nick is walking from room to room, making his list and checking it twice. He’s at one toilet, where I carelessly tossed a wrapper, and blessed by of low-flow and my lack of attention, it survived it’s swim.
He stops and tells me, we have a problem, “There’s plastic.” Muttering and clucking and generally being a crank, he goes on and on about plastic and flushing, blah, blah, fucking blah. He is completely oblivious to my protestations that I am friend of the environment, and it is paper, flushable paper.
As he continues in this vein and kind of implies I shouldn’t be menstruating around his fine apartment toilet, he takes a pen from his pocket and fishes out the offending agent. He examines it more closely and as it drips it’s toilety juices, he opens all the cabinets where he would have put a trash can and finally listens as I show him where the trash can is.
Apart from my outrage, which, of course, I stifled, because I am a complete and total pussy around old men (they are my Kryptonite), I could only think, “Ewwwwww.”‘
(Lucky for me, since doing stand-up comedy, my normal shame reflexes are non-existent, which is also clear as I put this little story on the web.)
I think Nick’s lacking in the normal ew-gross-germs reflexes (which I have in near compulsive levels). Later that same day, I watched (and listened to the kvetching) as Nick retrieved a perfectly good, but definitely used, toilet brush from the garbage bin. (There was a whole lot of explanation over the garbage versus the recycling bins.)
Nick’s gonna be a ball.
