Day Seventy-Four: Say no to House-Shame

Oh, hi! Thanks for dropping by. I’m just whipping up a three-course meal… in heels. Just like I do every day.

 

My grandparents came to visit me on Friday. They were dropping off a really decent appliance that they never use (which, as an aside, has got to be the best thing about moving out for the first time. We got couches, table and chairs, and coffee tables the same way). Their bonus reason for dropping by was to check out my new place. Now, we’re hardly living in squalor, but I still found myself falling into the apparently innate sense of house-shame that comes with, well, having a house.

I call it house-shame, because, the way I see it, someone who is house-‘proud’ wouldn’t feel the need to hide the state of their living quarters. “This is my house,” they would announce as you walked through the door. “Yes, people live in it–hence, the slightly-less-than-clean evidence of human occupation.” I’ve always been a bit of a neat freak (though it manifests itself as ordered chaos usually), but I’ve never been the type to get down and scrub the grout with a toothbrush.

I’ve been to friends’ and relatives’ houses before and been made to suffer the whole “oh, sorry about the mess”, where ‘the mess’ is two plates on the sink and a cushion that has tumbled from the couch to the floor. In most cases, I just laugh and tell them not to be silly. But still they persist: “I was going to vacuum before you came, but I just ran out of time, what with the baby and eating breakfast and responding to the call of nature. God, I am SO sorry.”

The first thing these people need to know about me is that I don’t notice microscopic specks of dirt; I’m much more of an ‘admire the furniture’ kind of girl. Unless I am being stained, injured, or bitten, then your house is fine. If I can’t see the floor for coke cans, then yes, perhaps you might want to have a little tidy up, but I’m not going to tell you so unless you ask. The second thing they should recall is that I’ve just moved out, and discovered, much to my disappointment, that houses don’t clean themselves and that a ‘weekly clean’ comes around way too quickly. There’s also that pesky correlation between a freshly vacuumed floor and the increased tendency to drop stuff on it.

A lot of this house-shame stems from the media (of course–everything is their fault). There was a Harpic toilet cleaner ad not long ago that always made my blood boil. A woman sits at home with her (clearly newborn) baby having just coaxed the little thing to sleep. She’s looking pretty good, by the way; no poo or spew in sight. The doorbell rings and the baby starts to scream. Remarkably Clean Mum opens the door to find about five of her girlfriends bearing gifts and loud greetings. The Harpies push their way inside without an invitation and crowd around the overwhelmed mother, cooing. Well, most of them do. One asks if she can use the toilet, because, you know, the drive over was so long and she couldn’t bear to hold it until she had at least complimented the new mother on her child and been offered a drink. (Maybe I’m being too judgmental though. She might have a bladder problem.) The new mother looks stricken. The trauma causes an unbidden flashback to earlier in the day, when the mother had strolled smiling into her bathroom and hooked a new Harpic 3-in-1 Toilet Thingy up to her potty. I can only assume that her baby was asleep or under the supervision of some now-absent father. I know when I have a baby, the first thing I’ll do when they fall asleep is clean the toilet, not, you know, pass out myself from the physical drains of taking care of a crying, pooping machine that sucks the very life out of you via your breasts (or symbolically via a bottle). The flashback fades, and Super Mum seems content that her toilet-cleaning efforts are up to scratch. “Sure,” she smiles at her rude bitch of a friend. Cut to rude bitch poking her head through the bathroom door, sniffing (!!), and giving a little nod, as if to say, “yes, these facilities are fit to host my snobby butt and the golden, sweet-smelling effluent that flows from there.”

The final insult comes with the tagline: If only everything stayed this fresh (or something, my sound broke) as two of the intruders sniff at the baby. Yes, ladies, babies shit themselves–it’s one of their only defence mechanisms against annoying twats like you.

I have many problems with this ad (in case you didn’t pick that up during my description of it). For one, if I’ve just had a baby, don’t turn up on my doorstep unannounced in a group of five shrieking about how you want to see the baby sooo bad like right now. Second, don’t presume to use my facilities the minute you walk through the door. If you do need to go so damn badly, quietly slip away and find the loo yourself so that I don’t have to hear about it. Third, if you are lucky enough to be granted access to my ‘facilities’, remember that I have the above-mentioned eating, pooping succubus to consider, and don’t even think about judging the cleanliness of my home (or anyone’s, for that matter. Is it alligator free? Then you’ve got yourself a useable toilet, my friend). Finally, if my kid drops a load of chocolate buttons while you’re holding him, offer to change him instead of wrinkling your nose like a twelve-year-old and muttering about it to the woman next to you.

I don’t have a baby, so arguably I shouldn’t be afforded the same lenient treatment as a new mother. But then, I have two jobs, a band, and a social life, so perhaps I should be. Or perhaps it doesn’t matter because nobody invites you into their house to judge it unless they’re selling it or featuring in one of those god-awful “Lady Pennyweather opens up her wonderful country manor to Vapid Woman”.

Before my grandparents arrived, I did wipe down some tables and pull the doona up to cover the tangled mess of sheets on the bed. This is what I call ‘tidying’ and is probably stuff that I should have done anyway (well, not the bed. I never did understand the purpose of re-making a bed you were only going to sleep in again). I did consider vacuuming, but then I remembered that I was wearing only a dressing gown, and had literally put a clean house before not-being-naked. Priorities.

“I am the devourer of the poops!!”

 

TB

Day Sixty-Eight: Five things I won’t miss about the beach holiday

I’m very well aware that this post is here to serve as a way to cheer myself up following the conclusion of two weeks of beachy goodness. I still stand by every word though.

Being at the beach (or on holiday in general) is pretty awesome. In a perfect world, we’d only work a couple of weeks a year and holiday for the rest, instead of the the other way around. But then, we’d probably be chafed, sunburnt, and verging on diabetes all the time. Christmas holidays at the beach do have their downsides.

 

1. Hot chips every freaking day

There’s something about sitting in sand, with tangled hair and salt flaking off your sizzling skin that just makes you want to stuff your face with fried potato. Or is that just me? Either way, it happens. It’s probably because running up to the shop to grab a salad to munch on just doesn’t have the same appeal. Ask the seagulls; they’ll tell you. Chips are easy to eat with your hands, easy to share amongst a family, easy to spread out on a towel, and let’s not forget the deliciousness. The thing is, after two weeks of constant chipping, I have had a literal and figurative gutful. If I could avoid even looking at a potato for the next two weeks, I would be a happy (and probably healthier) woman.

 

2. Sand

I know, I know: it’s the beach and you get sandy at the beach. But I reserve the right to demand a sand-free crotch for the majority of the day. I love sitting on the beach (on my towel, snarling at anyone who threatens to kick even a grain in my direction), but I have a time limit. A couple of hours of sandy arse each day is fine, if I can then wash it off and be back in dry clothes for the remainder. Having a swim in the ocean, completely air-drying in the scorching sun, then attempting to reapply sunscreen over the crusty salt-and-sand skin you’ve developed is not a comfortable experience. And what sticks to fresh sunscreen, you ask? Why, it’s our good friend sand. Sand follows you inside your apartment and scatters itself on the floor; sand wriggles between your starched white resort sheets and awaits you when you climb in (usually red-raw); sand makes its way into every meal you eat and gives you a shudder when you feel it catch between your teeth. Yep, sand is great. I sure hope there’s a stockpile waiting at the bottom of my suitcase…

 

3. The cricket (specifically, the commentary–but actually just all of it)

I don’t mind cricket. I like it about as much as I like listening to white noise while dying of thirst. But really, the game can be interesting… for about two per cent of the Test. Hell, if I happen to be walking past when somebody gets a wicket, I’ll be applauding with the rest of them. Was that a classic catch? Well, that was utterly thrilling. Turning it on every day (while we’re at the coast surrounded by heaps of fun, non-cricket-related things to do) and sitting for hours watching one dude try to hit the ball while the other dude tries to hit the stumps, while the poor suckers who aren’t bowling or batting just stand around hoping the ball will fall from the sky into their hands, is not exciting. Even the commentators are struggling to find enough new things to talk about, since they’re essentially watching the same thing over and over. This leads to such inspired segments as “stand on the pitch and re-enact what the last batsman did then superimpose said batsman onto the pitch to see how close we were to nailing it” and “we’re actually mind readers and can tell you the exact motivation for Johnson’s last move”. The second one is the worst. It’s like a really boring episode of The Mentalist. “He’s thinking that he’ll just take this nice and slow, because he knows that England aren’t going to be risking huge runs.” Is he? Really? I’d wager he’s more likely to be thinking “DON’T FUCK THIS UP, DON’T FUCK THIS UP”.

“With that bowl, Johnson is basically saying that England can all go bugger themselves with the thick ends of their bats. He’s also struggling to decide how best to uninvite Sarah from the new years eve party, because it’s going to be a total rager and she is a fun-vacuum.”

I suppose it’s better than, “and he’s hit the ball, it’s travelled a short distance, and that guy is throwing it back so that the bowler can have another throw. Truly nail-biting stuff, folks.”

 

4. The sun

I am a very pale person living in Queensland. It’s like Superman living in a house made of Kryptonite.

 

5. Living in close quarters with my brothers

There’s nothing like being woken every morning by someone standing at the foot of your bed, pulling your toes. I suppose it’s still infinitely better than the brown-eyes my younger brother was waking up to, but it still makes you want to kick the perpetrator in the face. Since moving out, I had become accustomed to walking around naked, having a urine-free toilet seat, and being able to get through a day without being punched, kicked, or farted on. For two weeks, I was back in a realm where a closed door means an invitation to enter, a thin heterosexual woman is a ‘fat lesbian’, spending longer than 5 minutes in the bathroom is ‘taking forever’, and a glance at a phone or a book is ‘antisocial’. I love my brothers; they are hilarious and strange. But I have no guilt about the joy I felt knowing I didn’t have to go back to the same house with them when we left.

 

TB