Hey, don't just yell at me for the lack of updates around here. I have houseguests! What's JV's excuse?
So, last night I had a little tantrum. Mom and I went shopping. Then we came back and we were all going to go out to dinner. Except, I wanted to change my shoes into something that wasn't featuring a three and a half inch heel. I walked to the spot in the dining room where the shoes live.
Now, you should know that designating a crate in the living room for my shoes has made me a better person. It means that the seventeen pairs of shoes I wear a regular basis and consistently take off and leave right in the entry way... Well, now their home is on the way to the bathroom and that's the first thing I do when I get home after I take off my shoes. So, you can see how this works for me.
I walked over to where my shoes go. And there was no crate with a million pairs of shoes in it.
You should also know that I do NOT like having my things moved. Many roommates past have learned how to get away with it. You have to tell me before I notice. "I vaccuumed. I had to move your shoes. I was going to put them back, but I didn't get the time." or "We were cleaning the bathroom. I moved your blowdryer to under the sink because you don't use it that much and we wanted that shelf for extra clean towels. You can put it back if you want."
I'm really fussy about my stuff. I don't clean up much, but I know where everything is supposed to be. I don't like it when I look for something like, say, all of my shoes, and I cannot find them.
This analogy has worked well for people. You probably have a bookcase in your house, if not pretend. Also, you need a bookcase. Happy houses contain lots of easily visible books. So, you have this bookcase, and let's say that the top two shelves are for paperback. They're not really in an order, but they're all paperback. Then the next shelf is all hard back text books, sort of arranged in the order in which you took those classes. Then on the bottom you have DVDs and CDs and maybe some VHS tapes.
Now, one day, I'm hanging out at your house and I get bored and when I get bored I tend to get compulsive about things and I decide to alphabetize the entire contents of the shelf by title, without regard to what kind of book it is. You come home, thank me for watching your dog (I can't imagine why else I was alone in your house that long), I leave. You decide you want to watch a movie. Your gaze instinctively goes to the bottom shelf.
Are you imagining that you're pleased to see that all of your stuff on this one bookcase is suddenly hideously out of order? Because you're not.
So, I say "Where are my shoes? I can't find my shoes!" My mother gently suggests that maybe I wasn't standing right there when I took them off. I inform her that I know where the shoes I was wearing are, but I wanted to put on my brown Simple. clogs and they live in the basket that's supposed to be right here and where are my shoes! Won't someone think of the children!
My mother, who is by now very much accustomed to these freak outs as she was the one who painted my bedroom walls and rearranged all the furniture and generally made Spring Break 98 into "The Week Mary Ann Spent Crying, Slamming Doors and Shoving Furniture Around Her Room." and she has done this to me on other occasions, where was I? Right, my mother says cheerily, "Oh! Those shoes! Come here, I'll show you what we did."
Now, I think we all know that she knew this was not going to go over well. I've gotten better than I was when I used to scream and cry if two of my ceramic animal figurines (there were like fifty. All I was really lacking was a unicorn Trapper Keeper from being on those scary kitty and puppy girls.) switched places on their shelf, and I had noticed that the trashcan had moved, but I was okay. I understand that you have to move trashcans in order to vaccuum, and you have to vaccuum if you have a cat allergy and you're staying in my apartment, and sometimes people don't remember that the trashcan was in the living room behind the end table. I did not freak out when I noticed the trashcan had moved.
But none-the-less, I am certain that Mom knew this was not going to be good. Maybe she thought I could handle it now. It has been four years since the last time we did this little song and dance.
I haven't told you what happened to my shoes. I need to focus. Well, I have if you've spoken to me since this happened to me. But most of you don't know what happened to the shoes.
I follow my mother. She takes me into the bathroom. I see my shoe crate. My heart rate begins returning to normal. I'm a little peeved that my shoes are on the bathroom counter and no one was going to tell me that, like I was just going to think to look on the bathroom counter for all of my shoes, but I think my little panic attack is over.
THEN!! Then! Then, I see that my shoes, the entire point of this little freakout I am having, are not actually in the basket. No. I am now dangerously close to having a stroke. What is in the basket? All of my bath products. The ones for the shower, my hair, my skin, make-up, frangrance, they're all in the basket together! The basket that is for the shoes!
I demand to know what happened to my shoes. I just want my stupid brown clogs. I am not going out to dinner at this point, because I am now subsisting quite adequately on my neurotic rage, but I need to locate my shoes and my mother is apparently taking me on a scavenger hunt instead of helping me.
They were dumped out on my bedroom floor. This was when I officially tipped right over the edge. (I was sort of hanging off of it before this.) There was no plan here. Well, there was, but it was more of a plot. THIS was why my mother was pushing the idea of a basket on my bathroom counter.
She needed there to be a solution to this problem about the shoes being on the floor as soon as I noticed that the shoes were all in the bedroom, which is way farther from the door than my shoes like to venture. And she has her own compulsive tendencies and they were telling her that bathroom stuff does not belong displayed all over the counter. Which it obviously actually does if you're me.
I got a little ugly. I mostly kept it under control, sporting a bright red face, tears in my eyes and a very tight voice as I told them to please go get dinner rightthissecond I cannot leave until this is put back I need you to go away right now.
Then I put my home back in order. The litterbox was in the kitchen. Once I was finished, I called Steady because I figured it would be good for him to hear me screaming about my things being moved while the fit was still sort of happening, because, you know, we plan to live together and you probably want to know these sorts of things before you move in with someone. He didn't make nearly as patronizing fun of me as you might think.
By the time Mom came back from dinner, I had calmed down. I apologized for yelling at them and asked that they please not do that to me in the future. Mom was already over it... because she's been dealing with this for twenty-five years and you would think that she would know better by now.
