"Do you want me to drive? I can drive! My car still sounds like sad puppies, but it's clean! Let's ride in my clean car!"
"Is there a place for me to sit and everything?"
"Uh... there's still stuff on the seat."
"What kind of stuff?"
"Not trash stuff! CDs and things. Things that were on the floor."
"Oh. So, it's not clean."
"It is too clean. It's very clean. There's no trash! Or crumbs!"
"But there's stuff on the seat?"
"I can move it."
[...]
"See! Clean Car! Aren't you impressed? The seat wasn't clean but look at how much space your feet have!" [my boyfriend can't actually look because he's a grown man in the passenger seat of my hatchback.]
Said in a tone you'd use while patting a dog on the head for bringing you a dead animal, "Yes, it's very nice."
This weekend I spent 35 minutes clearing the trash from my car. That is completely appalling and entirely true. I needed the car to be clean enough to take to get an oil change. I was hoping that the nice people at the oil change place would tell me why my car sounds like sad puppies when it's in reverse. They didn't.
But in preparation, I pulled into a random, temporarily closed gas station and started throwing out the trash. Then when I was finished, it was thirty-five minutes later.
I discovered that I have six tan cardigan sweaters in my back seat, ranging from almost off-white to camel colored. Just various shades of taupe. Six. This one is part of a twinset and that one is warm and fuzzy and that one is thin and so on. I think at some point, I lost the ability to pass a tan cardigan in a thrift store without taking it home with me. And they match most of my wardrobe...
And then the office is COLD and the car is HOT and the sweaters all end up in the backseat.
Also in my car was my Cincinnati Flying Pigs CD. This was a very exciting discovery. And the "case" for the New House Mix my sister made, which has her address on the front. I need that address so I can send her her birthday present. Since her birthday was April 28, I bought the present well in advance, and it's something that she never knew she couldn't live without.
I haven't bought Wint-O-Green since before Lent. You would never believe the quantity of wrappers under my seats and smashed between the seats and everywhere. Okay, you might believe it if you've ever lived with me.
I was mildly surprised by the number of coffee cups behind the drivers seat. (They're still there. All of the non-trash items are still there. Rome was not built in a day.) I don't actually drink coffee very often, but I guess when I do, I leave the nice mug with the lid in the car. Then I have to carry a normal mug down the stairs and pour it into the good cup. And this leads to a pile of dirty coffee mugs that I didn't actually drink out of behind the seat.
There are three rolls of old toilet paper in my trunk. I do not know why. I suspect each would have its own story.
Remember when I got that flat tire? Just nine short months ago? Right, the tire changing equipment is still all over the car. But that wasn't a suprise to me. (There's a picture on that entry. Was my hair really that short? It's so long now! I need a damned haircut.)
Also, it seems I hoard napkins like a madwoman. (The only part of this that is the least bit suprising to my boyfriend? That I admitted the napkin thing had gotten out of control.) I've been resisting throwing them out (perfectly good napkins! I spill a lot in the car! Almost always in work clothes!) for, uh, a long time. Perhaps since July of 2004. Not that I remember my sister designating a Crazy-Hoarding-Lady Napkin Space in my car when she came to visit then.
I threw them all away. I felt like a bad person who should have driven to some sort of donation center or recycling place or something instead. But then I had an image of me trying to find a place to take my napkins and decided that was even weirder than having so many napkins in my car. And I didn't just take them upstairs with me because I try to avoid using disposable paper products in my house. So, I threw all of my damned napkins away.
I went through a car wash and the nice people at the oil change place vaccuumed the car and now it... still looks like maybe someone lives in it, but it's not dirty anymore.
