And then I got just plain aggressive

Hey, remember how I wrote about the new roommate who stole my morning bathroom time, and how I decided to be lazy and passive-aggressive and just get up earlier instead of speaking to him about it? Are you curious to know how that's been going?

WELL! Let me tell you!

It has been two weeks of smooth sailing. I would get up early, brush my teeth, shower, all of that stuff. I then had plenty of time to get dressed and apply my makeup and skip off to work. I wasn't too worried about the new roomie, because his alarm was so loud that I could hear it going off, like, 20 times every morning. He was obviously just pushing snooze, not even bothering to get out of bed and see if the bathroom was available. He was obviously not too worried about when I got out of the bathroom.

Until this morning. This morning, I was a little bit tired, because I had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and I found myself staring at an unbelievably clogged toilet. So, at 1:30 AM, I was battling with this unbelievably clogged toilet, because SOMEONE didn't bother looking around for the plunger that is RIGHT FUCKING THERE. It took forever. In the middle of the night, I had to deal with a shit-and-toilet-paper-filled toilet. So, yes, when my alarm went off at 6:30 AM, I pushed snooze once. How dare I.

I was in the shower when new roomie started banging on the door. "Are you going to be done soon?" I hid my annoyance and said, "Yes, pretty soon."

He walked away, and then immediately came back and started banging on the door again, "Can I just come in and grab a few things? I have to leave in 5 minutes." And this is my problem because...? I responded, "I am in the shower, I will be right out." At this point, my voice was loud, my annoyance was obvious. He knocked AGAIN, "I don't know if you heard me, can I just come in and grab a few things? I need to leave really soon!" And this is where I lost my shit and bellowed, "I AM IN THE SHOWER! THE DOOR IS LOCKED! YOU CAN'T COME IN!"

Seriously - who the fuck asks a roommate they barely know if they can come in and rummage around while the roommate is in the shower? A self-involved dumbass of the highest degree, that's who. Also, I am the opposite of a morning person. If I was going to commit a violent crime (which I am not), chances are it would happen before 10 AM, because I am openly and obviously grumpy in the mornings. Anyone with working eyes and half a brain can see this immediately. Unless they are a self-involved dumbass of the highest degree.

I grabbed everything I needed and stalked out of the bathroom. New roomie was standing there, looking sullen and stupid. I said, "It is not my problem that you can't get up on time!" He immediately was all, "Well, you didn't have to scream at me!" I said, "Obviously I did, since you don't listen for shit!"

This went on for a bit, and then came my favorite part -  I said, "And if that was your mess in the toilet that I had to take care of in the middle of the night, I didn't appreciate it." He answered with, "...I'm not even going to talk about that. BUT YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO SCREAM AT ME!" Oh, really? We're going to argue about your dumbass hurt feelings, not about the fact that you can't use a toilet properly? Good to know.

Then he mocked my "screaming" in a shrill voice, and I called him a fucking asshole, and that was the end of it, for now.

For someone who was in such a hurry, he sure did have a lot of time to argue.

heat wave

Someone keeps finding my blog by googling the entire URL of my blog. I keep wondering... if they know the entire URL of my blog, why don't they type that into the URL box up there in the browser, rather than going to Google and searching for it? Why the extra step? I'm confused.

*~*~*~*

We are having a heat wave in Buffalo - the expected high for today is 80 degrees. The funny thing is that I went shopping on Saturday with my friend Alex, and I bought a bunch of sleeveless shirts, thinking that either I wouldn't get to wear them for months, or that I'd have to wear them under cardigans. And now I could wear them on their own, but it feels weird to be baring my arms in March, weather be damned. So I'm not wearing those shirts at all, because I feel more comfortable wearing sleeves at this time of year. I am in a quandary. A dumb one.

I turned the A/C on in my room last night, it was so warm. Opening windows is sufficient in the rest of the house, because the breeze is still a tiny bit cool, but I have no openable windows in my room! I know, First World problems...

*~*~*~*

This weekend I am traveling down to Familyland for the first time in a few weeks. I am more excited than usual, because mama and I are going to see "The Hunger Games!" Mom flew through the books, and the movie is already getting really good reviews. I am excited. And I know I'm going to cry at least once.



Katniss and Rue



the passive-aggressive approach

I have been listening to this song over and over again. Whenever I hear it, I have to replay it over and over again. It's so good that it makes my hair tingle. Particularly when the "Woo hoo hoo"s start.

*~*~*~*

I have a new roommate. I thought that I'd written about him, because he is a very loud slammer of things, but I guess not. Other than the slamming, he has not been around much, or he just stays in his room and is quiet. He doesn't make kitchen messes. He doesn't wake me up. He IS, however, trying to steal my bathroom time in the morning.

I have had so many roommates in the last 7 years. A lot of them have had unconventional job start times, or no job that I could discern, but I have come across people who get up as early as I do, who need to be at work around the time that I do. In the past, I have tried to catch people as soon as I could. I'd ask them when they'd be up, to see if I needed to adjust my time. With four or five roommates and only one bathroom, it seemed like the thing to do. To a one, every single roommate offered to get up earlier than me, without any prompting or strong-arming on my part. Or they would say that they got up earlier than me anyway. No problem.

But people lie. They might not lie intentionally, and I don't think that anyone sets out to piss me off, but people lie about when they get up in the morning.

I had one roommate who I SWEAR trained herself to wake up when she heard my feet on the stairs in the morning. She swore up and down that she got up really, really early, that I would never even see her in the mornings, because she would be leaving for work before I even got up. Well, I saw her pretty much every morning from then on... I saw her closing the bathroom door with a look of panic in her eyes as I turned the corner. She's lucky that I liked her, and that she was pretty quick in the bathroom.

Another roommate, one that I didn't like so much because she was crazy and mean, seemed perfectly reasonable when we first discussed morning bathroom times. And then she started an argument with me one morning about what time I get up, like I had no idea about my own schedule, and she had to school me. She started this argument with me through the bathroom door, while I was sitting on the toilet.

Some people don't just lie: they act like it's somehow your fault that they slept in.

So I have tried the reasonable talking thing in the past, but I am trying a different tack now. The passive-aggressive approach. When I noticed that this new guy was not only stealing my bathroom time (unknowingly, at first), but was also taking longer showers than I do, using up all the hot water, I decided not to say a word to him about it. I've also noticed that he leaves earlier than I do. I figured that he was waiting until the last possible second to get up and get ready for work - which is fine if you live by yourself, or if no one else is up and waiting.

Once it became apparent that he didn't care that I was waiting around for him every single morning (including one day when I had to wait forever, and all of the hot water was gone when I finally got into the bathroom), I decided that I'd get up earlier. And I did. I hurried, because I knew that he would be waiting, but I think that he panicked a little, just the same. If that's the case, well, I'm glad. Panic can be a good motivator. I am hoping to train him, through panic, to get up even earlier, so that we BOTH have adequate time to get ready for work in the morning.

Yesterday he beat me into the bathroom, and I didn't have to wait that long, and mentally I was all, "Yay, go you!" But this morning he did not, and I heard him push "snooze" several times. There is still work to be done here.   

This brings me joy

This is awesome - click here.

Happy International Women's Day!

Period.

I know what my readers have been begging for - a post about menstruation! Oh, you say you only came here looking for Left 4 Dead pictures? TOO BAD.

Yes, right now I can feel the hordes of cramps thundering over the horizon, bearing down on me with their sharp teeth bared. They're bringing the pain. I've got the Aleve, though, so I'm not scared.

But for some reason I started thinking about my personal period past this morning - how things have changed. I got my period when I was 11, which is SO young to me. I got my period before we got the health classes in 6th grade, and for a voracious reader, I was pretty uninformed. I had read "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret," and I was terrified of the idea of maxi-pads with crazy plastic belts attached... I really wish someone had told me that the crazy belts were defunct.

I also read a lot of inappropriate material for my age, a lot of VC Andrews. If a girl gets her period in the kind of adult books I was reading, it meant that she should be ashamed, and that grown men (possibly family members) would smell the blood and the shame and rape the girl. Seriously, if I could go back to my childhood and change one thing, I would have left the VC Andrews-type books alone. Those books were FUCKED.

Anyway, I was 11 years old on one sunny August afternoon. I was excited because my family was going to go to the beach at Lake Erie the next day, and I sure do love to swim. And then I was so confused when I went to the bathroom. I know I've written about this before: I knew that menstruation existed, and I knew that it would happen to me, but it was very abstract in my brain, the way that the future is pretty abstract now. So I was completely perplexed by the blood, and I was shocked by how red it was. And how much there was. And I was 11. And it would have made sense to run out caterwhauling to my grandma, and to call my mom at work so that I could caterwhaul to her, because it was scary, and it would have been nice to have two grown women who've been through it telling me that it was fine, it happens to most women.

But I was not a child of sense. I was quiet and anxious and weirdly secretive, so I didn't tell anyone. I threw away my underwear, and I hid my period for months. I must have stolen maxi pads from my mom, or left some other evidence, because one day I came home, and there was a giant package of maxi pads on my dresser, with a post-it note - "Why didn't you tell me?" Busted.

(My sister was even weirder, even more secretive about it. You couldn't even mention the word "tampon" around her for the longest time. Or "bra.")

Since then, I've obviously gotten over being secretive about it. I sincerely don't care who knows that I'm on my period, and I've graduated from maxi pads to tampons to the Diva Cup (great product, unfortunate name). I do like to be polite about it though - if someone asks why I'm grimacing with pain, I will reference my "lady troubles." I like the sound of it. It is better and more polite than "OMIGOD, SOMETHING IS EATING MY INSIDES! I DON'T EVEN WANT ANY FUCKING KIDS! WHY CAN'T I JUST REMOVE MY GODDAMN UTERUS?!?"

I've had my period for 22 years, and it still perplexes me in some ways. I've always had thundering hordes of cramps, but the pre-menstrual part is in constant flux. I went from no PMS at all for several, several years to "Um... did I just feel myself ovulate?" And then, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, I suddenly had "typical" PMS, the kind that stupid dudes joke about, with the mood swings for no good reason, and the extreme tiredness, and the bloating, and everything else. Since I had gone so long without the mood swings, they took forever to get used to, and it would take me way too long to think, "Oh yeah, it's time for the PMS."

But today, this very morning, I realized that the hordes were coming. And I totally skipped the PMS part this month, apparently. Perplexing, right?

Anyway, this has been a period post.

Poor Zooey

I got home kind of late last night, got ready for bed, started drifting off... and then the thunder and lightning started. At first, I thought that the thunder was a semi truck, because it was a short rumble, but then I though, there can't be THAT many trucks driving in downtown Buffalo at 11:30 PM. And then there was lightning - I was dozing off, and thought that the paparazzi was taking my picture. And THEN a very long and loud roll of thunder, which scared Floyd right out of my arms - or maybe he went downstairs to watch the storm, since I yelled at him for opening the curtains to look outside.

I finally got to sleep, and I had some very odd and disconcerting dreams. Like such:

I was watching my mom teach a class or give a talk on something. I had just decided that I actually didn’t need to be there when she saw me and waved. I waved back before slinking out (in real life I would stay for my mama’s WHOLE presentation, don’t you even doubt it).

Somehow I fell in with my friends Ami and Jon, and I was at their apartment, which was HUGE and very Art Deco – silver mirrored walls, polished marble floors. One odd thing – the bathroom was actually the building’s elevator, so if the elevator started moving while you were doing your business, you had to hurry up and finish, or risk people seeing you in all your naked glory. Otherwise, the apartment was gorgeous.

Zooey Deschanel had wandered in, and was bonding with Ami – in real life, Ami would enjoy this so very much! I was trying to join in the conversation, with little success. When Zooey D. said, “At one point, I almost had to get a job at Rave Up!”, I asked, “What is Rave Up?” Both Zooey D. and Ami looked at me like I was stupid. When I said that I really didn’t know what Rave Up was, both basically chided me for interrupting (this totally reminds me of that scene in “Stepbrothers” when Dale gets yelled at for interrupting, and he’s all, “But I was asking about the story!”).

Oh – Zooey D. was wearing a red, vintage, flippy kind of dress, and looked very much like she does in real life, but she was a lot meaner than I think she would be in real life. And Ami was being a lot meaner to me than she would be in real life. They both just kept chiding me or ignoring me, and I was getting more and more frustrated with them – and in my head, it was obvious that Zooey D. was trying to steal Ami’s friendship from me, so I wandered off in a huge huff.

And then I heard a scream and realized that Zooey D. was a child murderer. There was a sort of cut-scene in which I saw her on a sort of empty city street, trying to lure/steal/bully a baby away from a father who had two other kids in his tiny car. He resisted her, but then he was so poor that he had to leave the baby at a church door, for charity.

Then I was back at Ami and Jon’s, which was overrun with drunk partiers. The party seemed to go on for FOREVER, and I didn’t know anyone, and I couldn’t get through the crowd.

This whole dream took place between alarm clock snoozes.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t know her life, but I’m pretty certain that Zooey D. doesn’t murder children. And I’m pretty certain that Zooey D. and I could BOTH be friends with Ami. I feel bad that my brain randomly selected her to malign and dislike and fear: she doesn't deserve it. But I can’t help it… Zooey D.’s gonna be getting the side-eye from me for a bit. Sorry, Zooey D.

Zooey D. is shocked