25 March 2002 ~ Momma...

I was warned about Momma the night I moved into this dorm hallway. "Momma" is this Susie Homemaker of an 18-year-old girl, and they all warned me that nobody liked her, and that there was a real reason for it.

But she SEEMED nice, so who cared if she spent all her damned time organizing her room and cooking things from scratch? And who cared if she went to bed at like seven in the evening and then woke up at the butt-crack of dawn to go rowing with the crew team?

TWICE last night -- no! Three times! -- she interrupted my phone call. The phone regularly shorts out after thirty to forty minutes -- but Momma won't let me put MY phone, which doesn't short out, in the hallway in place of the bad one -- and in that amount of time, she managed to interrupt me THREE TIMES. "Um, do you mind going out into the other hallway to talk, because I'm trying to sleep," was her first gripe. Then it was: "Can you get off the phone soon and then knock on my door so I can call my parents?" She calls her parents like, four times a day or something. I felt like putting the phone down and saying, "look, you stupid twatrag! I'm on the phone with someone I happen to love, and someone I happen to be very far away from. And, by the way, somebody I get to talk to like, once a month or something. Can you please WAIT to yell at me? A FEW minutes?" But Momma wasn't worth putting the phone down for.

It's really bad when somebody 3,000 miles away is asking, "what is that girl's PROBLEM?"

I was cooking dinner last night; Louise and I had bought food at the Safeway. I got steak and fries; Louise got veggie burgers. I also bought a new frying pan so I can quit using everyone else's. I don't want other people using my shit, so I don't want to be using theirs. Well, dumbassed me, I left the sticker on the bottom of the new frying pan when I went to cook the steak, and it caught on fire and made the entire hallway smell. Well, okay, so that was stupid of me. Except THEN, Momma storms into the kitchen demanding that I open a window if I'm going to cook bad food. She peers into the pan, says, "UGH, you're cooking MEAT!? Gross! Well, we're going to have to open the window!"

Pardon mon français, Mademoiselle Twatrag, but fuck you! I happen to eat meat. It's probably a fifty-fifty split on my floor of folks who eat meat and folks who don't. The division might even lean toward carnivores. The carnivores don't COOK much, that's the problem. The only people who've cooked on this floor much are Momma and Dracor. But so what? I don't bitch when she makes the whole floor smell like onions and tofu, which *I* find revolting.

So she sees what's going on with the sticker on the bottom of the pan (I thought it was just something on the burner that smelled), pulls it off the stove, and starts ordering me to put my food in another pan, wash the burned new one, and then switch pans again, et cetera... She's BARKING orders at me. I really wanted to kill her. So damned patronizing! As if I couldn't have figured out what to do when I realized I'd left the sticker on my pan? But how do you walk up to an 18-year-old who thinks she's your mom, and politely inform her that she isn't?

Well, I think I'm about to do just that.

Momma went to bed last night at like, nine or ten. It's fucking SPRING BREAK, and she goes to bed at ten? Granted, she usually goes to bed at like, eight, so at least this is an improvement, for her. Well, then she wakes up sometime around six. She and eighty friends of hers start running up and down the halls screaming their bloody lungs out. Pardon, but didn't she tell ME to be quiet because SHE was trying to sleep last night?

So I go into the kitchen at around eight-thirty, after Momma has gone screeching down the hall past my room yelling, "Ohhhhhhh, the phone! IIIIIIIIIII'lllllllll get it!!!!!!!!" She then ran screeching back to the kitchen. I entered the kitchen groggy-eyed and pissed off. "What'n the hell're you DOING in here?" I asked. The crowd of Momma-worshippers grinned merrily at me and Momma announced in a sickening voice (reminiscent of Audrey, from Little Shop of Horrors), "We're having breakfast!" I'm surprised she didn't say "We're having breakfast, dearheart! Everybody, this is my oldest daughter Helena... Helena, honey, sit down and have some homemade oatmeal that I picked myself at the Organic Farm!" Lordy. She didn't say that. She did, however, as what *I* was doing. I said: "Trying not to be awake at the ass-crack of dawn." Momma laughed. All her little friends laughed. Like it was SO damned funny. Like I was this sweet little child who'd said something funny.

This girl can't even drink yet, but she honest to gahd treats me like I'm her kid. She pushes me around like I'm her kid, I mean. Well, fuck it. I'm not taking this shit anymore. Going to sit down, write her a nice long letter, tack it to her door, and then going to forget everything and go downtown to run some errands. Go to hell, Momma.

I should have listened when they told me you were a bitch.

~Helena*