I am in a sour mood. OH, I am in a sour mood.
I woke up this morning with the entire house smelling like urine. Why? I have no idea. Maybe that was what set me off.
I bought three CD's yesterday. The Yolk one, and promotional copies of new albums by Apartment 26 and Elwood. They were cheap -- I figured why not. However! For some reason, my computer's CD player isn't working worth shit, so I couldn't listen to them. Yes but Helena, don't you have another CD player? Yes, Helena DOES have another CD player. However, Helena's housemates needed it so they could practice their drag performances. Notice the wording: they NEEDED it, could not live without it, had to have it to maintain their most basic survival. And then, they went to bed with it in their room.
So I woke up, went to get the CD player in their bedroom, which I felt incredibly awkward doing, which I SHOULDN'T feel awkward doing because it's my fucking apartment, and went to the kitchen to make some food.
(And I played Apartment 26, because they're sort of scary, and I was feeling like people should be scared of me... Oh yeah, but I was, however, impressed when I found out that they named themselves after "the films of David Lynch." Heh. Yeah. It was either Henry or his next-door neighbor who lived in apartment 26 in Eraserhead, and I think somebody in Lost Highway was staying in hotel room 26. If you divide 26 by 2, it's 13, and Davey's quite fond of 13. Oh well -- who cares except me?)
No food. I brought home a bag of groceries the other day and it was gone. There was spaghettio's, which I may have eaten, and two boxes of cheap Mexican macaroni and cheese: Macarron con queso! It's like, less than a quarter a box, but my mom had bought them for me across town because she knows it's my favorite kind of macaroni and cheese.
No macarron con queso. My housemates ate it.
No dishes. My housemates hadn't done them. Jeff, who works 14 hours a week, and his boyfriend, who works zero hours a week, couldn't find twenty minutes in their busy lives to do the dishes. I guess it was more important that they do drag.
The stove caught on fire and started smoking. Apparently something has fallen in there. My housemates either hadn't noticed or hadn't bothered to pick it out. Since I haven't cooked or eaten in this house in five days (except for one pan of spaghettio's, which I cooked on the other burner), I assume that the bit of crap that fell into the stove was ENTIRELY the fault of... oh, probably some act of God. Yes, of course. And the boys couldn't have picked it out because they were too busy doing drag.
I'm embarrassed to have people over to the house. The living room is full of black garbage bags full of drag clothing. The dining room is full of hair things and makeup and crowns and Celine Dion CD's and board games and Shania Twain CD's. The bathroom is full of razors, and more razors, and hair things, and, about a third of the time, an unflushed toilet.
Nathan came over the other night. He was greeted by two wasted children (CHILDREN! At twenty, they were acting like four-year-old's!) slurping down the last of a huge container of vodka, discussing their sexual habits, interrupting my conversation with Nathan every twenty seconds to say, "Helena, guess what I did?" I don't GIVE a shit what they did. I don't give a shit about what drinks they made. I wanted to talk to Nathan. And Nathan really didn't give a shit either. It was humiliating. I was humiliated on their behalves. It's a good thing Nathan's a DAMN nice guy. I doubt he'll want to come over again. I wouldn't. Especially not after the screaming match they had in the bathroom, the five hours worth of showers and vomiting, and the door-slamming.
I hated them both SO much. They KNOW I have this thing about vomit -- they KNOW it's against house rules to get so trashed you're helpless. The last time this happened, I had to go to Price Chopper, eight blocks away, in order to urinate and wash my face and brush my teeth before bed. After that, the rule was instated: no more drinking until you're sick. And if you do, YOU are the one who goes to Price Chopper. The fucking SOBER person in the house should not be the one inconvenienced by the drunks.
But you know what? Of COURSE I didn't send them out of the house. They were crying. I fel sorry for them.
That's the only reason they're LIVING here -- I felt sorry for them. They eat my food, they take my things and hoard them in their room, and Jeff's money (his boyfriend doesn't HAVE any money) goes to making his boyfriend happy and to keeping them clothed in women's clothes every Saturday night. I HATE this. I LIKE Jeff. I LIKE his boyfriend. They're my FRIENDS, two of my closest friends, and they walk ALL over me. I'm supporting them just as I supported Peter. Granted, they usually tell me where they're going to be when they leave, so I don't panic that they've been run over and are laying dead in gutters somewhere, but they treat me just like Peter treated me: like I exist to keep them in a house and comfortable with food, money (do you have like, twenty-five bucks we can borrows until, like, next Thursday?), a TV, a computer, and a bathroom with a shower.
Oh yes, and a CD player.
What do they give me?
Well, they've paid me sixty dollars toward rent. They've let me share their alcohol. They've brought home orange juice, milk, and butter on a regular basis. Jeff's boyfriend has given me rides to work and rides to the grocery store and things. I've eaten a few of their potato chips. And Jeff is paying the cable bill. Gee, it would be nice if I had the money to pay next month's rent, but never fear, we've got cable. Also, they're nice to have around most of the time. I can talk to them about work, about boys, about Jeff's stupid manager who is now avoiding me now that he knows I like him. I can talk to them about clubs, about meeting a band, about music and movies and even serious stuff... Most of the time. Of course, not ALL of the time. Yesterday night when they came in, they'd been arguing and when I said hi they wouldn't even give me the time of day, just stormed past me and slammed the door.
I don't understand why people USE me.
The night after the latest (and, I'm sure, not the last) drinking incident, Jeff called me at work and accused me of taking twenty dollars from him. "Were you in my room last night?" he asked. Of course I wasn't. "Was Nathan?" Of COURSE Nathan wasn't. "Because I'm missing twenty dollars..."
He called back twenty minutes later -- after I'd hung up on him, and explained for the SECOND time to a housemate that I am not a thief -- to tell me he'd found his money, he'd just misplaced it, so he was sorry he'd accused me. Thanks.
In my fury at being called a thief AGAIN, I mentioned that, the previous night, I'd gone to the bathroom in a plastic cup and dumped the contents out the window because Jeff and his boyfriend were in the bathroom for FIVE HOURS. I mentioned that I'd slept on Peter's cot in his old room, without blankets because I didn't want to go into my room and listen to the barfing noises coming from directly across the hall. I mentioned these things and the answer I got was, "well, you could have just told us to get out of the bathroom."
Yes, I could have. But WHY SHOULD I? Why should I make myself into the bad guy? Why should I be the one to say, "no, children, you may not borrow my CD player and hide it in your room for days on end; no, children, you may not eat my macaroni and cheese; no, children, you may not use the bathroom for five hours; children, slow down on the alcohol..." They're fucking twenty years old, and I'm MOTHERING them. "No, children, you may not watch TV until you clean up the kitchen; no, children, you may not go out tonight until you've cleaned up all the CD's you've thrown all over..." I shouldn't HAVE to treat them like they're young children. They're older than *I* am. As Peter was older then me and couldn't find it in himself to take any responsibility until I put him on the street and told him to fend for himself.
On a related note, within a week of Peter leaving the apartment, he got a manager's job, planned where he's going to be living, and sent an application to Broome Community College. All of a sudden, once again, he turned into somebody I'm proud to be friends with, not just somebody who was leeching off me.
I'd do it to Jeff and his boyfriend -- send them on their merry way until they're both working 40-hour-a-week jobs and know how to do the dishes -- but they have nowhere to go.
I hate having to RESENT two people I love dearly. I hate that I wake up angry with them. I hate that I wake up and want to strangle them. I hate that the fucking TV is on in the next room and nobody's watching because Jeff's boyfriend decided to turn it on and then was too lazy to turn it off, so he just wandered away.
WHY are they using me? WHY are they taking everything for granted? Like it's perfectly okay to make my home into a rat-hole, like it's perfectly okay to care more about drag clothes than that one person in the household hasn't eaten more than two meals in the past four days. WHY? They KNOW how it was between me and Peter when Peter had better things to do than get a job, when drag was more important than eating, when meeting friends was more important than cleaning up dishes after yourself... They KNOW this. Why are they doing the same thing now?
Why am I expected to pay rent, phone, and electric on 5.25 an hour, 35 hours a week?
There's going to be one HELL of a serious discussion tonight.
~Helena*