O'er the Tumultous Must

It's come to my attention lately that the place I live in has a distinct sort of smell. I'm not sure exactly what the smell is due to, but I have my theories. After all the house-owner (to avoid being clubbed by ladies the world over for tarnishing their name, I shall no longer call her the landlady) has a unique way of keeping the place clean--she tosses a cloth in a pail of soapy water, wrings it out, then tosses it on the floor and steps on it and then proceeds to walk about, dragging the cloth around as she goes. It's a system that only works because nobody eats anything crumby or does anything likely to lead to messes.

But I'm becoming, as anybody with me on Facebook knows, increasingly disenchanted with the place I live in. The new roommate is already thoroughly disenchanted--two days after he arrived (that was when I met him, having just returned from my grandfather's funeral) he announced to me that he planned to move out.

But the place has a smell--it's the smell of a place where the fans are seldom turned on because the electricity is apparently expensive, but the windows are never opened (or, if opened, are carefully boarded up) because everybody outside the house is violently kleptomaniac; where the damp, newly-washed clothes are all clumped together to air-dry in the kitchen because the weather is too unpredictable, but mothballs are everywhere because putting lots of damp cloth together breeds mildew; where cooking, when it happens, tends to revolve around instant noodles or instant coffee, but washing tends to consist of very nearly soapless water applied in a miserly manner. All in all it's not at all a welcoming sort of place, not least because the house-owner has a habit of not turning on the lights until she (and I apologise to women everywhere on her behalf) starts tripping over the cat, and sometimes not even then; I often come back to find the house swathed in complete darkness and stillness, where the only sound is the hum of the TV (she watches it with the sound off) and occasionally her making odd noises.

For she makes odd noises. Very odd noises indeed, too. All day I listen to smacking lips and strange wordless crooning, occasionally interrupted when she complains incoherently or when she talks to the ten-year-old cat as if it were a rather retarded newborn (which, admittedly, is a redundancy, but bear with me here). I deal with this by putting on the headphones and some music; I'm quite glad I have easily four days' worth of music on my computer, and even if I didn't there's YouTube.

Suffice it to say that I dislike her immensely; she is an old woman, I grant, and probably older than the country she lives in is. But so was my grandfather. And so were the two old men at the swimming pool whom I overheard having a spirited discussion about Chinese medicines vs. Western treatments. My house-owner has no redeeming qualities in her. She has no friends that I can see, and if cats were as intelligent as everybody says they are then the one in the house should have found my bottle of potassium permanganate a long time ago and committed ownercide; she has no hobbies apart from feeding cats (which, apart from buying groceries in the morning, appears to be the only thing she leaves the house for) and otherwise spends her time staring at the ceiling while splayed on the couch in a most squickifying manner, or watches the TV with the sound turned off; she has no manners and no sense of privacy, and will happily invade locked doors with her master key if she so much as suspects that some electronic thing in the room hasn't been turned off--I once had her turn the lights of the toilet off while I was still in it--and yet she knows nobody's names, and indiscriminately calls everybody "Boy"--even the cat. I once had a teacher who called me by my surname and everybody else by their given name, and even then I was entertaining homicidal thoughts; as it is I've simply erected a wall of silence about me, broken only very occasionally. The only books in the house are mine, or her children's (and those are all textbooks or stuff on investment); she seems to read nothing but the newspaper. In fact she lives the kind of life that barely deserves its name.

I still think my parents are crazy for liking to wake up early and blast music at people and go for early-morning jogs and read all manner of self-help books. I think the two old men at the pool were a little bit crazy because they both looked like the kind of doddery old person you'd give your seat on the bus to, but I distinctly overheard them discussing running half-marathons and when I got out of the pool they were busily racing each other butterfly-style. I'm pretty sure my grandfather was a little crazy because he defied the doctors so much and would go off with his rifle to shoot squirrels and bats on the farms from his old motorbike, and my grandmothers like tottering around their respective houses and so forth. But I think they're on the right track. Idleness is not, I think, a good way to live. And I should know, having been under enforced idleness for the past three months.

(Not quite enforced idleness, but you get the idea.)

I still need a job, though the idea of seminary has been popping up every now and then. I suspect it'd shock a lot of people if I actually did it. Other than that? I rather like writing; maybe I should have taken up a Bach. of Arts; maybe I can be the science editor for a newspaper or magazine or something. I've been reading Bill Bryson; it's a little hard to reconcile the image of himself that he puts in his books to the fact that he's a Chancellor with multiple honorary degrees. Maybe if I finished off the NaNoWriMo project--hey, I've got the time, don't I?--and sent it to a local editor...