Dinkaltranen

My housemate is a very good man. I like him quite a bit, most of the time, and I’m sure that feeling is mutual.

He is very anxious. And that anxiety tends to get attributed to nonsense, or more recently, me. He is also now sending me sources for stuff we disagree on, to show he is more commonly right. Yes, he’s right about some things outside the house. But I don’t know how he’d exist out there. What he’s right about is stuff: the right lane is for overtaking only. I never use it, but I didn’t know this was its stated purpose. I just thought it was the lane for fuckwits tailgating and causing accidents from crossing 2 lanes. He’s also right about vacuuming slower being better.

What he also thinks:

• Door seals damage doors by adding force to the opening and closing of the door, damaging the handles and hinges specifically.
• The kettle will start melting itself at 100c setting.
• The kettle will be damaged by any water other than filtered water because it might have micro-contaminants in it that when heated up will damage the mechanism.
• Somehow garlic from a meal I had weeks ago has contaminated all the dishes in the dishwasher because a spoon now tastes of garlic.
• Chicken being non-refrigerated for 30 minutes is enough to make it not safe to eat.
• The dishwasher won’t clean properly when the plates are put in slots next to one another.

Look. I’m not a perfectly clean person. I’ve never claimed to be. I’ve lived in some pretty terrible places, but I respect the shared spaces because of that. But if you are going around with a green fucking laser on the floors and kitchen surfaces, no one is going to pass that test. There is always going to be dust and debris. I draw the line at the point where I am asked to do more than wipe down every surface with detergent and cloth to remove oil and debris every time I use it. I am not going to bleach every surface until surgery could be performed on it. It looks precisely like it did before I used it. I am not going to start wiping down the kitchen side while I am still breading chicken, because it’s a small kitchen and that surface is going to immediately get used and get dirty again. You clean after you are done making a mess.

Why is the kitchen getting a pseudo forensic level investigation? I’ve asked him to take pictures of what he calls a mess, and he won’t, he says it can be only seen under a bright light. Probably because it reveals that unless you took a blacklight to it that no one would notice, and it doesn’t affect the overall cleanliness of the house. I’ve started resentfully calling his expressions of this the CSI. As in, oh, shit, the CSI found my crime scene in the kitchen. Like, great dude, you found 20 million particles. Go check how many are on your toothbrush in the bathroom and despair. The number feels meaningful to him, like a score, but it’s meaningless. It’s an indication not of squalor, but of something he feels he has control over, and that soothes his anxiety. Which is fine, man, you do your thing, I personally stick to video games and writing passive aggressive journals for my surrogate control fantasy in this hellhole of a world. But when that score is attributed to me, that’s when it becomes a problem.

Because now you’re attributing your anxiety around not feeling in control to things I’m doing that quite literally aren’t possible.

No, dude, I assure you the $15 Ikea kettle can be set to 100c, because it is a kettle, it is designed to boil water, which happens when water reaches 100c, it is not going to explode or leak or melt shit into the water that is not already in there, we are already both probably infertile from microplastics anyway, please just let me boil water for my 2 minute noodles man I’ve had a really long day of being useless.

Door seals are funnily enough, again, designed to stop wind, dust, and noise. They aren’t going to damage the door by somehow adding stress to the mechanism that is designed to work hundreds of thousands of times, including under stress. If this wasn’t the case, every office building would be buying a lot of doors, handles, and hinges. I should buy stock in a company that sells doors. Big Door doesn’t want you to know this, but door seals are part of planned obsolescence. They intend to make you buy 2 doors in 50 years instead of 1. They’re in it for the long game, the bear game.

The dishwasher can have dishes put in slots next to one another. I know, again, crazy idea, that things are designed according to their function. It also doesn’t need to be run every day, and not everything that is used needs to be immediately put in there. You can reuse lots of things. You can handwash things, and the stray starch mark on the colander is not going to kill you or develop a black mould population. I feel like a luddite or some kind of antivaxxer going “How do you think people survived in the past?”, but no, really, do you think this is going to harm you? You are looking for things to harm you, because the actual things harming you you can't control, but then things you find are harmless, so you turn that onto me, because you see me as harmless, even though I am not harmless, because it's your place and I really would like to be able to renew my lease for another year and getting into a fight every week for the months by pointing out your stupid beliefs and behaviours before I get that opportunity to renew it seems like a really bad idea.

To be honest, some of this is my fault. I should have realised when I mentioned that my demented parents’ dishwasher grew mould because they forgot to put it on would make someone as anxious as you think that this was now a common pressing matter and the dishwasher must go on if it has anything in it. I should have put it together immediately after seeing the CSI laser. This, probably much like me bitching about my mostly great housemate, is an example of someone who has it so good that they are looking for problems.

I like you, dude. You may be the most whipped man alive, and a bit anxious, and you project that anxiety onto my behaviour, but you are, in fact, a very cool, nice, and successful guy. I just wish you also weren’t my landlord, and that I hadn’t nodded my head like a validating idiot whenever you started talking about nonsense like how the chairs with rubber soles needed to be lifted up to be moved out so they didn’t damage the tiled floor. So true, king. Pop off. The rent is cheap and I’m not dealing with drug addicts or a dozen Indians cooking one after another at all hours of the morning, so go off.

This is all projection. Everything is projection and displacement. Fucking Freud was right, again.

Motherfucker.