Newsflashes

I am cursed enough to live in a house full of slobs. They’re always doing things that are incomprehensibly careless, and it seems that I’m the one who always suffers. This entry is devoted to listing the things I wish my family members would know.

Toothpaste might do a great job cleaning your teeth, but that doesn’t mean you should use it in your hair. There have been many days, more than I care to count, on which I’ve picked up the hairbrush in our bathroom and found it covered in toothpaste. It doesn’t even make sense. Why would you want to have toothpaste — white, gooey streaks — in your hair? Why would you want to force everyone around you to do the same thing? Here’s the newsflash for you: unless you’re an idiot, YOU DON’T. So stop doing it, please.

Spring cleaning

I made the most of the second day of the holidays — and the glorious weather on that day — by cleaning. I cleaned a lot. I hadn’t meant to when I started out. I was just trying to put some books away which were cluttering up my desk and which were never going to get read. You know, books like Stalinism and After and, uh, King Lear. Those kinds of books. But then I realised just how much else there was cluttering my desk. Empty envelopes? Information about excursions some time in April? CDs I ripped ages ago and never listen to anyway? Letter-writing sets when I don’t write letters?

In the end, I worked myself into such a cleaning frenzy that, before I knew it, I was dragging heavy items of furniture around the room to get at what lurked underneath (and believe me, you do not want to know what lurked underneath). I even managed to snap my fan in half, so I might be in for an uncomfortable summer. And, sadly, I haven’t actually finished getting rid of all the junk in my room. The frenzy passed around the time I collapsed from sheer exhaustion, and it remains to be seen when (and/or if!) it comes back.