Reasons I Shouldn't Live Alone, But Probably Also Reasons That I Am Living Alone

Everyone does stupid things, I'm sure. I am temporarily stupid, like most people, though sometimes I really wonder what could possibly have been going through my head to make me do such asinine things.

I'm extremely organized, it's true, but there are times - like the present - where I have let things get a little out of hand. Usually, it takes something to make me fix it. There's a line to cross before I get my ass into gear.

For example - I usually wash my clothes at Mike's house. He has a much better washer and dryer, and also - he lets me. But when I cart my clothes home again, fresh and neatly folded, they tend to stay in my laundry basket. For days. Even weeks. Days that turn into weeks! I just take what I need from the basket, and all is well. But when it comes to doing laundry again, I need the laundry basket. An empty basket. So I transfer the clothes - not as neatly folded as they once were due to me rifling through them searching for one of my possibly hundred black shirts, tanks, and/or sweaters - and place them on my window seat.

And there they sit.

I am not proud to admit that summer skirts still languish there, along with t-shirts and other summer clothing that I haven't worn in months. So where's the line? Usually, the line is crossed when I just can't find what I'm looking for, have been searching for days on end, and I just get too fed up with my slovenly ways to continue on any longer. Then I put everything away. It takes about an hour.

At least they're clean, right?

(That is one thing that I am actually good about. Dirty clothes go into the hamper - nowhere else.)

I lock my keys in the car sometimes. And by "sometimes," I mean, "on more than one occasion, upon which I realize that the car is not only locked, but still running." This has happened once in front of my own house upon which I had to call a tow service to open the car - which cost me forty bucks; once parked behind Mike's garage - which meant that his car was in the garage, and I had to call my lovely sister-in-law to drive to Mike's, pick me up, drive me to my house, drive me back to Mike's, and deposit me; and once (in high school) in the parking lot at Applebee's. My dad had to bring me the spare set of keys, and delivered them with a lecture on responsibility. Thanks, Dad!

(from antiqueappliances.com)

Another example: When it comes to my fridge, the line only materializes when you can smell the decomposing food without opening the door. (I'm almost positive that I just made Mike's mom recoil in horror and possibly faint, and I apologize for that.) And my lovely sister-in-law can attest to this - I once PAID HER to clean out my fridge while I was at work.

(No, I am not proud of this.)

But I like to cook. I like to cook too much, I think, because I always end up with leftovers. Leftovers that I take for lunch and eat for dinner, but after a few days I become bored with this routine and return to chopping at the cutting board and sauteing at the stove. Thus, there is more food to eat than I can actually eat.

And then it goes bad. And I am disgusting. The end.

Also, let me tell you a little story about that fridge up yonder. Growing up, this was the EXACT fridge in my kitchen. It turns out, when my parents got married, they were poor (as most early 20s couples are). So when my grandparents got a new fridge, they gave my parents the 1953 Crosley pictured above. My parents were married in 1975, putting the fridge at over twenty years old. It was a pretty awesome fridge in its heyday, with a water dispenser and built-in egg cups. Egg cups! Of course, when we got it, my aunt had long ago broken the water dispenser by putting Kool-Aid in the mechanism, so we were not able to utilize the awesomeness. We did have to defrost the freezer every few months, so that was always good for when you wanted to sit in front of the open fridge with a hammer and a screwdriver.

(I am not kidding about this.)

Anyway, it lived until I was a sophomore in HIGH SCHOOL. Just to paint you a picture, I was born in 1980. So a little simple math (1995-1953=42) will tell us that the Crosley fridge lived a full, satisfying life. Of course, even though my dad wanted to get it fixed and keep it in the basement, my mom won that one and it ended up on the street.

(Of course, the model above is for sale at the website for $5800, which prompted my dad to exclaim, "I knew we should have kept that fridge!")

Anyway, I seem to have gotten off course by sharing such interesting anecdotes. This is what Mike calls my "peripheral nonsense." What inspired this entire post is the following:

I got home from work the other day and realized that I should have taken out the garbage, oh, like, five days ago. (In my defense, I hadn't been home in days.) I deposited it outside in the garbage can, and returned to an apartment that smelled of lingering nastiness. So I lit some candles, and sat down to dinner feeling accomplished. I eventually went to bed, forgetting to extinguish the candles.

"Do not leave us alone with Heather. Please."

It wasn't until I returned home from work the following day that I realized that the candles were STILL BURNING.

How do I let these things happen?

(The candles were pillars from Pier One, in case you were interested in cost-effective, long-burning candles.)