brusha, brusha, brusha.

Admittedly, I am not the tidiest person in the world. As in all things, my cleaning habits tend to ebb and flow, now the apartment is unfit for human occupancy, now you could eat off the floor. Ok, you can never really eat off the floor because, if you did, it would be coated with the hair I've shed over the past several months that no vacuum cleaner could tear from its imbeddedness in the carpeting (but to food, somehow, it's attracted like a magnet). But you get the idea. Basically, life gets a bit messy until I have time and energy and sufficient will power to clean. It's a cycle. The revolutions become shorter as the years pass, but a cycle all the same.

There are areas I do tend to keep consistently clean and tidy, though: the kitchen and the bath.

When I was preparing for my move to Santa Barbara, I knew having a space of my own would be important, despite the cost. I knew no one here, so sharing housing was not really an option. What I found, just in time, was the yellow room, a *studio in a big Victorian, conveniently located downtown, close to school and much else. 7 other people live here, but we all have separate spaces, with no common areas, save the hallways. I've been happy here, mostly the people are decent. Like with any rental, there are pitfalls and annoyances, like people not locking the door when they leave, or the front light bulb that's been dark for the past month, the dryer that doesn't stop internally rotating when the door opens, the couple who monopolize the laundry presumably because they live nearest to it. At the moment though, these are the least of my worries.

The term *studio here is a bit of a euphemism. My *studio is really just a big bedroom with a half-fridge and a microwave in one corner. I share a bathroom (the sink in which doubles as a kitchen sink, for cleaning dishes, etc.) with 2 other women who live on the floor: Angelina, who I usually refer to as *cell phone, due to her, literally, incessant use of said device; and Lisa, who's lived here a few months, who I've nicknamed *coughy, after a terrible cough/cold combo that lasted about 3 weeks. I've become somewhat accustomed to *cell phone's idiosyncrasies. She'll leave dirty plates in the bathroom for weeks, deposit her personal garbage next to the toilet, but then, at some point, will whirl through, thoroughly disgusted, leaving a somewhat cleaner and tidier bathroom in her wake. The dishes and garbage are sort of annoying, but she's not around that much.

*Coughy, on the other hand, I'm still adjusting to.

She didn't start off on the best foot by snagging a roll of my TP, nor have I particularly enjoyed regularly cleaning the shower drain of her hair. But it was during her monumental coughing/cold combo that I really started to think not-very-nice thoughts about her. As I mentioned, she was sick for a solid 3 weeks, coughing all over the place, big, ugly-sounding, deep, guttural coughs. (And yes, I'm totally anal about the people I live with or am close to getting sick and the possibility of contracting said illness because being sick interferes with my ability to dive. But the possibility of getting sick before the swim eval was, understandably, very especially worrying.) And in my fully paranoid mind, I saw her coughing all over everything, running her hands all over the place. In my mind, no surface was safe to touch. The worst part was, while she was sick, she repeatedly left her toothbrush and toothpaste out on the counter top. A few nights ago I came across the glass top for one of those country-style candles that come in a jar. It had been mysteriously sitting out on the counter for a few days. I thought about tossing it into the garbage, but then realized there was water in it. Correction: it was filled with solution, and her contacts were resting at the bottom. Tonight though, the best find by far: used dental floss right next to the sink.

There's something about the situation that makes me want to behave like an absolute adolescent, like instead of just asking her to be cleaner in using the bathroom, I have this urge to stuff used ear swabs into her tube of toothpaste. Really. How horrible. But writing it out has proven to take the edge off, and to give a bit of perspective.

So when next I see her, I'll try to overcome the adolescent urgees, and just ask.