It hits the fan

WELL! This morning as I was sitting down watching tv while eating my breakfast, Leah came in all aflush. She asked me for a piece of paper so I handed one to her. She wrote:

TLR please do the dishes. <3 House

I asked her what was going on and she replied with "I'm sick of it, SICK of it. She never does the dishes and I'm not putting up with it any more". She popped the note above the sink as I cleaned my bowl and began to put away the dry plates. Leah turned to me and said "Don't put them away, Claire, leave them for her to do". I put a couple away, the ones I had used, and left the kitchen.

A few hours later, Leah was off at uni and TLR came home. As she unpacked her shopping in the kitchen, I tentatively listened for the moment she saw the note. Dodging the storm I knew was coming, Spike and I went grocery shopping. When we returned, I noticed that in large blue texted the words "Whoever wrote this please come and see me - TLR" scrawled across the note. I winced and began unpacking my groceries. In the midst of this task TLR came in...

TLR: Hey Claire, did you write this?
Me (my head in the fridge): Did I write what?
TLR: this note about the dishes
Me: (straightening) No...
TLR: Do you know who did write it?
Me: I think it was Leah. She came in and asked me for a bit of paper this morning to write on.
TLR: It just...it really makes me angry. Why would she write something like that? Why didn't she come and talk to me about it instead of leaving a note for everyone to see?
me: Um...I don't think you were home when she wrote it. And then she had to go to uni.
TLR: I don't care. It just makes me so mad that she'd do something like this. Is it because I'm on kitchen this week? That doesn't mean that I have to do the dishes
Me:Oh I think she knows that...you'll really have to talk to her about it though. I don't really know much about it.
TLR: Yeah...I'm sorry it's just with this and all the other stuff I have going on...it's so frustrating. And so passive aggressive.
Me:Well you know Leah, she's straight to the point.

Ugh...I feel kind of worried. I know I've complained about how little work TLR does around the house to Leah and I'm afraid she'll try and make it sound like the note was my idea. I mean...I'll whinge about it at the time, but I'll just get over it and leave the dishes. Tbh, I feel a little guilty. It's not as though Leah isn't wrong in leaving the note, but TLR seems really hurt over it. I think she's the kind of person who can dish it out, but can't take it. I know she's left me notes about chores I've needed to do before. But if we do it to her she explodes!

I do wonder what the "other stuff" that's been going on is though. I'll be eavesdropping real hard later tonight when Leah gets home and the big blowout happens!

More later,
~C~

Bitch, please!

Last night I invited Jay over so we could catch up and go get pizza for dinner. It was great! She had a whinge to me about her roommate Sarah and I vented about TLR. There's no harm in that. If I didn't get together with her to let it all out of my system, I'd just explode and say something I regret to TLR. And, as proven in the past door-slamming incidents, I can't actually express any problems I have to her face. It was during this chat that Jay informed me about things Sarah had said. Apparently the last time TLR and Sarah caught up, TLR told Sarah that I was "being a total bitch about the cleaning". This made me laugh a little. Yeah, I am a bit anal about the cleaning but we have a massive ant problem...if I'm not anal about it stuff gets left out everywhere and the ants will never go away. If we didn't have them around, we could leave scraps on the benches for longer before it needs to be cleaned. But we have a serious infestation which I am trying, and failing, to get rid of. We can't get rid of them because people keep leaving food out. I get grouchy and tell them to clean it up. Which could definitely come off as bitchy.

Still kind of hurt my feelings a little =/ I mean if I wasn't doing the dishes or wiping the benches all the time or putting away clean plates, this place would be an absolute dump. In fact, I would love to see what the house is like after TLR living along for a week. I would LOVE that. It would prove me completely right.

Anyway, I'm a little tentative about things Sarah says. She once told Jay (in the heat of an argument) that TLR, FF and I had said that we all hated that she talked about her boyfriend all the time. She said that we were all totally sick of her and didn't want to hang out any more. Completely false, I might add. I think what I said to Sarah about it was "Jay talks about Tim alllll the time, she's so excited about him!". Which I meant in the nicest sense...it's normal to be excited about something new in your life but Sarah completely extrapolated it to get back at Jay for something. Since then I've been taking everything Sarah says with a grain of salt. Perhaps TLR was complaining about me but perhaps she didn't use the word bitch?

It makes me a little sad though. I may have complained about her but I only do that to 3 people, Jay, my Mum and this blog. I'm worried that if worst comes to worst and the whole situation escalates into an all out war, she might accuse me of turning people against her. I say this because Spike has come to me on multiple occasions to complain about her and I've agreed with him. I'm trying not to sway people against her, I don't want to be correctly accused of that. That's not the kind of person I want to be.


~C~

Little Whispers

Tonight we had a plan. Had a good old natter with all the roomies in the loungeroom while watching the Simpsons. What a sweet moment? And in this moment TLR suggested that we all go for Chinese take out! I wholeheartedly agreed being neither a chef, nor one to turn down an easy meal. Spike also said he was in, but changed his mind a bit later. At about 5pm TLR asked me what time I wanted to go. Not wanting to feel like a nanna, I suggested we wait an hour and go then. She agreed and I went off to my room to work on some notes for uni.

At around 6.30 I wandered out to look for TLR, sure she'd be starving by now! Lo and behold when I trod upon the kitchen tiles she appeared standing before the stove, a potion brewing in her pot, flames gently licking over the sides of the steel. I opened my mouth to belay my concern:

Me: At which hour wouldst thee alight into the carriage to fetch provisions from the Chinamen?
Her: We're not going...? Spike didn't want to go any more.
Me: Oh..

Heh...so suddenly, even if I agree to something, if everyone else bails there's no point in her going just with me? Thanks, thanks a lot. Without another word, I retreated to my room, fetched my belongings and went to have Chinese with another friend instead. Didn't even say goodbye (yes, hypocritical considering that's one of the things I complain about her doing all the time).

A couple of hours later I came home. I could hear FF and TLR having some sort of tea-towel whipping contest in the kitchen so avoided the area in fear of being drawn into the ruckus! I must have arrived quietly, or perhaps they were making too much noise to notice, but from my room I could clearly hear them talking. About me. Bits of the conversation I missed but what was clear was:

FF: Hey, let's have some of this! (some sort of food in the fridge, I could hear the door being opened)
TLR: No, that's hers, I think. If you eat any of her food she'll bite your head off.
FF: *laughs* Haha I suppose so.
TLR: This one time......................and she went crazy.
FF: *continues laughing*

At this point I walked into the room and a very sudden silence hit. Both FF and TLR glanced at each other, guilty expressions on their face. Expressions betraying the fact that they had just been talking about me and knew that I'd heard. I filled up my water bottle at the sink, both of them still sitting in silence, and left the room. The moment I'd made it a few steps down the hall, frantic whispers broke out behind me. The weirdest thing is that I'm not even anal about my food. I don't mind if someone uses butter I bought, or cheese or salads! The only real concern would be eating meat...seeing as that is so ridiculously expensive. And it's not as if they would've picked up my uncooked steaks at 10pm and thought "yeah, let's cook this".


~C~

Squeaky Clean

There's recently been a slight change to our cleaning roster. Previously we had someone doing sweeping and someone on mopping, but it's become too difficult to coordinate those two jobs so they've been rolled into one. The job that has been added to compensate is that of the kitchen. Now, as usual, I don't know if this was discussed with anyone, but the note on the fridge has appeared in TLR's handwriting regarding this change. Under the description of "Kitchen" it says:

"Clean stove, microwave, wipe crumbs off benches, general tidying"

 Most of this I agree with, although I have a number of concerns.

1) Cleaning the stove properly does need to be done properly (with oven cleaner and a scourer) once a week. However, I'm worried that if someone makes a dish and splashes it all over the stove, it should be their responsibility to wipe it off, not the job of someone else.

2) We have a fairly substantial ant problem. To combat this we need to stop leaving out all food scraps etc. Wiping down the benches after making a sandwich and leaving crumbs everywhere should be automatically done, not left for someone else to do. Case in point: TLR made pizza dough last week and spread flour across the bench so it wouldn't stick. She left it there for at least 3 or 4 hours. It was frustrating. Nobody else could use the bench during this time. If she were to leave it for someone else to clean up (because it's their duty that week) it'd be ridiculously out of order

3) General tidying, yes. General tidying of other people's crap? No. TLR has a habit of coming home and just dumping her belongings on the kitchen counter. The kitchen is a public area. You can't just leave your personal belongings strewn across the counter. 5 of us need to use it to cook! Recently TLR's mum brought some gardening tools up for her to use. Today, 3 days later, they'd still be sitting on the bench if I hadn't moved them to another table. They haven't even been touched. In fact, I think I might go and get them and put them on her bed right now.

4) The dishes. It's not on the list (that would be ridiculous), but I get the feeling that because I'm on kitchen duty I'm expected to do more dishes than usual. Even things like putting the clean ones away. That's not my job. Spike came and talked to me today. 3 days ago, he washed all of the dishes; a huge amount of them from TLR cooking an extravagent dinner. 3 days later, the dry dishes are still sitting on the dish rack because nobody has bothered to put them away. Just about every morning I get up, put the dishes away from the night before and then start making my breakfast. It's the first thing I do in the morning. Spike knows this and told me to make sure that TLR puts away the dishes this time. It's been days, but I think she's still got the whole "if I leave them, someone else will have to do them" mentality. Well screw her. Spike and I have decided that we're not putting them away this time. I just hope Daniel doesn't do them, although I wouldn't put it past him.

Actually that reminds me. When we first moved in, TLR complained that Spike and I put cooking utensils in weird places after we'd done the dishes. Several months later, we've heard no such complaint again. Plain and simply, she never puts them away into the places she thinks would be normal because she never puts them away!


As usual, if I attempt to discuss my concerns with TLR my thoughts are entirely stomped over or dismissed with "well, that's not what we've decided". And just the other day, one of these issues came up. I'd just given the kitchen a clean the day before. The benches were spotless, I cleared all the dishes, scrubbed the sinks till they shone....it was perfectly clean and tidy. The next day she came into my room and asked me when I was going to clean the kitchen. I frowned, stepped into the kitchen and lo and behold! TLR's bag was on the bench, her food was strung across the counter, the dishes she'd just eaten off were next to the sink and a whole stack of clean ones were in the dishrack. Let's look at the list of duties:

1) Clean stove: it was clean.
2) Microwave: cleaned the day before.
3) Crumbs off benches: only the area she'd just made her lunch on was dirty. All other benches were clean.
4) General tidy: items she'd left out yesterday were returned to their homes or moved to the loungeroom. The only items present were those she'd just used.

What part of the kitchen duties had I not upheld? Apparently, the dishes. Well, I'm off to put gardening tools into someone's bed!

~C~

I will survive!

We sort of reached an awkward truce over the weekend. I gave her all of the episodes of a tv-show she loves and had missed over the past few weeks. She brought me an icecream when I was studying. But as inevitable as an old lady sitting on a park bench with her legs wide open, it all went sour again.

On the weekend it was the 21st birthday of a friend and he'd organised a big pub crawl for all of us to go on. It started quite early, at about 5pm...but we're uni students and drinking at all hours of the day is what we do best! As we live quite a bit out of the central part of the city, we needed to get the train in and leave by about 4.30 to get there on time. No biggie! Except for TLR. She decided that 5pm was way too early to start a pub crawl and she'd meet us later on. Fair enough, I suppose. To her credit, she turned up at about 6.30 and joined in the festivities. I suppose I need to explain a little background at this point so let me introduce you to Jay...

Jay is a friend from uni. During the time when TLR was befriending FF (and essentially completely ignoring me) I started hanging out with Jay more and more and ignoring TLR. Now TLR had a problem with this. She couldn't understand why I wasn't hanging out with her and bending over backwards to make her happy like I used to do. What I accomplished was showing her exactly how it felt with her ignoring me, something she had a major problem with. She was cut. Had no idea that she'd done anything wrong and thought that me hanging out with Jay was some malicious act of betrayal.

*sigh*

Anyway, we've made up since then but I still enjoy spending time with Jay, particularly seeing as we don't see each other as often any more since she moved to inner Sydney. Jay was on the pub crawl and it was the first time I'd caught up with her in a while. Perhaps I was ignoring TLR a little, really anything that woman does just gets on my nerve these days. At about 7.30 we moved on to the next pub and on the way we ran into FF. She wasn't on the pub crawl because recently she lost her license (too many speeding tickets!) and didn't have a valid form of ID. TLR latched onto her and that was the last we saw of her that evening. The next day she posted on facebook:

"Great night, bar hopping, bestest friend, STI cookies, cherry beer, crazy karaoke and a burning desire for Gay Bar! Funfunfunfunfunfun!"

Well let's digest that for a moment.

Bar hopping? She was only there for one of the bars we went to. I suppose she got halfway through the "hop" to the other one, but that's a stretch. Bestest friend? Oh my, I've been officially downgraded! (tbh, I can see why. I don't act like a voluntary slave for her any more. FF does though)

It's the karaoke part that makes me saddest. Ever since we moved to the city and met I've been saying "we should do karaoke sometime! We should go to one of those karaoke bars". Now she's gone to do it and didn't think of asking me along. I LOVE karaoke; although thus far my experience has been limited to Rock Band or Singstar. It's something I've always wanted to do. She knows this, knows that I love singing. I take it very personally that she didn't ask me along. PLUS she abandoned all her friends (and the birthday boy) when she'd committed herself to the event already. Didn't even say goodbye. Is it just me or is that a tad rude?

~C~

A slap in the Face-book

Hey Reader!

Among my group of friends we use facebook extensively to keep up with each other and organise events...and so on and so forth. Last night TLR posted an event about a dinner party at our house next weekend. Normally this would be alright, but she's done so without asking anyone if it's okay. Of course, that's a little bit of an assumption. I know for a fact she didn't talk to me about it, but she could have spoken to the others. However, Spike just came in to see me and asked if she'd talked to me about it. So obviously, he hasn't been spoken to either. He's a little miffed as well. If she hosts this dinner party it's going to be a large expense to us and, being poor students, that's not something that can happen too often.

I'm not sure if I'm being unfair in my judgement here, but in my opinion, if you're going to host an event that will affect all of your roommates, you should ask them if it's okay first. When Daniel suggested a housewarming party last week, he came and talked to all of us to make sure it was okay to do so. TLR seems more interested in getting people over to entertain so they can praise her for hosting >>

...Okay, I admit, that's a little judgemental! But every time we've had a party in the past FF and I have done all the cleaning up and TLR has taken all of the glory for hosting the event. It's a little tiresome, but definitely leads me to believe that she wants to please as many people as possible to make her feel good about herself.

~C~

Around the world? Around the bend!

A couple of years ago TLR and I decided we really wanted to go overseas together so we set about planning where we'd go and for how long and what we'd do each day, the sights we'd see...everything! She mentioned it again late last year and I was all excitement thinking I'd finally get the chance to visit the states.

Earlier today I was browsing through facebook (as you do!) and noticed that on Fitness Freak (FF)'s wall was a link to a round-the-world ticket from TLR. I was a little hurt, but figured it could have just been part of a plan to incorporate the USA trip we planned earlier into one big trip. Now, as usual, I am let down. For around the past 10 minutes she's been talking to FF about getting them an appointment with a travel agent and looking up prices online etc etc...FF piped up a minute ago saying "Hey, maybe my boyfriend can come!". TLR replied with "Yeah, I suppose if he wants to join the two of us!"

The two of us.


As in FF and TLR...one...two people.



Not me! Not "Hey maybe Claire will want to come?". No invitation at all.
Bastards. It's things like this that make me kind of happy I'm a crier. The curse of bawling at things like this makes me hope that they might actually SEE the emotion in my face, SEE that it's them that's made me upset and force them to think about someone else's feelings for once.

A somewhat downtrodden and feeling unloved
~Claire~