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.
Sewing needles do not go on chairs. In fact, sewing needles should really be placed inside a sealed container where no one can accidentally stab themselves. Needles most emphatically should not be placed point-upwards on a kitchen chair on which someone might want to place their knee while reaching over for some other object. The end result is that some poor, unfortunate person will stab their knee on the needle, and will have to pull it out and will then bleed profusely. This causes unnecessary pain and resentment, and when you get all defensive about how it’s not YOUR fault that they stabbed their knee, they might even stop washing your dishes for you. And you wouldn’t want that.
Dishes placed on the sink do not magically become clean; someone actually has to clean them first. This means that when you “forget” to throw your scraps of food in the bin, someone else will have to do it for you. This means that when you throw a cat food covered spoon into the sink, someone will have to pick it up and move it to where it ought to be, getting cat food on their hands in the process. This means that when you don’t rinse your glass of milk right away, someone else will have to try cleaning dried milk out of the cup, and dried milk is much harder to clean than liquid milk. This brings me to my next newsflash…
When you’re making others clean up after you, it’s really impolite to start complaining about how they haven’t done it right. After all, you’re the lazy one who decided you don’t clean. When you refuse to clean at all, you can’t really demand that everyone else clean your stuff to your exacting standards. If you have these kinds of exacting standards that you expect to be met, you should really try to meet them yourself. No one else cares.
I’m sure there are more things I could have written, but four newsflashes is enough for one entry, I think. For the purpose of provoking discussion, I ask anyone who reads this entry: in what ways do slobs irritate you?
