Gross things

Everyone has things that bother them. Things that they find gross. Disgusting. Revolting. Sicky and icky. Insert your choice word. Por ejemplo, my good friend Jenessa cannot stand it when people clip their nails without using a bag or trashcan. She also has a thing with bathrooms. And not wanting to sit on dirty toilets. That’s her thing.

Gross Thing #1: My thing is dirty dishes and stacking food on top of food. I can just hear the nasty squishing sound. Especially food like oatmeal, which we eat a lot of here. I cannot stand looking at the food stuck to the plates after a meal for very long because there are so many flies. Millions, if I dare say. And I think they have all called their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and nephews to take up residence in our dining room and kitchen. So when I see the flies crawling all over the dishes left on the table. And all over the pots. And all over everything, for that matter. Being gross, cleaning their little dirty poop hands. Yeah, I can’t take it.

Gross Thing #2: Imagine walking your kitchen late at night. You see that a stalk of celery has been left out on the counter. I should probably put this away, you think to yourself. You reach for it to put it in its rightful place, the refrigerator. You think that this should be a very simple task. The moment you pick up the stalk of celery, time seems to commence in slow motion. The soundtrack of your life is playing in the background. At the very same instant that your hand makes contact with the vegetable, about 50 cockroaches come crawling out of every crack and crevice of the stalk. Disgusting. Gross. You put it in the fridge anyway. We’re going to have to eat it. Oh well. That’s life here. I’m sure your kitchen probably isn’t like that. I’m sure you don’t have roaches living in your fridge. But we do. As I’m typing this, there is a roach crawling on the hymnal next to me and one about to crawl on my leg. I don’t even try to kill them anymore. There are just too many.

Gross Thing #3: Spiders. Our house has an open ceiling area, so that means that we’ve given the spiders plenty of room to cozy up and make themselves at home. There are spider webs everywhere. Cleaning the spider webs with a dishtowel at the end of a broom is scary. They all come crawling and falling. I take the broom outside and wack away at the sidewalk like a raging maniac. These spiders have huge butts. And so when you squish them, a lot of guts come out. It’s gross.

Gross Thing #4: Not flushing toilet paper. Yeah, even the number two stuff. It’s really quite lovely. If the person who uses the bathroom before you for some reason doesn’t put their toilet paper face down, there is a nice little gift waiting for you when you come to use the bathroom. And while we’re on the subject of bathrooms, I can easily transition into Gross Thing #5.

Gross Thing #5: Frogs in the bathroom. So it’s 4 o’clock in the morning. And I’m peeing. I’m barely even awake. I see a couple little frogs hopping around the walls of the bathroom. All of a sudden, Splat! One of them is on my back. Oh great.

Alright, I’m done with all my complaining. I guess from this you could probably deduct that I’m not a huge fan of the creepy crawlies here. Maybe we can cohabitate. The thing is though, I don’t want to. I want them all to die. Well, maybe not the frogs. They’re kind of cute. But the rest - the rest can all die.