I’m afraid my Brother is going to kick me out.
A few days ago, I put a pan in the dishwasher. It had grease in it. No, it had a lot of grease in it. It was thick with grease. I rinsed it out, but didn’t scrub it. Grease was still caked in the corners. I figured it would be fine. Well, it wasn’t. When I opened the dishwasher to take out the dishes, I noticed that all of them were covered with a thin film of grease. So I looked inside, and there was about an inch of extremely greasy water standing in the bottom of the dishwasher.
I did all I knew to do to get the water to go down. I ran the “dry” cycle of the dishwasher a few times. Then I took apart the spinny thing in the bottom and tried to find out where the dishwasher might be clogged. I couldn’t even find the drain hole. I didn’t know what else to do, so I called my Brother and copped to what happened. He didn’t seem too irritated as soon as he heard it.
The irritation came later, when he tried to work on the dishwasher. He examined the drain hoses and couldn’t see any particular blockage. He took the dishwasher apart further and examined those drain holes, and couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. He tried to start the “dry” cycle again and again, and each time the dishwasher would make a sucking noise for about 3 seconds before giving up. Nothing seemed to work. My brother got irritated and said, “I guess it’s fucked.” I suggested that perhaps the dishwasher was about to go anyway, since the dishwasher was so old, but he said, quite firmly, “I think the grease burned out one of the motors for the drainage mechanism.” All I could do was apologize.
So, he bought a new dishwasher, and the last two nights he has worked on disconnecting the old one and installing the new one. As soon as he got finished with it, he came to me and started bitching. He told me to hand wash the pots and pans that had piled up immediately. He complained that I had put off washing the dishes by hand because we didn’t have a stopper, when we actually had a stopper the whole time. He was angry that I left his hand can opener in the sink in standing water, which ruined it, and told me I would have to buy him another one. (I don’t even know how I’ll get to Wal-Mart to buy it.) So he was obviously very irritated at that time.
This comes right on top of me breaking the toilet tank lid in the downstairs bathroom. I took it off to drop down the flap inside, which had stuck open (it frequently does that), and leaned the toilet tank lid up against the sink as I always do. It slipped and hit the floor and shattered into like 5 pieces immediately. I paid for a replacement a couple weeks ago, but he ordered it from eBay (none of the plumbing sites seemed to have one for our model in stock) and it hasn’t gotten here yet, so we might have to order another one. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to pay for that one.
Which brings me to the point, these have been major irritations that I have caused in the span of a couple of weeks, and I’m afraid they will keep piling up until Bro just doesn’t want to live with me anymore. After all, it has happened with most of my previous room-mates. Every so often Bro comes to me with what I call a “bitch session,” he angrily recounts some mistake I’ve made and demands I fix it. I always do without complaint, at worst a flat “okay” from the corner of my mouth. (I’m very Passive.) It makes me feel like there is a lot of resentment built up inside him that he just never expresses.
Why am I such a pain to live with? Well, there’s the breaking of shit which this whole entry has pretty much been about. I am just very clumsy and absent-minded, and combined with my lack of motivation this makes me extremely prone to ruining things out of carelessness. I also tend to make messes and not clean them up; for example, I almost always spill coffee everywhere, staining walls and floors, and I never notice it until somebody points it out. But I have gotten much better about that since my Brother has been hounding me about it. I actually do most of the cleaning in the shared areas of the Townhouse these days, and he has told me he wants me to take over all of them to “work off” my breakage of the dishwasher. (Looks like I didn’t break it, but I’ll still do the cleaning without complaint.) On top of all this, my carelessness makes me very indifferent to the needs of others, and I’m always overlooking something I should have offered to help with. Finally, I can’t drive due to my scatter-brained nature, so I’m always having to ask for people to take me places. I tend to eat or drink whatever substances in the house are appealing to me, no matter who bought them. All of these are potentially very annoying. Should I change to make myself a more attractive room-mate? Probably. But I don’t know if it will “stick,” due to my illness.
I don’t really think these are Mortal Sins, though. When I do live with someone I mostly keep to myself. I leave my Brother and his Girlfriend alone, only seeing them when I go through the living room to the deck to smoke, although I do that about every 30 minutes. I try my best not to ask to go anywhere unless it’s absolutely necessary, and I even ask Bill or Al to come over and take me sometimes so I won’t get on my Brother’s nerves. Although I don’t much think of helpful things I can do on my own, I do everything asked of me without complaint. And I’m very sensitive, almost Neurotic, about doing anything that pisses anybody off. I think I really do try to handle everyone with kid gloves when I can. It’s just that these aren’t exactly shining, memorable positive qualities.