dirty – hannah ananas

Nuts

Not only are we a white girl and an Asian girl living in a majority black and part-Hispanic apartment complex – read that ‘major minorities’ – but we are also just generally weird people in the first place… put us in black culture, and we become suddenly even more weird.

Example? Well, today, I tested out how best to go about cleaning the hallway outside our front door… the hallways are outdoors technically, but they are covered, and most have walls on both sides almost their entire lengths. However, they are coated in black and general dirtiness, and it is dreadful. It gets all over the bottoms of shoes, it is so horrible. So, what do I do? Naturally, I scrubbed it with bleach water. I would power wash if it were an option, but there isn’t a hose hookup on our floor near here, and I feel like that would be a bit frowned upon as a whole for the noise and water…

So, yeah… I was scrubbing the ground outside my front door this afternoon. And I’ll be using a bigger floor scrubber, probably tomorrow, to do the whole strip of the hallway next, now that I know it works. And I’m excited about it…

Crazy white girl, for sure… 😛

Post-a-day 2022

Bizarre

“He-llo.”

“Hey. What are you doing?”

“Wiping boogers on my knee, and marveling at how one looks like a squid.”

“…”

“Don’t you hate being dirty?”

“Yes. But I’m about to shower, and so a little bit more dirt apparently doesn’t bug me right now…”

“…Ooooo-kaaayyy…”

“I know… Trust me. I know…”

Gotta love the weird folks. 😛

P.S. Happy Friday, the 13th!!

Post-a-day 2021

Cleanliness

It’s amazing how a clean (or not clean) space makes a world of a difference. I am staying st my aunt and uncle’s house for a few days right now, and so have been somewhat stressed because of the lack of cleanliness left by the last person who stayed here while they were gone. I have been wanting to leave since the day I got here, in a way… I want to be in my own, clean home setting, not here where almost every surface has something icky on it, floors included, and chairs, too… something I have to clean just to be able to use the surface… Of course, the necessary cleaning supplies are in short supply right now, so I had to use them with extreme discretion and rationing, not allowing me to clean all surfaces and floors… ugh…

The last time I stayed here a month without hesitation, and I only left because I had to leave for something back in Houston. Very different experiences here.

I feel like a Sophie Kinsella main character right now, wishing that cleanliness were part of the law. 😛

Anyway… so, there’s that, and it has been bugging me and I am ready to go home tomorrow as soon as I can (after my tutoring, which will go possibly all the way to 2pm).

Ugh… irony can be really annoying sometimes. Haha 😛

Post-a-day 2020

Boiling point?

I might be at my boiling point this week… physically, though mentally regarding the physically…

You see, I have learned to handle acne rather well for my body… meaning that I have learned how to avoid having very much of it.

Unfortunately, my body is extremely sensitive – well, kind of to everything, but that’s not the point right now – to sweat, when it comes to producing acne.

All I need is to have my skin be the level of sticky sweaty – pouring/dripping sweat is fine, but, once it stops, I need to clean off the skin – in order for acne to show up in the very near future in those exact spots.

So, I washed my face three times throughout the night last night, and have done it several times today, simply because of the heat of the place where I am staying this week – it is warm, like 76 overnight and 82 degrees Fahrenheit during the day (And, before you start saying the temperatures are to save money on electricity or to help save the planet, know that the air is set to “ON”, not to “AUTO”…, so it is always running…, but with warm-ish air abouts.)… I couldn’t identify at first why I was so mentally disturbed by the fact that the apartment was kept so warm, but I eventually realized that that was it: the acne concern.

I was kind of supposed to go take photos with someone this week… now, it is definitely not happening… I already have more acne on my face than when I got here yesterday, plus, I only slept a maximum of a few hours last night, for fear of bugs (I got bitten while aiming to sleep) and for the struggle of the intense warmth of sleeping atop a fabric sofa and wool-like blanket…. so, no photos of me this week, buddy – I need to be not semi-miserable and not annoyed at my physical state to go take such specific photos.

Let’s be real: sitting here, writing this, I keep taking breaks to move my arms away from my body, and to breathe deeply, both in hopes of cooling off even a little bit more… it reminds me of the days of no a/c in the world, when everyone just suffered all summer long, and sat, miserable, on their porches with cold lemonade and a cool rag, unable to get themselves to do anything else, because the mental effort involved in starting any physical effort was just too much for the overheated body and brain to handle…

That’s about how I feel here, breathing in the warm and humid air of the apartment, as though I might just be sitting outside still…, but outside has bugs and wind and rather low humidity, actually… man… not even my deep breathing is relieving, it feels so oxygen-low…

Ugh… okay, you can do this, Banana…

Post-a-day 2020

Ick

I hope you’re comfortable with discussion of bodily parts and dirtiness, because that is what follows here. 😛

I’ve just got to say: What is the deal with toenails?

Every time I shorten them, or even clean some fuzz (from the socks I’d just removed) out of them, it smells so stinky!

My feet typically do not smell bad.

And I never notice anything coming from the toenails.

Except, of course, when trimming them.

Am I really struggling that much with keeping them clean?…. is it actually that dirty underneath them, because I don’t clean them well enough???

That’s the only explanation I can imagine… and it totally freaks me out.

Totally.

I mean, am I carrying around grime in my feet all the time, and it only goes away by cutting the nail free, and, therefore, the creepy contents beneath it???

Eeeew!

That’s just gross.

And, the thing is, it is always the same smell… it never changes, if it is there at all.

Okay, I must get something I can use specifically to clean underneath my toenails every single night, a solid scrape of clean, since clearly soap and water don’t do the job.

Yikes… what a discovery… especially for someone who has panic around dirtiness…

Haha… that irony is actually hilarious… so long as I don’t think about the actual dirty, of course… 😛

How clean are your feet and toenails, really?

Post-a-day 2019

Laundry day

Okay, what is my actual deal with doing laundry?

When I lived at my mom’s last year, and had access to the high efficiency units that did wash and dry with a combined total of about an hour, it was no big deal – I did my laundry just about every time I had enough worn clothing for a single load.

I actually really enjoyed it.

Now – as well as just about every year prior to having the HE units last year – I can’t seem to get myself to do laundry until I’m actually about to run out of clothing… or, rather, have run out of something vital.

In high school, my best friend and I would have “swimsuit day” every so often, for which we would wear swimsuits underneath our school uniforms.

She participated, because she actually found her swimsuit top to be as comfortable as, if not more comfortable than, her regular bras.

I participated – and established – because I was out of clean bras and underwear, and so a swimsuit was my only option for undergarments.

Therefore, every couple weeks or so, we’d have a “swimsuit day”, which I could tell her about the night before, while I still didn’t necessarily out on a load of laundry (though I usually put on laundry the night I ended up pulling out a swimsuit for the next morning).

Fast forward to now: as it stands, this will be my third or fourth night of using a dress and t-shirt to dry myself after my nighttime shower…, because both sets of my towels have been used and placed in the dirty laundry pile/s.

I’m thinking it has to do, in part, with the fact that the HE washers are so much safer on the clothes, especially in terms of color transferring… when there’s a high risk of color bleed, there’s a low chance of my carefully organizing out everything to be wash-ready any time soon.

Also, it just takes so much longer with regular washers and dryers – close to an hour for each.

Seeing as how we live in Houston, I definitely don’t want to put on a load to wash, and then leave for more than an hour… and I am definitely not reliable to turn back up in an hour, if I’ve left home – I just get too distracted with other exciting things that are all out there, in the world, not in my house, you know?

And so, instead, I have laundry pile up and pile up… and I’ve been quite tempted (and even have done it with a suitcase from a trip recently) to pack it all up and bring it to my mom’s house – I never did that in college, so maybe now it’s time, at last. 😛

Also, one bit of defense for me: My current washer and dryer are reached only by going outside on the porch first, and so 1)I want to be safe and not go do that late at night (when I actually am at home and have time to do laundry), and 2)I didn’t have a key that could lock that door properly for the first month+ of living here, and it just seemed a terrible idea to leave the room unlocked, so I just didn’t do laundry for the first several weeks of living here.

Now, however, I have a key that works(!), so I can do laundry here.

The question is: Will I actually do it?

Post-a-day 2019

Tying up dirty boys with grammar

Changing laundry from the washing machine to the dryer (It’s a machine, I know!!!!!!!*), I saw a towel on the floor between the two machines. It was originally intended for the load of red shades earlier today, but the load was too large for comfort, so I pulled out the towel. I left it on the floor, because a towel load needed to be done today or tomorrow anyway, so why bother bringing it back upstairs just to bring it back down only hours later? But that isn’t the point.

The point is (sort of) that I saw the towel sitting there, and I had an almost-urge to pick it up and put it in the dryer with the laundry I was transferring. Not that I wanted to put it in with the clean laundry, but that, usually, whenever something is on the floor there, it is because it has fallen in the transfer between the two machines. So, I simultaneously wanted not to touch the towel, to put it in the dryer, and to move it to the dirty towels upstairs (since I wasn’t doing the final two loads tonight, but doing them tomorrow). And, for a good moment, I was worried that I would pursue the final of the three, and accidentally fulfill the second in my tiredness and in the middle of routine muscle movements, and then wish for the first.

I managed to let go of having to deal with the towel now, and I left it on the floor, for fear of the second result.

As I thought about that possible second result, I was practically distraught at how it would ruin the fact that I had already put the load of clothes on to wash. By putting one single towel in the dryer, I thought, an entire load of laundry would be considered dirty. Now, why doesn’t that work the other way around? Why does one piece of clean laundry not make a load of dirty laundry clean, when mixed together? The dirty still win out. And how come a whole load of clean laundry can’t overpower the one dirty article? The clean just can’t overcome.

And then – now, this is the point of this all – I wondered about what is life is like this, if anything. Almost immediately, I thought about gender pronouns (and particularly in Spanish and French, because I learned those first). It’s just like guys and girls. A group full of guys, the dirty clothes, is (let’s use French) ils. Add one girl, the clean clothing, and it stays ils. A group full of girls is elles. Add one boy, and it becomes ils.

So, no matter what, if there are any boys, it is ils, dirty. The only way to keep it elles is to have only girls – no boys allowed.

And how odd that the boys are the dirty laundry and the girls are the clean… so like life, and I hadn’t even intended it to be so.**

Anyway, isn’t all of that fun?! Towels to grammar to life comparisons – I do lead an extraordinarily interesting life, huh? 😛

*Japan doesn’t exactly do dryers. People are expected to hang clothes outside, because every has a stay-at-home wife, you see… not. Everyone used to have a stay-at-home wife, but the lifestyle hasn’t changed. It just takes days and days to do laundry as a solo-liver, because weather can decide to soak your clean clothes while you’re off at work, or hide the sun from them, or be too humid for them to dry at all until they start to smell of mildew… I just hung mine all indoors, because I’d heard too many stories from my brother’s issues. Plus, supposedly people steal women’s underwear from the drying clothes in Japan. I didn’t need to deal with any of that nonsense. So, I set my air conditioner to a daytime setting to keep the apartment mildew-free, which also helped dry my clothes!

** I once wrote a poem about how boys are dirty. I didn’t exactly believe any of it, but I knew that people thought boys were dirty and smelly, and I rolled with the idea.

Post-a-day 2017

Bathroom thoughts

I have developed a new concept regarding bathroom sinks lately. I have resisted the idea for the past few months, I guess, and rather regularly. However, I think I have somewhat resisted the idea for the past several years, off and on. And now, obviously, I am acknowledging the idea. The idea is this: Why do we use the same sink for washing our hands after using the toilet as we do to brush our teeth?

This could seem harmless at first glance, so I explain. We use the bathroom, and then wash our hands. We do this to remove the ghastly germs that come from our own wastes. In the process, we touch the knobs of the faucet. As we wash our hands, some of the germs likely splash around on the sink basin, and possibly even onto the edges or countertop around the basin. Fast-forward to another, say, twenty minutes later, when it is time to brush out teeth. We touch the same knobs on the faucet. We rub the bristles of the toothbrush with the fingers that grabbed the faucet knob. We bang our toothbrush on the edge of the sink, possibly even set it there. And we put our face quite close to the sink to rinse out our mouth.

Recall that this is the same sink that might or might not be splattered with poo germs.

Anyway, that is a thought I aim to remove from my brain whenever I am using the bathroom sink. It sometimes goes away, but has recently taken what seems to be a semi-permanent residence over to the side in my mind, not quite bothering me, but watching carefully, as though for an opportunity to jump in and WHAM! get me. Fun thoughts, huh? 😛

Post-a-day 2017