things in my room which piss me off
- The empty box of M&Ms in which I placed two discarded smarties bag earlier this week. It sits by my desk, marginally ajar, and every time I catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, I think it still has M&Ms in it. I get all excited, then discover very quickly that you have to be a total moron to mistake a rubbish for a M&Ms. The upshot is that I acquire a strong craving for chocolate.
Solution: write a reminder to buy more M&Ms when I next go shopping
- The perpetual absence of paper/notepad that makes it impossible for me to write any reminders to myself. I always dump it in the dining room. Which means that I would have to go all the way downstairs to make a note of whatever is on my mind, by which time I will almost definitely have forgotten what it was.
Solution: invest in a home tattoo parlour so I can scrawl important things on my body
- The lack of a bin. (I acknowledge that neither this, nor the paper-problem, really counts as a ‘thing in my room’, but in an abstract way, it is possible to argue that a notable absence can subsist, in a sense, so I’ll pretend to believe that, for the sake of preserving my integrity). I hate not having a bin. Emptied canned drinks and M&Ms boxes are strewn across my floor, half-filled with all the rubbish that I never want to see again. They look forlorn and abused. It depresses me.
Possible solution: n/a
- That god-damned spider. He hasn’t grown at all since I let him stay, and moth season is fast-approaching. He’s such a wank. I hate him.
Solution: make a human friend, then use him/her to kill all the moths and eat the spider
- The ever-growing pile of clothes that is wedged between the end of my bed and the wall. Most of the clothes are clean. Every day, I lift them from the floor on to my bed, in the vain hope that, by the time I want to go to sleep, I’ll have done something about them. Over the course of the day, the pile grows – sometimes by just a few items, other times with a whole wash-load of clean, dry garments. Sometimes, I try to tidy them away into a cupboard. With little success. I’m like Achilles trying to catch the tortoise: no matter how much headway I make into the mountainous heap, it will always grow a little bit more, forever keeping me from completing the job. Every night I shove the mound back off the edge of my bed, then lie back for an hour or so in order to think of a practical way of solving the problem.
Solution: wear all of my clothes each day
- The nocturnal woodpecker-ghost who lives in my wardrobe. When I rest my head to get some well-deserved and disturbingly weird dreams at the end of a long day, he wakes up and gets into action, tapping away like a madman. With all that racket going on, I stand no chance of getting to sleep. Grumpily, I slither out of bed, whack on the light, and seek out the source of the sound. Of course, the pecking stops when I get out of bed so, after a quick search, I optimistically return to the comfort of my duvet and shut my weary eyes.
And he starts again. Tap-tap-tap-tap-fucking-tap. The second time, I’m feeling pretty riled, so I stand around waiting for the sound to start again after I turn the light on. I can hear it faintly, but then it suddenly dies down again as the woodpecker becomes aware of my presence. So I turf out my entire wardrobe, taking care to put all the clothes in a neat pile at the end of my bed, but he’s nowhere to be seen. I fail to return the clothes to the wardrobe. Eventually, they join the stack.
The third time, I lie still for a while, trying to ascertain exactly where the sound is coming from. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is the god-damned wardrobe. It simply has to be.
I give it a few more minutes, just to be sure, but still the wardrobe remains the only candidate. Furious and bemused, I get up one last time, just to scour the now-empty wardrobe one last time, and still I find nothing. Exasperated, I collapse onto the mattress, flick the light-switch, and shove my fingers in to my ears in a show of resignation. It takes me a good hour, from that point, to get to sleep, as it is hard to get comfortable with your hands on either side of your head, it transpires.
Every god-damned night. Woodpeckers are rubbish, and ghosts are even more pointless and annoying than mosquitoes and my mum.Which begs the question: why? And why me?
Solution(s): learn witchcraft or kill self
