gack

Everything in my house is covered with dog hair.
Everything. Every barefoot step makes me clench my teeth with ick as I feel shmutz tuck itself between my toes. Dog hair and kosher salt, dog hair and kosher salt. That's the sound of walking in my apartment. And I just cleaned.

I've always been a bit dramatic about cleanliness. At my worst I would grab the glass out of your hand and have it steaming in the drain rack before you had finished swallowing, but living with animals and a husband has made me loosen up a bit. Still I cringe thinking about what my host mother would say if she could see behind my toilet, or under my bed, or the inside of my frig.

So I'm scrubbing today, podcasts of This American Life playing in the background as I shift the furniture and sweep the salt. I mumble and occasionally yell about the sheer injustice of the way my brand new IKEA sink is rusting out and how Dan could be traced like Hansel and Gretal by the steady trail of tiny scraps of paper with emails and numbers scrawled on them that lay anywhere he's been. And the man puts change wherever he is when it occurs to him to empty his pockets, dresser tops, bookshelves, on the piano, bathroom sink.

A student told me a while ago that she had a cleaning meltdown once where she couldn't stop screaming "AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN SEE THIS?" over and over again as she thrust a clump of drain hair into her family's faces. Everyone can see, but not everyone hyperventilates and has nightmares about it.

just me.

I wanna be cool with it, it seems like something cool people are cool with. I went to a friend's house a while ago to have a post yoga bagel and her house had no sharp edges between the rooms anymore as the river of clothes and magazines and play dough had sort of softened everything up into more of a mushy house-ish living arrangement. She was pulling handfuls of hair off of her dog and laughingly letting them float to the ground where her children could dance in them. She looked at me like "I'm so cool, dog hair can't get me down." But all I could think about was where I could safely set my purse down. Would it look weird if I went back to my car and finished our conversation yelling through the window?

I have decided that I will develop and perhaps market a line of garments made of those sticky de-fuzzing paper roller things. Imagine a skirt (perhaps it would be a bit stiff) that would allow me to de-salty dog the couch as I sat. Then stand up, rip off that layer and move into the bedroom. Patent-pending.

The floor in the dining room is dry now, time to re-wash it.