My supposed sister-in-law is not actually, strictly-speaking, my sister-in-law. She is not married to my brother but they've been together for a few years and they have a two-year-old child and will presumably be together for the foreseeable future. So for the sake of sparing other people that explanation I just say that she is my sister-in-law rather than my brother's baby-mama. Mostly though I just refer to her as Cheryl.
Interestingly I am friends with Cheryl. I don't hate her. This is party because of the kind of person I am and partly because I would find it hard not to be friends with her. She's too crazy to not be interesting. I mean literally crazy. I think she might very well be Manic Depressant. She has been diagnosed with OCD, anxiety, and depression. Interestingly the doctor was most concerned about her OCD and prescribed her some medication that Cheryl ceased to take after a couple weeks because it made her feel as though she had "gotten stoned four hours ago"... all the time.
For further clarification Cheryl has things that bother her immensely. Presumably it's because of her OCD. But things have to get done a certain way. And she will get incredibly bothered and have to go and rearrange the living room or sort all of the change that she can find by the year it was minted. She will get worked up over small things that I don't even think about. Sometimes there are maelstroms of anger at tiny things going wrong.
She is a vegetarian environmentalist who smokes cigarettes. She claims that she would like to just burn down her house and go live in the woods. She doesn't like consumerism but she likes to buy things. She thinks that we should farm organically (this is not rational, not unless your only goal is saving the planet and never mind all those fuckers who have to die in order for that to happen) and despite the fact that she knows that buying products labeled "organic" is illogical she does it anyway ("organic" doesn't actually mean anything in the United States because of commercialism.)
She likes to argue sheerly for the sake of arguing. She likes to read classics so that she'll be able to talk to a wider range of people about the books she has read. She disconnected the internet at their house because she felt it would force her to read more and play more board games. I'm not sure if it helped that particularly but it does prevent her from spending mass amounts of time being a Dirty Facebooker and compulsively buying pseudo-antiques on eBay.
This is also the woman who (not quite literally) threw me out of my previous apartment and caused me to almost move to Georgia. This was a large fiasco in my life that caused me to have to move and rather a lot of financial stress as well as regular stress for that matter.
And while that rant felt pretty good on its own you may be hoping I will soon come to the point implied by the title of this essay. The point really mostly has to do with my roommate's girlfriend and the almost indescribable rage I feel about her existence in general. Unfortunately there's going to be a little more backstory which should hopefully also provide you a little amusement.
It's generally better if I tell this story in the order that I found things out rather than chronologically. My roommate went to visit family for Christmas. He was not dating anyone when he left. He came back to our apartment on Boxing Day (which is the twenty-sixth of December for your edification) and he took a shower and cleaned up his room a little bit. He said he was going to bring a girl over and offered to take me to spend the night at K'van and Cheryl's but I thought that maybe they were tired of having people over after Christmas and said that I could hide in my room.
So I went into my room and cuddled with my laptop. I noticed something about this girl almost before she set foot in our apartment. She has one of the most annoying and hard-to-ignore voices I have ever had the displeasure of being exposed to. With the volume of my headphones at a comfortable level I could still hear her very easily even though the closed door to my room. I probably thought something like: "Oh god, I hope he doesn't bring this girl over often."
Within two hours of this girl being at our apartment a thing happened which is not something that should happen on a first date. I didn't actually see it because I was in my room but I heard it easily enough. She dragged Sean into the bathroom and (I imagine) pointed at the toilet and said: "You see this? You don't do this. The toilet seat goes down." ...I have it on good authority from married women that this is a bad habit that you do not try to break your significant other of until you are at least engaged and living together if not actually married.
As someone who closes the toilet lid completely (out of habit from when I lived at home because my brother's dog would drink out of the toilet otherwise) after I go to the bathroom I feel as if I should have the right to complain about this to my own roommate if I want to. And I don't want to. I don't care. It doesn't bother me. If you are too stupid to check and make sure that the toilet seat is down before you sit you probably deserve to fall in. I would not complain to my theoretical future spouse that they fail to close the toilet lid before flushing (as not doing so is disgusting) but hey, whatever, as long as I'm not in the room feel free to spray microbes and bacteria everywhere!
The next day I finally met this girl because (of course) she spent the night. She started calling herself Sean's girlfriend even though they were definitely not dating when he left she she lives in the town we live in (not where Sean went for Christmas) yet magically she had become his girlfriend in this time. I could already see signs in my apartment that, if my life were a novel, the reader would take as horrifying foreshadowing. My roommate left with her later that day to go do whatever and I optimistically thought she wouldn't be back soon if I were lucky. They returned after a while and filled our apartment with the nasty smell of a giant pan of pulled pork (which is actually still mostly-uneaten in our refrigerator more than two weeks later as I refuse to touch it on general principles). They also drank vodka cran and she got extremely drunk. I erroneously thought that the fact of her being drunk had to do with her behavior that night when I sort-of hung out with them (sort-of because we were all in the living room even though I would have preferred she were pretty much anywhere else).
She stayed the night again that night. In fact, from the time he first brought her over (before which they were not dating) she stayed at our apartment for four days except when she had to work. In fact, for the last two weeks, she has been at our apartment pretty much constantly aside from working with few exceptions. One day last week I had a day off and she had a day off while my roommate was working and she spent the whole day at our apartment. I periodically fired questions at her in a theoretically non-threatening manner.
It turns out that this girl is exactly one month younger than I am, making her twenty years old. Not only that but she has a one-year-old daughter. I have to wonder who takes care of this child while she is constantly at our apartment. I also have to wonder where exactly she really lives as she is always here.
Other personal traits (read: flaws) that I have confirmed through observation of her include her constant texting or facebooking or whatever it is that she does with her phone. I don't know or care what she does with her phone but her juvenile ringtone has jarred me from my thoughts many times and she tends to make what I assume she thinks are snide comments out loud at whoever is contacting her. She also makes statements that are clearly wrong and then justifies the fact that she is "right" about them because she's his girlfriend and he has to agree with her (because she has boobs, I guess?) She constantly needs to be the center of attention or she tends to lose interest and goes into Sean's bedroom to "nap" (read: regain attention). She attempted to make a simple meal (chicken, dried potato flakes and some kind of vegetable, I think) in our kitchen that did something unspeakably awful to actually ruin our wok (it cannot be cleaned, we are going to have to throw it away and buy another one) and needless to say was never consumed. She has stuff in our shower and a hair straightener on our sink and there are bras on Sean's floor and little sparkly hair-clippies everywhere. I'm not sure if the stuff strewn about is some kind of female territory marking ritual (I suspect not) or if she's just a slob. In short: she acts exactly like my fourteen-year-old cousin (minus the sex and child-having, of course) who I already find to be several years less mature than I was when I was that age.
All the time that this girl has been here I have looked at the things everywhere. I have stared at our poor wok. I have scraped nail polish off one of my endtables in the living room. I have done an inordinate number of extra dishes. I have wondered how much extra her showering and hair-straightening and inability to turn off lights is going to cost me in electricity (our hot water is electric). I have looked at her shoes that she kicked off on the carpet as she walked into the room instead of wiping them on the mat and leaving them on the linoleum by the door like a civilized person.
I have observed all of these various offenses and wanted to tell her about all of her flaws and absurdity to her face in Cheryl's usual style. In fact I even tried to get them to come over to K'van and Cheryl's so that Cheryl could at least tell Sean (who is an old friend of hers before I ever met him) what an idiot he is being. I keep thinking these angry thoughts and wanting vengeance and wondering if I'm turning into Cheryl like the paranoiac that I am. Turning into Cheryl is a terrifying thought. I also think that cock-blocking my roommate is probably not very nice. I realize that I am not exactly normal and perhaps I shouldn't say anything out of the fear that I don't actually have any highground to stand on.
I decided to test the turning-into-Cheryl theory by describing the situation to female co-workers and seeing if a theoretical confrontation with Sean is something they would advise against. It was not. They encouraged it. I can only conclude that I'm not turning into Cheryl. The only thing that worries me is the rage that I feel. I have not actually hated anyone since before I went through puberty. I thought it was something I had grown out of as a rational person. Evidently this is not true. Given the right stimuli I can still hate people.
I'm giving it two more weeks to see if he breaks up with her when the plot points charting the novelty of having sex with this chick intersects with the line marking how much annoying bullshit he can tolerate. I know I've long reached the level of annoyance I can suffer silently and I'm rapidly approaching the level necessary for me to start doing vindictive things to her stuff. Watch out sparkly little girl hair-clippies and watch out unsuspecting pedestrians below my window- soon you're going to meet.
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