i r doofus

[hudebnik]

So we've got a bunch of La Belle Compagnie friends coming over this weekend. Company is always a good way of forcing ourselves to clean house, and in particular I decided to take on the mildew on the bathroom ceiling, which has been getting gradually more visible and annoying for months. I had spritzed it with a variety of mold-remover products before, without much result, but this time I decided to scrub a spot immediately after spritzing, and it actually came off! Yay! (I had previously been giving the mold-remover some time to dry, so I wouldn't have to breathe the fumes at close range, and more often than not forgetting to come back and scrub it at all; I guess I figured the mold-remover would have some kind of growth-retardant effect. In fact, this only gets the mildew angry.) So I grabbed safety goggles, rubber gloves, dust mask, deep-sea-diving suit, etc. and set to work on the rest of the bathroom ceiling, with reasonable success.

Then I looked down. A bunch of clothes were piled on a standing towel-rack in the bathroom, right underneath the toxic rainfall of mold-remover, and one pair of pants seemed to already be covered with little pink spots that hadn't been there before... e.g. when shalmestere bought them... the day before yesterday, in a bit of a shopping coup. They had been worn once.

On the plus side, they seem to have given their lives to protect the rest of the clothes in the pile -- after evacuating all the clothes to another room for triage, I didn't see any damage to the rest. The pants in question are in the washing machine, in an attempt to dilute the stuff as quickly as possible with cold water, but I'm not optimistic.

Maybe the rest of the day's cooking and cleaning will go better....

Comments

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Please note that you do not, in fact, speak for "most men." You work in an environment in which no one gives a rat's patoot how you look, as long as you adhere to currently-accepted standards of hygiene. You could show up (and probably have) dressed like the winos that sleep in the Port Authority bus terminal, and no one would bat an eyelash.

It might not be to the same extent as what women suffer, but men go through Shopping Angst, too: I've heard men complain about looking for a conservative business suit when all the stores have is European Cut that won't fit American Stocky, or zoot suits in pimp colors; or trying to find a pair of black pants that don't look like flamenco wear; or hanging on to that "lucky" sweater for years because they'll never find another one like it....