Oh Scrungie, Where Art thou?

Vile is the thing that devours scrungies while you're not looking. And here yet another reason not to clean - half your wardrobe, half your important papers, and all of your scrungies fly to the land of milk cartons backs.

[Have you seen this blouse?]

The only scrungie spared is a flourescent orange creation that lights up your head like it's Christmas in Hell. Got this one for free from my aunt - or rather my 10 year old cousin. Aunt comes back with this thing, giggling her silly little head off which is always a reason to grab your skirts and run like a girlboy -

"Do you know what V said? She said, 'you can give this to Creep, it's too ugly for me'."

I had no good comeback. "I am rubber and you are glue whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you" is too much of a mouthful. It would have also technically made me have to give back the scrungie while saying it. Swallowed my pride, lit up my head. My policy is that if you can't verbally vanquish someone with three words or less then you've no right to open your mouth.

"I love You" is the common solution for the time-efficient man.

But I digress and will now do this again. Fact : Children say the darndest things, but parents who regurgitate these darndest things to everyone often fail to relay the cuteness of it, making the kid sound more like Damien from all consecutive Omen movies and the parent look rather dopey. Now despite my obvious perfection, even I have, in my youth, been guilty of letting toads leap by the dozens out of my mouth. See now, I was raised on a diet of Swinglish in an English speaking country - meaning I mixed languages, and still do. Four year old me therefore presented certain problems for my mother. The Swedish word for 'spot' is 'prick', and there miiight have been a couple of occasions when I pointed at people's facial scars and yelled "PRICK! PRICK!". Much to the amusement of none except my mother when her spotty mother in law hobbled over to visit us.

[ Generic Scrungie no. 5, come home, all is forgiven.]

I promise I would laugh whole-heartedly if a few scrungies would jump out of nowhere right now pointing and commenting my spots. Man cannot live on bread and water and flourescent-orange scrungies alone. Even if I knew where they were, I probably couldn't find them, I'm half blind anyway. Not blind in the way that I'm the cane toting kind of girl, though a cane is always pleasant on any given day, because you can wave it. And such. And maybe even pretend that you are the twirler in a marching band, like my uncle who spent five years in the military, only to come out proud owner of a stick with pink stripes, with which to lead his fearful army of tuba players.

"Behold the mighty Twirler, thou. KNAVE!"

"You're threatening me with a candy cane?"

"Tis NOT a candy cane! Tis a stick of Music! And Death! But mostly Music (anddeath!) "

"I will not bow to a grocery item! Here! Look! A gumdrop that's been lying in my pocket for a few weeks. Now that's something scary. Lint and all. Quite looks like a small hamster."

"Allright. can we at least play you a little song then and be on our way?"

"Carry On."

On a good day, I could have smelt them out. But now that I've cleaned my room, disinfected it with icky apple-blossom cherry-pie something, I'm stripped of my carefully developed super skill of smelling my way to whatever I'm looking for. I can no longer tell paper from plastic and thank the Lord each day that I'm not a grocery-boy. Instead the geek in me runs around my new room, mind shreiking "Control+F! Control+F!", my body generally bouncing into everything that I never thought was there. Like Dan.

Which brings me to another reason not to clean - Dan drops by my room a whole lot more often than I'm comfortable with. The reason for this being that it's it's now physically possible to enter without partially killing yourself or the small batallion you've handpicked to protect you from dangers untold. Having people in my room throws me off since it's so rare to find any sort of life form in my quarters. Course, the presence of people any where, anyday, throws me off. But when it comes to the bedroom, you don't know whether to seize the day, toss yourself over the new life-form and roll around on the bed or get out your magnifying glass and try to determine its species. Pull down its pants or poke a pin through it and mount it on a frame, neatly labelling it. "Buggus Maximus." as opposed to "Bugger Me, Maximus."

[Allright, I'm awful, I know. Generic Scrungie no. 5, come home, is all forgiven?]

Me: "Why are you here?"

Dan: "Just chilling."

Me: "Can't you chill in the living room?"

Boy leaves muttering something about there not being any king sized bed in the living room and that I should afford him the luxury of my bed since I went and wet his bed and he can't understand why he can't just lie down in mine, at least mine doesn't smell funny, whine whine whine. One of these days I'm going to get tired of all of this and tell him I love him. The common solution for the fed-up Creep.

All in all, the vacuum cleaner, dust wiper rag, and disinfectant have all three done their part in turning my room, my life, my world, into a strange strange place. These days I spend half my time staring at the creature that stares back at me from the now über-polished surfaces, fall on my knees and mumble "Take me to your leader." She never really answers. Just dances off into her world of paper scraps, mountains of clothes and trash, lint covered gumdrops and perfect bliss.

Afterword:
Found a rubberband, so I'm off to join the world of the living.
Wish me luck, pastry-faced polished surface girl.