I am gonna whine

Sunday, early afternoon, and I am cleaning up.  We are recyclers, but the city in which we live doesn’t make that easy.  We have to gather up our recycling and tote it about in order to love our planet, but we do it.  So Sunday, as I’m picking up, I put all of our recyclables in a bag, planning on taking them to a recycling center the next day.  They are sitting in the open trash bag against our front door in case I come upon a soda can or empty soap bottle whilst I go about my other cleaning business.  Bart, chubby feline, begins nomming on the bag because he loves to eat plastic.  Okay.

I figure it’s pretty full and put said bag out into the shared hall of our building while I finish my last task with every intention of getting the bag and putting it into the car in just a few minutes.  I wasn’t ready to go outside because, well, I didn’t have pants on, okay?  It is kind of hot, and why should I wear pants in the summer if I don’t have to?

Meanwhile, The Boyfriend wakes up and starts having explosive diarrhea and simultaneously begins vomiting.  My attention immediately switches to him.  Instead of doing other stuff, I'm worried about him dehydrating because this goes on for HOURS.  Thirty hours to be exact.

Cut to today, nine o'clock on a Monday night.  He's been sleeping soundly without waking up to shit every 20 minutes for the first time in a day and a half and I’m lying in bed next to him vigilantly watching because he’s hardly kept down anything.  Suddenly there is crazy knocking on the front door and doorbell ringing.

What the holy goddamn fuck?!

I jumped straight up as did The Boyfriend.  I told him to lay back down as I run out to the door.  Normally I make him answer the door because this place is SCARY, but this time I am PISSED that someone woke him up and I don’t want him out of bed, jarring his stomach around.  In probably fifteen seconds I’m at the peephole.

NO ONE IS THERE.

I am NOT going to answer the door to no one.  I wait, look about, there’s no noise.  If someone’s waiting on the other side with a gun or something, I decide I don’t want to be there, so I go back to The Boyfriend, tell him to get back in bed (he’s out at this point) and follow, telling him no one’s there in a hushed voice.

Then the banging and ringing begins again!

Only this time with the drunken slurs of our landlady/super/whateverthefucksheis, “It’s Drunken Landlady!  You need to clean up this trash out here!  Blah blah, *hic* blah!”

So I immediately open the door to get her to shut up.  I realize I am in the wrong, but am also really pissed at the way she’s handling this.  Before I can even say hello, she goes off about this trash and how we can’t be doing this because if we do than everyone else will and “That’s trash—it doesn’t belong in the hall it belongs in the dumpster!”

I was really taken aback, and I wanted to apologize initially, so that’s what came out.  I started telling her I didn’t mean for it to happen, but she just went on and on, so I interrupted her and tried to explain what happened, that I had completely forgotten it was out there, and then The Boyfriend was behind me and he was so pissed and starts telling her she doesn’t need to come over banging on the door and screaming.  So I try and explain about how he was really sick and I forgot about the bag, and she just yells over me the whole time, really inappropriately—that’s not how adults deal with a problem.

So I put my hand up and say, “WAIT!”  She finally takes a breath.  I’m like, “Before you started screaming I had every intention of apologizing.  I had forgotten this was out here, so I’m sorry.”  I was saying it with a hard tone, but I wasn’t screaming by any means.

She kind of settles down, then goes on to say, “Well we’re talked about this before.”

Excuse me?  My mind went completely dumb.  We had?  Then I remembered.

Last fall I had these bites all over me.  My whole body swelled up.  TURNS OUT IT WAS BEDBUGS.

Anyway, the fuckers were coming from the apartment above us, so we had to truck all of our clothing out in big plastic bags and wash it at a laundry mat, AND TAKE THE CATS WITH US, while some strangers roamed around our apartment and sprayed it.  Anyway, in that process, we had like eight bags of clothing lined up in the hallway to take to the laundry mat.  She happened to come by at the same time—WHILE WE WERE CARRYING THEM TO THE CAR—and tells us we can’t leave trash in the hall.  How fucking stupid can a person be?  We tell her, WHILE CARRYING THESE BAGS, that we are moving them RIGHT NOW and they’re not trash—they’re our clothing because HER BUILDING gave us bedbugs (she didn’t know because the building is owned by a different company, I don’t really know her exact role).  We then had a conversation about the whole thing.  She settled down after we explained it.

So back to the present, I remember the bedbug situation, and I go off, “Seriously?  You mean when we had eight bags of NOT TRASH out here and were moving it when you came along?  That was NOT us leaving trash out!”

She basically says whatever and tells us it’s her job to check on these things.

Ah.  Finally I know what her job is.

Then she kind of goes to leave and I decide I’m not done.  “You know, you can’t just disappear after you knock because I am NOT going to answer the door to no one.”

She get all offended then and says, “Well, I guess I just have to announce myself from now on!”  Rolls her eyes, throws her hands up, that sort of thing.

I was downright PISSED.  I point to the shared door and tell her when other people are leaving that open constantly, I am not inclined to just answer the door when someone comes literally pounding on it at nine at night.  She seemed to get it then, she even told me she got it.  The Boyfriend warns us the cats are going to run out, so I basically shut the door on her, but she was already walking away.

What pisses me off so much is that she chooses to pick on us when the other people in this building are utterly disgusting and the general upkeep of the whole place is pretty much nonexistent.  The other tenants are loud as all fuck and are all perpetual smokers (but so is she so of course she sees no problem with a little extra cancer floating our way).  I can’t use my bathroom in the morning without feeling like I’m showering in an ashtray.  The people who have balconies have shit strewn all over them (I think someone is even growing pot), the dumpster is always overflowing and smells terrible, and the parking lot is filled with an assortment of cars that don’t have parking tags in them.  Half the screens in these windows are falling out, the doors have one inch gaps underneath them, the tile in the walkways are all ripped up, the cement stairs are crumbling, the washers both leak, the dryers smell like burning, and I could go on and on, but that’s really enough to prove my point.  How does one bag of trash warrant her tirade when all this other shit is going on?

And what made talking to us like that, like we are children, seem appropriate?

Total lack of sense.

Sorry, I just…ugh…I couldn’t.  FUCK LANDPEOPLE!