fade away

I am still trying to work out the logic of living with people. You know, commune style (a.k.a. the houston compound). It is not like this is the first time I have lived with other people, Dordt gave me my intro to that. It was at Dordt that we discovered the roommate elimination rule (i.e. if you ask Justin if he had left the remote in the refrigerator, and he didn't then if must have been Joel. So regardless of who did it you still only need to ask one person. This only works when three of you are living together.). And of course the study of the ratio of time spent with the water closet and the corresponding time that should be allowed to pass before you allow it to be used again. This ratio is, of course, exponential.

Brielle and I have spent all of today working on the house in preparation for our guests tomorrow evening. There is a high school choir singing at the church and a few of them are sleeping here. When I saw the announcement in the church bulletin it made me remember the cool host on Dordt choir tour as well as the not so cool hosts. I don't know where we will fall on that scale but I was banking that we would score in the fair to middling range and so figured we should go for it, for the sake of the children. I will do my best that you get word of how it goes.

In the sake of being fair I should mention that we are also working on putting together some raised garden beds in the back yard. We have made it quite far on only recycled materials and, to boot, it looks cool.

But back to the commune math. It often seems that there should be less work and clean-up when sharing a space, but never does it ever come out that way for me. It always adds up to more. I do love a clean kitchen/house and as such often find myself working to keep it that way. It is hard in a shared environment to not allow yourself to feel like everything you do around the house is a favor to the others. In reality it is just part of living.

So here I sit. Glaring at and silently judging the few dishes left on the counter. Focus Matt. Breath. I am the zen center of the universe. I am calm as a Hindu cow. I am Phillip Glass. I am metamorphosis one, two, three, and four, but not five.