Fry Baby

After dining with the other LL last night, I returned home and was suddenly overcome with motivation to clean! I don't know why. It was late-ish and I was tired, but I thought "Hmmm... my friend might be crashing here tomorrow night. I should probably tidy up a bit."

Additionally, I was over D's apartment on Sunday night while he was cleaning (I read the UMass Alumni magazine for the first time ever while he focused on the cleaning), which for D involves getting on his hands and knees with a sock soaked in some sort of cleaning product and cleaning his entire apartment's floor by hand. I said "D, I don't know how you spend any time in my apartment. You must be disgusted." Then "D, why do you put such love and care into the floors of an apartment you don't own?" He said "Because, it has to be liveable." "But wouldn't it be fine if you just, like, swept? And maybe mopped every so often?" He does this at least once a week. I then said "D, you'd better stop doing this. You're making me want to move in with you." I'd be exempt forever from doing any sort of cleaning if I lived with him. How appealing!

My kitchen floor has some shady areas, areas that were un-clean before I moved in. I'd mopped a couple times but the areas were never cleaned. I just assumed that there was no hope, that the floor was stained, but last night I thought "Perhaps I should try the Cinderella-clean-the-floor-on-my-hands-and-knees-while-scrubbing- unglamorously method that D has had such success with."

Miraculous!

Since my entire apartment began to reek of cleaning product, I decided to air things out and opened a window.

Within two seconds my entire apartment smelled like Fried.

Fried what? I don't know.

It was immersed in Fried.

Like someone had turned on 4204 deep fryers in my apartment, not in order to fry anything in particular, but just heated up oil. Tons of it.

I shut the window immediately, but it was too late.

Everything was soaked in the aroma of Fried.

What do you do in this situation? You can't air out your apartment, because if you open the window, it will just get worse. I lit candles and hoped it would go away.

D turned up late - he'd gone to see Transporter 2 - and I said "Does it smell like..."

"Fried? Yes. It's the people on the second floor."

"Could you tell what they were frying?"

"Chicken?"

"No, its definitely not meat. It just smells like Fried."

"French fries?"

"Maybe."

Later D revised his statement and said that he thought it smelled like a fried dessert of some sort.

"That's actually just the smell of Fried mixed with fruity-smelling red candle, darling."

"Oh."

I was reminded of how Former Roommate RM used to cook meat on his George Foreman Grill, and how, because my bedroom was closest to the kitchen, all of the meat stench would accumulate in my room and there was nothing I could do.

It seemed that the fried had dissipated this morning, but its possible I'd just habituated to it.

At about 12:30am, D said "Oh my god. I haven't stopped thinking about the strawberry milkshake you didn't have. I think I am going to go to McDonald's right now and get one for us to split."

"Oh, well, if you want one, but I don't want any. It's too late for food."

I said this (a) because I didn't want the milkshake anymore and (b) because I was dying for fried dough.

Those bastards on the second floor!