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Spices | Nov 22 2002

Problems with M. No one bothered to tell me how… specific she is. I bought new underwear, the exact kind she mentioned, but it’s not enough. I’ll be the first to admit this has made me oversensitive. Like for example, there was this thing with the spices.

I come home one day (a day she stayed in my apartment after I’d gone) and she’s put my spices in the cabinet. I don’t like my spices in the cabinet; I like them right there on the counter where I can reach for them whenever I want them. It would be different if the cabinet was over the counter, but it isn’t; it’s over the sink. And not only is it over the sink, but it opens the wrong way if you’re standing at the counter, which is where one normally stands when one needs spices. Granted the counter looks nicer without the spices cluttering it up, but this is not about aesthetics; it’s about usability. I mean, think about it. You’re at the counter and you need one of the spices. What do you do? Well, if the spices are in the fucking cabinet, I’ll tell you what you do. You take two steps to the side, open the cabinet, take down the spice you want, close the cabinet, step back to the counter, use the spice, step back to the cabinet, open the cabinet, put back the spice, close the cabinet, and step back to the counter. That’s lunacy. Underwear is one thing but I’m not doing this little dance every time I need to put salt in my oatmeal. Sorry.

A few days pass and I can’t stand it anymore and blurt out something about the spices. Why the fuck did she move them to the cabinet? Actually I don’t say fuck or anything like fuck. Instead I’m totally calm about it, as though it hardly matters to me, just idle curiosity. She says, “Oh, shit, I meant to move them back. I put them up there while I was cleaning the counter.”

Later this day I’m lying in bed and she’s in the shower and she’s pretending to talk to herself in there, only she practically yelling because she wants me to hear what she’s supposedly saying to herself, because it’s a kind of performance: Much Maligned Girlfriend Talking to Herself in the Shower. “Woe is me,” she yells, “I try to do something nice by cleaning his counter. I think, He’s going to come home and see how clean his counter is, but now look what happens…” and so on. It’s hysterical and I love her.

Right. But it’s not over yet. Because later this same night I’m about to go to sleep and I’m washing a few dishes and I happen to look over at the counter where the spices go…