If I were to get married, we'd have a disrepairage.

Like I've already sort of gone over in my self-introduction, there are a number of simple household tasks that I have extreme difficulty completing. And this is, usually, not for lack of trying. I would like very much to be a normal, capable adult that never worries about trivial things that have a low probability of happening. But then I find myself wondering if my washing machine is going to blow up because it doesn't have a little place in the middle to pour detergent (like our washer at home does.) and I just poured it straight in. I know that this is okay to do because I have seen many more adept-at-life people doing it (it's especially okay if there's no place designated for the detergent.). And yet, I worry. I worry about things much stupider than that. This is probably because I don't know how to do most things that I consider 'adult'. I didn't know how to use the washer or the dryer until I started attending college last year. Even since learning how to use them, there are still many things I haven't learned. I only very recently asked my mom which water temperature goes with which color of clothing. I don't know anything about detergents or fabric softeners, I don't ever feel comfortable closing my door when the machines are going (because I fear explosions caused by inattention, as if the dryer were a difficult child) and every single, solitary noise the thing makes forces my heart to stop beating for a moment. This is a pain in my ass because washers and dryers are perhaps the loudest appliances there are.

What I'm trying to say here is, of the (admittedly few and mostly useless) things I'm good at, housewifedom is not going to be one of them.

..Not that I plan on being a housewife.

Continuing with the theme that noise frightens the hell out of me - which sprung up naturally as I was typing this, but now realize is a big part of my life - I think that if I were an animal, I'd be some sort of canine. This is not only because we've domesticated the hell out of dogs and they now, for the most part, need our care to survive, (This is an analogy describing myself and my parents, who I had to call to ask if it was okay to set the dishwasher to 'normal'.) but because I trust my senses far more than I should.

A dog can hear sound as high as 40,000 hertz. (Humans can hear up to 20,000 as children, and that decreases as we get older.)
Sitting in my room, no matter how cold it is, I always decide that I need the fan to be on. (The fan is the only machine that I get along with. I love the fan and the fan loves me. Should I get a tattoo that immortalizes the fan? I think..I think I should. These last two sentences explain awfully well why I never let myself get drunk. Because I was sober when I wrote them. I can't imagine what kind of crazy unearthly shit I'd think was a good idea if I were sauced.) When I'm in my apartment, which has air conditioning, I still rely on the fan. I set the thermostat to 69 (heheh.), then I put the fan on setting 2 and I lay under a fuzzy blanket. The blanket, as my mother would say, rightfully belongs under the other covers on my bed, but I take it out and lay on top of the covers. Because I'm a rebel that way. No, but it's really because there is a delicate balance concerning my body and heat. I once tried to do that with another blanket, and it was too fuzzy. It was wrong. Damn, this post is making me seem more complex by the minute. ANYWAY. What I was eventually trying to get around to saying was that the fan, no matter how much I love it, or how low I set it, makes noise. And with that droning noise filling the room, I can no longer hear other things as well as I normally can, but I convince myself, subconsciously (I never actually think, MAN I CAN HEAR LIKE A GOD.) that my hearing is so sensitive that I can hear tiny noises which my mind most likely creates just to trick me. Then I take those nonexistent noises and create stories for what they might be. If I think I hear a little clicking noise, I think, "Maybe someone's trying to pick the lock to my apartment.." or "Maybe my fish have found a way to jump through the little hole in the top of the tank, sprout legs through some form of accelerated evolution, and are attempting to pick the lock and get OUT of my apartment!" When I take into account just how many stories I create for the noises I've also created, I wonder why I haven't been creative enough to allow myself to finish writing an entire book, but I stop wondering why I never get any sleep. 

This personal phenomenon is far worse when I add a larger, more dangerous and less friendly-toward-me machine to the equation.

Dogs have 100 times more smell receptors per square centimeter than humans.
The oven we have at my house is, I suppose, a normal oven, but it is different than the one that my apartment has. In the oven at home, the heating coils are on the top - which, to me, makes sense, because..I envision the heat coming down from the coils and baking whatever I've put into the oven. In the oven at my apartment, the heat comes from the bottom, and, I suppose it swirls around in the oven, cooking it the same way the oven at home does, but to me, this makes less sense. I suppose, in my mind, heat is very constricted, and can only move one way. I don't know how I got to thinking that, but I can't help but find the oven here a little weird. It's this kind of thing that makes me think I might have been a racist in another life. I mean, it was the big thing back then, wasn't it? I have an oven at home that I'm all accustomed to, and then I come to college and use this strange oven that's different with its newfangled ideas and consequently find it weird and frightening. Get my drift? Good, I don't have to expand on it any more. (That could have been risky, but I'm going to leave it in. This blog is getting pretty edgy.)
Anyway, because I'm so freaked out by this oven which is new to me (it takes me years to trust these machines.) not only do I check on it constantly, but I take anything I smell as a bad sign. Even when the smell has a decidedly food-ish scent. Even when it smells exactly like the food I am cooking and is perhaps, for that reason, a good sign and not the sign of the cataclysmic oven related apocalypse that I take it for. Just as it does with my ears, my stupid imagination becomes a factor here, creating smells that probably don't exist, and stories to go along with them. Then, in another nightmarish combination, I take the scents and combine them with any sounds the oven might make. Is that cake smell the way burning plastic smells? No, I've got to have smelled burning plastic before..well, maybe not, but I feel like it's known as a very pungent odor..no, no. It's fine. It's just the cake letting me know how good it's going to be. Or maybe it's the cake calling to me for help. "HEY. THIS IS KATE THE CAKE INVADING YOUR NASAL PASSAGE. THIS IS HOW I CALL FOR HELP. COME CHECK ON ME." So I do. I end up checking on the cake about a zillion times. (Or even just glancing over the kitchen partition to see if an inferno has sprung up.) Which is probably why they never rise for me. They barely get any alone time in the oven - I'm sure it's their way of rebelling, the way a teenager might.

The way I compare all my uncooperative machines to misbehaving children should say a lot about the kind of mother I would make.

The other day, one of my room mates took it upon herself to clean the metal parts that go beneath the hot coiling parts on the top of the appliance. (Google was not helpful in coming up with the proper name for those.)

I came into the room and instantly sensed that something was wrong. I looked at the oven and saw that the coils were lying in the white center, completely detached. And the metal parts were gone. This room mate of mine is an adult by my classification. She was able to fearlessly take the oven apart and shove parts of it into the dishwasher. (That's TWO MACHINES, people!) I told myself that she knew what she was doing and let it go. But when the dishes were finished, and  looking at the parts that belonged attached to the oven, I felt..lost and frightened. The assembly seemed as simple as putting the metal plate down into its place, then fixing the coils so they connected to all the parts beneath the metal - so that the heat would travel along the coils properly. In my mind, this seemed as difficult as I imagine building a superconductor would be. (The idea of building something that could make magnets levitate seems like fucking wizardry to me.) I imagined myself struggling to connect coil A to metal part B, causing them to bang and scrape together repeatedly until they sparked a fire as if I were lighting a Bunsen burner. Needless to say I left the parts unassembled until someone else not only decided to do it, but also used the attached pieces to cook something. (Just to make sure it was safe before I tried it myself. I don't foresee much personal accomplishment in the firefighting field.)


Because of the personal idiosyncrasies this post details, I think that my 'marriage pool' is quite limited. It's more like my marriage puddle.

My Ideal Husband:

• Manages to make me laugh pretty much all the damn time.
• Is well read.
• Can kill bugs with a sort of manly ferocity that'd almost be hot if it didn't involve bugs.
• Is good at math and loves doing all math related things so that I never have to fail at them.
• Will let me correct his grammar and spelling without wanting to tear my head off.
• Will play video games with me. Or just watch me play them.
• Doesn't mind having to clean up after me if he wants the house to be clean.
• Is pretty much my best friend but also someone that I can have sex with.
• Isn't too..gooey. None of that PDA stuff.
• Can cook so that I never have to risk burning the house down.
• Will watch horror movies with me.
• Will watch foreign movies with me.
• Will watch foreign horror movies with me.
• Is capable of watching many seasons of a show, one episode after the other, all the way through without a pause.
• Doesn't mind having boisterous, uncensored, inappropriate conversations. 
• Doesn't mind being woken up at all hours of the night by my not-yet-close-to-sleep self, most likely wanting to be taken to get a smoothie. No, a bubble tea.
• Will get me an Amazon gift card if he can't think of a present to get me.
• Won't think it's perhaps a sign of schizophrenia that I speak to inanimate objects. No. He'll think it's cute. He'll like me MORE because of it. I realize I'm asking a lot of this guy. That's why he's nonexistent. 
• Won't give a shit about what a wedding looks like because I sure don't. We could just not get married, I don't care. That makes the potential break up messier and record scarring. 
• Will help me have a makeshift funeral for the lobster I ordered right there at the dinner table because I didn't realize the face would make me want to cry. (RIP Fast Eddie the underwater car salesman.)
• Will eat at Olive Garden with me every night during a vacation to NYC. (If only I was a lesbian, Sameera. If only.)
• Is semi-buff, Korean, and can sing and dance. [Okay, so I'm pressing my luck. But I don't care, I'm leaving it in. I'll just..put it in italics to signify that it's not necessary.]
• Loves animals. (Like, pets. I'm a dog person.)
• Above all, lets me be me. I don't need to be tied down and made to focus only on him and the relationship. I have my own life and he should have his.

It's a good thing that, unlike most women, I'm not focused on finding someone to marry. I mean, God, in places that list just got unbelievably, unrealistically specific. Good luck, possible future men.