Maxigumee

My karma has been so out of whack this week it is not even funny. Monday afternoon I had a dentist appointment. They wanted me to come in so they could laser some of my gums off to see if the oral surgeon had installed a bracket on one of my teeth. The oral surgeon didn’t. So not only did I have to have my gums lasered, I need to go back to the oral surgeon next Monday to have them lasered even more. I’m not looking forward to another roadblock in my future. That’s kind of how I think of these things. I would like to have a completely carefree road of pleasantness to look forward to. Like my Halloween party. But I know that I need to endure the pain of going to the oral surgeon before I can get to that point. I thought that this whole thing would be over with by now but um….. guess what! It’s not!

Oh, and then my mom went on a business trip and you know what that means. Mr. Maxwell becomes Mr. Homemaker. Mister Maxwell Homemaker must cook the dinner, do the wash, fold the towels, clean the dishes. Not because I’m required to, but because if I don’t, the accumulated mess from both my sister and my father will make me want to throw myself out of our attic window. I spent a lot of my time the last three days cleaning up the kitchen that I worked SO. HARD. to clean on Sunday. I have been obsessing over getting the kitchen one hundred percent spotlessly clean and pretty so I can get into cooking. I never cook, but Martha makes it look so easy.

I got home from school on Monday or Tuesday to find that my father hadn’t bothered to clean any of the dishes or knives or anything from breakfast that morning. There were knives sitting on the counter that still had butter attached to them and there were crumbs from cutting bread scattered over the counter. I had to clean. I put away the clean dishes, I washed the dirty ones and put them in the dish washer, I threw out anything that looked throwoutable. Apparently I should not have done that. In my attempt to tidy up the kitchen so that it meets my perfectionist standards, I managed to go screw up a bunch of other things for me. The events that followed are so slap-you-in-the-face ironic and cause-and-effect-y that it makes me kind of sick.

My father woke up Wednesday morning to find that he could not find his coffee scoop. Cue the screaming. “MAXXX! WHERE ARE THE COFFEE CANS?”

“I put them under the sink.”

“THEN WHERE IS THE COFEE SCOOP THAT WAS IN THE CANS?”

“Oh…. I think I threw that out. Don’t all coffee cans come with a scoop in them?”

“WHAT? WHAT? OHMYGOD JESUS ALMIGHTY HOLY POOP. YOU’RE INSANE. YOU ARE FUH-LIPPING OUT.”

“You’re kind of scaring me right now.”

My father then retrieved all of the garbage bags from the last few days and emptied them onto the floor. Cue even more screaming. “ANA! ANA! LOOK! REMEMBER THOSE COOKIES THAT YOU WERE LOOKING FOR YESTERDAY? MAX THREW THEM OUT! MAX! ANA WANTED TO ENJOY THESE COOKIES WHEN SHE GOT HOME FROM SCHOOL YESTERDAY AND YOU THREW THEM OUT. YOU’RE NUTS. YOU’RE NUTS!”

“Um…. well, they were just lying there on the counter. I thought they were left out overnight.”

“OH GOD. IS THIS MY SHAMPOO?! WHY WOULD YOU THROW OUT MY SHAMPOO?”

“It’s empty and I found it under the kitchen sink. I thought that somebody just put it there.”

“THAT’S MY SHAMPOO. DO NOT TOUCH MY SHAMPOO.”

“How was I supposed to know that you like to wash your hair in the kitchen sink?”

I went upstairs, kind of freaked out about my father’s fit and I ironed the clothing that he was supposed to have done the night before. I then looked online for the standard coffee scoop size. It turns out that the standard coffee scoop size is one tablespoon. How convenient! We have like fifty of those in the kitchen. I went downstairs and told my father. “WHY DID YOU GO ON THE INTERNET? IT’S BECAUSE YOU HAVE OCD, ISN’T IT?! IT’S YOUR OCD!”

My father found his coffee scoop in one of the garbage bags and put it back into one of the new coffee cans. That wasn’t the end of my karmic punishment for throwing things out. My father developed a case of the sniffles. When my father gets the sniffles, he hardly ever uses a tissue. Instead, he snorts up a wad of snot in his nose every five seconds or so. The noise of snot snorting is seriously one of the most irritating in the world. When we went to Rite Aid later in the day, I begged my father to buy some DayQuil.

“I’m not spending my money on that.”

It just so happens that in my cleaning spree, I threw out the rest of the Nyquil and DayQuil that was left over from when I had a cold. It’s like the freaking Gift of the Magi except worse. There is snot snorting involved.

Oh, and that is not all. There were a series of sequential annoyances over the three day period that my mother was on her business trip. Like the time when my math teacher called on me on the spot and I had absolutely no idea what was going on and I tried to do the problem in my head and ended up spewing out a line of incorrect answers. It turned out that I was looking at the wrong problem, but but the time I realized it, the damage was done. I am officially scarred for life from math class.