Summer in the City

It’s summer in boston, all but officially, now. After a sopping May and breezily cool early June, the sun is finally exerting itself, alternating shiny-hot days with muggy-hot preambles to isolated T-storms; scattered T-storms; liberal sprinklings of T-storms.

It’s summer, and schools are out so kids have more time to help out on the farm during these peak growing months. Harvard Square has shifted its focus from late-night hungry undergrads to university-memorabilia-hungry summer school students and khakier-than-ever throngs of tourists eager to swallow specious legends about large campus buildings and thoroughly defiled statues.

The T, in its best days convenient but vaguely sketchy, has begun its transformation to tremoric miasma. Sweat makes its triumphant return. The view off the Longfellow Bridge tempts the unthinkable idea: maybe it would be cooler if I jumped in the Charles.

The weather and I are still in a sort of honeymoon period: brief, scattered showers come along break the humidity every few days, and my Danish skin has yet to feel the full effects of the sun’s blistering wrath. And soon, hopefully, we will know enough about the sun to tame it and bend it to our will. It’ll be nice if science can trump weather in this case, because, as I learned in my meterology class, science says that raindrop formation is exceedingly unlikely. Ella and my office-mate Mary Kate would tend to disagree with science in this case; they’ve both missed baseball games when astronomically small odds collided to form raindrops right over Fenway Park.

Felinity

This, by the way, is my cat:

This is my cat, again:

My cat and I are similar in many ways. Mostly, this is not so surprising; various people at many stages in my life have described me as “cat-like” or “somewhat feline.” I think these comments were usually brought on by my stretching a lot.

So, some of what I have in common with the cat may be a function of my catlike-ness, but some is definitely also due to my cat’s personality.

We both:

frequently sneeze.

were born with a healthy mistrust for water, which we are currently at some stage of overcoming.

like to climb up on things; sometimes can’t get down.

are convinced of the presence of something small and swift, moving just out of our field of vision.

tend to fall asleep in random places.

test what new things are through biting.

are interested in my knitting projects.

think we are entitled to drink out of the water glass on my nighstand.

fall off of things, then pretend we didn’t want to be up there anyway.

stretch.

sometimes think my sweaters might be plotting something insidious.

are irritated to be woken up by the thumping bass of the guy upstairs’ sound system as it noticeably vibrates the wall, floor, and bed.

enjoy chicken.

are fascinated by that bundle of feathers on the end of a string, and think we can catch it.

are intrigued by, but are often also a little frightened of, the outside world.

could not ignore that cardboard scratching post even a little bit more.

I may not be neat, but I am clean.

This entry is mainly, if not entirely, for the benefit of my mother, who has already heard—a few times at this point—that hard-to-utter phrase, “Mom, remember [that thing] you taught me [so many] years ago? That I used to complain about all the time? Well… you were right.”

I somehow don’t think she’ll mind hearing it again.

There are several things that my mother once taught or told me, that I really wish she had also told my roommate’s boyfriend, who pretty much lives in our apartment now. I didn’t used to think that these were things a person could only find out from my mom, in fact, I thought some of them were universal, but in this assumption I am apparently dead wrong.

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking of how I would teach these lessons if I were this guy’s mom. One thing I might say is: “putting peanut-butter-coated knives in the dishwasher results not in clean knives, but in knives and other dishes encased in a peanut-butter enamel—but it is understandable that you don’t know this, because you have never, to my knowledge, unloaded the dishwasher during the day while we’re all at work and you’re busy watching our cable TV and creating new generations of goo-covered knives.”

I might also suggest: “the towel that you carry with you into our bathroom before your shower, and wear out of the bathroom after the shower? Yes, that towel. You may use it to dry yourself off; no need to wander the bathroom, leaving puddles of water in your wake and spraying drops onto the mirror and toilet seat and into the cat litterbox, where they will clump with the litter to make small clusters too small to be caught by the litter scoop, but big enough to annoy the cat. Making proper use (or really, any use at all) of your towel will also allow the bathroom rugs to return to their normal state, which you’ll be surprised to find is not one of ever-drenched squelchiness. This will in turn allow us to avoid the situations in which I hang up said rugs to aid in their attempt to get from ‘soaked’ to only ‘very damp’ before your next shower, and then you ask me why it looks like ‘someone tore up the bathroom’ because ‘the rugs are all askew.’ ”

And: “speaking of the bathroom, if you are going to use my toothpaste consistently, it would be nice if you put it back in the place where you found it. Alternatively, maybe you could use your girlfriend’s toothpaste, which looks nothing like mine.”

Also: “the other three of us living here also tend to eat occasionally; it might not be safe to assume that a food item—or several—on a shelf that does not otherwise hold any of your girlfriend’s groceries in fact is—or are—hers. This is especially true of meat items, seeing as how your girlfriend is a vegetarian.”

At times, I wish I could have my mom call this guy up for a little refresher course in basic living techniques. Other times, I consider actually trying to mention these things to him in person, but my roommate, who shares my fairly low threshold for grossness and dirtiness in the apartment, has not noticeably attempted to effect a change in his ways, which makes me think she has tried and failed in the past.

Incidentally, I would have included “squeeze out the sponge after using it so it doesn’t fester with mildew,” but I have had to accept that this is fairly esoteric knowledge, based on the constant oozing wetness of the sponge in the kitchen at my office.