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.