I’m now almost entirely certain that my house is filled with tiny cameras. You say latent schizophrenia, I say healthy paranoia. Human beings just don’t act this strangely without a script. I am an unwilling participant in some sort of social experiment, or reality TV show, or both: of this I am sure.
My landlady, the Crazy Frog, is getting weirder by the day. The washing machine recently broke. She helpfully taped a sign to it reading, “Broken! Repairman called!” (except I think she managed to misspell every single word). Several days went by with no sign of this purported repairman, and a few of the tenants had the temerity to ask her when the machine would be fixed. Faced with this unreasonable demand she exploded in a fit of apoplectic rage, screaming that she wasn’t going to fix it at all and that she was going to kick everyone out of the house. She hasn’t yet gotten around to issuing mass eviction notices, but she has taken the sign off the machine, which now sits silent and derelict whilst the healthy wum-wum-wum of her own machine blares through the wall of her private flat. I’ve been doing my washing in the tub all week. I feel like a pioneer, scrubbing and wringing out my clothes by hand! I think I’ll start wearing a bonnet and churning butter in the living room.
CF has issued one of the tenants with an eviction notice, which she left lying out on the kitchen table for everyone to see (presumably as a warning to the rest of us). The notice claims that he owes her money (he denies this) and that she will be commencing legal proceedings against him (she recently claimed to be a lawyer. Next week she’ll probably claim to be a chimneysweep, or a cheese Danish).
V has been a little late on the rent this month, as she’s waiting for her bank card to be delivered (I estimate that half the country is waiting for a bank card to be delivered at any given time). Crazy Frog caught up with her yesterday, and to distract her from the issue of the rent, V ingeniously burst into tears, claiming to have broken up with her boyfriend (which she did, about three months ago). It sure did the trick. CF sent me frantic, indecipherable e-mails all day telling me to “Take care V she need you she is so uppset”; and yesterday when I ran into two of the housemates, they swarmed me and demanded to know if V was OK.
“Uh…yeah? She’s just downstairs.”
“Oh, thank God! CF told us she was going to kill herself.”
You stupid people! Don’t you know that DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION?
God help us all.