I woke up this morning trying desperately to remember what day of the week it was and whether there was anything special about it. As of this writing, it's Friday, and no.
It has become clear that I have moved into a situation of grinding poverty. I knew when I got here that nobody was going to have any money. Literally everybody involved in this venture is disabled in some way, which in modern America means you are left to starve by default. What I didn't realize until I got here is that the other two kids in this apartment grew up in this kind of deprivation, without any useful parental figures of any kind.
When I arrived, there was no bath mat. I assumed this was because everyone was skint and had better things to do with $8 than buy one. I probably had better things to do with that money, but I was tired of slipping on wet tile, so I went and ordered one anyway. They said thank you. I also ordered a wire shelf for the freezer, because I was tired of vegan "patties" trying to avalanche onto my feet every time I opened the door. They said WAIT SHIT WHAT FREEZER SHELVES ARE A THING? I said yes, you can get them for $10 on Amazon. My parents were emotionally abusive and neglectful, but they were also upper-middle class and WASPy as fuck. The one thing they did do at a near-Olympic level of expertise was buy fucking housewares.
I gave the shorter housemate a bag of toiletry samples I keep around for travel, because who the fuck knows when that will be happening again. They were astounded by the quality. The samples were all products I use or have used. None were expensive. When people ask me what kind of shampoo I use the answer is "the kind that is on sale 2/$7 when I go to CVS". I get annoyed when I have to buy more Cetaphil once every four years and it costs $14.99 a vat instead of $6.99.
Tuesday night, everyone had oodles of fun talking to the EMTs. Short Housemate has a laundry list of medical problems, and "asthma" is on it about six times. We were busy getting all seven house rats treated for lice (oh, yes -- the rats are scratching themselves scabby again, and between the two of us, we had seven at the time), a process that involves cleaning all the cages thoroughly and having the individual rats out and quarantined for an hour while the Revolution dries, so the other rats don't groom it off them. Brief tangent, vet visits ain't free, there is a GoFundMe here.
Short Housemate's love for rats and allergy to rats are almost equal. They had a coughing fit that turned into an asthma attack, lunged for their inhaler and found that didn't fix it, sent Tall Housemate (their gf) off to get their nebulizer, found that didn't fix it, foolishly tried to stand up, conked right out on the floor in front of me and had a hypoxic seizure. I asked Tall Housemate if they'd ever done this in front of her before. Answer: No. Okay then. Time for 911. Short Housemate has what I gather is some pretty nasty history with hospitals and Tall Housemate has mentioned being on the spectrum and has been told 'no hospitals' by Short Housemate, so I had to contend with the two flailing at me trying to get me off the phone while I waved at both of them to fuck off and told the dispatcher where we were.
I get to do this about once a decade. The last time it happened, we lived in an apartment literally behind an ambulance station. The roommate in question had been so sick she was unable to keep anything down, including water, for two days, which she had not bothered to tell us. I stole her shoes while she was on the floor and hurled them back into the bowels of the apartment so she couldn't be a dumbass and try to go to work like that, phoned her boss to tell him that she'd passed out on the bathroom floor so he wouldn't let her go to work like that, and told her that if she didn't gather her shit and call her sister to take her to the ER I was going to hover over her until she lost consciousness again, at which point I would go next door and summon the paramedics in person.
I've now been apologized to by Short Housemate, Tall Housemate, and a related third party who was on the phone with them from a different state at the time, who all told me I did the right thing. Yes, I know, that's why I did it. I would like Short Housemate to be alive to be pissed at me later. The fact that this was the correct thing to do was confirmed by the way the EMTs refused to leave our living room until either Short Housemate could breathe well enough to talk to the attending on the phone, or they agreed to ride in the whoo-whoo wagon to the actual hospital, where they could be given the really good drugs under supervision.
This evening I got to make a three-hour round trip out to Lowell to pick up yet more rats. People keep contacting Short Housemate to take rats who need new homes, and they are terrible at saying no. This set belonged to a lady who was incredibly flaky about getting them to us, and also owned a snake so was probably not so big on #ratlivesmatter, if you catch my drift. She ghosted us twice before I said I would just goddamn go up to Lowell on the train and get them from her.
Lowell, MA, was a lovely town about 100 years ago, and hasn't quite caught up since. It's at the end of the commuter rail line, so that was a nice 45 minute ride that I got to spend staring out the window, because the car wifi wasn't working and my tablet was running out of battery. She said the rats were skittish so I was prepared for biting, but no; she just didn't know anything about rats. They were wiggly and zoomy, but it took me all of two minutes to scoop them out of the shoebox she had them in and plop them into the cat carrier I brought. Then I got right back on the same train I'd just gotten off of to get back into Boston, where the conductor saved me from having to buy a return ticket by not giving two shits, which is frequently the case.
[The commuter rail out here could be accurately described as "laissez-fare". The conductors tend to only check passes in the direction the regular commuters are going (in my case, from Boston to Lowell at 5 o'clock on a Friday) and otherwise just sort of walk through the car making sure you're not setting the seats on fire or trying to transport cattle to a flag stop or whatever. If you're traveling from one stop outside of the central zone in Boston to the next stop outside of Boston, they will be annoyed if you actually stop them and attempt to buy a ticket.]
The two rats are much younger than she thought they were. She said six months; they look more like 4-ish, and sort of small for that. My guess is that they were fed nothing but plain lab block, which is okay for them, but does not result in the sort of squashy chonks that my rats generally are. We promptly fed them scrambled eggs and peas, which they devoured. The boy is mine and is named Tseng, because I have a theme here; the girl belongs to Short Housemate and, as she has been living in a cage with the boy(!?!?!?) is predictably already pregnant.
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