Earlier today I walked over to my landlord’s apartment to
hand her my June rent check. In doing so, I would effectively be
extending my year-long lease, which I signed last June, for another
year.
But she wasn’t there, so I walked back to my apartment.
The implications of another year at this place weighed heavily on
my soul, and I began to think of the etymology of the word
“landlord.”
Lord of the land. Having a landlord kind of makes me feel like I
am someone’s serf. Picture Russia in the 1600s, me coming
home after a hard day of working in the field. (Note: I thought it
would be cute to write the word “field” in Russian. So,
I went online and got the Russian translation for the word
“field,” but it was in all these weird Russian
characters, and when I pasted the word into this Word document it
looked like this: ?>;5. So, I decided not to use it.)
I’d have dirt under my nails and a sickle in my hand.
I’d be so tired from threshing wheat and arguing with my
comrades about Marxism that I’d fall asleep on the couch
watching SportsCenter.
Well, Bob Dylan says you gotta serve somebody, so I don’t
mind being a serf. In fact, in the 1979 song “Gotta Serve
Somebody,” he actually sings, “You may be the
heavyweight champion of the world/You might be somebody’s
landlord, you might even own banks/But you’re gonna have to
serve somebody, yes indeed.”
Well look at that, just like Bob Dylan, I’m writing about
sports and landlords. Now I don’t know too much about boxing,
but I do know quite a bit about living in an apartment. Last July I
wrote a column about the sport of self-sustainment ““
household activities as sports. It has been almost a whole year
since that column, and knowing what I know now, I know back then I
was an idiot.
So, from taking out the trash to cleaning the bathroom to
vacuuming, let’s look at some of the household sports and
separate myth from reality.
A year ago I wrote taking out the trash was a strong man
competition. Well, a year later, the only strong man competitions I
know about are shown on ESPN. Those guys have to lift and carry the
most random stuff. Sure, they could stick with dumbbells or
weights. But that isn’t half as interesting as dragging an RV
across a football field or throwing rusty boat anchors.
No, around here it’s my roommates who take out the trash.
My roommates often wonder why, even when the apartment smells, I
decline to remove the smelly trash can from the kitchen. The answer
is: I don’t know. I just don’t know why I don’t
do it.
“I’ve never seen you do it,” my roommate Alex
said. “But that doesn’t mean you haven’t done
it.”
Actually, Alex, that’s what it means.
Next, we have the bathroom. As a rule of thumb my roommates and
I try to clean the bathroom once every two months, or at least the
day before a girl is supposed to come over. The problem is, last
time I tried to clean the bathroom, I almost killed myself.
I had just dumped some toilet bowl cleaner in the toilet and
moved on to clean the rim of the toilet bowl with some disinfectant
spray. As I sprayed the ammonia-based disinfectant all over the
toilet, I thought about the bleach-based toilet bowl cleaner. Now,
I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure that the mixture
of ammonia and bleach produces a deadly gas. Realizing this, I ran
out of the apartment crying. I haven’t cleaned the place
since. Score one for the bathroom.
The most acrobatic household sport is vacuuming. With a bit of
grace and good conditioning, one can excel at this sport ““
it’s a lot like synchronized swimming. The last time I
vacuumed my bedroom, I was in quite a hurry and didn’t have
time to pick up all the clothes that littered the floor. Things
were going smooth until I came across a sock. For some reason I
thought I could vacuum over the errant sock. Surely, the vacuum
cleaner was not powerful enough to suck up a tube sock.
Score one for the vacuum cleaner.
So as the year draws to a close, my apartment leads the series
3-0. Hey, there’s always next year.
I’ll see ya later alligators. E-mail Miller at
dmiller@media.ucla.edu, and have a safe summer.