Saturday, Dirty Saturday
By Lauren Pincente

Cleaning an apartment that has not seen a good scrub in months is never fun. Mildew builds up on surfaces, dust somehow gets stuck to places it should not even be near and there is likely a pile of hair behind something you did not know you had to clean behind. I finally gave my condo a thorough once-over today and I can attest that all these situations are commonly found when cleaning.

My most dreaded space to clean is the bathroom. Did you know that you have to actually clean the bottom of the toilet because there is dew that builds up? Did you know that no matter how much you clean yourself, your shower has dirt stuck to the floor? I scrubbed and scrubbed today until I thought I was having a heart attack. I distracted myself with music from my iPod but to no avail: by the end, I was sweating through my "Cougar" t-shirt and my favourite jogging pants were covered in vim. I was dizzy, drained and hot all over. Cleaning is difficult.

The worst part about cleaning a bathroom is the bathtub drain. My hair has gotten pretty long and thin but I am never one to go all trichotillomaniac on it and pull it out for fun. Somehow, hair seems to float everywhere in my apartment-- I usually have to vacuum the floors about once a week. The bathroom drain, however, is a whole other story. People often use the cliche "out of sight, out of mind" and in this case, it definitely applies. Not being one to clean my bathtub regularly (what? The dirt means you have grip!) I often find myself about once a year remembering to clean the drain. I shower daily. I lose a lot of hair. You do the math.

Today, I finally remembered that it had been about a year since I cleaned the drain. Those who know me well know that I am not one who vomits easily. I can watch horror movies and torture videos, look at dead bodies and I am always the one to clean up another person's vomit. I am insensitive to grossness and scary situations (proof: last night a crackie crashed into me on the street singing "I'm gonna rock 'n' roll 'til '64!" and I could not stop laughing. Love the downtown crackies!).

[Left] A Really Dirty Bathroom (Not Lauren's).

After scrubbing down the bathtub to about as white as it can get (though it still has a nice yellow tinge to it), I reached down inside when I noticed it was draining too slowly. It felt like someone had dumped a pot of old spaghetti down the drain (had I? I do weird things when I am drunk...). With a very hard tug, up came soggy, shampoo-filled hair, the thickness of a ponytail. And it kept coming up. Visualize a magician's scarf-up-the-sleeve trick. Yep. It was that bad. But here's the kicker: after I had pulled it all up, saying, "ew ew ew ew ew..." the entire time, I remembered a scene from "The Ring". Anyone who has seen that movie knows how gag-inducing the scene was, when Naomi Watts starts choking and pulls a clump of hair out of her mouth and the hair keeps feeding until a necklace comes out. The second I thought of that, I started to gag to the point where I was leaning over the toilet, trying to thwart the urge to throw up. Keep in mind: Naomi gagged up a much smaller amount of hair.

It was so disgusting, I felt the need to take a picture of it as it lay there, like a dead squirrel in the road, on my bathtub floor. I wanted to post it on the internet to show people what their cleaning personnel or moms go through when they clean their disgusting bathtubs (especially for Italian men who never get off their asses to clean and are the hairiest of the bunch. Dad.). Lucky for anyone reading this, I decided against it. While I could tell the horrors I had seen, I could never show. It was that disgusting.

The moral of the story? Clean your bathrooms, assholes. You will regret later if you let the mildew and dirt and hair build-up because you will be vomiting instead of cleaning, making it worse. Also, respect your cleaning lady if you have one. It takes a lot for a person, especially a stranger, to tug your nasty hair out of the drain.

Coloured Bitter
By Lauren Pincente

If you happen to have been to my condo, you know that I like to paint each room a staggeringly different colour. From the blood red study to the chocolate brown living room, the walls of each quarter stand out. Today, in my boredom, I thought it would be wise to finally finish painting the rooms that I have yet to do: the bathroom and the bedroom. My father pressured me to keep it white, but did I listen? Nooooo, of course not, I'm too stubborn to do that. After fiddling with my Colour Your World colour palette for about 2.5 seconds, I picked a colour and was off to buy my paint.

I got to Colour Your World around 8pm and was helped by a very friendly but sadly dumb Chinese lady. I should have known when I saw her making her job about ten times harder than it actually was that I should wait to have someone else mix my paint colour for me. An older, grumpy lady kept walking by about every minute or so to correct what the Chinese lady was doing or to point out ways that she could make her life a whole lot easier. When the Chinese lady ran around, confused, looking for eggshell bathroom paint, I tried to whisper to Mrs. Bitter Barn that I thought she should check what the other woman was doing but she was too wrapped up in checking out her caked on make-up.

I knew that a problem was arising because I've been in this situation before with paint colours but I did nothing to stop it, assuring myself it would be okay. The colour I had chosen was the darkest, most royal blue I could find because my marble countertops and tiles have specks of grey in them. Like so many people I know, the colour looked good on paper but was pretty much a disaster. When the Asian lady had finished it and showed it to me, it looked almost like a baby blue. I guess a look of doubt was on my face because she somehow convinced me by testing it on a sheet of paper that it looked good so I paid and was off.

Happy about my $15 activity for the evening (on a budget you have to find fun things to do for very little, says Cosmo!), I came home and began painting. Up to this point in time, there is one coat on the walls of my bathroom. To put it simply, the colour looks like the kind of blue that overeager parents would paint the room of their firstborn son. I like dark and gawdy. I don't DO children's rooms. Needless to say, I am angry. My night is ruined. Colour Your World has coloured my fucking apartment an annoying shade of happiness.