Dude! Mother’s still trolling me! I mean, check this out:
I had to laugh at your idea of a teensy weensy present……when I said tiny, I meant tiny! You’ll see. As for your dressing gown, what do you think your upmarket washing machine is for? Just put the offending item through a couple of washes with fabric softener, and it will be as good as new. Do you think I’ve never dropped anything in the toilet before? Of course I have, but I just fished the article out and laundered it. Problem solved!
—Mother
I’d just finished explaining about toilet contamination, how once something’s been in the bog, it’ll always have been in the bog. You can wash out the germs, but you can’t go back in time and steer clear of the loo. Whatever went in there remains toilet-contaminated, and anything it touches becomes toilet-adjacent. That’s just how it is. Toilet rules, y’know?
It’s like when I moved back to Vancouver, and I got food poisoning my first night. Well, ibuprofen poisoning, but I thought it was chicken. Anyway, I spent that night choking back vomit, because once the puke hit the bowl, that apartment would’ve become the vomit apartment, and I’d have had to move. First-night rules, yeah? Those first twelve hours set the tone for your stay, so you swallow your barf and reread your airport book. That’s just how it is.
I mean, I could retrieve my dressing gown from its isolation bag. I could wash it again, maybe think about wearing it. I’d flushed when I dropped it. It’s not like it’s…peed-on. It’s just, toilet rules. Contamination.
…contamination?
All right. I’ll admit it. I want a new dressing gown, not some frumpy old towel thing. Something fancy, like Sherlock Holmes might wear. I want to be more Baker Street, less shabby homebody. And my mother’s a troll. What the hell did she send?
Oh, check this out, from Google Translate:
It’s really only funny if you’re an opera fan, or if you speak Italian for some other reason—but that doesn’t say “what a terrible lightning whale.” I mean, it could, if you threw context and grammar out the window…but it doesn’t.
Anyway, I laughed. (In truth, I looked it up because I thought Google might translate it that way, but that didn’t keep me from giggling. Simple things, simple minds, and so on.)
RG Double Ghost 