Don’t Be a Stranger | An Inconvenience a Day

Hey stranger,

It’s been a while. Today I’m writing to you from the desert — I mean Pittsburgh — to let you in on a few life updates — first one being that my apartment is hot.

Volcanically hot. I am constantly fanning myself with the nearest object. My new after class routine consists of pressing my stainless steel water bottle against my face in hopes of a reprieve. Sleeping with a sheet on feels like I’m being buried alive. Don’t even get me started on climbing Cardiac Hill in this weather. I feel like I lost some sort of bet. Also, there are a myriad of new friends hanging out in my kitchen — and by friends, I mean gnats, fruit flies, ants, the like.

My good friend, who is much more engineering-inclined than I, spent a grand total of 13 hours building my dresser. This was after my mother, my roommate, another friend of mine and I all took a shot at it. My mom accidentally hammered the nails through the sides of my dresser, so now there are very unaesthetic gashes in the wood. The third drawer does not attach to the track, so it is permanently lopsided and defective. My friend concluded her construction session with the words, “okay, just don’t open that one.” But hey, three out of four drawers ain’t bad. 

My sliding closet door completely broke off of the hinge within a day. This was after it got stuck, though, and I had to contribute all five feet of me into trying to knock the door down for about an hour. Really, my neighbors must love me. Then, my full-length mirror toppled over and shattered. Not only do I have to tiptoe around my room to avoid any stray shards, but I’ve got seven years of bad luck on top of that! 

My personal favorite moment of my first week centers around the bats that decided to split rent with my friends that live upstairs. I thought the bugs in my kitchen were bad, but bats in your kitchen definitely take the cake. The adventure included building a barrier out of cardboard boxes, donning lab coats and goggles for safety, throwing brooms, banging pots and pans and staying up until nearly six in the morning trying to get the bats to leave—all with no luck.

Obviously, maybe excluding the bat situation, these aren’t real problems. It’s a privilege to be able to complain about such first-world issues. You also have to admit, it’s a little bit fun. Before we know it, it’ll cool down into autumn, and soon we’ll be complaining about the cold instead. Think about it — what do you typically do to subtly keep a conversation going? You complain — “I’m so hungry,“ “it’s so cold in here,” “traffic was so bad,” etcetera. We spend our lives bonding over inconveniences. 

I ended up replacing my closet door with a curtain that, in my expert opinion, looks way cuter. My roommate and I created an apple/dish soap/hot water amalgamation to repel the bugs like little girls pretending to concoct a potion. Also, the cut up apple soaking in brown liquid that’s sitting in the kitchen sink is quite the conversation starter with our guests. And, thankfully, the bats are out of my friends’ kitchen.

Those 13 hours spent with my friend while she built my dresser were wonderful, and we talked for every second of them — and if we weren’t talking, we were laughing. I recently watched that same friend practice the guitar, and while she sang “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls, I admittedly got a little teary the lyrics — “And the best thing you ever done for me / is to help me take my life less seriously / It’s only life, after all.”

What I’m saying is, when these inconveniences build up, it can really get under your skin. There’s no better way to put it — life is annoying. It’s a pain. It’s a pest, like my new bug friends in my kitchen. But if you can take these annoyances and look for that hopeful sparkle of a silver lining, it really doesn’t seem all that bad. When you let yourself laugh over these things, when you learn how to take life, with all its charming irritants, less seriously, that’s when you’ll start to breathe a little easier.

I hope all of your fall semesters are starting off smoothly, and I hope your dressers are sturdy, your doors are intact and your kitchens are exterminated.