This is a continuation from my last post, that dealt with my birthday and how my stay in Italy turned sour. This is not a novel, but only a story about how 2 of my flatmates made my 24th birthday the worst day I had probably ever spent on Earth. And I have known bad days before.
It is divided into ‘Chapters’ in order to facilitate reading as it is quite long and you may want to read it in a few times, unless you find yourself so enthralled in the story that you can’t wait to know what happens next and keep on reading till the end ;) Here it goes. Illustrations will come a bit later, with ‘beautiful’ pictures of our main characters.
The Pumpkin Massacre: a tale of discrimination, petty-mindedness, and uneducated people
Chapter 1
INTRO
So the birthday was going on fine with all my friends and I think there was not one who was not having a good time. That was until my flatmates came. So let me brief you a bit about that.
I lived in an apartment where 6 girls (all Italians) used to live, but 2 had to go do a few months abroad. So, I was leased one room for the few months I in turn had to be in Italy. Out of the 6 girls, as I found out the hard way later, 3 were ok with it while another 2 were really not, with a 3rd one with no personality who just went along with what she was told to go with.
CHARACTER BRIEFING: Big Sofa Pumpkin (BSP for referencing purposes…Bullshit Pumpkin!!hahaha!she was full of it anway)
Of the 2 who were not ok, one was..hmm how to say..let’s say 2 and 1/2 times my size, spoke at the same volume as that at which normal people yelled (I have no idea if this is related to her big size or not or to hearing impairments or to being oblivious that other people (unlike her) could hear, which was probably not the case as she sometimes thought out loud or talked to herself or sang song fragments or listened to her music all at volumes that would hurt the human ear – referring to our respected professor V for this one). So this one has as her usual ‘territory’ the small two-seater sofa that usually stays in the kitchen. The horrifying thing is that when she sits on it, they both merge n veand it is almost impossible to tell where one starts or the other ends. They become like a morphed version…it’s like transformers in even more F*ed up! And tons and tons grosser, too. This one is Big Sofa Pumpkin.
CHARACTER BRIEFING: Alzheimer Granny Pumpkin (AGZ for referencing purposes..haha the letters can be rearranged as GAZ! GAS! LoL!)
The second one. The top boss. The most hated. The one who supposedly dictates everything only to have it all explode in her own face. Speaking of exploding in her own face, maybe that is what happened earlier in her life as..GOD! she is fugly. She is younger than I, but damn…looks at least twice my age. Her face is…to say the least, wrinkled and the skin seems rough from far…Personally, I’d be scared to touch it. I think even l’Oreal (NON, elle ne le vaut pas – reverse slogan specially made for her) would be unable to do anything to help. So yea, more about the beauty of her face..maybe she realised it herself because, as funny as it sounds, she herself hides her face in ALL her pictures. I repeat, ALL of them. The items that hide the face vary…they sometimes come from the environment such as trees and branches or they sometimes are man-made such as towels and scarfs or whatever. So Alzheimer Granny Pumpkin is not only a granny-lookalike, but also seems to have the memory and annoying habits of one. She forgets easily, or maybe selectively (yea right!) remembers. And also, being a know-it-all control freak. Scary combination eh? And yes, she is also a pumpkin who tries to hide her ‘Pumpkinness’ with loose clothes and many layers.
Chapter 2
THE HAPPENINGS
In the middle of the party while we were all chilling at the apartment and chatting, GAZ came back and immediately started bitching. “Oh what is going on here,” acting as if she had no idea even though I had told them. She was accompanied by a nice flatmate, who came to wish me happy birthday first thing upon entering. Then, begrudgingly, GAZ came to wish me with clenched jaws.
NEXT MORNING
I had to go to Bologna early in the morning to file a deposition against sotame dude who had been scamming international students in Italy and stealing their money and all. So even th0ugh I went to bed late, I woke up early to go there. I was held up at the station along with the 4 others who went due to administrative procedures and I only got back to the apartment, that I now call Pumpkin Farm, in the afternoon at around 16h. So imagine the state in which I was in: little sleep, tired as hell, stressed from having to remember those things about how we were scammed, having to travel and then wait for the ‘locals’ who were late..ugh!
THE BSP CLIMAX
Yeah so I just stepped in after a tiresome trip, and add the heat on top of that, and went to get a drink of water as I was frankly dehydrated. I had not even put my bottle to my mouth when BSP started yelling at me about my having a party and not having cleaned up yet and about making noise at night (she was not even here, so I don’t know why…). I smiled back and asked for them to let me just take a sip of water and then I would clean up. Boy! My calm reaction acted as a catalyst to their incendiarty tendencies and she pretty much blew up! Thankfully only figuratively as I cannot imagine that much pumpkin all over the place. So all this episode was in Italian so far, when I looked at her and said ‘Calma..’ God..I never knew being calm could annoy others so much! Or maybe I did..hehe. Well she could not take it and lambasted me for being a foreigner and not speaking or understanding Italian (even though she had been yelling at me in Italian for the past few minutes) and asked the other girls to explain to me in English. The funny thing about this is that she kept leaving the room, then coming back, then leave again, then come back again, and repeated that throughout her ‘argument’. Only to finally leave to her room and slam the door, then yell even louder that she had to study now. Weird.
I had planned to clean up anyhow, but had not done so due my previous engagements. So since I was ‘home’ and had drank something, I set out to clean up. I cleaned up the whole kitchen/living room, including the mess the girls had made while I was not here. I swept the floor, wiped it with some disinfecting solution, and took out the trash (mine, and theirs too, that somehow piled up all of a sudden as I was cleaning.) Nothing more normal, until GAZ tried to pour fuel in the fire.
THE GAZ CLIMAX(ES)
As I was finalising everything, she nonchalantly said ‘Oh you should clean it in this and this way.’ I was like I just cleaned everything pretty well in front of you. She insisted and the issue came to standards and how hers were higher than mine and bla bla. I retorted that she could clean it herself in the way she wanted. Well, the ripost was surprising: ‘YOU are the one who partied so YOU clean it!’ What was I..a slave? Slavery has been abolished long ago GAZ..maybe she did not get the memo while she was stuck up in her own little world. The standards issue made me think about how could she have such high standards…did her serious lack of any personality or physical attractiveness make her seek comfort into controlling her environment? Possible.
That was not all. By came the night, so beautiful and refreshing compared to that day. I was in a somewhat good mood for it was still my birthday even though the prior discriminatory abuse I had received had somewhat shaken me to the core [which is quite rare FYI]. So I then started to get to the emails and messages I received, including e-cards from the family and close friends. I was in the middle of that when our beloved Granny came by and pointed to me and made the ‘Get over here’ motion with her index finger [that would have looked sexy on any other girl but God..it was disgusting on her]. I was wondering what was the matter and went to see what had happened. She pointed to my clean bathroom that I had cleaned on the eve and asked, in English, ‘What is this?’. Thinking I was in 8 years old again instead of 24, I was like ‘I don’t know…a bathroom?’. Very denigratingly, she said ‘You should clean this bathroom! Before I came only you were using this and nobody else! Look at this [as she walked to the toilet and tried to show me something that was not there]’. I followed to see if maybe I had missed something. She had just come from Portland, so she sure felt proud of her English and, acting all American on me, said ‘I am a Lay-day (lady)! Do you want ‘me’ [pointing to herself] to put my ‘ass’ [single-handedly slapping her fat butt, which seriously almost makes me throw up as I think of it] on this??’. The single quote marks highlight her accent while she was talking as it was seriously funny when she said that..typical satirical-clown moment I might say. Then I saw a tiny bit of rust that was on the toilet, that had come off the hinges after she had slammed down the seat [can’t have been me since I leave the seat up]. I picked it up and went back to the kitchen where she was preparing to merging with the sofa and asked her to come see if the bathroom was clean enough for her majesty, to which she bestowed me with her highest level of trust and told me that she trusted that I had done it right. I insisted, smiling with clenched teeth and having a fiery gaze, that her majesty get her lay-day ass up and come check the bloody effing clean bathroom to see if she saw anything? Maybe dead people too?
The next morning, I was up early as usual. I never knew pumpkins had to be stocked in their crates for so long every night for they only appeared after hours and hours after the sun had rose. When they did, I was on my computer trying to see if I could answer emails/messages that I had received on the eve [on the occasion of my birthday] when GAZ entered the kitchen, ‘accidentally’ unplugged my laptop cable with her foot, and kept on walking. I called it walking for the sake of easy writing, but it was more like dragging her feet in furry bunny slippers that were big enough for her to stick her head in and make it seem like she had a moustache.
THE END AND A SHORT EPILOGUE
I left the same afternoon with the help of 2 friends [thank you to you both btw, PMPM and CF] as I could not tolerate such petty-minded inviduals who were frankly the most uneducated people I had met in my life [even more than my future ex-brother-in-law, who was the reference to everything stupid that I knew on earth prior to this event in Cesena, province of Emilia-Romagna, Italy]. What had perhaps saddened me the most was that GAZ was part of the same program that I am in that is supposed to widen the horizons of people, and she had displayed the very opposite characteristics required from students from this program.
If any of you all who are wondering about the 3rd pumpkin with no personality that I also mentioned earlier, well guess what..surprise surprise! She just went along and agreed with the other 2.
I always looked, from a slight negative angle, those who came to a place where I already was and struggled to adapt. Granted, I have what others describe an abnormally high adaptation rate and flexibility when it comes to moving across cultures. However, I had never been, before now, confronted with a language barrier.
A Slice of Mind 