vacation

For the past week my host mom has been on vacation. Her son has been staying here “watching” the dog, and it’s been a little strange. I apologize in advance for any offense that is taken on the following profile of this young man (looks to be in his early thirties), but I call it as I see it, and this is what I see:

He doesn’t change the toilet paper. I can’t reach it or else I would do it, but it’s on the top of a cabinet in the WC. There must be a fold-up ladder in the wall or a button that shoots the toilet up high enough for Renée to get at it, because she’s shorter than I am, and there is no way she can reach up there if I cant.

He doesn’t take out the garbage. It’s been overflowing for the past week, so I finally stalked the hallway through the peephole in our front door until I saw a neighbor walk out with a garbage bag. I lowered the sunglasses and followed them to the big garbage bins.

He doesn’t do his dishes. I figured machinery like dishwashers would be relatively universal in how they function, but not the French ones. There are ten different settings for hot water, ten different settings for cold water, ten different settings for warm water, a few for hot then cold or the reverse, a few for pots and pans or just dishes, one for utensils, combinations of all of them, a setting for cooking fish, one for baking a cake, one for flying to the moon, and one for forcing unruly sons to learn how to use the dishwasher. I couldn’t get that one to work.

He doesn’t have a job. This, I can’t really knock as I look across the Atlantic to America… or can I? I am in France after all, a fact I seem to forget way too often.

He doesn’t take the dog out. The only reason he’s here is to walk the dog and feed it. No, I’m not that naïve, I know he’s here to make sure I don’t throw giant parties like I normally do and end up burning the apartment complex down too. I leave for classes from anywhere between 9 and 11 in the morning. I wake up somewhere in between 7 and 8 AM, and usually Renée has already left for work, which means she’s already taken the dog out. Mr Slick on the other hand doesn’t wake up until after I’m gone for the most part. I can’t imagine the confusion in that poor pup’s head and bladder. Wait, I can, because I’ve cleaned up his confusion a few times this week.

He parties hardy. I woke up this past Wednesday morning to a gurgling, heaving sound. He was barfing up the 3 bottles of wine he had consumed the night before. It was obviously wine; I won’t even get into how I know. The night before, he had taken the dog with him to wherever he went, because he didn’t want to come home to take it out. That was a great idea, it got him out of a world of difficulties.

Please don’t think I abhor this character though; he’s very nice, which is the problem. People like him park a truck in the path of my behavioral logic thought process. I can’t hate him, but I want to, and I can’t like him, because I’m trying to hate him. He’s not much of a conversationalist but he’s inclusive; if he goes to the store he asks if I need anything, he asks how my day was when I get home, and he helped me tweak the grammar in a paper I wrote for a class. So I’m left dumbfounded, thanking him with my grammatically correct paper in hand, and cursing him a little later while wiping up runny dog crap from the living room floor with toilet paper I had to climb up a wall for, as a dish falls over the sink and shatters on the floor.

Renée is coming back this evening, but I'm leaving for my vacation in an hour. I won't be able to tell her how much fun we all had together until after I've gotten over it; but upon my return, it may still be fresh enough in my mind for me to ask her who has babysitting who exactly, because the dog and I were really confused.