Fundamental Illogic

[R. S. Martin]

So it’s my fault that I get a headache when the fans howl all day and all night. She, my landlady that is, seems to think I could automatically turn off the headache if only I were mature enough to do so and willed it so. Thus, she lectures long about the logistics of constant sound--constant sound, according to her, does not disrupt one's peace; it's the start-and-stop kind of sound that is bothersome (as though I don't know my own self ), but the headache does not go away. She lectures and scolds. My headache obeys neither her scolding, nor my will or wishes. My headache finally submits to strong meds but this woman has me mad.

 

 

She’s the person who flooded the house in the first place, making the industrial fans necessary. Not that she could have prevented the thing altogether but she could have kept it from getting so big if she had kept her head on her shoulders. She came home one day to find the water tank on her toilet had sprung a crack, and water was pouring through the ceiling. Instead of immediately turning off the main water supply to the house, or the toilet water tank itself, she used my bathroom three times in three minutes and ran in circles throughout the house for about fifteen minutes saying "I have to call the plumber to ask how to turn off the water." And, “I have to go out to get some buckets to catch the water.” She said these things about three times.

 

Dumb-founded, I tried to solve the riddle: How does it make sense—to which store will she go—to get buckets to catch the water that is pouring through the ceiling?

 

 

I could not figure out what was wrong with my brain that it made no sense but something seemed seriously out of whack with the situation.

 

 

Finally she found two very small buckets to catch the water but then she realized she needed a trough rather than two little buckets. I found her a “trough"—namely, a solid plastic laundry basket. It worked! Then she turned off the water tank and the water stopped pouring through the ceiling. I realized then that this was what she should have been doing from the moment she entered the house, but never in a million years would it be safe for me to tell her what to do. This is a woman who “fixes” a leaking dehumidifier by cleaning up the mess on the floor. (And I fix the real problem the minute she's back up the steps.)

 

 

 

In the four years that I've lived here I've learned "my place." Like my family, and very many other "proper people," she sees me as inexcusably and embarrassingly stupid, a child who must be taught from the ground up how to "act like an adult." (I suspect that means how to pretend things aren't what they really are because that is how she lives her life.)

 

Naturally, then, it’s my fault for getting a headache from the howling fans. And this headache could naturally be willed away if only I wasn’t too immature to will it so. It logically follows that when I figure out how to turn off one of those howling fans and am unable to turn it back on, that I was immature and foolish and require another scolding for meddling with sensitive and sophisticated machinery. The advice, obviously, does not apply to her. She adjusts a number of buttons and switches in an attempt to make it work again. That she is unsuccessful only proves how serious a break I caused. This woman who does not know how to turn off the water tank when there is a major leak somehow qualifies to meddle with sensitive and sophisticated machinery.

 

Not to mention that after moving in I had asked her how to turn off the main water supply in case of emergency and she had tried to calm my fears that it would ever be necessary for me to know that bit of information.

 

Sometimes I think I learn a lot about fundamentalist religion simply by watching her “logic” at work in everyday life.

 

 

 

 

 

PS. The insurance company technician has now come and restarted the fan. He answered some of my questions about how the fans work, how long they will have to run, and who will stop them. He acknowledged that living with the fans is inconvenient but necessary. I feel so much better now just knowing what to expect than being hushed up by a crazed woman who knows nothing about everything.

 

 

This is just one more of those “mainstream culture things” that I have no experience and knowledge about. I understand machinery but not “the system.” When Old Order Mennonites have a catastrophe, they fix it right away because they have no insurance so they don’t have to wait for the insurance company to do it for them. So this is really new for me and I feel so much more reassured by the technician's logic freely and willingly shared, than by the condescending “trust and obey” attitude that covers fundamental illogic.

 

 

And now, with the meds, some really good ear plugs, this rant, and some solid logic, I'm beginning to feel better. Thanks for "listening."

[buffettphan]

...I get a headache when the fans howl all day and all night...

 

Oh Ruby, I feel for you. I went through that about a year ago due to a flood caused by a washing machine malfunction. Unless somebody has to live with those industrial fans, they have no clue what it's like. A nice gentle constant hum? HA! NO WAY! It's like a tornado constantly whirling through your home. If it weren't for some good ear plugs, I wouldn't have slept a wink.

 

To make it even worse, you have to deal with your wacko landlady.

Hope things are better soon!

[R. S. Martin]

...I get a headache when the fans howl all day and all night...

 

Oh Ruby, I feel for you. I went through that about a year ago due to a flood caused by a washing machine malfunction. Unless somebody has to live with those industrial fans, they have no clue what it's like. A nice gentle constant hum? HA! NO WAY! It's like a tornado constantly whirling through your home. If it weren't for some good ear plugs, I wouldn't have slept a wink.

 

Thanks for understanding.

 

I've never experienced a tornado but those fans....

 

To make it even worse, you have to deal with your wacko landlady.

Hope things are better soon!

 

Thanks again. For some odd reason, right about now, I like the word wacko being used that way.

[Loren]

Ruby, your landlady sounds an awful lot like mine.

 

I won't go into details, but the same stuff is there, minus the religiosity. My landlady sees herself as being a "nice lady," but she's very shallow and selfish. She thinks first and foremost of herself. This is exacerbated by the fact that she's dumb as a bag full of hammers. She really isn't able to do the abstractions necessary for self-examination. She occasionally does "nice" things for others, but there's always something in it for her. There's either a quid pro quo (Which you will find out about later, since it's disguised as a favor or act of charity.), or an ulterior motive. An example of one of her ulterior motives would be that she's an antiques shopaholic. She doesn't just enjoy shopping, she uses it to medicate herself. She will come home with a car full of junk which, being a pack rat, she has no room for. Both of our places are tiny, and hers is absolutely jammed with junk. So every time she buys a single piece, there's always the logistics problem of what goes and what stays. And she never gets rid of stuff, she stores it. We've seen her store stuff like that in an outside covered porch where it gets destroyed by weather. And this at times when she's in dire financial straights.

 

So sometimes, she'll call us and ask if we would like some furniture. She'll really try to sell it, telling us how cute it would be in our place and so on, and all that after we've responded with a firm, "No, thanks!" And she'll spin it as though she got the stuff with us in mind, just to do something nice for us, not thinking about how Reach and I are more than bright enough to know when the item in question is something she's had in her place for a couple of years and is now being displaced by some new piece of junk. I can't think of how many times she's tried to use us for storage and simultaneously try to take credit for being some kind of altruist.

 

And she lectures us as though we are somewhat undisciplined and slightly stupid children. It's so insulting. Reach and I are both quite damned intelligent, while this woman is a true dunce.

 

She's one of those unfortunates who live in fear of every shadow. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that these arrogant controlling behaviors are meant to shield her from facing how out of control her life is, because of her stupid decisions. They are meant to prop up her delusion that she's a nice person and a wise motherly figure who always knows best. Maintaining the fiction that she's a qualified, in-charge authority figure gives her a sense of control in an out-of-control life.

 

There was one time when she provided us with some liquid ant bait to deal with an ant problem (Which she had caused by not washing her recyclable food containers and storing them up for months at a time in her kitchen!), and, as she gave me the stuff, she had to explain in detail, as to a retarded child, just how to use it according to the simple instructions on the package in my hand! It was all about how to pop a little pre-cut circle of cardboard off of the package and place a drop of ant poison on it.

 

It was one of the few times I got impatient with her, due to the extreme insult. I kept saying, "Okay, Jane. I've got it. I think Reach and I can figure out how to use it. No, really. We can get it figured out. No, I'm serious. We can figure it out. No, really, Jane." And so on.

 

But here's the thing I noticed: Every time I interrupted her "instructions," she would get this deer-in-the-headlights look like she was increasingly frightened that the situation was getting out of control. The more I insisted that we were capable of dealing with it without her help, the more frightened she looked.

 

She didn't look pissed off, she looked frightened.

 

That incident was a running joke around our house for a couple of years, and it really epitomizes our dealings with her.

 

I don't mind someone being dumber than average. A person can't help that. And I've known some extremely respectable and very high-quality people who were definitely not bright. But she's too dumb to realize how far below the average she is, and too arrogant to not treat the people around her as though she's smarter than them. She's so far down on the scale of intelligence that it's truly pointless to confront her on her bad behavior; She'd be totally baffled at how somebody could see her that way. She truly wouldn't be able to understand it.

 

I have stories about her. Boy, do I have stories! It came to be that times when Reach and I were ranting to each other about one of these incidents, I'd say, "Well, she may be an idiot, but she's *our* idiot."

 

Reach would always respond with, "No! She's not *our* idiot! You knew her before I did, so she's *your* idiot!"

 

It amazes me how similar our two landladies sound.

 

It's been a real lesson in patience.

[R. S. Martin]

Loren, thank you so much for sharing about your landlady. I'm not quite sure, though, were it not for the details about her craze for antique collections, that you didn't "borrow" MY idiot. On the other hand, it seems as though you and Reach have been together almost as long as I have been living here, more or less??? so maybe this world is graced with TWO such creatures...I'm not too clear on early exC history. I've been here in this house four years and on exC for two and three quarter years.

 

Well, my landlady is gone for the day so I did the unthinkable. I went upstairs to see what her part looks like. I NEVER cross into her part of the house but I decided since she has NO respect for me and my needs, it will hurt nobody if I go take a look. When her daughter still lived at home, once I caught her snooping my quarters when she thought I wasn't around so I'm just returning the favour.

 

What I saw upstairs made me decide this woman is a selfish pig. She has an extra bedroom up there that nobody uses and she never offered it to me when I suggested that it might be necessary for me to sleep in another part of the house. There is no fan on the top floor where the bedrooms are. The powerful fans are all beneath the main floor level. Yet this godly woman never told me this when I asked whether the fans were throughout the house; she said "it's all through the house."

 

This is a split level house so the main set-up is in the front hall, with another one in the basement where I live. There is a dehumidifier on the top floor that runs constantly but it's the fans that are the really noisy machines. I love buffetphan's description of living with a tornado. And this woman has a problem when I vacuum after she goes to bed. She has a problem when the kids next door play loud music late at night. When I put stuff out in the garbage at midnight because I get into a cleaning spree (it's several trips), she comes downstairs to complain that I'm disrupting her sleep. (Later she admitted that it was just as much an unexpected late-night call from her daughter, but she did not apologize for the scolding and the angry email she sent me for cleaning up my place and cooking at the wrong 12:00.)

 

If I didn't like everything else about this place except her, I'd be out of here. The thing is, I like this place, I like this part of town, this is the longest I've lived in one place since leaving my own people and I am living next door to an old friend who helped me loosen my roots from the horse and buggy community. An old friend of hers lives here in the same neighbourhood, too, and is an atheist and former modern Mennonite who has also become my friend and loans me books and videos. (I just want a long-term place to live and a community of people to belong to.) Not to mention that this basement has nice large windows. Most basement apartments have tiny cellar windows.

 

All the same, at times like this some of my favourite fantasies involve the idea of moving out without notice. The biggest problem with that is that it is illegal. I have to give her sixty days notice. Then I'm plagued with the idea that I'm an idiot for sticking with it. It's good to know I'm not the only person who sticks with a stupid landlady. Thanks again for sharing, Loren.