Day 1: Mothership has taken off

I am an early riser. I enrolled at the gym right opposite my building yesterday, a whole four months and three kilos later. So my typical morning routine involves crawling out of bed and crossing the road. An hour later, I’m back, sweating and starving.

I am extremely threatened of the repercussions I’ll face if mom’s plants die by the end of three weeks, so I watered them before I was off to work.

Most of the day went by like any other manic Monday. I spent most of my time streamlining a couple of stories I’m turning in for this cool magazine. I missed calling mom for a random hello in the middle of the day but reading up on funky hair styles kept me preoccupied.

Years later when I’ll be asked about that one thing I remember most about living alone, I’ll flip my hair and say: Coming home to see everything exactly the way I left it.

Here’s something I’m new to. Daily, after I’m off to work, the helps stream in, the house is dusted, ventilated and things just mysteriously look brighter.

Everything was just the same today.

Anyway, I was ravenously hungry and made straight for the food. I accuse mom of micro-managing all the time, and she vehemently denies it (but quietly stashed three types of chicken gravies and loads of chapattis for me). I insisted I wanted to experience every single bit of living alone and she was not to help out! But as the universally-accepted fact goes, there is no fighting the mother.

So I got one of the chicken gravies out of the freezer only to realise it was rock solid! Duh. But I couldn’t wait for it to defrost! That takes forever! I grabbed a large spoon and began jabbing at it. The fight with the gravy lasted about 10 minutes before I could break a bit off, and shut it into the microwave for a good five minutes.

I got it out in three and gobbled it down in four.

I slouched on the sofa, waiting for the help to come. She’d be here in a bit to sweep, swab, wash clothes, clean the utensils and neaten up the bathroom. One could never clean the house enough if one lived in heart of all the pollution.

You know feeling when you tilt your chair a little too much and instinctively know that if you don’t stop yourself exactly at that moment, you’ll die? Yeah, that crept up on me a little while later. The help was nowhere in sight and there was a fat chance she’d show.

There is only one thing I loathe more than dry fruits and that is washing utensils. I walked to the kitchen and my day’s worth of plates and pans lay before me. I couldn’t risk leaving them there. So I took a deep breath and scrubbed the hell out of everything.

Ugh!

She’d also promised she’d hand wash all of my clothes. Since that wasn’t happening, I switched on the machine and dumped everything in. Whatever really had to be hand-washed could wait. After I’d dried off all the clothes, I contemplated sweeping the house but was exhausted. So I defrosted some more chicken (jab.poke.scrape.bang.bang.break.scrape.silver foil), packed it up for tomorrow and now, cannot wait to get under that blanket! 

So what I'm really trying to say is: 

1) Always leave the house tidy. You do not want to come home to filth. 

2) Organise. Know or decide what needs to go where, and follow the rules. 

3) Get the utensils out of the way. Hoarding is a bad idea, let alone when there are greasy plates in questions.