do tenants dream of electric appliances?

yesterday was a very stupid day in terms of electronic appliances.

first of all, i washed my fan. and by "washed" i mean, i submerged it in the bathtub, minding my new knowledge of Legioneer's Disease, courtesy of totalvirility's recent vacation with his father. i was like, "i'll keep the cord out of the bathtub, and it will be okay." when i removed the dripping fan from the porcelain embrace (doesn't this sound like fan porn? perhaps i am channelling a missing section from "The Russian Debutante's Handbook"--those of you who have read it will know what I am referencing, and those of you who have not read it must go and read it right now), and noticed all the metal/electronic mishmash at the center of the fan, it occurred to me that it might not have been the best idea. i also got a bad, bad flashback to when i was little and i gave a bath to our family vacuum cleaner, becaue it was cute and anthropomorphic, and i was a child with a rich imagination and no siblings (at least none that i knew about at the time). so i called totalvirility at work, and was like:
"hi. i just washed my fan in the bathtub. do you think that's ok?"
"what do you mean, you washed your fan in the bathtub?" was his incredulous reply.
from his tone i surmised that my belated second thoughts were about to become a "hindsight 20/20 and boy am i RETARDED" kind of thought.
"like, the whole thing?" he prodded?
"i left the cord hanging outside the bathtub," i explained.
silence.
"should i not plug it in then?"
"noooo..."
"i guess i'll go buy a new fan," i finished weakly.
which i did, i bought this weird gray monstrosity at the household supplies store that i rationalized as "cool" because if i squinted it looked like some sort of peripherally deco-meets-70s horro (horror that's retro). but really, it would make anyone, from howard roark to my dentist, normally prone to that kind of decor, vomit. anyway, i tried to position it in my tiny room in a strategic way that would maximize the air current. that did not really work because the goddamn thing would not be raised or lowered, or rotated (although it looks like it rotates along a horizontal axis, it's hard to explain, but if you saw it, you'd know what i mean). i tried to put it on the one chair in my room, reasoning that that chair never gets used anyway, just abused by heaps of clothes i throw onto it, since pretty much anyone who comes over either hangs out in the living room or sits on my bed, since the dimensions of my room are such that if one person was sitting on the chair, and other other one of the bed, it would lend itself to a weird dynamic, somewhere between "psychoanalytic/dialogic" and "interrogative/uncomfortable." of course, it might be fun to make people uncomfortable just for social fun, but i am not Erving Goffman, and don't get off on that sort of crap. when propped up on the chair, the fan huffed, puffed, threatened to blow the entire house down (not a difficult feat in my current place of residence), but at NO point did the air actually make contact with my overheated flesh. between the incredible humidity in my room, the fly kingdom (now thankfully gone) in the living room and the accusing stare of the very overdue Edward Said library book on my bookshelf (now thankfully back at the library), i felt like i was in some sort of naturalism-via-misadventures-in-the-Orient narrative. crosslisted with "claustraphobia," just for fun. so anyway, at the end of the day, The Landlord arrived to install my AC, because nothing else was working. The Landlord has been surprisingly amicable lately, ever since the ceiling fell in half an hour before universaldonor's and J. Ro's birthday party and we had an upsetting incident the following night, where instead of fixing the big gaping possibly asbestos-filled hole that used to be the ceiling (random Landlord quote: "asbestos? what asbestos? there's cotton up there!") he proposed gluing construction paper over it, out of desperation i agreed to it as a temporary solution, and while attempting to get it up there, he found himself in need of a knife, and requested one from me. I told him that he could have his pick of the kitchen cutlery or anything from my knife collection, to which he said "no, no, I need one of those...how do you call them...you KNOW, those knives kids use to SLASH people?" to which i said, "no, Landlord, I don't in fact know," silently adding in my head that "yours and mine denotative strategies do not overlap, like, at all." Anyway, he's been contrite in his slumlord-Catholic way since then, and actually came over to bring window screens, as a part of our multilateral way of dealing with the fly problem, and to put my AC in. i don't know what the hell he did, because within 5 minutes of him being over i had a seizure after he refused to take off his boots while climbing onto my bed on the grounds of "i dunno what could be on your bed" (like what??? cooties? anthrax? an invisible portal that will result in anyone barefoot being consumed by cannibalistic quicksand, against which dirty nasty street boots are the only protection?) and i was also trying to talk on the phone, so i just locked myself in the bathroom, while he kept making inexplicable phone calls from his cell phone to my cell phone while being in THE NEXT ROOM, but upon surveying the end result, i became very afraid, and am still very afraid. you know those matchstick houses that are elaborately constructed and then held together without an aid of glue or nails? i don't think they are a good working model for how to install an 80-pound air conditioner in a very large third-story window, where the glass in the window is barely held in place, and only by a layer of old paint. i don't know how or what the fuck, but somehow he installed the AC using only three uneven pieces of some rescued-from-the-basement 2-by-4, and NOTHING ELSE. the three sad-looking wood pieces are lying on the outside of the windowsill, supposedly prevented from falling by the weight of the AC sitting on them, and in turn they symbiotically prevent the AC from tipping over, in theory? on the top, the AC is "fixed" by the window, which i can't even begin to explain here, but those people who have been to my house will understand why it's a deeply, deeply problematic solution that goes beyond jerryrigging (and obviously The Landlord fancies himself some sort of Slumlord McGuyver) and into an expression that my father briefly became enchanted with, like he sometimes gets with certain American colloquialisms, that expression being "a crapshoot." to be fair, i have been typing this entry while being cooled by the air from the AC, i just can't look at it. so i think i am going to leave, and go meet nuncstans for coffee and hope that the AC unit has not killed or maimed anyone by the time i get back.

shalom.