Aggressively Hostile Household Objects

Why does everything in my house seem to want me dead?

THE USUAL LIST OF SUSPECTS

• The coffee-table corner, strategically positioned at precisely the height required to introduce itself directly to your kneecap.

• The rug corner, which begins curling upward for no apparent reason, patiently waiting for you to catch your toe and perform an involuntary interpretive dance.

• The vacuum cleaner cord, which seems capable of detecting the exact moment you're carrying something fragile.

• Impossible, hermetically-sealed packaging—those plastic-and-cardboard contraptions that require industrial equipment, three knives and the upper-body strength of a lumberjack to open.

• My personal favourite—the Saran Wrap box, featuring an actual saw on its packaging because apparently, uncooperative plastic isn’t dangerous enough on its own.

Saran Wrap. A perfectly ordinary household product whose primary function is apparently to determine how much frustration one human being can experience before banging one’s head against a brick wall.

Think about the design. They created a transparent, clingy, static-charged material that desperately wants to stick to everything except the thing we're trying to cover. Because that wasn't sufficiently hostile, we put it in a cardboard box with a serrated edge built into the design. A frigging SAW. For cutting plastic wrap. What could possibly go wrong?

You pull the wrap across the container. It sticks to itself. You fight with it. It scrunches up into an unidentifiable wad of origami something-or-other. You try again.

It sticks to your hand, and gets a deadlock on three of your fingers.

You finally get the damned thing positioned correctly and reach for the cutting edge—

Zzzzzt! Congratulations! You have successfully wrapped the leftovers and nearly amputated a finger.

You're now bleeding all over your leftover veal cutlets, which is especially irritating because you haven't even had dinner yet. You slap on a Band-Aid, which immediately begins the slow, infuriating process of peeling itself off.

Now, with one finger injured, a Band-Aid already plotting its escape, and blood mysteriously migrating toward the veal cutlets, you decide to leave the kitchen before you accidentally kill yourself, and go make the bed.

You pick up the fitted sheet...and this is where things get personal, because a fitted sheet isn't really a piece of bedding. We all know it’s just a four-cornered adversary. You locate what you believe is the correct corner. You stretch it over the mattress.

POP.

Off comes another corner.

You put that one back.

POP.

The first one comes off.

You try holding two corners simultaneously, so now you're crawling across the mattress like a badly coordinated spider, trying to convince a piece of elasticized fabric that it belongs on the frigging bed.

You get three corners on. Three. You are this close. You reach for the fourth. The sheet suddenly develops a philosophical objection to the entire arrangement and launches itself halfway across the mattress.

At this point you stop. You glare at it. It stares back. Somewhere deep inside your brain a primitive little voice whispers: “Kill it.”

But you don't. Partly because you're an adult but mostly because it won’t die anyway, since it was never actually breathing.

Eventually—through sheer determination, profanity, and possibly divine intervention—the fitted sheet is finally on the bed. You stand there, wounded finger throbbing, Band-Aid hanging on by sheer optimism, staring at your handiwork.

Victory.

Except...the first corner pops off again.

You melt into a sobbing heap in the middle of your still-unmade bed, clutching the offending fitted sheet like a defeated gladiator, your wounded finger throbbing beneath a Band-Aid that has now surrendered completely. You stare at the ceiling, and through the tears, the exhaustion, and the lingering scent of wounded veal, you finally ask yourself: “Why am I so damned angry?”

Objectively, none of this is a catastrophe. Nobody died.

Well...not yet, anyway.

This is the point where you spit in the general direction of the bed and call the dog. You have to pass the kitchen to find him so you spit in the general direction of the kitchen, too. You finally leash up the dog and leave the whole thing behind you—the arrogant coffee table, the Jack-the-Ripper Saran Wrap, and the homicidal area rug.

You step outside, finally allowing yourself a cautiously optimistic grin. You lock the door and hear the bolt click into place. You got out. You and the dog are safe.

Then, just as you try to walk away, dog pulling on the other end of the leash, you try to keep up but your shirt sleeve somehow manages to get caught up in the door knob.

The House of Horrors does not want to relinquish its hold.

Ziana de Bethune.

Offering a momentary reprieve from life’s relentless seriousness....because that's how we do psychology around here.

• Question: Is it scopaesthesia...or...wait...what IS that anyway?

Ziana de Bethune