Old sins

Old sins... they come back to haunt you. You may have spent a million days in frolic, happily idling away time or even indulging yourself in little 'sins' and sinister pursuits. But you can't escape, for nature has its own way of exacting revenge. Three quarters of a year later, inevitably all your sins come back to haunt you in the form of an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no restraint at the other [from here].

During my internship, we rented an apartment close to the office and 5 of us temporarily called that place our home. In a 2 bed 2 bath apartment, I specifically chose the living room to live alone while the others split into pairs and lived in the two rooms. Oh the joys when we had first come into the room --- such a clean and spotless place! Every inch of the rooms shone: right from the kitchen cabinets to the bathroom tubs. We managed to buy the bare minimum necessary to live: a few table lamps because there weren't any light fixtures inside and a few air mattresses so that we could sleep in peace. And the rest of the place was free to use!

Oh the joys of living there! I used to get into the house and then fling off clothes in all directions, along with the shoes which I aimed towards the wall straight from the foot: something like "Look Ma, no hands!!". Chocolate wafers used to fly all around, and little somethings from our plates used to drop all the time on the carpet while we dined and watched the Simpsons. Strangely, the carpet never really 'looked' like it had undergone all that! Numerous cooking disasters later, the kitchen began to resemble a battlefield. Some tiles on the floor had been burnt from melted aluminium (don't ask me how). The oven top which was clean and white before we came had several layers of dried testimony of the various concoctions we cooked. And then the shelves where we stored the spices had all turned various shades of yellow from the creamy white condition we had found them in. Oh did I mention the various shades of molds on bathroom curtains and the different patterns of white on the mirrors? :D

But there came a time when we had to leave. And clean the apartment before we left. Boy I never realized that we actually had managed to screw up the apartment so badly! We asked each other, "Hey, where did this black stretch on the wall come from?" That one turned out to be from the bicycle that we kept in the house. Or while I am cleaning the bathroom floor I exclaim, "Hey guys, what the hell is this slippery thing here encased in swabs of hair?". Turned out that it was actually a long lost bar of soap which had since been subject to numerous washes and other unmentionable watery misadventures. We went scrap-scrap on the kitchen counter, with three guys at it simultaneously. One had a knife in hand, another a spoon and a third guy held a bleach and a detergent in his two hands while I shouted encouragements! Err.. okay, so I also switched roles once in a while. But I damn well understood Lady Macbeth when she had said, "Out, thy bloody spot, out!" :D

The important thing is: we did a cleaning job. And I should say a darned good job. Or so I thought until I came back here and then visited a girl's apartment for a pot luck dinner party. By God that place was heavenly! Even after the whole cleanup and arrangement stuff before we evacuated, we hadn't managed to make the apartment look any bit less messier than a stable. And here was her apartment: everything so much in place and nice. How on earth she managed it, I don't know. But I do know that I will never be able to do that. After all, indulging in those little sins every two seconds was almost worth the time we spent scrubbing kitchen ovens and bathroom sinks. Okay so we were haunted by a few old sins, but I doubt if we could have done anything otherwise ;)