chinese fire drill.

My heart is filled with tender affection for my roommates. I have been castigated for saying stuff like this before, but sometimes I feel like Vice-President Nixon showing Kruschyev the American model kitchen. It's been a slow tour-- they were amazed at the drawer for storage underneath the oven, but we haven't quite made it to the dishwasher, which they have never inquired about and I don't really have the patience to explain (despite the fact that they go through about fifteen times the dishes I do during a given day. I know this makes me a bad person. I tried to explain to them why practicing your English by watching Fox News is not a good idea and it was a lost cause; I figure if I can't do that, the dishwasher would be too much).

Anyways, there have been a couple of incidences lately that have increased my concern that perhaps we needed to conference over the kitchen-- like running water for a half hour to defrost fish (we live in the desert!) or the many narrowly averted grease fires that might have occurred in unsupervised pans. But I hate to be the stodgy, unpleasanttolivewith American, so I have become resigned to grumbling to myself about how I wish I could afford my own place again. I really wish the kitchen wasn't so sovereign to me, but it is. I recognize that living with other people it would probably drive me just as crazy because I have seen what other people do in their kitchens, and really, maybe I have it good.

Nonetheless, you can imagine my dismay this morning when I awoke to the flashing lights and piercing shriek of our smoke alarm. I had just reset my clock so that I could resume a dream I was having about swimsuit shopping (which is so out of character for me that I had to find out what would happen). You can perhaps imagine the chaos amplified for my roommate as I come blazing out of my room, swearing, yelling, hitting all of my main points-- stove burners, stove fan, living room window, bathroom fans-- as she stands on a chair waving a bright orange felt flower placemat at our smoke detectors to no avail. The ante is of course up-ed when her shouting at me in broken English is replaced with her shouting at the other roommate in Chinese after she emerges belatedly and half asleep from the hall and at the moment when she goes to open the smoke filled microwave-- DON'T DO IT!!!!-- but like watching conservative news pundits, she does it and the apartment again fills with more smoke and burnination. After the detector finally silences, I inspect whatever it was that burned in the microwave-- a black, indistinguishable cube in a bowl. Fish, maybe?

It's a complete mystery.

I know I shouldn't complain, but I would give up my dishwasher just for the ability to take the batteries out of my smoke detector now and then.