House of Cards

As some of you may recall, I work in a beat-down old house on our campus. Trashy fraternity houses have seen better days even. It is on the "condemned - do not repair" list on our campus. Yes, you read that correctly. It's a shitty place. Literally. We had a sewage leak at one point in our basement. Nothing says shitty like a wading pool of raw sewage.

We always joke that our house is a breeding ground for a new age plague. It sucks to be right sometimes. Almost everyone was out today because of illnesses. We have 13 employees and only 7 of us were there today (4 of which were sick or getting sick). I think I work in the Portal to the Nexus of Hell. Otherwise known as the White Sickly Elephant on Campus that No One Notices. My home away from home. It even has a tub in it. Yeah, a nasty old bath tub. Jealous?

I was talking with HH about The House one day. I was actually impressed that in my 2.5 years there, I'd never really noticed any bugs or spiders lurking. Seemed odd for an old house. She looks at me matter-of-factly and says "that's because they know better not to come in here." Wow. How true that is. Even the vermin have half a mind to steer clear. Who's the unevolved ones here?

There's also another mutation going on in our halls. The house breeds the contemptuous, the catty, and the eccentric. The exhaust of its furnace breath is a slow poison, and like the Joker villain, so do we have our own irradiated cadre of malcontents. You've already met Blurt McLoud. There's also Mean Face. She's like Two-Face, Jekyl and Hyde, and the borderline woman from Fatal Attraction rolled into one. Only she doesn't need to drink a potion to turn into Ms. Hyde. Oppositely, when she doesn't take her lithium, the Portal to the Nexus of Hell breaks loose. Her stare rivals Medusa. Her comments bite like serpetine hair. Her contempt for humanity is revealed. This woman can be a super beyotch, and her venomous strike comes from the shadows. She is a viper that cannot be charmed. I've tried to kill her with kindess. Her mutation is too evolved.

So I write this now from the throes of an illness that hath no name. I have blown my nose two thousand times and consumed eight gallons of orange juice. Between the two activities, I have likely killed and stripped more trees than a rain forest slasher. But I write this post to share the fruits of my labor with you -- and perhaps as my final entry, for I may in the middle of the night, sneeze my heart out. Literally.

And yet if I do survive another night, I must once again face down The House, that messy house of cards that, despite all of it flaws, just won't fall down.