#reddpenn

From the diary of Lily:

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When I was little, I used to talk to my stuffed animals all the time.  They were my soft, cuddly friends who were always there for me, and even though they never spoke a word, I always imagined I could hear what they wanted to say.  Even as an adult, I still treat inanimate objects like they’re people too.  In fact, everyone does at some point or another in their adult life.  Anyone who has ever argued with their car that refused to start knows what I mean.

But recently, I realized that sometimes people can do... well the opposite. That sometimes we don’t treat people (who are actual, real people) like they’re people.  It’s not something we consciously think about, but it’s more like we forget that, well, people are people.  I know this sounds really dumb, but I felt like I needed to write about this after a... well after an “argument” I had with my roommate.

I’ve lived with my roommate for a few months now, and I thought I had gotten to know them pretty well.   They like to watch cartoons (like, seriously LOVES them) and we had worked out a TV viewing schedule to make sure that we got along together.  But the other day, I realized that I wasn’t necessarily treating them like they were their own person.  I didn’t mean to do that, but it just kind of happened, and...

...well it gets really complicated because, technically, they aren’t a person.

I mean, they aren’t human; they’re an apparition.

It made me think about all those stories about monsters and ghosts.  Like a ghost used to be human, but then they died, and their spirit became a ghost.  Do we still treat the ghost like the person they were when they were alive?  Outside of a few exceptions, the answer’s a definite yes.

But what about an apparition? It’s kind of like a ghost, but it’s not. I mean, it’s not the soul of someone who died or anything. They just sort of exist. (Would Slimer from Ghostbusters be an apparition or a ghost?).

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So anyway, reason I’m bringing this all up is because of what happened last weekend. I was channel surfing through the Cable Guide and as I’m flipping through, I pass by Boomerang (you know, the cable channel that spun-off Cartoon Network to hold all the older cartoons?) and all of a sudden, my roommate appears out of nowhere (literally) and practically grabs the remote out from my hands.

“Hey! What gives!?” I say to them.

They immediately change over to Boomerang and my TV screen is suddenly filled up with the color pink. At the same time, my roommate starts “doot-ing” along with the song and goes, “Doo-Doot! Doo-Doot! Do-Doot-Do-Doot-Do-Doot Do-Doot-De-Dooooooooo-Doo-Doo-Doo-Doo-Doooot”. I have no idea what they’re doing, but then the cartoon starts up and it’s the Pink Panther.

Rhetorically, I go, “What’s this?”

“Pink... Panther...” my roomie says.

And then I make my first mistake by saying, “Huh. Never seen it before.”

Now if I had been paying attention to them, I probably would have seen the face of shock they were making. “You... NEVER... saw it!?” They gasped.

“Nope. Must have been before my time,” which was totally true. I mean, I later found out my Dad used to watch it when he was a kid. It wasn’t on TV when I was growing up. (Why am I defending myself for not watching a specific cartoon?)

Anyway, roomie asks, “Watch... with me?”

And then I, being a total dumbass, say, “Nah. Think I’ll get some dishes in,” before getting up and walking away.

If I had stayed put for just a few seconds longer, I would have heard them asking, “...please?” (In case you’re wondering, they told me about that later.)

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Yes, I hurt its feelings.  Yes, it was insensitive.  Yes, I am sorry.  But like I said, the thought didn’t even cross my mind back then.  As far as I knew, as long as my roommate had their cartoons, they were happy.  It didn’t occur to me that they cared about anything other than the cartoons themselves.

For the next week, my roommate made sure I knew, now and forever, that this was not true.

My first clue that they were mad at me was later that evening when I went to the living room to watch my usual shows.   It was my turn on the TV, and usually I have to pry my roommate away so I can watch what I want to watch. But that night, the instant I walked into the room, they changed the channel to what I wanted, put the remote down on the couch, and left the room without saying a word.  I thanked them, plopped myself down, and went straight into couch potato mode.

This should have thrown so many red flags in my head, but for some reason, it didn’t.  Maybe I was being too self-absorbed at the time? Maybe I was just tired and thinking, “Aww man, I gotta work tomorrow!”?  No matter the excuse, mistakes were made, and I started paying for them the very next morning.

My “haunting” kicked off with waking up to find most of my rock collection missing.  I have a particular affinity for pretty rocks and gems (I’m kind of a rock nerd) and have my favorites out on display.  But that morning, the only rocks that I could see were the pink ones.  Someone had pilfered almost every pebble from every pedestal to perturb me.   (I saw a chance for alliteration and took it! So sue me!)  I was still waking up and too tired to care about it at the time (me making excuses again) and had work, so I got ready to go and left.

Now I’m not sure how they did it, but my roommate did something to my car radio.   I turn it on and all I get are tunes by Henry Mancini.  Fifty percent of the time, it was the Pink Panther theme, twenty-five percent was the theme from A Shot In The Dark (I had to use Soundhound to figure out that one), and the rest was a mix of some of his other work.   It didn’t matter what station I tried changing it to!  Although I did learn that Mancini composed Baby Elephant Walk, so that’s something.

By now, I’d already figured out what was going on (roommate did it), but couldn’t really do anything about it because I still had work to go to.   As if the daily grind working at an art supply store wasn’t hard enough, I had to work while having the dang Pink Panther theme stuck in my head all day.  Not even the music that played over the store radio could get rid of it.  (Given the quote un-quote “music” they play over the speaker system, I eventually considered it a good thing.)

Then I came home, and that’s when things REALLY escalated.  First words out of my mouth after I walked in was, “Hey, I’m hoooOOOOOLY~!”  Every single wall in the apartment, from the living room, to the kitchen, to the bedroom, and even the bathroom...

PINK!

All of them were painted PINK!

Like strawberry frosted doughnut pink!

As I’m gawking at the interior design sugar rush nightmare, out walks my roommate from around the corner.  Immediately, the first thing I noticed was that they had feet. (Normally, they don’t have feet; they just kind of “hover” or “emerge from the ground” or something.) They had their eyes closed, head held up, and made a point of showing off these noodle legs they had constructed by skipping every other three steps.

They were doing the Pink Panther shuffle.

They walk out of my line of sight and I run over to have a word with them, but by then they disappeared.  I look around and all I see is more and more pink.  From behind me, I hear a mix of snickering slash wheezing.  Like you ever hear of this cartoon dog named Muttley?  They were laughing like him.  And of course, I turn around, and the only thing I see is more pink!

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I knew that my roommate could be ornery at times, like that time I tried to get an idea of their daily routine by setting up a webcam, but this...

I mean, where did she even get the paint?  (Upon reading back here, I realized I referred to them as a ‘she’ even though I’m not sure if they are a ‘she’ or not.  Yeah, I can edit it to a more neutral pronoun, but something tells me I ought to point this out instead of editing it, for some reason.)

I was half tempted to get back at them by painting the walls back to their original color (they do sell paint by the gallon where I work, and I get the employee discount), but realized they’d just paint(?) the walls pink again.  Like I’d turn around after thinking I finished only to find the work I did completely undone.  I could just picture my roommate doing that and finding it hysterical.

Anyway, tacky as the pink walls were, I didn’t get too angry about them.  For starters, my lease agreement said that I couldn’t paint the walls without landlord approval.  But my lease agreement also acknowledges that my apartment may be haunted.  If the landlord ever brought it up, I’d just tell them the “ghost” did it.  Second, these pranks my roommate was pulling were kind of amusing and didn’t really bother me that much.  (I mean sure, I wanted my rock collection back but I doubted my roommate would have thrown them away.  They know how much they mean to me.)

The one thing I was putting my foot down on was that I wasn’t going to ask my roommate what was wrong.  I got the hint, sure, but I wanted them to know that if something is bothering them, they need to, y’know, actually say something instead of leaving spooky pink clues.  They were being a butt, and my hope was that when they saw how much the pink wasn’t bothering me, then they’d finally open up.  This went on for about a week with me going about my daily routine only to be surprised by the occasional pink interruption.

Like on Wednesday, I go to the fridge to get something to drink, and all I find in there is Pink Lemonade.  It actually wasn’t that bad, but I have no idea how my roommate actually got it given that they never leave the apartment.  Thursday, I get a notification saying a package arrived, and find my roommate used my debit card to order the entire Pink Panther cartoon series on DVD.  And earlier on Tuesday, I got a call from my landlord asking if I knew why someone had called in an order, in their name, to have Owens Corning insulation installed.  In case you weren’t aware, that’s the pink insulation who has “you can guess who” as their mascot.

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So, Friday rolls around, and by now, the entire apartment is pink.  Like EVERYTHING.  The furniture, the electronics, the toilet, the sink, the appliances, the TV, and everything in between has been made pink somehow.  I’m not sure who out there still makes pink toilet paper, but apparently my roommate has either some special powers I don’t know about yet, or they got connections.

At this point, since my roommate had yet to approach me about “The Pink-ening”, I began playing the reverse-psychology card.  I came home and got to making dinner.  While some of this was a bit more expensive than what I usually spend on food, I figured it was worth it if it meant getting my roommate to talk to me.  My menu included delicious smoked pink salmon, some crab linguine with a nice amount of pink to it for a side dish, and some mashed red potatoes that turn out nice and pink if you got the right recipe.  To wash it down, I picked up a glass of pink lemonade from the fridge, and in the freezer, some strawberry sorbet.

I get down to eating at my pink table, with a pink wooden chair, pink napkins, pink silverware, pink glass of pink lemonade.  It took a little more effort to put this together, but I made an exaggerated point of showing off how good this pink meal was and how much I was just enjoying all this pink.

About halfway into my meal, I get a feeling that someone’s standing behind me.  It’s hard to put into words how you know someone’s there especially since my roommate doesn’t really eat or breath.  It’s like the hairs on the back of your neck become sensitive like cat whiskers and can just... feel that someone’s there.  Usually sends a chill down my spine when that happens, but this time, I was ready and waiting for it.

“Care to join me for dinner?” I say without turning around.  If I had, they probably would have vanished on me again like they had been doing all week.

“Looks... good...” they say in their ever so familiar by now raspy voice.

“Got something you want to talk about?” I ask between bites.  There’s a brief pause as my roommate thinks to themselves.

“...yes,” they finally answer.

“Okay.  Pull up a chair!  It’s been a while since we just, y’know, talked and stuff,” which was true.  

The instant I said that, I realized that even before the “week of pink” began, we hadn’t spent a whole lot of time together outside of our usual TV time.  I had long since figured out that my roommate wanted me to watch Pink Panther with them, but I just thought they wanted to show it to me to show off how (subjectively) good the cartoon was.  Only then did it hit me that they wanted me to watch it with them because they wanted to watch it together with me.  It was like they were hoping for some roommate bonding time or something like that.

Now, it wasn’t like we weren’t talking to each other before this.  I greeted them whenever I saw them, and let them know whenever I came home or was leaving. but we hadn’t actually talked, like... “talk-talk” in a few weeks.  Instead, the conversations over the last few weeks were like the kind of conversations a person would have with their pet cat or pet dog.  Like you’d talk to them, but not really expect an answer from them.

I had been treating her like a pet more than a person.  (Did it again!  I’m thinking I’ll ask them later what kind of pronouns they’d like me to use, or if they’ve even given any thought towards gender or anything).

My guess is that my roommate picked up on this themselves, and just like a disobedient pet who is bored, lonely, or other, they made a mess of the place.  Maybe they were thinking that if I was going to treat them like a pet, they would act like one too?

Of course, I didn’t mean to treat them like that.  I don’t think anyone really does mean it when they do.  It just kind of happens without thinking about it.  The whole reason I’m writing this down here in you, diary, is so that I can make a mental note slash reminder to be careful of doing that kind of thing.  It’s especially important to remember when interacting with other people, like my co-workers or the store customers.  (Unlike my roommate, they can’t get on my case by making my entire apartment pink.)

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Now where was I?  Oh yeah, our talk.  I think I remember the most important bits of it.  It went something like:

“So, whaddya wanna talk about?” I ask between bites of food.

“Pink...” they say to me.  I wait a moment, expecting them to say “panther” after that, but it when it doesn’t arrive, I step in.

“Yeah!  Pretty amazing what you did with the place!  I didn’t know things could even get this pink!” which was one-hundred percent true.

“...Thank...you...” they say with a smile.  I can tell that was not the answer they were expecting as I could have swore they turned and blushed.  Although I couldn’t tell because of how pink everything else was.

“Although,” I add, “I don’t think the landlord is going to like the apartment being this pink.  If it stays like this, they might kick me out.  And we wouldn’t want that, right?”

Now my roommate, the apparition, actually looks shocked for a moment.  The thought hadn’t entered their head, and for a moment, they looked a little scared.  “N-n-n-no...” they stuttered.

“Well, I’m sure together, we can get this place back to the way it was before the next time they have an apartment inspection.  Whenever that is,” I reassure them.

“Yeah...” my roommate nods.

“Say I got some time off this upcoming weekend.  Want to watch some Pink Panther with me?”  (Oh my God, you should have seen the smile on my roommate’s face when I asked this.)  “I see I have the DVD collection now, apparently,” I say with a wink, “and we can even watch the movies together too.”

“...movies?” they ask.

“Yeah, the Pink Panther was a movie first before it became a cartoon.  It was a live-action movie, but... well some of it’s like a cartoon here and there.  Lots of slapstick comedy that I think you might like.”  They were practically beaming and agreed immediately.  

After Friday’s dinner, we watched some of the cartoons (which are actually pretty funny) and for the upcoming weekend, we’re doing a Pink Panther movie marathon with cartoons mixed in to spice it up.  I also found out that my roommate doesn’t just watch the cartoons, but actually knows a thing or two about them.  Like how Friz Freleng, one of the directors and creative minds behind the original Looney Tunes cartoons, was involved in the Pink Panther’s creation along with a new studio after he left Warner Brothers.  I don’t know how my roommate came to know so much, but it’s pretty cool.

Anyway, I got me some sweet, pink treats to snack on during the movie marathon.  The apartment is still pink as can be, but my roommate said they’ll take care of it once the marathon’s over.  Exactly HOW they plan to take care of it, I have no idea.  Oh well.  No use pinking too hard about it.