The Kitchen

I was originally going to attempt to show I clever I am by going into a mini discourse about Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth. I was going to talk about the fact that Romans worshipped her showed that they understood that the kitchen was literally the heart of the household, integral to its being. But then I realised hearth could also mean a conventional fireplace located somewhere else in the house, not necessarily the kitchen, depending on how annoyingly picayune a reader could be. Therefore I choose the safer, but still pretentious path of attempting to highlight this possible deviation in definition and distance myself slightly from its originally desired (but definitely pretentious) narrative.

So anyway I cleaned the kitchen today. On Saturday, Jewish people celebrate the Sabbath. On Saturday, my roommates celebrate the fact that I clean the kitchen, and simultaneously clean up all my dirty kitchen implements. I'm not exactly sure to the extent which they appreciate me cleaning however, as I often take around an hour to clean the kitchen. One does no housework at all, and the other takes about 30 mintes to clean the bathrooms. The kitchen is by far the hardest thing to clean because of the raw work and time needed. Still, I am surprisingly less peeved because they tolerate with my dirty dish pile and often take the initiative to toss the contents of the large black bin in the kitchen away when it overflows (one of Christoph's friends told me about her household last year... the flatmates refused to take the initiative to toss the trash and after a few weeks maggots started appearing).

This week as I cleaned the kitchen, I listened to Outlook on the BBC podcast. The first one which was very interesting was about this woman who went to Afghanistan to live among the locals and befriended a local family after 7/7. The second one was far less invigorating, but nonetheless interesting. It was about a man, who suffered from domestic abuse for more than a year before the neighbours called the police to rescue him. He spoke of how his partner would pour kettles full of boiling hot water on his lap, punch him until he got black eyes and the like. It was rather depressing really. What depressing really was that it reminded me of my flatmate. While merely confined to what is apparently self-induced emotional abuse in her relationship, the fact that she sits there and just takes it while non-stop justifying it to herself, depresses me to no end. I really hope her other friend moves in with us next year because I'm at the end of my depth of empathy.

On another note, I apparently forgot there was an ACS dinner last night. For some reason I thought it was on the 14th of March, and not the 11th. It only occurred to me to check when I was showering last night around midnight, when I suddenly remembered. I then realised why I thought the 14th March was a special day. It is, for starters the birthday of my uncle, an event we celebrated every year at home. Secondly, it's also the day I met Christoph last year. This is the second year running that I missed the dinner, I bet there's going to be more gossip again.