Eternal Sponges of the Not-So-Spotless Kitchen

My housemate/landlord is a saver. Not only does he prefer not to throw things away, he uses items way beyond their use, or he saves random objects (like a hair gel bottle or lidlesss tofu tubs), thinking he may need them someday. I do this to some extent. I even considered myself a saver until I met John.

For example, there are piles of styrofoam waiting on the patio in case Gainesville suddenly starts recycling styrofoam. All of the walls in the living room and tv room are lined with bookcases or file cabinets. He appears to save every piece of written material he has ever purchased or received. I noticed there is a GRE book from 1996. Who can use a ten-year-old GRE prep book? They changed the test, dude. There are yogurt lids without their respective containers simply because they came from his favorite brand of yogurt and he doesn't want to get rid of them. He has a pile of soap bits from the end of the bar in the bathroom. He wears his clothes until they look like what the Senegalese kids wear. I am not kidding, but he went contra dancing in a pair of jeans with a visible hole in the crotch. I don't know when he deems his clothes unwearable, but when he does, they go in the rag box. Today I went searching for a rag to clean my lamp. Here's what I discovered:

How effective is an entire holy t-shirt going to be? To begin with, it's too large. Second, it is disintegrating.

And underwear? There is no way I am cleaning anything with this man's old underwear. And because he's out of town, I secretly threw them away today.

But worse than the underwear rags, are the sponges. He re-uses sponges by washing them in a bleach load and then hangs them to dry. The washing machine begins to take its toll; the sponges slowly disintegrate, and then they start smelling bad after three days of use. I don't know if it is the humidity and the fact that they really never dry between usage, but I like to attribute their accelerated smelliness to the fact that they are being re-used. Sponges are not meant to be eternal. Most sponges take three weeks to start smelling, but these sponges are putrid after only a week. I can smell their funk as I walk into the kitchen, and then I lose my appetite as I near the sink. When it gets to that point, I pull another sponge from his so-called "fresh" stash put the old one out on the line until his next bleach load.

I will probably be living here for the next year, but if there is any reason I move out before then, it will definitely be the sponges.