mikao's world

Things That Society at Large Likes, Yet I Don't Get
Part Two

Carpet

When I was a kid, pretty much all the houses we lived in had green carpet. Not nice green, but that weird mossy green. And it always felt plasticy.

When I got older, we moved to a house with "gold" carpet in the living room and grey in mine. The grey was okay, I guess, if you like that sort of thing.

But carpet's gross! Sure you can vacuum it, but does it ever really get clean? Sure you can shampoo it... but you can't really rinse it, you're just making it wet and stinky.

One time in grade 7 I had to do a science project at a friends house and they had dirty brown carpet. I was sure I could feel the germs crawling on to me while we were sitting on the floor.

My Gramma's house doesn't have any carpet in it, because it was built in the 1930s when it was very posh to have linoleum. And she has this super cool greenish-coloured linoleum with a feather print on it that I always loved, in a few of the upstairs bedrooms. Anyways, the point of this paragraph is that she had rugs, which are nice to step on when getting off your bed in the morning. But the wonderful thing about rugs is you can either pick them up and beat them, or wash them, or even throw them out when they get dirty! Horray!

After I finished high school and my parents moved to Alberta, and a year or two after they had bought a new super-deluxe Electolux vacuum and deep carpet cleaner, they bought a house with no carpet. None. Nada. No carpet in sight. It's a wonderful thing.

There is carpet in every room in my apartment except for the kitchen and bathroom. It's all this weird dark mint green colour, except for the grey-on-grey "snowflake" patterned carpet in my room. I'm glad I get the grey-ish carpet though, because the mint green is too reminiscent in colour of everything I wore between grades 4 and 7 when mint green was the best colour in the world... or my world at least.

But, truth be told, carpet's gross. It's not clean. You can't clean it properly. Everything that has ever touched the carpet you are standing on is touching you back.

All those dirty feet. All of them.