Mold. Mildew. Fungus. Decay. Just the sounds of these words seem insidious and bad for one's health. Turns out, they are! I didn't know this, but MJ did: Brittany Murphy, the late actress, tragically died in 2009 partly due to prescription medication, but also due to toxic mold! Just another thing to worry about in 2020 besides racial tensions, coronavirus, election madness, hurricanes, etc., etc. Oh and now cockroaches have invaded our apartment complex! Not our unit specifically, but in the swimming pool area and around the neighborhood. Probably doesn't help that trash and dumpsters get strewn about around the edges of the property. Beat back the cockroaches! Stop their advance immediately and purge their colonies!
Koreans pride themselves on cleanliness (not just them, btw, so do a lot of countries like Singapore), but they especially watch out for something called "gongpangi" in their homes, a type of mildew that forms in between the walls. It's a sign of something wrong in the home and should be addressed immediately. I now agree. To this point we've lived in only brand new "luxury apartments" for a year or a little more, and then we move, probably before the onset of mold or any other nefarious threats. We just crossed the 13-month mark living in our current apartment, and....voila! We've started noticing more mold and mildew in humid and wet places, especially our shower room, which is constantly wet on the ground and has a lot of corners and edges where mildew and mold sets in. Gives me a creepy feeling even talking about it. I've noticed that there are a LOT of things related to cleanliness that I have neglected and let build for many years at my old apartments, which probably did some undetected damage to my health. I blame it on living with other men who are just as dirty and nonchalant about overall conditions as I was. Sure, once in awhile I would clean the toilet or scrub something or vacuum if one was available, but very seldom would there be a big, knockdown spring cleaning to cover all parts of the house, even ones we didn't think about. A couple roommates did pay cleaners for cleaning services, but that just made me less cognizant of cleaning, and who knows how thorough the cleaners were; especially if they have various other jobs to rush to and only getting paid a flat fee for each home they go to and no incentive to do an extra careful job, I suspect the quality wasn't great.
Now that I think about it, one of the apartments I lived in during law school was SUPER moldy and mildew-filled, and neither my (guy) roommate nor I cared about it at the time. It was just super dark there, near water sources, cool..... perfect for mold to form, and my acne got pretty bad during the time I lived there too. I sense some correlation or even causation. If we want to talk about "microaggressions" that people perpetuate towards each other nowadays causing angst or dischord, we should definitely look at "microbiological aggressions" that cause us harm little by little, without us even knowing it, and affecting our health and our mood.
Another thing I'd like to complain about is also food that suffers mold in the refrigerator.....another microaggression that causes stress, usually some not-so-tasty food that is left in the back of the fridge that gets forgotten and then one day you reach back there and it's totally changed color or taken over by mold.....exceptionally shudder-inducing. Happens with a bag of grapes or oranges too.....a sign of bad mold and mildew going on in the home.
So everyone, if you don't want these things that I'm describing to happen to you, take the Korean approach and watch out for mold and mildew and scrub them out at the source (I was scrubbing my shower room floor today to do exactly that).
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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