Have you ever felt slightly uncomfortable at a party where you didn’t know very many of the other guests?
Have you ever told someone “Oh, I’d hate to impose,” then stayed for dinner but felt like you’d done something wrong?
Put your fears and self-doubts to rest: you are a better and a kinder visitor than Hans Christian Andersen ever was, and Charles Dickens would almost certainly never have immortalized you as a greasy ginger snake in a work of classic literature.
They met at a party in 1847 and got along pleasantly enough. Charles complimented Andersen’s work and Andersen did the same. Afterwards they struck up on occasional correspondence and things rather trundled along nicely in the world of literary English-Scandinavian relations.
A cordial correspondence developed between the two and Andersen returned to England for a fortnight as Dickens’s guest at Gad’s Hill in the summer of 1857. Before his arrival, Andersen had written to Dickens, promising: “I shall not inconvenience you too much.”
Sometimes we have friends who, when we say to them, Let’s really get together sometime soon, it’s been much too long, we truly mean it. Sometimes we have let time slip away and have failed to set a date to renew a friendship that truly means a great deal to us.
Sometimes, we have friends with whom Let’s get together soon, you really ought to come by sometime is a polite way of saying I wish you no particular ill; these are the words we say to one another when we meet, but they are words without meaning and without promise.
The Danish man of letters, a tall, gaunt and rather ungainly character stayed for five weeks.
Dickens dropped polite hints that he should leave. After he finally left, Dickens wrote on the mirror in the guestroom: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks – which seemed to the family AGES!”
Dealer David Brass, who is bringing the volume to the fair, said: “To Andersen, the visit was a timeless Elysium, a holiday, a fairytale come true.”
To the Dickens family it was eternal torment. Dickens’s daughter, Kate, would later recall that Andersen “was a bony bore, and stayed on and on”.
He was, she added, “a social blockhead. Andersen never quite understood why Dickens ceased to answer any of his letters”.
Do you live in fear of being the kind of person who invites a social blockhead to your house and cannot get rid of them for five weeks? Or do you live in fear of being the kind of person who accepts an invitation that was not sincerely meant and overstaying your welcome without ever realizing you have made yourself ridiculous? I fear the latter much more; I cannot imagine staying more than twice as long as promised in someone else’s house. How many guest towels he must have gone through. How much of the jars of marmalade that Cook had set aside specially for Mrs. Dickens, who loved a bit of marmalade at Christmastime, must he have gone through during his sad-eyed breakfasts. It must have been like having Eeyore as a houseguest.
Charles Dickens Writes To Hans Christian Andersen
oh, well
you’ll have to come and see us if you’re ever in town
do you mean it
do you really mean it
you can’t possibly mean it
not for a sad-eyed friendless old wandering willow like me
of course, stop by anytime
I’LL BE THERE TOMORROW
well don’t put yourself out
when my best friend asks me to share his bed
nothing in the world will keep me from flying to his side
well i wouldn’t say i’m –
it will be nice to see you again
what pajamas do you wear
what
send me a drawing of your pajamas so i can be sure to get a pair to match
i don’t –
what am i saying
of course we’ll go pajama shopping together
Hans Settles In
are you awake
what time is it
i don’t know
i can’t sleep
well
try to get some sleep
what if a duck was sad
i don’t know
what if a pine tree were lonely
i’m sure pine trees have lots of other pine tree friends
what if this one didn’t
what if all the other pine trees were cruel to him and then he was chopped down and made into firewood
or the cross that Christ was murdered on
i don’t think they made crosses out of pine trees
what if a serving-ladle fell in love with a snuff-box but they could never touch each other
do you think
that maybe this could wait
until morning
yes of course
i’m sorry
how rude of me
it’s all right
i’ll come in and get in bed with you and Mrs. Dickens and that way i can ask you in person once you’re properly awake
please don’t do that
oh i don’t mind
The Dickens Family Plays The Waiting Game
Hans
Hans, it’s Charles
are you going to come out of your room today, do you think?
the maids would like very much to tidy it
the candles are sad
what?
the candles
in this room
they look so sad
is that why you haven’t come out?
they seem so lonely, Charles
i’m sure they’re not lonely
you’re just saying that because they’re so brave
the candles need me, Charles
can i at least send the maids in to clean the room
while you stay with the candles
Hans?
Wherein Hints Are Dropped
Hans, I’ve left a train schedule on your bed
it’s so you can see when all the trains are leaving
oh how fascinating
I thought it might be useful
I’ve always thought trains seemed very sad
yes, they probably are
what are you doing this afternoon
well I was going to go into town and see my a–
let’s go look at the trains
and talk to them
and pet their heaving metal bellies
and comfort their chained spirits
oh i’d just love to, Hans
but i’m on a deadline
all right
i’m going to go smoke on the roof for three days then
please don’t
and i’m taking all the towels with me
i’m so glad we’re best friends and you just understand what i need
Tags: charles dickens, etiquette, hans christian andersen, history, this is why you should always have a firm departure date before your guests arrive, unwanted guests, your social anxiety is perfectly justified
Reading the “witch” post from yesterday, I was jealous that I had never experienced a moment of “man’s intuition.” But LO AND BEHOLD, I absent-mindedly browse to the toast for the first time this morning and NEW MALLORY HUMOR COLUMN.
WHAT.
also obviously it’s hilarious. that goes without saying.
Do you live in fear of being the kind of person who invites a social blockhead to your house and cannot get rid of them for five weeks? Or do you live in fear of being the kind of person who accepts an invitation that was not sincerely meant and overstaying your welcome without ever realizing you have made yourself ridiculous?
the latter mallory and i did so well in therapy today so thanks for resurrecting that fear
“Or do you live in fear of being the kind of person who accepts an invitation that was not sincerely meant and overstaying your welcome without ever realizing you have made yourself ridiculous? ”
That one. That is the one.
“Wait…is this person responding to my letters because they want to talk to me, or out of a misguided sense of social obligation? OH GOD WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS AT ALL WHAT IF EVERYONE IS JUST TOO POLITE TO TELL ME THAT THEY HATE ME.”
I feel I am doing well when I’m only convinced that people are nice to me solely out of pity half the time.
I feel like I am going to go to my grave never really getting over the feeling that anyone who is talking to me would probably rather be somewhere else.
I spend a lot of time when with groups of friends/acquaintances not talking to people because I feel I will be imposing myself on them and only be nice out of politeness. Then when nobody talks to me I assume I am right in my interpretation. Vicious cycle!
I still get anxious every time I have to briefly leave a group (to use the bathroom, to pay a check, to get something, &c.) that everyone will be gone by the time I get back.
Human interaction is terrible and stupid.
Every time I briefly leave a group, I imagine that they’re all rolling their eyes and wondering why they invited me……. ugh anxiety.
Ooh ooh, how about when you meet someone new and have a completely enjoyable conversation with them, and then five minutes later you’re convinced that they thought you’re a complete idiot and a bother? That is my favorite*.
*the opposite of favorite
When I meet someone I know in passing on the street, and we chat for a while, if they’re the person who brings the conversation to a close, I feel like I must have been imposing on them, and they finally couldn’t stand it any more. If I’m the person who ends it, I feel like I was rude and abrupt, and if they liked me at all, they won’t any more. There are no right answers!
The human experience is a mystery whose every iteration ends in anguish.
I feel the same way if it’s any consolation? Although if you’re anything like me, it probably isn’t.
I’m the sort of guest who has only recently realized he asks for permission to use the host’s bathroom.
Like, every time? Or just the first time?
Because I ask the first time I mean to use the bathroom at someone’s house, even if I’ve been to that house a hundred times before.
(I also, as it turns out, never, ever eat their food, no matter how many times they invite me to help myself.)
Yep, I do the same on both accounts. …Usually. One of my friends has a cut out of a parrot saying “Help yourself to beer!” but I still asked the first three times because WHAT IF THAT PARROT IS LYING
Parrots are familiars of the devil and can never be trusted.
The parrot has shewn me by many tokens that he is not my friend.
Double thumbs up for “shewn”
I also, as it turns out, never, ever eat their food, no matter how many times they invite me to help myself.
If fairytales, mythology and Pan’s Labyrinth have taught me anything, it’s that no good can possibly come of eating food in someone else’s house. And if they insist that you help yourself, well, that’s just suspicious as hell. Don’t fall for their tricks!
Oh, don’t I know it. I also never accept gifts, and ALWAYS leave by the same door I came in.
You can’t be too careful, you know. The last thing you want is to accidentally violate a geis or something.
I am doing this RIGHT NOW regarding an invitation to come along on an outing with my coworkers. What if they just invited me out of obligation and it will be weird if I actually go??
At least the outing is tonight so I have to actually make a decision instead of freaking out about it for days.
I remain convinced that most of the people I’m friends with actually just like my partner and accept that hanging out with him frequently means also hanging out with me.
This has neatly summarized the sum total of my adult life. Thank you.
HANS you idiot. Trains are happy.
Maybe Scandinavian trains aren’t happy?
Oh, what am I doing, giving Hans the benefit of the doubt? You’re right, he’s wrong: trains are happy.
Nothing Scandinavian is happy.
Somewhere, Strindberg is nodding.
Also Lars von Trier is feeling a tingling sensation in his testicles.
Scandinavian here. Slightly happier because of this comment section.
Just read a review of the local university production of A Doll’s House. The reviewer’s conclusion was that the lead actress is too young to play a convincingly bitter Nora and the lead actor is too twenty-first century to patronize a woman convincingly. (?! Has this person been on the Interwebs?)
in conclusion, insufficient Scandinavian; too much happy.
“Yes, trains are indeed lonely. The train back to Scandinavia is particularly lonely. You should be on that train. To keep it company. While it goes back to Scandinavia.”
Where’s rkfire and her manifesto I LOVE TRANES???
..do I have a manifesto for loving trains? o_O
They’re pretty ok but I don’t remember writing about my love for them! I think we’re friends, at best.
I had to go hunt up this comment thread because I was afraid I sounded like a total creep there http://the-toast.net/2014/03/12/trains-wonderful-…
I laughed until I cried
Hahahahaha no worries! I’ve been writing long screeds in comment sections about anime and random stuff, so I was starting to wonder if I wrote a goofy one about trains and forgot about it. o_O
I’m actually really touched that you remembered that!
Trains are not subject to men’s pathetic fallacies.
I watch a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine at work and I can assure you that trains are miserable. They’re just cogs in the capitalist machine living narrow, repetitive lives narrated by Ringo Starr.
“what if a duck was sad”
I am welling up and snort-giggling at the same time.
I had a sad duck. All the other ducks died and then she was alone with the chickens and geese and turkeys, and none of them would let her hang out with them. I posted “FREE SAD DUCK, needs friends” on Craigslist and within a couple of hours I got like three people who wanted to make her a happy duck, and I got to pick which one sounded like she would have the most duck friends to play with!
So, be comforted! There are many people in the world working to prevent duck sadness! Apparently.
I’ve had 3 glasses of red wine and couldn’t handle the first part of that story At All.
However, I am going to concentrate on all the supposed duck happiness that came later.
This is too timely as I’ve recently moved to Odense, Andersen’s birthplace, where they have a magnificent museum about him and they have devoted an entire display to this very occasion.
Of course, Mallory’s genius far surpasses that.
Which interpretation does the museum have?
More of a “Oh, that silly Andersen, stayed with Dickens for FIVE weeks! Hahaa, imagine how embarrassed he must’ve been….Here, look at some nice pictures of his other work.”
This reminds me of another one-sided 19th-century literary bromance.
If it wasn’t for the fact Kate Beaton has gone on-record as saying people getting tattoos of her comics makes her uncomfortable (which, totally understandable), my best friend and I would’ve already run out and gotten the BROS panel from this engraved permanently on our skin.
I missed her saying that – do you happen to have a link? I’m sad, because I had vague plans for a Fat Pony tattoo that will now have to be scrapped.
It’s the fifth question down in the FAQ here: http://www.harkavagrant.com/about.php (and references hypothetical Fat Pony tattoos, weirdly enough)
Probably because Fat Pony is the best. Oh well.
Oh! I may have to change my profile image to that last panel.
Charles Dickens can still go fuck himself and even if you were right about my precious Hans Christian he would still have done a good thing by contributing in his little way to some small measure of discomfort felt by Charles Dickens.
that’s all.
Yeah, I’m sure whatever awkwardness the Sad Dane put your family though pales in comparison to your SHAMELESS WHORING, CHARLES.
The trailer for that recent Dickens movie succeeded in making Ralph Fiennes sexually repulsive to me. that is a feat even Voldemort had trouble with. impressive, Dickens
That recent Dickens movie was just the worst period drama I have ever seen. Just the worst.
It made me like Dickens more just because it was so terrible.
AT LEAST CHARLES WENT OUT AND EXPERIENCED LIFE INSTEAD OF JUST SWANNING ABOUT COPENHAGEN WRITING LETTERS ABOUT CELIBACY TO UNCOMFORTABLE LADIES
give me an active philanderer any day over some guy who DELAYS A TRAIN so he can stammer out a marriage proposal to a woman he’s met like three times
I feel like if Hans Christian Andersen were alive today he would be on reddit talking about how women don’t appreciate chivalry anymore, so Team Dickens obv.
Oh come on, if he were alive today he’d be free to direct his clingy crushes towards men at least as much as towards women. not that he didn’t anyway, some of the time. He was a piner, not a resenter. He was not in any way a fedora tipper; he wanted people to be chivalrous TO HIM. and he deserved for them to be, the poor thing. Every woman in his stories is a self-portrait. so are the ducks and fir trees for that matter.
I mean, he was very plainly more interested in overidentifying with women than with controlling them; I don’t know how anyone could mistake that.
I’m confused by this bickering about which of these men was worse than the other, when a perfectly reasonable conclusion is that they were both terrible people.
HCA was wonderful; he was just also difficult. He was not a terrible person. It is not reasonable to put a repellent beard monster like Charles Dickens on the same moral level as a melancholic wretch like Hans Christian Andersen just because they were both great writers.
Do you think we could fit this on a tshirt?
i enjoyed this thoroughly and it does not diminish my appreciation for either writer. we are all horrible in different ways.
I’m not sure about that. HCA lived in a world that was genuinely unjust to him, while the times catered to the sexual appetites of Charles Dickens. I find it hard to knock him for failing to be straightforward with women when it seems like he had no real desire to have heterosexual sex. Excessive chivalry seems like a useful refuge. (Also, HCA wins the effed-up childhood sweepstakes, despite stiff competition.)
And his thing about Jenny Lind? He thought he WAS Jenny Lind- not without justification. Their lives were weirdly similar (started out as indigent child performers, ended up as international art stars). Lind seemed to tolerate it- she had to have known. And here’s me mega-projecting, but she had to have at least thought about the possibility of being half of the world’s most famous Scandinavian power couple, which is why I imagine her rolling her eyes and saying “Hans is a Dear but I just don’t think it’s going to work out.”
That said, if you wanted to hang out with one of them, Dickens. Dickens threw great parties.
MY HANS CHRISTIAN WENT ALL OVER EUROPE FROM ONE END OF BELGIUM TO THE OTHER END OF ITALY AND HE DIDN’T LIKE ANY OF IT VERY WELL, IT ALL MADE HIM FRETFUL AND WORRIED ABOUT VENEREAL DISEASES. that is living for you. excuse him for not putting more effort into growing abominable whiskers all about his face such as your good friend Charles Dickens excelled at. he was too busy with art.
and better it be said of a man that he made many women uncomfortable by writing them peculiar letters than that he made one woman miserable by marrying her
she would have been miserable anyways
And men; don’t leave out the uncomfortable letters to men.
Don’t forget about Harald Scharff! Sexual bliss with a danseuse is nothing to sneeze at.
And, I mean, I’m not inside the brain of HCA’s dick, but I suspect his feelings for women were idealized and cerebral, while his feelings for men were more crotch-feelings. You gotta give him a little wiggle room for being a tragic closet case.
That said, he would have been an amazingly frustrating friend.
I’m on board with this – I just read Parallel Lives (so good, everyone go read it) and am primed to side with any tormentor of ol’ Charles Dickens.
Parallel Lives is the BEST. I didn’t think anything could make me love George Eliot any more, but it succeeded.
Thank you. The first time I read about this, I cackled evilly at the glorious notion that someone (especially Hans Christian Andersen) had inconvenienced Dickens in any and all possible ways.
Now I am imagining that all of Hans Christian’s sadness was just knowing, passive-aggressive punishment for Charles Dickens being terrible.
Ooooh, I had no idea Dickens was a dick. After some googling, I found this:
“…Other investigators have combed through his bank records, searched property rate books for evidence of a love nest, and figured out he had less money on his person the day he died than the day before: Did he collapse or even expire at the home of Ternan [girlfriend] who then picked his pocket and had him driven home? That’s what Claire Tomalin, author of biographies of both Ternan and Dickens, thinks – and where Slater’s book wraps up.”
I kinda love imagining Ternan going through his pockets, maybe even whistling a jaunty tune under her breath as her hands casually go about retrieving his wallet, going “Hmmmmm…what have we got here…..BALLS, that’s it? Should’ve known, Terry-Girl, should’ve known” then dragging his ass to the door where she screams “TAXI” and when the carriage arrives, shouts from the landing “To the dump, please” shutting the door firmly behind her.
Dickens on the birth of his son, Edward: “on the whole I could have dispensed with him.” God, he was such an asshole.
GO GET YOURS, SAD HANS. TAKE HIS TOWELS.
TEAM CATHERINE HOGARTH.
I’d be the Dickens in this situation because any time anybody even manages to get me to agree to come stay with them I am way more likely to leave early because my home is better than their home because it’s mine and nobody else is in it to judge me when I drink too much wine and get really emotional about Chopin on a Tuesday night (just a hypothetical situation, certainly not a recent experience).
Same here – if we ever invite someone over to our place, I immediately regret it and start scheming of ways to make sure they leave early. Weekend houseguests who stay past 10AM on Sunday are the bane of my existence.
WOW wine & chopin are my 2 favorite thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings together they make you so drunk and melancholy! A+
Does your house have my cats in it? No? I think I’m fine where I am, thanks.
Dickens feuds! Best feuds!
I cannot stop reading the Hans Christian Anderson texts in the voice of Madeline Basset.
YES
I really enjoy reading contemporary stories from the 18th and 19th centuries (oops just typed 195th, that would be a very different story I imagine) where guests would habitually come to stay for months on end or whatever, and the family would just be gritting their teeth going “Oh, hm. I see you’re still here, enjoying the fruits of our hospitality. No, truly, we wouldn’t possible urge you to leave unless you had some OH VERY URGENT BUSINESS AT YOUR HOME OR ANYTHING.”
Also, in Biblical times: “Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house, lest he grow weary of thee and hate thee.”
Houseguests: a scourge for all ages.
AUNT MARY MARIA
I knew I could count on you to get my reference!
The moment someone tells me I can’t eat onions anymore in my own house is the moment I throw them right out the window.
If only more odious relatives could be ejected by throwing them birthday parties! That way the relative is gone and you get to eat cake.
Yes, on this I am basically Team Benjamin Franklin, who said: “Fish and visitors smell in three days.”
“Thou shalt not take moochers into thy hut”
AAAAH OH NOOOOOOO I was the Hans Christian Andersen houseguest one time (…that I know of OH GOD HOW MANY TIMES AM I NOT AWARE OF aaaaaaaaaaaaaah) when I moved to a new city with no apartment lined up and my friend who had lived there for a few years invited me to stay with her in her tiny-tiny-tiny apartment while I looked for a place of my own, and my air mattress and two duffel bags of all my earthly possessions took up ALL the floorspace in her living room, and also I had no job lined up in this new city AND I was in the early stages of breaking up with a man I had been passionately in love with but I was still in denial about breaking up, so I was MOST CERTAINLY insufferably mopey and angst-ridden, and I am QUITE SURE that she immediately regretted inviting me even if she truly meant the invitation in the first place. I think I stayed for a week before I found a room to rent. It probably felt like a million years to her, aaaaaaaaaaaah.
We are still friends. I should probably send this to her, and she will laugh and say that no, it was lovely to have me visit, because she is such a kind person. Yes, I will do that right after I finish hyperventilating and curling up into a ball and never interacting with people ever again because I am clearly the WORST.
I did the same thing traveling abroad. I stayed (illegally) in a friend’s dorm room for weeks because all my other travel plans fell through. There was barely any floor space, so we had to share the twin bed. Our friendship was already strained, but I definitely killed it.
You are fine. A week is fine.
I had a friend hit a series of unfortunate events and stay with me for 4 months without paying rent.
And we are still friends.
I once hit Difficulties & ended up staying on some friends’ floor for upwards of 6 months and they still let me in their house & speak to me for some unfathomable reason.
Haha, yeah, at least I got out from underfoot relatively quickly.
However, I was so angsty over this guy (who really was not worth it, they never are, are they) that I was just insufferable. Me and Hans Christian could totally have stayed up all night together in matching jammies, talking about sad trains and weeping into each others’ shoulders.
Anything longer than a week, and even my sweet generous friend would have stabbed me in the eye.
One year. With all their furniture filling our living room as if it were a storage unit. No rent. I think it was a year. It felt like a year.
and i’m taking all the towels with me
Inexplicably terrible houseguests are the WORST kind of terrible houseguest. None of your life experiences could have prepared you for the task of making the terrible guest stop doing the thing.
Not much exaggeration there. The first volume of Andersen alone tells Sad Animal/Inanimate Object stories about:
-Sad fir tree
-Sad duckling/cygnet
-Sad tin soldier
-Sad match girl
-Sad grasshopper
-The dozens of sad people infected by shards of a demonic looking-glass
-Sad old man
-Completely different sad tin soldier
There’s also another half-dozen stories about inanimate objects/animals being punished for their hubris:
-Proud darning needle
-Proud Morocco leather ball
-Proud flea
-Proud piggy bank
-Proud apple bough
And then you have Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” which is just terribly, terribly misleading as a title.
Oh my god. My mother would make us watch The Happy Prince (this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIwupcYwimY) every Christmas. It is … less than festive.
My dad had a thing about that creepy version of A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim so I feel your pain. Nightmares forever.
“Take my eyes. Take my skin. TAKE EVERYTHING!”
Oh hey there, Giving Tree.
When I lived in LA we had a friend of my mother-in-law ask if one of his employees could crash on our couch for a couple of nights as he was passing through LA. This guy shows up and announces that he is staying a week. He was in LA for one meeting and for some reason scheduled a whole week around it. He basically sat on our patio and smoked for a week. I never saw him reading or watching TV. Just sitting and staring at the field behind our apartment complex and smoking. I finally got fed up with him moping around the apartment all day and took him to Disneyland. Worst visit to Disneyland ever!
I understand your pain, Charles, I really do.
Wtf? An employee of a friend of your mother-in-law? What sort of fucked up forced house guest-ery is that? *shudder*
She honestly thought he was only staying one or two nights and would then be out of there. That I could have handled, but a week of just being in our tiny apartment, all the time, was just too much.
I’m really glad I have my own office because I shriek-laughed when I got to “what if a duck was sad”
I’m not the only Father Ted enthusiast on the Toast who’s thinking about Entertaining Father Stone, right?
I wanted to post gifs, but I was too lazy to look for them. One of my favorite episodes.
For your viewing pleasure :http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4qzriDP4Q1r7eveq.gif
That episode also contains one of my favourite Ted-Dougal exchanges:
Dougal: Did you ever see that film, Ted, where your man has his head transplanted onto a fly, and the fly’s head was transplanted onto the man?
Ted: Oh, yes… what was it called…?
Dougal: Out Of Africa, I think. Anyway, your man has the head of the fly and he’s chasing his wife all over the place and she’s hiding the jam and everything so he won’t get stuck in it…
Ted: I’ll have to stop you there, Dougal.
Dougal: Yes, Ted?
Ted: No reason. I just have to stop you
I fear being a Hans because I am a Charles at heart. When I’m a guest, I try to make myself as scarce as possible, assuming that people will get annoyed that I’m ALWAYS AROUND (because I sort of feel the same way when people stay with me for long periods of time).
“greasy ginger snake”
GREASY GINGER SNAKE
Years ago my daughter had plans to go trick-or-treating with some school friends, the children of two other families. They were all meeting up at the home of one of the other families. When I went to drop her off, I ended up waiting around for a bit, while the kids were finishing getting ready. While I was waiting, it dawned on me that the other two sets of parents were planning to eat dinner together while they waited for the kids to come back. I had not been invited. Now, I knew these two families, and knew that they knew each other. I should also add that I was quite recently divorced and 1) kind of lonely and not sure who all my friends still were and 2) maybe still a little insane but it struck me as odd and really kind of mean that they had made these plans and not included me. So I sort of just decided that I HAD been invited and…stayed for dinner. It was kind of awkward and I didn’t have a great time. It was probably rude of me but, honestly, I think they committed the greater error.
Oh that was kind of mean of them! Baller move to stick around – I would have just slunk home and cried into a glass of wine.
I am still trying to figure out how to make my parents give me a firm departure date when they come to visit. They don’t stay too long, so that’s good, but it would be nice to know in advance just how long they’re staying.
I may have to move back across the country so that they’ll have to book flights and tell me when the flights are.
I’mma let you finish but Paul Erdos was the worst houseguest of all time!
Storytime?
Ta da! http://the-toast.net/2014/10/01/dirtbag-hans-chri…
The amphetamines must have made him an extra-special house guest.
Seeeeriously.
Do go on.
So, Paul Erdos was a brilliant mathematician with, by all accounts, zero ability to look after himself. He was homeless for most (all?) of his professional life, would show up unannounced at other mathematicians’ doorstep and announce “My brain is open!” and expect them to spend the next few days/weeks/months (? not sure if anyone put up with him for that long) doing math with him all day everyday. He lived for decades out of a pair of suitcases — so he’d sleep on their couch, eat their food, and generally mooch around the house. He took amphetamines regularly, because he got more math done on them; he’d insist on working on math for 20 hours a day, and bang pots at all hours to wake people up when he had an idea. Dude was legitimately a genius, so lots of mathematicians would be happy to see him, but this is the early 20th century, when almost all of these mathematicians were dudes. So while the dudes were mathing it up, the host mathematician’s wife was the one stuck cleaning up after Erdos: doing his laundry, making his food, and generally putting up with him upending the house with no warning. I have never, *ever* seen this mentioned in narratives of The Great Vagrant Mathematician, which, >:( >:( >:( Erdos had an extremely difficult time functioning in social society, which I can empthaize with, but he put all the burden on his community, and it’s written as this wistful narrative of quirky genius, when I imagine the reality is orders of magnitude less rosy.
Well, first obviously people with a high Erdos number need to appreciate their spouses, and second all the jokes about sleeping with someone with a high Erdos number are now doubly squicky.
That is an excellent point, and one that I didn’t consider in the v. lively Dickens vs. Andersen debate: Poor MRS. Dickens, you know she’s the one who had to make decent conversation with the man, as if her life wasn’t difficult enough.
Osutein: “It was great talking to you again. If you’re ever in Chicago, be sure to look us up!”
Acquaintance: “Oh I’d love to. Whereabouts do you live?”
Osutein: **Escapes into the sewers**
Oh my god. OH MY GOD. In grad school, I organized online to take an apartment with two other people from my department. Moving day arrives, gal roommate and I move in just fine. Dude roommate shows up with a friend – we assumed he was there to help move stuff – and the friend fucking STAYED. For TWO WEEKS. And dude roommate had warned neither of us about the friend ahead of time, nor told us when he’d leave. So this guy slept on the floor in the middle of where everyone had to walk for days and days while gal roommate and I kept whisper-hissing to each other “What are we gonna do? Why is he here? Why is he STILL here?”
No doubt, I have the “was this really a real invite?” anxiety all the time. But any person I don’t know staying in my home for an excess of 3 days – including relatives I don’t really know – is my nightmare fuel.
About twice a year, I go to stay friends in N.C. for week-long visits. This is when I get to see my little goddaughter, and they seem to love having me, but I feel such CRUSHING ANXIETY about eating their food and stuff. I have tried multiple times to give them money, even sneakily (I thought) leaving an envelope with cash behind. But they FOUND IT and returned it. I JUST DON’T WANT TO BE THAT GUEST WHO TAKES UNFAIR ADVANTAGE OF HOSPITALITY!!!
Bring an excessive amount of gifts? Then they can’t return them! Just like nice alcohol and foodstuffs. Or take them out to dinner? Although with ridiculously polite people it can be difficult to wrangle the check away from them as they INSIST on at least splitting if not paying for you. (The anxiety of intending to pay for a friend’s meal and having them treat you instead has totally happened to me. I am not very adept at these negotiations and polite people can be so TRICKSY.)
On the other hand, I’m sure they love having you!
All the unwanted houseguest stories in the comments are reminding me of the time one of my college roommates invited her friends to come stay ‘for a little while’…leaving out the part where they had two children under the age of ten.
We had a family of four living in our living room for three months. Probably longer, but after I came back from winter break to find out the four-year-old had drawn on my bedroom wall and someone had slept in my bed (among other activities, based on the fact I found an empty condom box under the bed as well), I made plans to get out as quickly as I could.
oh my god.
That is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.
Oh, it was. I didn’t even get the satisfaction of telling my roommate ‘I am leaving this house because there are people living in our living room, what even’, as she beat me to the punch by telling me I had to find somewhere else to live ‘because you stay in your room like an antisocial person.’
Plus, I now have a horrible roommate story with which to regale friends and internet strangers, so.
I had a roommate who moved his girlfriend and her two-year-old into our house, rent-free, without consulting the people who were paying the majority of the rent (my partner and I had the master suite–biggest bedroom + private bath, so that was fair but STILL, we never got to park in our garage or driveway as it WAS). If they were just living in his room it wouldn’t have bothered me about not adjusting the rent situation, but it was his room and an additional room.
His defense was that she was giving him rent money.
Um, okay, but now we have 6 people living here instead of 4 and the rent split needs to be reassessed entirely.
And while he and his girlfriend were sleeping and my partner and I were on an opposing shift, the child would be awake and looking for food or entertainment or whatever and why would she want to talk to these strange MEN she lives with, so I got to hang out with a toddler. Which is fine, it’s not the kid’s fault her adults are garbage trucks, but this is not a responsibility I’d ever been consulted about. But then when I say “hey kiddo, don’t run around while you’re eating chips” when her mother’s trying to make dinner, it becomes a Thing, how DARE you tell her child what to do, if you speak to that kid again you’ll be out on the street.
Honestly it wasn’t even the girlfriend and the toddler who were the problem, it was That Guy, he was just such a massive shitwizard. I have so many stories about living with that guy.
God job Hans, because Charles Dickens was a major asshole and totally deserved it.
Seriously. If only all the assholes of the world could be somehow punished via an unending stream of vaguely mopey houseguests.
Exactly. Dickens was a pretty horrible person to live with at times. WHATEVER CHAZ… don’t you have to go and moon over your wife’s sister like a creeper?
Does your house have my cats in it? No? I think I'm fine where I am, thanks.
My boyfriend and I were recently unwanted, overstaying houseguests, but trust us WE KNEW WE WERE.
It was not our fault. We were invited, and then we were stuck in the country house because we were not really welcome to use the only car there, but our friends had just moved and had had two sets of surprise houseguests in the week before our arrival, so were just DONE.
To be honest, the whole thing sucked and I was choked to have spent my labour day weekend flying out to see friends who very obviously wished we weren’t there.
I let a friend crash at my house last night because she’s “between apartments” and now I am FILLED with dread that she won’t leave.
Can the future of #unwantedhouseguests include the time Rousseau crashed with Hume, convinced himself that Hume was trying to murder him, and *still* wouldn’t leave?
“http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/29/philosophy
I do not know whether I have been the bad guest, though I dread it and fear that I have been that guest. HOWEVER, I actually have had the Hans Christian Andersen guest, and I also dread that quite a bit now.
My sophomore year at art school I moved out of the on campus housing and into a lovely little apartment with two roommates. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was not. One roommate I knew well, but not well enough to realize that she would eventually steal the rent money from the other two of us. The other roommate was a virtual stranger who decided early on that she did not like me. Eventual thief roommate, who will henceforth be referred to as Rachel (not her name), told me soon after we moved in, that she’d heard from a childhood friend who would like to come for a visit, and would that be OK? This request was framed in such a way as to give me the impression that this was not yet a matter that was decided, and that the childhood friend was someone well known to Rachel and trusted by her.
I said yes, and then found out that it was good that I had, as childhood friend Ross (also not his name) had already purchased a plane ticket from Canada, and was going to stay with us for two weeks. After he arrived, I found out Rachel actually hadn’t seen or been in touch with Ross since childhood, when they briefly attended elementary school together. He’d just creepily looked her up on the internet, emailed her, and swiftly invited himself for a visit. Had I known, I would have said hell no. With an actual person just shown up from Canada with no place else to stay, 18 year old me turned into a pathetic doormat who felt that kicking him out would be heartless. Ross quickly took over our living room, where he liked to sit in his underwear.
Additionally, Ross liked to have long conversations in which the conversing was all on his side, and consisted mainly of a long list of the women who had wronged him. I tuned him out, but still remember the moment when a phrase came distinctly out of the drone and I heard, “And I KNOW the baby isn’t mine because she’s a total slut,” and then there was some more about how ugly this woman was. He took no hints, none, so even though I am usually quite afraid of hurting or offending people or *gasp* making them dislike me, I very quickly moved from hints to open forthright hostility, which he chose to take as evidence of my hilarious sense of humor.
Me: “Stop talking to me.”
Him: “Ha ha, you’re so funny!”
Me: “I am not being funny. I do not like you. I do not want you to talk to me.”
Him: “You are just so hilarious!”
I tried to get Rachel to kick him out, but she told me he’d spent all his money flying there and didn’t have any left to leave until his prepaid flight. In addition to his lists of terrible women, topics of conversation favored by Ross included his physical ailments and his insistence that he was a druid who was practicing the druidic arts exactly as his Celtic ancestors had. Naturally, over the course of his interminable stay, he fell in love with Rachel, who did not return his sentiments.
Basically, it went pretty poorly, but he DID leave, so I thought that wretched chapter was closed. But no, because soon after Rachel stole the rent money and we three roommates split. I took the phone number with me, since the phone was in my name. Rachel stole a phone card associated with my number and ran up hundreds of dollars of calls on my bill. I was something of a wreck, so I was not at all pleased when my phone rang at 2:30 in the morning and it was Ross calling for Rachel because he thought it was still her number. When I told him we no longer lived together and that I did not have her new number, he told me his sob story instead and I was too tired to think of hanging up on him, though I was very mad later in the morning when I realized that had been an option.
Turns out Ross never told his boss he was going to the States for two weeks, plus he’d messed up a car repair at the mechanic shop he worked at before he left, and his boss was left with the mess and no explanation, so he was fired on his return. And he’d spent all his money on the trip and fell in love with Rachel and she didn’t love him back and it was just so unfair and he needed to tell a hostile near stranger about it immediately.
And now I only allow guests I would be willing to live with permanently because I realized I do not have to live with people and drama like that ever again. Amen. Also, I lived alone after that and liked it VERY much.
Did you hear that? Just now? That was the sound of the Most Horrified Upvote Ever.
All I could imagine was Simon Callow as Dickens and Danny Kaye having these conversations. It made it even funnier.
I’m certain I’ve been Hans in this relationship.
So I guess the ideal literary love match would be between Hans Christian Anderson and Blanche Dubois.
I heard that Hans Christian Andersen would probably be diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome today.
"Thou shalt not take moochers into thy hut"
For your viewing pleasure :http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4qzriDP4Q1r7eveq.gif
That episode also contains one of my favourite Ted-Dougal exchanges:
Dougal: Did you ever see that film, Ted, where your man has his head transplanted onto a fly, and the fly's head was transplanted onto the man?
Ted: Oh, yes… what was it called…?
Dougal: Out Of Africa, I think. Anyway, your man has the head of the fly and he's chasing his wife all over the place and she's hiding the jam and everything so he won't get stuck in it…
Ted: I'll have to stop you there, Dougal.
Dougal: Yes, Ted?
Ted: No reason. I just have to stop you
Do you live in fear of being the kind of person who invites a social blockhead to your house and cannot get rid of them for five weeks? Or do you live in fear of being the kind of person who accepts an invitation that was not sincerely meant and overstaying your welcome without ever realizing you have made yourself ridiculous?
Asking me to decide between these two fears is like asking which cockroach is your least favourite. Whether people are peopling at me in my house, or whether I am peopling at them in their house, THERE ARE JUST SO MANY THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG AND RUIN EVERYTHING FOREVER