On Life
Sorry, I've been really, really busy lately, so I haven't had time to update. To rectify this, I am putting up a mammoth post that has been building over the course of several months.

On the Saga of The Roach
I sing to you now of the story of Pete. A few months ago, I was preparing to talk to my parents one morning. As I reached over to grab my hair dryer, Something large and black fell from beside my hairdryer and landed with a tick on the floor. Wondering absently what I must have put by my hairdryer, I proceeded to plug in my hairdryer. That’s when I noticed that the ticking noise hadn’t stopped. Sudden realization dawning, I looked down at where the Thing had fallen and realized that it was no longer there. I was in a hurry that day, so I quickly decided that what had just happened was something I neither wanted nor had time to dwell on. I was about half way through when I noticed something large and black crawling out from underneath my washing machine. At first I thought it was one of those giant scarab beetles from The Mummy (I hate scary movies, I know I hate them, so WHY do I watch them?), but upon further examination, I realized that it was a cockroach. A giant cockroach. Now I understand why that guy in Space: Above and Beyond was so freaked out when he thought of tons of cockroaches. I freaked out for a good long minute, then decided I needed to get to my computer for my call with my parents. I first got the vacuum as a preventative measure. In America, my preferred method of choice for spider extermination was a quick ride down the Vortex of Doom.

And then I had to pause and wonder about vacuuming up a cockroach as an effective means of destroying it. Anyone who has studied biology or has read a Farside cartoon is well aware of the fact that cockroaches are the only creatures that can survive a nuclear holocaust. So I began to wonder: what are the chances of a cockroach being able to live after being sucked into a vacuum? If I was a betting man, I think my money would be on the cockroach in that battle. So I figured the only way to help the roach along on its path to destiny would be to turn my vacuum into a Swirling Vortex of Doom. I turned on my vacuum to suction power high (its sounding more and more like a sci-fi movie, isn’t it?). But every time I would even make a movement towards the roach, it would go scuttling under the washing machine. Eventually, I decided that I had better things to do than babysit the washing machine to keep the roach in check.

Later that week, I went and bought roach traps (I had been taking a nap on my couch and heard the fateful ticking noise of roach feet on tatami [floor mats] and had immediately decided that the roach needed to die), which to me looked too small to fit the roach, but whatever. Oddly enough, the roach didn’t die. I’d see him scuttling away from me very fast about once a week. And that was it. He never climbed on my food or furniture, he never came in my bedroom (I kept both doors leading to the bedroom firmly shut), he never really came out from under furniture if he could help it. Soon, I found that somehow in the past few weeks, Pete had grown on me. I didn’t mind that he lived in the apartment with me so long as I rarely saw him and he was alone. And I also realized that I had inadvertently named him. And he had become a he, not an it. With horror I realized: I have a pet cockroach. And I was sort of okay with that. Now I was sort of okay with Pete because he was a Japanese cockroach at heart. He was WAY more scared of me than I was of him. He had only to see my shadow, and he’d go hurriedly scramble under the nearest piece of furniture. You know, I guess I’m okay with cockroaches so long as I know they’re scared of me. If I can’t see them, I can tolerate their existence.

Our relationship started to sour, however, when Pete did something unforgivable. Pete always seemed a decent sort of roach, fairly quiet and conservative. I guess he was just hiding the inner party roach from me. Yes, it all went south when Pete started living in sin.

I came home late one night from a party and went straight to the bathroom so I could get ready for bed. I took out my contacts (located on the left side of the sink), then got ready to start brushing my teeth. I saw a black blur by my toothbrush on the right side of the sink. “I must have moved the plug for the sink sometime today and forgotten about it,” I thought. I was about to switch it back to the left side of the sink when a bell started to go off in my head and my hand froze. “Wait a minute,” my inner intelligence thought. “You haven’t moved that plug since you cleaned the sink when you first arrived. It’s probably stuck fast to the sink, and you don’t remember tugging it off today.” My eyes swiveled to the left side of the sink. There, indeed, was the plug for the sink. My eyes swiveled back to the right and saw the inevitable. It was a cockroach. On my sink. Half-on top of my mouthguard (which I wear to bed every night). Not moving. Now that’s just not cool. I could tell right away it wasn’t Pete – Pete is humongous and black, and this roach was much smaller and brown. I don’t know why I immediately decided it was a female, but I did (female roaches are probably bigger than male roaches, but at this point, Pete was Pete in my mind). Sudden realization dawned: Pete had a girlfriend! And no, I wasn’t jealous. Mostly. It’s sad when your roaches have a more exciting love life than you do, is all I’m saying.

Once I realized that Pete had a girlfriend, I became less friendly to him. I was okay with a bachelor roach living in my apartment on his own. But now he was living in sin in my apartment, and this I could not tolerate. It was time for me to evict Pete. I went out and bought approximately a million roach poison pouches (if he had a girlfriend, I could only speculate as to whether her family was going to move in with them, so I wanted enough poison for all to share) and laid them all over my kitchen, tv room, and bathroom area. At first I didn’t notice a difference – I still saw the girlfriend around every once in awhile. After a few weeks, though, I realized that Pete and girlfriend had been absent for quite some time. And the peasants rejoiced. I left the poisons out, just in case.

But the story does not end there, oh no. Skip forward 2 months for The Reappearance of Pete. I can’t remember where he first popped up again, but I remember seeing him scamper by very quickly when I turned on the lights to my kitchen. A few days later, I saw his girlfriend reappear as well. Dangit. And she was right in front of my shower. How am I supposed to ignore that? I needed to take a shower, so I needed her out of the way. I cautiously approached the roach (ie – I kicked a water bottle at it). It didn’t move. It kind of gave me a contemptuous roach shrug and said, “Yo, was that supposed to scare me? You’re gonna have to do better than that.” Never one to leave the stakes where they lay, I decided to up the ante. So I kicked a sock at it. Still nothing. It scrambled a little towards the wall, but it was still showing defiance. “It’s a sock. Scary! You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

Now, I’m okay with roaches when they’re scared of me and cower in fear. But when they start pulling this defiant attitude…well, I’ve gotta draw the line somewhere, right? And this roach was ticking me off. Who did it think it was, blocking my shower and not cowering in fear before me? I started to get really angry at the imposition this roach was putting on me. It brought to mind the Disney movie “Beauty and the Beast” where all the villagers are singing “Kill the Beast!”? I was about one pitchfork and a few flaming torches short of that. I wanted to commit some serious roachicide.

I looked warily at the cockroach, and realized that she was smaller than Pete and thus had a better chance of fitting inside my vacuum tube. I got my vacuum cleaner out and slowly approached. I gathered my courage and like St. George stabbing the Dragon, I thrust my vacuum tube into the heart of the beast. Although in retrospect, I doubt St. George squealed like a little girl and made little fearful whimpering noises when he made contact with the beast. And he probably didn’t wet himself, though only because rusty chainmail rubbing against your nether-regions is NOT something you want to experience on a thousand mile horseback ride. Okay, well I didn’t wet myself, either, but it was a close call. At first the roach didn’t go up the vacuum tube, but then I turned to maximum suction power and it fit nicely up the tube.

Enter dilemma 2. As mentioned before, cockroaches can survive nuclear fall-out. So, how could I create a mini A-bomb in my vacuum cleaner? I don’t know enough about science to answer that. But I do know enough about sharp pointy objects to realize that they can be deadly when hurling around in a Swirling Vortex of Doon. I started looking around my floor for anything with sharp edges that would hopefully not puncture my vacuum bag but would still perhaps cause serious damage to a roach. So I began sucking up plastic tabs for bread wrappers, paperclips, staples, and anything else that looked pointy and sharp. Eventually satisfied that there was nothing left to suck up after la cucaracha, I let my vacuum run for another minute so as to inflict maximum damage, then I slowly switched it off. Immediately, I grabbed a Ziploc bag and rubber-banded it to the end of the vacuum hose, just in case the cockroach tried to pull its bleeding and mangled body out of the vacuum cleaner tube.

While talking to my mother later, she paused and said to me, “Okay, you thought about this WAY too much.” Maybe. But I know that someone, somewhere can sleep better knowing that there is one less cockroach on this planet. Sleep well, entomophobics, wherever you are.