You win some, you lose some

Let’s start with the good news, shall we? I had a huge breakthrough the other day with insect assassination.

I feel like I should back up a bit first. Rewind to about 3 years ago. I had just broken up with my boyfriend of 5 or so years and I was having a bit of, how should I put this? Let’s call it “trouble adjusting.” With my old boyfriend, when I needed to get something done, I just called him up and said, “hey sweetie, can you do [fill in the blank] for me?” and it would get done. Fill in the blank could be anything from putting together Ikea furniture to changing light bulbs to ordering a pizza. After five years of filling in the blank, it’s pretty easy to see how I would end up a bit helpless.

It’s worse than you think though. I seriously couldn’t even hang a picture. Hammering a nail into the wall was an ordeal.

Over my year of singlehood however, I embraced my inner Betty Friedan. I moved to a new apartment all by myself, mastered Ikea furniture and at one point, I put together a cabinet for our bathroom and used a power drill to hang the thing. Yee-haw! The only problem is that I could never kill bugs. Especially not those gigantic brown roaches that infest D.C. in the summertime. Luckily for me (not so lucky for the bugs), I didn’t stay single long and the Scooby Snacks has been around to defend me from roaches and other beasts, like bees, gnats and spiders.

When Scooby moved me up to New York, I was a little nervous about letting him leave. I told him that one of my biggest concerns was the possibility of bugs. He was very supportive though. He said, “you are an independent woman, capable of doing anything and certainly capable of killing bugs.”

I had to remember these inspirational words the other night when I got up at about 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom. When I flipped the light switch on in the bathroom, a little brown blob on the wall caught my eye. It was a roach. Thank goodness it wasn’t one of those giant ones, because I would have just run back to my bedroom and hidden under my covers. I looked at the roach, practiced the scooby’s mantra, “I am an independent woman!” and clumsily swatted at the insect with a tissue covered hand. On the 4th try, I made contact, picked up the sad little guy and threw him in the toilet.

I do feel a little badly, but he was an intruder and so I like to think of it as self-defense.

Of course, as you may have guessed from the first line, I have a touch of bad news. When I came home this afternoon to check my email and do a little research, I was greeted by a completely dark and silent apartment. The darkness was to be expected, but the silence was not. My fan should have been running and thus making a slight whirring sound in the next room.

I walked into my room and flipped the light switch. Nothing. My power was out. I walked down the hall of my apartment building and asked the super’s brother to do something about it and then walked back to school to check my email there. When my roommate and I returned home however, the apartment was still dark, hot and silent. I had just bought groceries too, so it was depressing putting my hummus and milk into a lukewarm refrigerator. We called the super and 30 minutes later he arrived and went down to the basement to fix the problem. The lights came on, the fridge started working and my roommate’s DVD player scrolled “HELLO” across it’s screen. But my room was still silent. Not even a hint of a whirr.

I don’t know if it was my fan that caused the power outage or not, but once the power was back on, the fan was not. I tried it in every outlet. It’s dead. And worse, I’m hot. Really, really hot. The kind of uncomfortable warmth that I know is going to impede the sleeping process.

I considered opening up the window and getting a little air flow in here, but I’m too scared I'll let bugs in.