#DeadRoach

Because I have nothing of consequence to write about right now, and because my blog has been uncharacteristically silent, I am going to write a post about the other day when I found a dead roach.

A few days ago I was sitting in my room trying to figure out what to do with my day.  That has been my reality as of late.  I sort of wake up, sometimes I have plans, sometimes not so much, but it is always a matter of trying to busy myself in the mean time.  I usually figure I ought to do something productive – organize my books, clean my desk, send out some writing samples – but instead I always end up sitting at my desk, drinking coffee and watching gymnastics clips.  Just this evening I gave myself a little test and realized that I can look at the entire USA National Gymnastics Team, juniors and seniors, and identify all of them by name and many of them by name, gym and best apparatus.  It is not something I am proud of.  Anyway, that specific morning I decided that the best use of my time would be to unpack the suitcase that had been sitting on my floor from a weekend trip to my friend Debbie’s wedding.  I love Debbie and her wedding was great.  If I had a video of her reciting her vows I would be so happy.  It was like, the most love I have ever seen verbalized before in my life and it was really something beautiful.  (Congrats Debbie and Bobby!  Love you guys!)  Now that I am thinking about it, I didn’t decide that the best use of my time would be to unpack the suitcase.  I decided that I wanted this fun headband that my friend Emily had given to me a few weeks prior and I was pretty sure it was in the suitcase.  I was right but I didn’t figure that out until something terrible happened.  So I went over to the suitcase, I moved it, and

THERE WAS A DEAD ROACH UNDER IT!

It was so bad.  I hate roaches.  Honestly I don’t care if those fuckers are dead or alive they totally gross me out.  There was this one time when I was in India back in 2004 and my friend Michelle and I were traveling around Rajasthan together.  We were at a train station waiting for our ride to the next spot we were going to visit when we found out our train was incredibly delayed.  Not like, “this train is delayed because of train traffic ahead of us, and thank you for your patience,” but like legit 6 hours of waiting for a train.  There were lots of people there also waiting.  Also a really cute little calf wandering around eating all manner of things.  Michelle decided to go off and get us some chai and snacks and I was tasked with watching our bags.  Normally that would not be a problem except that right when Michelle walked away an army* of rat-sized roaches walked right over to where our things were.  They were the biggest roaches I have ever seen in my life.  Like, imagine the roaches that we have here, like, the water bug ones, and then make them something like 5 times the size and that’s the shit I was faced with.  It was horrible.  I had to pick up all of our things and try and relocate them slightly away from the roaches so they wouldn’t hide in our bags, eat the cashew nuts we had, build up their super powers, and then emerge from the bags at the fucking Taj Mahal and kill us all.  So incredibly gross.

So I had India-sized roaches flashbacks.  I was convinced that this sucker was just playing dead and that when I went to dispose of him he would come back to life, fly across the room and give me a fucking heart attack.  So I did what any normal person would do: I put the suitcase back on the roach, called my dad, texted with some friends, and started tweeting.  Nobody really reads my tweets but I tweet nonetheless.  Here is a look at what you are missing:

I then moved the suitcase again and

Then my brain started getting carried away and I got scared.

At this point I had tried calling my friend Ben once and my father two times.  Neither of them had answered.  I was in crisis mode.

As is custom, no one read any of these tweets so me like, putting out calls for help into the Twittersphere did absolutely nothing.  Then I texted my friend Emily and she said that I should probably get a broom and a dustpan.  Genius.  In my mind I had a picture of one of those broom and dustpan situations where you have the broom and it is a regular broom with the broom stick and everything but then you have the dustpan and it is not one of those ones where you have to bend down to use it, it also has a stick.  A dustpan stick.  And the stick makes it just as tall as the broom.  So I was really excited about this prospect because it meant that my face had to be no where near the roach.  The only thing is that I don’t have one of those dustpans with the sticks.  I have the normal one.  Fuck.  So I ended up moving the suitcase, averting my eyes, somehow brooming the dead roach (it didn’t move) onto the dustpan without bending down, then using my foot to angle the dustpan in such a way that the dead roach slid all the way to the back, then extending my arm as much as possible to lift the dustpan and then ever so slowly walking the dustpan with the dead roach over to the window with the open screen that I was really concerned my cats might fall out of and flinging the dead roach as far as possible.  I felt proud.  I still do, actually.  I have been telling everyone about it.

Anyway, so the roach is gone and my suitcase is still packed although I did find the headband thing and I wore it two days in a row. Thanks for listening.

#In truth there were only 3 roaches but if we use the fact that these roaches were 5 times the size of the dead roach on my floor, that means that there were really more like 15 roaches which is very intimidating.

Tags: bugs, chai, cockroach, dead roach, India, insects, Rajasthan, roach, suitcase, weddings