Monday, August 1, 2011

MY deep-seated FEAR of Cockroaches

This morning a tiny beige baby cockroach crawled onto our dining table during breakfast, causing me to leap back and holler like a true pansy. Becky came in from the kitchen to find me with my back on the ground beneath the table frantically trying to find the elusive, 1/4" cm little bug. She coaxed me back to the table to finish our breakfast with the admonition that "there are going to be bugs. Get used to it." Truer words have never been spoken. We've found 3 cockroaches in and around our wonderful new house in the last 2 weeks, and have dispatched 2 of them promptly. The third was outdoors, and I'm not going to count the little infant I saw this morning. I despise roaches. With all my heart. I wrote a pretentious essay in high school describing them as the embodiment of what Freud calls the Id, "the dark, inaccessible...cauldron of seething excitations..." I've hated roaches since a childhood encounter with a huge flying beast of a specimen left me quivering in a hysterical heap on my bed. Such is life in Asia, though. Once in Bangladesh, a 2" roach flew into a kitchen where I was hanging out with friends. 4 grown men fled that kitchen, which is a testament to the formidable hold these creatures have on our imaginations. These things have been crawling around for hundreds of thousands of years...I should get used to the fact that they're not going to respect the boundaries I erect around what I mistakenly believe is MY turf...

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