COCKROACHES!!! They're everywhere!! Outside. Inside. Like vampires, they only come out at night - so I've seen, but knowing my luck they'll probably come out to haunt me during the daytime now that I'm talking about them... you know how people always seem to do that, when you're gossiping and then the person you're dishing on is within earshot? No good.
To start at the beginning of this buggy journey. When I was at the farm in India, pouring through books in the dusty library - trying to avoid the leeches, I finally read Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (I had picked it up years ago, but for some reason - probably the turning into a giant cockroach overnight part - I put it down) gaining a newfound respect for all things six-legged (spiders are still on my blacklist). After the farm, I spent time in Anjuna, Goa (touristy and full of old hippie-partiers who love leather/suede and "You have a look at my shop"-ladies, and cows), and encountered a cockroach on my first night there. Frozen with fear for a moment, then suddenly armed with my right shoe, Gregor Samsa crept into my mind and I just couldn't crush the little guy, no matter how many diseases were festering off his surface. I turned off the light, shut the door, and jammed the rolled up bath mat in between the floor and bottom of the door.
Since that time, I've also gone through a metamorphosis of sorts, and have returned to crushing cockroaches (if I can catch them) with a sick glee. No, no, no. I take that back. There is no glee, more of a relief that the room invader is dead and won't be crawling on my face in the middle of the night, biting my cheeks and laying eggs inside.
The cockroaches started coming early on in my history with Guam. It was a night not unlike tonight where the humidity was enough to kill a canary, but there was a gentle breeze and so Lindsay and Ryann decided to have their balcony door open. I think this was the first night that I tried to get everyone to watch "Moon", but it hadn't streamed all the way - blah, blah, blah, that's not important. So, Lindsay, Bobby, Ryann and I are hanging out, having chats and laughs, and then, for some reason we're standing in the middle of the room and all of a sudden, in a whoosh of brown light, some insect kamikazes into R's neck. She drops down in a frantic "Oh God!" and I say, "Don't worry, it was only a moth."
R: "It got me in the jugular!" at the same time the roach flies onto my leg,
ME: "NO IT'S NOT! IT'S A COCKROACH! IT'S A COCKROACH!!" as it flies further into the room I run the opposite way on to the balcony, slamming the door behind me.
YEAH, FLIES!! THEY FLY HERE!!! THEY FLY AND SCAMPER AND --- oooh! Yuck.
So I'm standing out on the balcony, by myself, screeching and shouting for my friends to kill it as the roach is trying to shove its way in between the [cement] wall and ceiling, reacting frantically to the loud noises we're emitting. Everyone inside is trying to usher the guy to the balcony and yelling at me that I have to open the door, but I don't want to get the roach on my face so I'm keeping the door shut. L is saying don't kill it, and while all of this lasted a good 5-10 minutes, I'll spare you the details and just end it with a glass jar chopping of its head.
Since then, there have been countless encounters. Working the Mountain (slide) rotation during Eve is the worst because you're in their domain and they're just crawling all over the rocks, their copper backs glinting in the moonlight. It's awful. Sometimes you can hear the screams of the Clubmates at night, followed by the thwacking of objects being thrown at the walls. Everybody here has at least one cockroach story.
About a month ago I was hanging out in my friends' room and we were just sitting and chatting, laughing too, and they had mentioned something about having a garbage-loving intruder, but they thought it had gone because they opened their door. Then I saw it on the wall and I screamed and ran out of the room (again, I don't deal well with emergency situations - surprise ones at least). Eventually I was cajoled back inside to find and destroy the demon, and I did. (The roaches are very sensitive to noise, by the way.) I shouldn't have killed the guy because maybe his friends would come looking for him, but I didn't appreciate being startled. Another reason why I shouldn't have killed him is because these same human friends had a cockroach in their room last week and called me down to hang out under false pretenses. They hadn't seen it in two hours, but were convinced he was still inside. I asked my friend if she wanted the roach to say good-bye, and I was imagining a cockroach in a top hat doing a little dance out into the hall like he was leaving a stage in the old days. She didn't think that was funny, so we rattled things that were shakable and stamped our feet to no avail seeing as how he was dead on his back on the balcony door sliding track.
Last roach story!! YAY!! There is no point to this post other than I have had encounters with roaches and wish to have no more!!
One day at swim-thru maintenance (where I get into SCUBA gear and basically janitorialize the algae and fish poop out of there - maybe I'll blog about it later... maybe.) I put on my tabbies/booties/water shoes/what have you's, and felt something up on my right toes. Thinking it was nothing more than the old fabric falling down I kept on keeping on what I was doing for a few minutes, then I strapped into my BC and stepped into the water only to have the "fabric" start to freak on me. Everything happened in fast slow motion as my mind realized something was alive and grotesque inside my shoe. Weighed down by the tank I struggled to take my shoe off as fast as I could and then dropped it in the water. A roach swam out! Swam! One of my co-worker friends scooped it out of the water and it started chasing me on land. I ran away (tank still on) and it disappeared into the jungle, hopefully to die, but probably not seeing as how cockroaches were the first things ever created (even before the world) and will be the last things to die, but they won't, they'll just float on into space towards some other star instead.
And that's it.
To start at the beginning of this buggy journey. When I was at the farm in India, pouring through books in the dusty library - trying to avoid the leeches, I finally read Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (I had picked it up years ago, but for some reason - probably the turning into a giant cockroach overnight part - I put it down) gaining a newfound respect for all things six-legged (spiders are still on my blacklist). After the farm, I spent time in Anjuna, Goa (touristy and full of old hippie-partiers who love leather/suede and "You have a look at my shop"-ladies, and cows), and encountered a cockroach on my first night there. Frozen with fear for a moment, then suddenly armed with my right shoe, Gregor Samsa crept into my mind and I just couldn't crush the little guy, no matter how many diseases were festering off his surface. I turned off the light, shut the door, and jammed the rolled up bath mat in between the floor and bottom of the door.
Since that time, I've also gone through a metamorphosis of sorts, and have returned to crushing cockroaches (if I can catch them) with a sick glee. No, no, no. I take that back. There is no glee, more of a relief that the room invader is dead and won't be crawling on my face in the middle of the night, biting my cheeks and laying eggs inside.
The cockroaches started coming early on in my history with Guam. It was a night not unlike tonight where the humidity was enough to kill a canary, but there was a gentle breeze and so Lindsay and Ryann decided to have their balcony door open. I think this was the first night that I tried to get everyone to watch "Moon", but it hadn't streamed all the way - blah, blah, blah, that's not important. So, Lindsay, Bobby, Ryann and I are hanging out, having chats and laughs, and then, for some reason we're standing in the middle of the room and all of a sudden, in a whoosh of brown light, some insect kamikazes into R's neck. She drops down in a frantic "Oh God!" and I say, "Don't worry, it was only a moth."
R: "It got me in the jugular!" at the same time the roach flies onto my leg,
ME: "NO IT'S NOT! IT'S A COCKROACH! IT'S A COCKROACH!!" as it flies further into the room I run the opposite way on to the balcony, slamming the door behind me.
YEAH, FLIES!! THEY FLY HERE!!! THEY FLY AND SCAMPER AND --- oooh! Yuck.
So I'm standing out on the balcony, by myself, screeching and shouting for my friends to kill it as the roach is trying to shove its way in between the [cement] wall and ceiling, reacting frantically to the loud noises we're emitting. Everyone inside is trying to usher the guy to the balcony and yelling at me that I have to open the door, but I don't want to get the roach on my face so I'm keeping the door shut. L is saying don't kill it, and while all of this lasted a good 5-10 minutes, I'll spare you the details and just end it with a glass jar chopping of its head.
Since then, there have been countless encounters. Working the Mountain (slide) rotation during Eve is the worst because you're in their domain and they're just crawling all over the rocks, their copper backs glinting in the moonlight. It's awful. Sometimes you can hear the screams of the Clubmates at night, followed by the thwacking of objects being thrown at the walls. Everybody here has at least one cockroach story.
About a month ago I was hanging out in my friends' room and we were just sitting and chatting, laughing too, and they had mentioned something about having a garbage-loving intruder, but they thought it had gone because they opened their door. Then I saw it on the wall and I screamed and ran out of the room (again, I don't deal well with emergency situations - surprise ones at least). Eventually I was cajoled back inside to find and destroy the demon, and I did. (The roaches are very sensitive to noise, by the way.) I shouldn't have killed the guy because maybe his friends would come looking for him, but I didn't appreciate being startled. Another reason why I shouldn't have killed him is because these same human friends had a cockroach in their room last week and called me down to hang out under false pretenses. They hadn't seen it in two hours, but were convinced he was still inside. I asked my friend if she wanted the roach to say good-bye, and I was imagining a cockroach in a top hat doing a little dance out into the hall like he was leaving a stage in the old days. She didn't think that was funny, so we rattled things that were shakable and stamped our feet to no avail seeing as how he was dead on his back on the balcony door sliding track.
Last roach story!! YAY!! There is no point to this post other than I have had encounters with roaches and wish to have no more!!
One day at swim-thru maintenance (where I get into SCUBA gear and basically janitorialize the algae and fish poop out of there - maybe I'll blog about it later... maybe.) I put on my tabbies/booties/water shoes/what have you's, and felt something up on my right toes. Thinking it was nothing more than the old fabric falling down I kept on keeping on what I was doing for a few minutes, then I strapped into my BC and stepped into the water only to have the "fabric" start to freak on me. Everything happened in fast slow motion as my mind realized something was alive and grotesque inside my shoe. Weighed down by the tank I struggled to take my shoe off as fast as I could and then dropped it in the water. A roach swam out! Swam! One of my co-worker friends scooped it out of the water and it started chasing me on land. I ran away (tank still on) and it disappeared into the jungle, hopefully to die, but probably not seeing as how cockroaches were the first things ever created (even before the world) and will be the last things to die, but they won't, they'll just float on into space towards some other star instead.
And that's it.
Hilarious post about the roaches! Wish I had been there to see you dancing in your scuba gear! I am laughing as I write this! Too funny! Safe travels home to you!
ReplyDeleteAndrea in Guam at the PIC