It's become increasingly apparent to me that my obsession with the apartment's cockroaches is more of a problem than the cockroaches themselves. Case in point: yesterday I found a roach in my bedroom for the first time, and quietly flipped out. Up until this point, the roaches had been confined to the kitchen and, to a lesser extent, the bathroom and dining room; my bedroom had been a sanctuary from the infestation. After finding said loathsome roach, however, I found myself unable to think of anything else. My brain clicked around in endless, depressive, anxious circles. I was contaminated, I would have to throw away everything I owned or spend the rest of my life doomed to carry roaches with me from apartment to apartment, like a plague, an incurable infection.

All this from one tiny bug, not more than half a centimeter long. I was clearly losing it.

I went to bed still thinking about it. Around 4 A.M., I woke up, in more of a panic then when I went to bed. I scoured the internet for information on how to move apartments without taking the beastly bugs with me. To some extent, this helped. Knowledge locks the fear in place and defines it, keeps from expanding too far beyond the bounds of reason. In some ways it didn't help. Most of the people posting information were either more obsessive about roaches than I am, exterminators who have everything to gain by making people terrified of their bugs, or jerks whose only contribution was to the discussion was to berate people for not cleaning their houses, the slobs. Because clearly only disgustingly unhygienic people ever get insect infestations. Aaaargh.

Anyhow, I'm hoping just writing all this down will get it out of my system, and get me to realize on an emotional level as well as an intellectual level that panicking about the roaches isn't going to do me any good, or them any harm. When the time comes to move apartments (and oh, I can hardly wait until that day comes), I will ditch what I can, and carefully clean and inspect the rest. I will use fresh packing boxes, and I will lay down borax in the new place to make extra sure that no roaches take up residence there.

Beyond that, there's not much I can do except keep up my policy of washing dishes right away and storing all my food in plastic tubs. If I'm going to continue to live in apartment buildings in large urban centres, I'm probably just going to have to get used to that habitat's natural fauna. It's unfortunate, but not nearly as unfortunate as not being able to sleep or think for fear of creatures at most half the size of my thumb.

So, yeah. Snap out of it, me. Here's hoping this little bit of internet therapy did the trick.

On the up side, I haven't seen any cockroaches at all today. So maybe yesterday's swarm was just some weird anomaly. The neighbors' cockroaches on vacation, or something. That's probably too much to hope for, but dammit all, I'm going to hope for it anyway.

On the down side, I am falling badly behind on the comic book work I promised to do for SCIC. An hour of free time a night is just not enough time to make significant progress on this project, especially if I want to retain even the barest semblance of a life. Which I do.

On the up side, I've somehow managed to gracefully wriggle out of doing any work at all for the school newspaper during my co-op term. So yay me.

On the reading about science on the bus for lack of anything better to do side, I find it really interesting that Einstein's model of space-time has come to be known as the theory of relativity, despite the fact that Einstein himself thought it should be called the invariance theory, a name which has pretty much exactly the opposite connotations. Perhaps this is because at the time the theory was being popularized, English-speaking society was more interested in moral and artistic relativity than in unshakable absolutes and invariant laws? I don't know. In fact I don't even know when it was that said theory first started being widely popularized,or whether it's only called theory of relativity in English, or any of that history of science stuff, so I'm basically just making stuff up here. Still, it's kind of a neat disconnect.

I think I'm actually starting to like the 1h20 commute. There's very little useful you can do while riding a bus and, therefore, very little you have to do. As a result, I spend most of my commuting time just reading or daydreaming, which is very satisfying in a relaxing, undemanding sort of way.

The commute seems to be especially good for reading popular science books. Although I like popular science books a great deal, under normal circumstances I find they're just too easy to get distracted from, what with videogames, internet, sketchpads, other people, &c all vying for my attention as well. However, on the commute there are no distractions, or at least very few. And because commute reading time comes in discrete, 1h20 packets of time, I'm less likely to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by the length or density of these very serious books than I might if I had unlimited time to spend with them.

In news more or less completely unrelated, cockroaches may be the greatest diet aid known to man. You just have to watch one scurry across your kitchen floor, and your appetite simply vanishes. Or at least mine does. My Bahamian housemate, who's used to roaches at least 10x the size of ours, doesn't seem at all bothered.

So now I'm engaged in a cleaning frenzy of a sort, although it's difficult to work up much of a frenzy with only an hour or so of free time a night, if that. A slow motion cleaning frenzy, maybe. Anyhow, I'm throwing out all food that hasn't been securely sealed, wiping down the counters, mopping the floors, and maybe if I get really brave I'll even try to clean out that tricky area around and behind the appliances, which probably hasn't been touched by rag, mop, or human appendage since the building went up.

It's a good fight, no doubt, but it's hard not to be bitter when I know it's probably going to take up pretty much all of my free time for the rest of the week. And that it still probably won't have a noticeable effect. And that I have cartooning and school newspaper pseudo-work I should really be doing instead. And that I really, really want to watch the rest of Dexter. And the first episode of the new Torchwood, because I have no taste.

And now my alloted ~ hour of free time is up. Must sleep, so I can get up early tomorrow to retch at cockroaches and read about string theory.