our hero rides off into the sunset...

and so our story comes to a close.

last we left off, i think my stella was towed off to midas. on monday morning i explained to them that all her lights came on but the engine didn't even think about turning over. why everyone thinks that sounds like a battery problem is beyond me, and why midas insisted it might be my battery when hamed and the aaa guy had both tried to jump my car is also beyond me. so it came as no big surprise when don from midas called and said "guess what? it's not your battery!!" and also as no big surprise when he ran some fancy-pants diagnostic test which told him exactly what the cab driver from friday night said without ever seeing the car -- bad starter. although unlike what the cab driver said, which was that the mexicans would fix my starter for $130, somehow at midas this same repair was going to cost $489, because also struts and something related to steering needed something or another. i don't know, i stopped listening at $4. i'm a little suspicious that don raised the price of my repair artificially (you think? at midas?) because he conveniently remembered that i was looking to get rid of the car. suddenly his daughter needed a car, and he had $400 to pay me, and that extra $82 diagnostic charge disappeared. so yesterday i took the title over to midas and left with $400 in my pocket. that seems better than a $500 repair. so now i feel that stella has a proper home with exactly what she needs: a young student who doesn't have money for a nicer car but needs to get to work, and has a father who happens to be a mechanic. everything comes to a nice happy ending. and puts me squarely where i belong, making better use of my two bikes.

it does, however, put me in the position of needing to name my bikes, which i haven't done in the few years that i've owned them. taking suggestions, with stella having been retired, and cicciolina in use as the name of my cell phone (i can't think of a better phone name than that of an italian porn star in parliament, can you?) anyone? the two girliest bikes on the road need names -- a mint green giant mountain bike, and a black specialized road bike with anodized purple wheels and matching water bottle cage? just get me a little white plastic basket with flowers for the fronts and i'll be in business.

sttteeeeelllllaaaa.....

so you tell me. what counts as charity here, anyway?

it is now three days later in the never-ending saga of stella's retirement. it turns out that my cab driver's beloved "automex" does not, as far as i can tell, exist. i think la mexicana incognita is a little disappointed (as am i) that she doesn't get to go all latina with the mechanics, but such is life...

also, sadly, stella had not been kidnapped by hamed or the cab driver. i found her parked safely in a lot behind lalo's on lasalle. feeling a few twinges of nostalgia for my sweet car, the only one i've ever owned (and also because i learned that aaa does not tow straight to salvage yards) i called aaa and a pickup truck came to move stella to the midas across the street faster than i could order a margarita for the wait. this wrecks my blogmate's and my streak of waiting for tow trucks while drinking, but i can't complain. this bought me a day and a half of procrastination since midas was closed until this morning.

what to do now? while at work saturday morning i managed to amuse my co-workers with my never-ending internet hunt for salvage yards, car donation charities, etc. i found:

- a salvage yard that would give me $125 if i could get stella there, $60 if they towed
- some charity called kars4kids, which claims to pick up the car, donate to some other charity that gives the money to youth in some fashion, and give me a voucher for 2 nights' hotel stay in some resort-esque locale

i was feeling good about the charity/hotel option (especially since aaa wouldn't tow me straight to the salvage yard) until this morning, when i actually looked up the charities in question on some non-profit evaluation sites. i was initially excited since their links included stuff like gottorah.com, which along with my new-found love for matisyahu, might further my previous designation as honorary jew (for the purposes of holidays, anyway), except that nothing on any web site actually told me my car money would actually go to said causes.

i had a long drawn-out conversation with mb last night where i told him i had known stella's time was coming, but wanted her to pass with more dignity than this. he told me it's like caring for the elderly, where you love them but can't bear the burden anymore and have to ask for help, except that the elderly don't get sold for parts.

so feeling even guiltier, i called another salvage place this morning to see if i could get a better estimate. hooray! bob at the salvage place told me that they just bash cars in, but he knew a lady who was looking for a cheap car to get around town, and once i got an estimate from midas could i call him? so now i'm wondering if i can an estimate for what i think is the starter (~$170 repair, i think), and an ok from salvage-bob saying the lady in question could give me the cost of the starter repair plus ~$100 (maybe total $300?) i could sell her my stella. this makes me feel less like i'm sending stella off to a yucky nursing home or pulling out her feeding tube, and more like she's retiring to be a walmart greeter or something minimally productive.

i think it might be the right thing. but i invite opinions.

to be continued... again...

the day stella lost her groove (some stories need to be told in full detail)

don't ever say something if you can't live with the consequences.

my car insurance payment is due this summer, and i was starting to think that my car (lovingly named stella, so that when i lost her in parking lots i could bellow a la streetcar) was getting a bit old and unreliable, and although she and i have been together since grad school, maybe it was time that she retire. i looked into blue book values for stella, realized she'd be worth $600 in trade-in, which means about $400 on the street or $100 in the salvage yard, and decided that all of that was not worth the $900 i'm paying in insurance.

now shift gears (no pun intended) to my excitement as being asked to be the stand-in date for our friend dwtacc as she attended the wedding of one of our co-workers. as we got ready to go to the ceremony last night, i volunteered to drive, thinking i knew hyde park better to find the chapel... but as we headed afterward toward the downtown reception, one of those creepy inner voices started hinting to me that maybe my unreliable stella was not the best choice for this adventure...

the reception was fabulous. cheers to our usually quiet friend jt for such amazing one-liners as "hey, i think gramps wants a piece of the reverend" and his smooth post-running-man dance moves. but on leaving the reception and attempting to pick up my poor stella, a fairly tipsy but apologetic valet apologized that my car was not starting. i figured he just didn't know the key-jiggle required to get my car going (i suppose the lexus suv's he normally parks there don't have this issue), shrugged, and dwtacc and i laughed as we noted his empty malt liquor bottle and slight waver in his step as he led us down a back alley toward my stella. sure enough, no engine-turnover for my baby. i think the tipsy-valet-guy was a little surprised that i didn't shout or throw a high heel at him (maybe a little more high-maintenance clientele downtown?) and just said, "well, i work in seven hours. where can we put this car so i can come deal with it later?" and he was so relieved that soon a legion of red-vested men were pushing my car into a mysterious back lot to wait for me until after work today.

so feeling a little suspicious that my car and car key rested with a red-vested drunk guy who i only knew as hamed, dwtacc and i hopped into a cab, and i thanked dwtacc for being the next (last?) of my friends in chicago to get stuck in a car adventure with me (twinset and my blogmate already have many stella tales under their belts). when the driver asked if we'd been having a good evening and i answered that the night had been great until my car died, the driver proceeded to interrogate me about the details of my car and its non-working-ness. i figured the best thing that could happen to me was that someone might steal the car so i could file an insurance claim, so i obliged with as many details as i could barring my name and social security number and all that. first he offered to buy the car from me outright (how do you negotiate a price with a cab driver who's driving you because the car he's trying to buy doesn't run???) then he decided i should have the car fixed, then he promptly announced that the only people who should fix my car were the mexicans. dwtacc, who shall hereafter be referred to as la mexicana incognita (lmi?), calmly asked the cabbie why only mexicans could fix my car: "because they're cheaper." and when lmi asked "where are these mexicans?" we were, i think, initially told "everywhere" but then were provided an address for (i can't actually believe this) "automex."

needless to say lmi and i were fascinated. first drunken red-vested hamed, then the mexican-virtue-extolling cab driver... the cab driver spent the whole ride to hyde park so engrossed in a conversation in some unrecognizable language that i was sure my car would be gone from the red-vested parking lot long before i got to automex...

(to be continued...)

the day the music died

one of my favorite ways to kill time at work is to fuel my obsession with matisyahu. i realize it's a little silly that i had to go all the way to the caribbean to discover him, but i swear, he wasn't this famous before i left. when i heard him playing at target yesterday i realized that yet again, my attempts to be edgy had been thwarted.

edgy or not, it turns out that matisyahu is carried by epic records, and the epic records offers high quality, add-free, uninterrupted streaming of the music videos of their artists, allowing me to watch "king without a crown," and "king without a crown (live at stubbs)" over and over and over again. conveniently enough, epic also carries shakira, so i can also watch "hips don't lie" to my heart's content.


when i had finally managed to overdose on matisyahu and shakira i started perusing the other videos that epic promotes, and that's when i stumbled upon teddy geiger, who on first inspection looks like just another garden-variety angsty boy with a guitar. but the longer i watched the video, the more i started to hate him and his heart-on-the-sleeve drivel.

he looks and sounds like a younger, less good john mayer (see pictures), and he has an earnestness that makes me crazy, wailing on about how he's "gonna muster ever ounce of confidence" that he has to get some girl to notice him. but it was seeing the video, and examining the girl in question that put me over the edge.

unless she's his real-life girlfriend, there's just no excuse. the video features our young martyr dejectedly playing his guitar on the street, wistfully watching a very nice, very pretty, very plasticky girl who looks like she stepped right out of an abercrombie & fitch ad, stupid sherpa boots and all (she could also be a contestant on "the bachelor"). she's strolling down the street with her tool-looking boyfriend (who kind of looks like stiffler from "american pie"), giggling, talking on her cell-phone, and just being obnoxious.

it doesn't make any sense. teddy geiger has perfectly mastered the look of the misunderstood hipster: shy, skinny, shaggy-haired, perfectly beat-up jeans and thrift store shirt. he'd be perfect in greenwich village or wicker park and it makes absolutely no sense that he'd be writhing around so miserably for this kind of girl. she's too blond, too perfect. if they'd picked the usually gaunt, dark haired heroin-chic type i'd understand... sort of. but why america's favorite tri-delt?

if this is the best that the post-boy-band pop music era has to offer i think i'll stick with shakira.

what would shakira do?

transient infatuation with uber-trendy pop culture icons is a part of life- i understand this. but why is that suddenly i can't get enough shakira? not that i'm a raging feminist or anything, but i've always taken issue with her blatant self-institution as the world's most sensational sex symbol... and her weird warbly voice.
i guess that even though i reject all women who appear on the cover of maxim on principle, i'm also a big believer in jumping on media bandwagons. life is just easier if you like what's on the radio. for example, road trips aren't nearly is painful when you've learned to tolerate country music (or christian rock, but that's a whole other can of worms).
so after six weeks in st. lucia where "hips don't lie" (shakira featuring wyclef, for those of you who remain un-brainwashed) played like clockwork on the radio (sometimes twice in a row) and on tempo (caribbean MTV for those of you who just tuned in), i got completely sucked to dark and disturbing world of shakira obsession. the girl has got it all- she can sing, she can dance, and she's really hot. AND she gets to flaunt her hotness in a way that's neither subtle nor tasteful. not only is it not fair, but it's just plain raunchy.

and for some reason i love her for it.

priorities

my new work schedule has some built in sitting-around time in the morning... and free breakfast. so it seemed logical to form a little routine, where i finish my coffee, eat my turkey sausage, and peruse the headlines on the internet. it's been a few years since i read the paper regularly (thank you NPR for keeping me the loop all this time) and i'm having trouble adjusting to the internet format. it just seems aesthetically wrong. i'm also unwilling to register (even though it's free) to actually read the articles, so i jump from the new york times, the chicago trib, to cnn.com skimming headlines and looking at pictures.

lest i manage to absorb some real news, i made an amusing, though not very surprising discover today. we could all go on and on about the vapid articles in the paper and on TV, and about how none of us are interested in real current events. i often use that as justification for my non-news-watching and non-paper-reading. but i learned this morning that most of us gravitate away from real news, even when it's offered to us in easily accessible, point-and-click format.

here are the "top stories" as listed by CNN:

- Iran pledges $50 million to Palestinians
- Pentagon fights back over Rumsfeld
- Nepal protesters fired on, 1 dead
- Group: Iran may be expanding nuke plants
- Hussein trial resumes, adjourns again

and here are the "most popular":

- Two sex offenders slain; suspect kills self
- Jolie reportedly to have baby in Namibia
- Suspect blogged about cannibalism
- Crash tests: Toyota Prius, small cars and minivans
- An inside look at Opus Dei

i guess it's not so surprising that the average american is more interested in angelina jolie than they are in donald rumsfeld, but what is surprising is that "Rangers catch bear after deadly attack" didn't feature more prominently on either list.

back to reality...almost

coming home from my six week caribbean adventure was a bit of a jolt. i understand that nothing would really have made it easier, except perhaps some sort of insider tip that my crush-du-jour was waiting impatiently for my return. in reality, crush-du-jour (cdj?) may or may not know my name and has probably found some impossibly skinny, broody asian girl to date by now.
it didn't help that my return to the mainland marked the abrupt end of an extravagant, 3-week drinking binge which transitioned itself rather unpleasantly to a smoldering but miserable hangover on the plane.
it also didn't help to find my apartment still occupied by my now arch-nemesis house-sitter who drank all my liquor and killed all my plants... but that's a story for another day.

as one might have expected, i showed up to work the morning after my return pretty darned tired and cranky. that said, i think i came back with a sense of well-being and optimism that i most certainly did not possess in february. maybe it was the sunshine, or the rum, or the snorkeling... or maybe it's just the tan. my blogmate has been trying to tell me for years that a great tan makes everything better, and now i wholeheartedly agree. for one, it just screams, "ha ha, i went to the st. lucia while you were stuck here festering in the dregs of chicago winter," but it also exudes an ill-defined yet strangely powerful aura of fabulousness.

unfortunately, the new, glam, hi-lighted persona that i've confabulated doesn't integrate very well with the alter-ego i couldn't help but develop (over the last year, really) under the effect of nick hornby novels, the OC soundtracks, john cusack movies, "the time traveler's wife," steven frears movies, and now "sex, drugs and cocoa puffs." somewhere in there i think i failed to recognize that i don't get to be a cool hipster swing-chick, no matter how many movies and books i absorb about punk, sarcastic, witty, drinking, smoking hipsters.

i've almost got it together.

same? different? you decide

directions to madam popo's

head out of st. jude's via the back gate, following the main, paved road into augier

at the first intersection turn left

go straight past blue boy's pub on your left

stay on the left at the next intersection, richard's pub will be on your right

at the next intersection hang a hard left- round the bend pub is on that corner on the right

continue straight down the road, passing the "pigs for sale" sign on your right

continue past the unusually large pothole in the middle of the road

on your left you'll come to a heineken sign, and pass under two power lines that have orange aerial markers- just past that you'll come to a narrow alley

turn right into the alley and head down a ways- on your right you'll see the oven

if there's no one there, continue further down until you come a a house with a cement porch- if the plastic tarps are down you're out of luck. if not, the lady inside is madam popo

local meal

i could start a lot of funny stories with that title: the goat back or sheep back or "turkey" (which we think is actually goat) mystery parts (spinal cord and all), or the fact that every st. lucian stops us to inform us that we are truly eating a "local meal" said with more pride than we would assign to eating vertebrae...

but what i'm actually thinking of is the new delicacy of "st. lucian sandwich," which consists of my blogmate sandwiched between two dancing dreadlocked lucians last night at the gros islet jump-up. there we were, laughing at my silly guidebook that says you need a local guide to take you to this every-friday-night block party if you're a girl, munching our way through barbecue chicken and "bakes" (which are actually fried and delicious) -- we finally had enough piton to start dancing when we realized the actual problem with being a girl at the jump-up: not allowed to dance without someone else's pelvis heading your way. that being said, these pelvises (pelvi?) are fairly benign, as they were located inside the very high-watered pants of a steve-erkel-esque man with his tongue hanging half out of his mouth.

again, we congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

refugees run the seas 'cause we own our own boats

we'd like to think of ourselves as sophisticated travelers, who embrace local culture with sensitivity and insight, who tread lightly when exploring the country's delicate ecosystems, who drink in moderation, who savour the flavours of west indian cuisine...

but who are we kidding?

while we have managed to engage in the activities listed above, the modifiers are a little off.

since we landed in our suprisingly posh condo we've clocked hours and hours of time watching "tempo," the caribbean MTV equivalent. we're both riveted by the amazing displays of west-indian, jamaican, puerto-rican, and cuban bling. we've been dutifully writing down the names of all our favorite artists, only to discover that there's only one CD store on all of st. lucia, and that even after we'd fully terrified the teenage kid behind the counter, he didn't really have anything to sell us.

when the music gets too bad, even for us, or when it's time for the dreaded "downtown island" (sort of akin to "cribs") we flip to HBO or TNT to watch astoundingly bad movies that are only entertaining in their "place that semi-celebrity" capabilities. the came goes roughly like this:
me: "hey, isn't that ryan phillipe"
blogmate: "who?"
me: "you know, married to reese witherspoon?"
blogmate: "who?"
me: "he was in 'cruel intentions'!"
blogmate: "huh?"

we've also been engaged in a lengthy debate about whether leonardo dicaprio and matt damon, are in fact similar enough to be confused with one another.
blogmate: "this is just like that leonardo dicaprio movie"
me: "which one"
blogmate: "the one about the janitor who does math"
me: "you mean matt damon"
blogmate: "what's the difference?"

sometimes we break up the monotony by going on long, sweaty, un-graceful treks to beaches and mountains, that involve alot of tripping, falling and swearing.

then we get home, drink vast quantities of locally produced lime rum, and plan the next day's meals which are a delicate balance of creole fish with plantains and fritos.

our parents would be proud.

petit problem in gros islet

as my blogmate and i furrowed our collective brow at our flat tire (can a tire be very flat or are they all the same degree of deflatedness?) at the beach today we thought longingly back to our 36 hour blitz through coconut bay all-inclusive resort.

let us summarize: land cruise. beach chairs, pina coladas, waterslides, lime rum and diet cokes, lazy river, vieux fort special, lounge chairs, caribbean explosion, buffet lunch, dirty banana, dancing jerk pork carver at buffet dinner, lucian driver, worst most emotionless steel drum cover band EVER, worst white wine ever, lime rum and sprite, gin and tonic, more lime rum and sprite, more worst cover band ever, ten minutes at the gym, one more lime rum and sprite for the road, all-you-can-grilled-cheese, fountain diet coke (a rarity in this country), and best of all, a room to sleep in with ALL FOUR WALLS and much fewer mosquitoes and barking dogs than we thought possible.

our state of despair about the flat tire lasted the entirety of the 40 minutes that it took us to attempt to change to the spare, be assisted by a bored-looking taxi driver, find a "tyre" station, get the "tyre" fixed (for the standard st. lucian rate of $3.50), and find ourselves seated over pitons and spicy fish cakes at our new favorite beach dive.

from this we conclude that some things are just done more quickly in st lucia than in chicago. but this might be the only thing that's fast in st. lucia.

we weren't kidding

walk softly and carry a fake leg

though no one really told us before we came to st. jude's, it's customary for volunteers to bring some kind of donation to the hospital, usually medical supplies. my blogmate and i were lucky to trip into a big stash of medications before we left. we brought them with a fair amount of pomp and circumstance, and not a little bit of whiny complaining. "i can't believe we have to carry this crap," and refrains similar.
as it turns out, our meager contribution was pretty ho-hum... since some of our favorite elders showed up with a suitcase full of prosthetic feet, a coffee maker, and a circular saw.
i'm sure the guys at TSA had a field day.

there goes the neighborhood

on our daily morning walk, i was reminded that i like travelling with my blogmate for the number of times we are thinking the same thing, when she broke the no-coffee-yet silence with the exact words in my head: "does it smell especially chicken-ey today?"

so this afternoon while my blogmate is on call, i was a little sad to venture out for a walk on my own, thinking there would not be nearly so much to laugh about. but my fears were quickly cast aside: in addition to the legions of farm animals lining the roads and the man with machete and bag full of green coconuts laughing at me for how slowly i was climbing the hill, i passed a completely naked man politely wishing me good afternoon as he urinated alongside the road, and another man gesturing wildly at me with a zucchini. the ironic thing is that men in st. lucia don't really sound that offensive when they speak (other than being nude and waving with phallic vegetables). the one man who tried came up with "hello, how are you? you look good. you look like a woman should..." which just sounds too polite when uttered in a quasi-british-caribbean-calypso-music-in-background accent for me to be taken aback.

i'm going to miss this place.

an open letter to the creators of yahoo avatars

dear masterminds behind yahoo avatars,

we love your service, and spend more time than we should re-inventing our appearance and location. however, it has come to our attention that there are not nearly enough third-world backdrops and accessories to suit our current needs. The following are a list of suggestions for add-ins that would assist the volunteer/tourist's avatar needs:

1. enable more than one animal per avatar. who travels in the company of just one pig or chicken?
2. in place of accessories, can we add leering hissing men in pick-up trucks?
3. the only road choices are hiking trail or sidewalk or highway. we need more gravel roads and torn-up blacktop with large potholes marking significant geographical markers.
4. can we add shoes hanging over electric lines to indicate drug houses?
5. the skin color changes we can make are great. but can we add mosquito bites, sunburns, hatband acne, peeling sunburn, and scrapes from falling down on poorly constructed hiking trails?

thanks,
jo-na

honk if you love st. lucia

last weekend my blogmate and i rented a little jeep and drove up the western st. lucia coast. we had a number of tasks: drop off boss at fancy hotel, check out suspiciously cheap rental condo, acquire snorkeling gear... to our loyal readership back home this might not seem like an ambitious list for a saturday afternoon, but by the end of the day we were darned proud of ourselves. we were also mighty tired and each of us had one bright red arm, having let them dangle out of the car with reckless abandon.
there are many obstacles to driving in st. lucia, especially if you insist on cheap, under-the-table car rental. once behind the wheel of the car that came with no papers to speak of, a car that clearly belonged to someone, it finally dawned on me that i was sitting behind the wheel on what i consider to be the passenger side, and that i'd volunteered to drive up the narrow, windy, mountainy road without even considering how scary it might be. i was fortunate not to notice the horrible squeling sounds the little jeep was making in protest of being forced up the hills. also lucky for me, my blogmate was a good cheerleader (and map reader), and before i knew it i was cruising down the "highway," blasting terrible calypso music, and giving the little car horn toot required to alert oncoming traffic that might tearing around the bend.
in doing this, we became aware of the many things that can be said via honking. the various honks have subtle, nearly imperceptible differences, but the meaning varies widely.
there's my honk, the "please slow down as you make your sharp turn so that i you don't run me off the road.
the encouragement honk from the guy behind me that says, "come-on girl, you can do it, i know you can pass the bus in front of you that's going 8km an hour!"
there's, "hey you big stupid cow (or pig or horse), get out of the road!"
as a pedestrian i've learned a few more...
"hey nice girl."
"hey sexy mama!"
"'sup?"
the list goes on.

the official language of st. lucia may be english, but i still have so much to learn...

yoshimi battles the pink robots, part 2

i squished two more cockroaches yesterday.
this time they were actually living before i stepped on them.
feeling pretty strong... although the st. lucian nurse who heard me squeal for my blogmate's assistance might disagree.

in other news, to our friend nm who thinks mosquito nets are useful, i protest.
they do serve to make a romantic-looking hotel room for two, which was oh so useful for my blogmate and me. we looked really classy this weekend at the nice hotel room saying things like "ah yes, i do believe i'll have another round of pringles, brutus" with our non-fancy eats... but no actual avoiding of mosquitos.

jedi masters

my blogmate and i admittedly spend many hours of the day congratulating ourselves on negotiating six weeks in the tropical paradise that is st. lucia. i think we both kind of feel like we're getting away with something (because, well, we are). but even we occasionally stop feeling good about ourselves long enough to think more meaningful thoughts like, "wow, it's kind of weird that it's cold in chicago," or, on a really insightful day, "this is nothing like what we were thought it would be." truthfully, in preparation for our trip i don't think either one of us thought much beyond, "do these flip flops match this bikini?"

meet the parents:

one of the things we didn't really anticipate about life as a st. jude's volunteer was that there would be lots of other st jude's volunteers, all from different walks of life. we certainly didn't realize that there would be a whole community of such people who have been coming here in states of retirement and semi-retirement for years and years.

we call them the elders and we love them. they're smart and funny and have all done really interesting things with their lives. though there are plenty of retired doctors with school teacher wives, there are just as many doctor wives with retired contractor husbands. they kick our butts at trivial pursuit and, most importantly, they know where to get the good coconut buns. the thing about these people is that they know this island inside and out. they know where things are and how much they cost and which beach has the better snorkeling and which day they have lime cake at debbie's.

the elders have been doing this long enough to know that not everyone wants travel advice. as such, it takes a little (but not very much) work to get them talking. sidle up, get spanked at scrabble, and sooner or later the information starts to flow. come with beer and they start inviting you to stuff. we're still trying to coordinate some serious hiking with one of the couples who between them have at least one heart attack and one pace-maker.

i can only hope to be such a bad-ass one day.

yoshimi battles the pink robots, part 1

things that are unpleasant when returning alone from the hospital at 11pm to wash your face before bed include finding a large cockroach scuttling around the sink where you were about to put your face.

our new orleans readers, i understand that you're all laughing at my squeamishness, but in my defense, it was a very big cockroach, and its little horns or tentacles or whatever were about to be in my nose. also in my defense, i did not scream like a little girl. i jumped, thought about screaming like a little girl but decided that it would wake the hyperactive three-year-old downstairs and then i would never get to sleep, and then commenced a ridiculous chasing of the cockroach around the sink with a washcloth. i incorrectly assessed that it was unable to get out of the sink, and promptly scared it to a hiding place underneath the large shelf where my clothes and suitcase are stored. having decided that i could not move the shelf, i got ready for bed, turned out the lights, and tried to ignore the various bug noises coming from outside. but every time i heard a noise i was sure it was coming from inside my room, and i was sure that the cockroach was taunting me. yes, i understand that cockroaches don't taunt. but this morning when i woke up, there was the cockroach, sitting three inches from my backpack, directly facing me, wiggling its tentacles in mockery. i grabbed for my shoe but it ran back behind the shelf.

so needless to say i'm happy that i packed lots of sealable plastic bags. i'm ready to hermetically seal everything i brought. but i got the last laugh for this round; when i came back from a walk this morning i found it lying on its back in some kind of death throes. i whapped it with a shoe a few times to feel better about myself, like i was the one who had conquered. for all i know the dying cockroach was actually the old disabled grandfather of my nemesis, and my nemesis kicked the old man out of his home to show me who's in charge here. we shall see.