I HATE ROACHES

The past week has seen an influx in roach visitors to my apartment. For those who don’t know this about me, I HATE roaches. I don’t even want to kill them (but I do want them dead). I don’t want them anywhere near me. I don’t want to see them dead, I don’t want to even see pictures of them. I just want to pretend they don’t even exist.

Unfortunately, this can’t be done here.

With the heat, they are coming out in droves (in droves, I say!). And they FLY. Talk about a nightmare coming true. Yuck.

Usually we find them in the bathroom or the kitchen, but in recent days they are getting bolder, and one even had the nerve to come in my room and rest on my bedside table (he was dead immediately, thanks to my Crocs). One was in the cushions of our couch the other night. Maz and I tore apart our living room area to find him, and inadvertently crushed him under the leg of the sofa, which was lucky.

They are fast, and huge, and show up unexpectedly when it is 3 am, dark, and you are barefoot going for a late night snack or bathroom visit. I have to do roach spot checks whenever I enter a room, and since they often scatter when the lights come on (and I can’t see them well enough in the dark), I am stuck knowing they are out there but unable to get at them to kill them. I even put a towel along the bottom of my door to keep them out of my room as best as I can, and Maz and I have laid down roach bait to kill them.

They often come in the windows, so I am wary of opening them because of this (we don’t have screens). But the summer is so hot and stuffy, and we don’t have central air, only window units, and those are only in our bedrooms. So, the kitchen, when cooking, becomes a sauna unless you open a window … and then the roaches, and moths by the truckload, come wandering in and swarm our home.

Just a few minutes ago, as I was sitting here typing, a roach jumped onto my desk and started madly crawling all over the place. I leaped up, told my intern to kill it, which she did (not in her job description, but she’s a Hong Konger and more hardy than I am), and saved me from its clutches.

I HATE ROACHES.