Driving in the Rain

Today I drove Hannah and Ebony around in the rain, because that is what they wanted to do. We stopped over at Bangsar Village and I spent enough time reading The Lost Symbol to make Hannah impatient, but not enough time to make any significant headway into the book. Oh well.

After that we went to McDonald's and I shared my fries. I paid way too much for that meal. I should stop eating McDonald's unless it's during the discount lunch hour and I'm with friends. We had free carbonara at home, and carbonara is delicious.

Anyway before we went home I drove around for a bit so I could listen to Ian's CDs. The rain was nice, too. I enjoy rainy weather, it changes things and makes them more interesting.

Back at home I read my psychology textbook for a bit again. I think I can stop mentioning that in posts now. I learned about senses. It was cool. Psychology is an interesting subject, I'm glad I chose it. I feel I'm misusing the comma. Perhaps I should use the semicolon instead. This paragraph has lost coherency.

I have two arbitrary thoughts to add to this post: The splotch of dried blood or whatever under my fingernail that I got during my second motorcycle accident is right at the tip now, so it'll be gone soon. There's still a small scar on the finger it's on, though, so I guess I'll always have that to remind me. Also I left the door to the bathroom open when I was brushing my teeth on Friday, and Stefanie walked into our room and saw me naked. The next time she entered our room she didn't knock. I think such an event would have caused me to knock the next time. It was surprisingly unawkward afterwards. Hopefully the angles were such that nothing significant was seen.

Also I watched (500) Days of Summer and it was really good. I'm pretty sure the "day after" scene is the funniest thing I've seen this year. Well, aside from this.

This One Time I Killed A Cockroach That Saw Me Naked

(Originally written on the 13th of May, 2008)

I hate cockroaches.

I'm terrified of them. It's only roaches, not any other insect. It may have something to do with their slimy bodies or their hairy sharp-looking legs, but the most disturbing thing about cockroaches is knowing that for every cockroach you see there are always dozens more hiding away. They’re like ninjas in that way.

To a normal person with a fairly clean house this fear would not be much of a problem. However, although I have a fairly clean house I am apparently not a normal person. Normal people don't have cockroaches appear on them at random times for no reason.

I've had a cockroach suddenly appear on my arm while I was taking a whiz in the jungle which resulted in frantic brushing off of the area for the next few hours every time I felt a movement, I've had one crawl up my thigh towards my manparts which resulted in frenzied slapping and more brushing, and I've had one drop on my shoulder while I was changing my shirt which has led me to conclude that there is something about me that cockroaches seem to find irresistible.

One night as I was exiting the shower I saw something scuttling across the bathroom floor. Without my glasses I could only just make out that it was a cockroach, and a pretty big one at that. I was absolutely mortified when I realized what I was looking at since these things have a history of crawling on me and now I am totally naked.

Panic took hold of me. The roach was too close to my glasses for me to risk grabbing them, so I sprang for the nearest weapon, which happened to be a bottle of heavy duty toilet bowl cleaner. I decided that it would be easier for me to poison the bastard than crush him with the bottle, so I unscrewed the cap and squirted the cleaning fluid with as much precision as I could manage without my glasses (which is not much precision at all). The roach ran from one side to the other and I traced its path with a blue trail of cleaning fluid across the tiles. The roach then scuttled under the door and out into the bedroom.

I had lost. The roach had escaped to terrify me another day, and I was left with a whole bunch of cleaning fluid to mop up. I put on my glasses and was about to start cleaning up the mess I made when I heard a meow.

My cat is the best cat that a guy who hates cockroaches could want. I’ll wake up some mornings and find hairy sharp-looking legs strewn across the living room floor and a limbless, chewed-up cockroach corpse under a chair or table. He likes to bat them around a bit before he tries to eat them, you see. It’s not just cockroaches that he hunts down and kills; one time I came home to find a dead pigeon in my bed and my cat next to it. He was pretty pleased with himself after that one.

Anyway, I looked in the direction of the meow and sure enough my cat was batting at the now belly-up roach. So I did manage to poison the bastard. Usually I’d leave the roach to suffer and die but my cat was in the room and I didn’t want him to start chewing on the toxic carcass so I decided that I had to get rid of it soon.

I shooed my cat away and threw some toilet paper on the writhing roach. Its flailing legs moved the paper around a bit, but it didn’t manage to uncover itself. I smacked the bottle of cleaning fluid on top of the paper and heard a crunch and a stain appeared on the paper. I kept hammering the paper with the bottle long after the roach would’ve been dead and then hammered some more. I picked up what was now nothing more than guts and crushed bits of exoskeleton in yet more toilet paper and flushed it away.

After washing my hands and putting on my jammies I climbed into bed and pulled the covers tight over myself while my cat kept watch on the bedside to ensure no cockroaches would be crawling over me at night.