the cockroach incident

this morning, i was enjoying my bath. i was happily shampooing my hair.. staying under the spray of the cold shower.. when i saw something that made my heart skip a beat. it was huge. it was scary. it was huge and scary. it made me want to scream at the top of my lungs (but i didn't, because if i did, it just might jump on me). it was.. a cockroach.

ok, ok.. so i got this stupidly irrational fear of cockroaches. just the thought of them flying around the room and possibly landing on / crawling over me was enough to send me running out of the shower (ok, so i didn't really run - i towel-dried first, then got the heck out of the bathroom as quickly as i could - after throwing on some clothes, naturally). i've always been afraid of cockroaches for as long as i could remember. they're creepy, gross, dirty, germ-carrying, awful-smelling creatures. ugh.

they say cockroaches can survive for weeks even if you chop their heads off. they also say that in case of a nuclear war, these buggers are the only ones that will still survive to populate the planet. great. how can such nasty things be so darned hard to kill?!

anyway, the only sure-fire way to kill a roach is to stomp on it (or to squish it with the most effective tool of all - the old-fashioned chinelas). simply stepping on it won't do. you have to make sure you hear that crunching noise of the insect's body being squashed.. and its innards all spilled out on the floor. otherwise, it could still crawl away when you're not looking (remember, a cockroach can survive for weeks without its head). then clean up the "crime scene" thoroughly (apply a liberal amount of disinfectant to the area) to get rid of the nasty smell of the cockroach. once the deed is done, bow your head and say a short prayer for the soul of the insect you just murdered. after all, it wasn't really doing you any harm - not directly at least.

there's a lesson to be learned in all this.. but at the moment, my mind is too full of images of squished roaches that i just have to stop here. maybe i'll write more on this next time...