The Roach

Roaches can bite people, they can also live a month WITHOUT their heads attached and typically live 1.5 - 2 years with their heads attached. Lets see, what else, they come out the 4 hours after you fall asleep to look for food and don't need very much to survive. A yogurt cup here, a few crumbs there, a nasty dirty stovetop... I just spend the better part of the nine-o'clock hour researching the American cockroach and his foreign cousins and this combined with my previous experiences have caused me to itch all over and I have chills down my spine. This was brought about by an ENCOUNTER with a large roach in Em's apartment where it was taking up residence in one of the boxes in her living room. I opened the box and a LARGE roach waved it's feelers at me and so I did what any red-blooded princess would do. I screamed, jumped and kicked the box towards Em who in turn, screamed, screamed, shrieked, screamed, hopped a bit and kicked the box outside. Her reaction took longer because she had the get the door open and get over that I'd kicked the killer roach towards her. My memories of the dupul are suprisingly fresh and I remember crawling on the bathroom counter to get to the toliet and the rustle of roaches crawling on my walls at night. They can climb SMOOTH surfaces and hatch 140 babies. That reads infestation to me and I really don't want to go through any of that again. I keep getting chills thinking about it and now that I'm more informed and have been flinching at pictures of roaches on my desktop I'm even more thoroughly grossed out. UGH. Did you know there are people dedicated to the study and preservation of roaches and they PURPOSELY breed them and there's people who eat them fried. I think that can be classified as a cultural thing. Be still my stomach. Anyway, I've printed off informational material on cleanliness standards and at least we don't have German roaches swarming, however I'm not looking forward to them coming indoors for the winter. :( Very, very thoroughly grossed out.