Unlucky in Bugs

So this blog started out with a clear enemy. Which is always a good thing for a blog that wants a readership. Bed bugs are just my JA, yo!

But it quickly evolved into something different: a strange and sad, perhaps TMFI, place for me to voice my changing relationship to my apartment and my possessions in the enemy’s aftermath.

So let me be clear. The reason why bed bugs SUCK SUCK SUCK SUCK SUCK, is because it is really forking hard to find an apartment that you love in New York city, and I really truly loved my apartment.

Enormous.

Sunny.

Near lots of trains and food (two blocks from Sripraphai).

Crazy/awesome immigrant neighbors and super.

Rent controlled.

Sure, there are the drawbacks: worn down bath tub floor and toilet bowl that can never stay clean, chippy white paint job over 100 previous chippy white paint jobs (65 of which probably had lead), schizophrenic water temperatures, windows that don’t stay up, bedroom door knobs falling off, and I live on Dog Poop Avenue for sures. “My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun…” but I loved her. And I love her still. Even though she had to go and get apartment herpes.

But it’s not just about the apartment. Everyone goes through apartment drama in New York. Getting bed bugs also means a very strange process that doesn’t sound like too much at face value – laundry, packing and unpacking stuff, even getting rid of your mattress… Everyone knows how to do laundry; everyone has packed and unpacked and gotten rid of furniture during a big move. But people usually move when they’re not happy with their current situation. Or they move for a new job, or to move in with a boyfriend or girlfriend. There’s an excitement to it all. People dealing with bed bugs are going through all that crappy inconvenient exhausting stuff just trying to get back to status quo all the while reading the internets and getting really freaked out and scared that bed bugs are these invincible superinsects who are taking over the world.

Going through bed bug treatment means being a refugee in your own home. It’s the ultimate post-modern situation. And like all post-modern things it SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS.