Life

Life has been rather slow lately. With my homecoming just over a month away, I'm finding myself increasingly anxious about the amount of stuff I need to finish, and at the same time losing motivation to do it. My weekend has dragged by while I sat on my floor and tried to finish a paper. I'm out of practice and the topic is boring. Inbetween the paper and surfing the internet, I found time to write up a script for a skit I have to perform in my spoken language class.

Other useless stuff is killing my time too. I'm still working my way through a large stack of classic novels I bought at a sale in Shanghai. English books are hard to find in Chengdu, and those that are here are both pricy and old. Why Chengdu bookstores sell only the classics I'll never know. Chinese students of English should be offered a selection of easier to read novels than those that even native speakers struggle with. Anyway, that's a topic for another time.

The most exciting thing of my week was the discovery of a HUGE cockroach in my house. It was nearly two inches long, the kind of thing you only see in movies. I've seen these things roaming the street before, they're a type of free-range roach. I saw it just as I was about to run out of the house for class. I realized I forgot my phone so I ran back in my room to find it. When I did, I saw the beast crawling slowly across the floor. After the initial shock (adrenaline rush turn into flight or fight mode) I grabbed a shoe and squished it.

I was in denial about it all morning. In class I reported to my friends that it was a "huge bug" that caused me to be late. I don't have cockroaches in my house. We're fairly clean and there's no other evidence of infestation. Whenever I do see cockroaches in China-- in hotels, buses, or in apartments, they're always the small kind. Like I said this was a free range roach, not a resident.

When I came back that afternoon I was determined to do a massive cleaning of the entire house. If any evidence turned up I was going to buy roach motels by the dozen and then spray the entire house with roach killer and let it settle while I went shopping. When I went to clean up the original "giant bug" it was still moving. That was the moment my denial changed into acceptance. There was a roach in my house and he was going to die.

Thank goodness nothing else turned up. I've been keeping a tight watch on things all week, and I've concluded that my roach came in through the window when I wasn't looking. Nothing to be worried about. Nothing.