The horror of moving when you have bed bugs.

So, it's an unbelievable pain to move apartments when you have bed bugs.

Since I don't have money for pesticides, I have to cleanse all my stuff to make sure I don't take any bed bugs or eggs with me.

For clothes, I can wash and put them directly into clean garbage bags that are rubberbanded, and spray them on the outside with rubbing alcohol in the off chance that any bugs or eggs are on the plastic.

For furniture etc., I can spray them down thoroughly with rubbing alcohol till it drips off, since that should kill bed bugs on contact as well as dry out any eggs.

With personal possessions like books, however, it gets trickier.

Bed bugs and eggs will die if they're below 0 degrees (Fahrenheit!) for 4 days straight, or above 120 degrees for 90 minutes.

Or, newly hatched bed bugs will die in 3-4 months without food, and adults after a year.

So, I bought 2 plastic bins at Target, along with a bunch of black Halloween napkins.  I taped up the black napkins on the sides of the bins, loaded some books in, and put it out on the back fire escape where the bins will be in direct sunlight; ideally, as I've read, on very hot days the heat will be trapped if the bin is in direct sunlight, and the internal temp will reach above 120 for at least 90 minutes.

I also got a thermometer and put it in the bin where I can see it without opening, but the weather's been cool and cloudy, so the temp in the bin hasn't been more than 10-12 degrees above the air temp.

I guess if there's not enough hot and sunny days before I move, I can always get seal-tight bins and keep them in my new apartment and freeze or heat the stuff as weather allows over the next year, or just not open the seal tight bins for a year until all the bugs starve and I'm safe again to use those possessions.

Dreams (2 of 2): Plague.

The other week I dreamt –

I wake up and look over to my right, and there’s a (blonde) (male) (undergraduate) library coworker who I've known for like a year and he's my roommate and he’s getting up out of bed, and he’s wearing a t-shirt and boxers and is groggy, and he’s lifting the leg of his boxers and looking at his thigh and there’s just welt after welt after welt in big clusters from bed bug bites, and I feel sorry for him.

Dreams (1 of 2): Contact.

The other week I dreamt –

I open up my email inbox, and there’s an email from a friend who I hadn’t heard from pretty much all summer.

. . .

The next day, I got an actual email from her, in reality!

I can’t remember the date, if she sent it on that actual day after my dream, or a few days prior, and I was only actually checking my email that day.

Crazy night of celebrating finishing my dissertation.

It was multiple multiple $7 martinis, then a club night till 4am, and a lot of people came out, including my one (Asian-Canadian) friend, my one art school colleague who wears women’s clothes, and my one language coordinator friend.

The next day I woke up, and on my cell there was this text message at 3:44am from a number with no linked contact, and the message simply said:

Suck

. . .

New library job.

So, my one library job ended, and I’m starting up working for the shelving department in the basement of the library.

On my very first day of work, they pointed out this one very tall cart with five shelves where books are preliminarily shelved per library floor before they’re preliminarily shelved in a more ordered manner per library floor before finally being put onto a cart to be taken out and reshelved.

“This is what we call a supertruck,” my one supervisor was like.

Later, as I was doing preliminary shelving, I could see all of these books from my dissertation that I’d been returning whenever I came into campus, tucked here and there among all the other books people had been returning.

A day in my neighborhood.

I sit in my dining room, and I hear ice cream truck music.

First it’s “Clementine,” then it’s the “Theme from Love Story” again, and as I glance out the window, it’s a Mexican paleta vendor, likely the same one who I had heard playing the “Theme from Love Story” the last time around.

Then, the music stops.

Later, I go stroll up on an errand, and see a (black) (druggie-looking) guy out in front of a building where I hear there’ll be a one bedroom available.

He tells me he’s looking to move out because of the roaches, which are just everywhere and caused the people who just moved out to move out.

“Sometimes I go in the hallway,” he was like, “And it be like stepping on Cheerios.”

Later, after my errand, I go walk up to go see another apartment, and as I walk down a side street, there’s a little (Asian) kid hanging out of a building’s front window and his mom is saying something to him in Chinese from out of view, and the smell of homemade Chinese food is just pouring out the window and open door and onto the sidewalk, it smells like the inside of a Szechuan restaurant, only out on the sidewalk.

Messed up reaction to bedbug bites.

So, a few weeks ago after I thought the bedbugs were gone since I didn't get any bites for a week, I woke up with 9 bites, and some of them swelled up and itched horribly.

So, I kept thinking to myself, "They're body trials," like my one art school colleague who wears women's clothes had said, when he said it was like I was some weird Catholic saint because of all the welts and scabs from itching and stuff.

Oddly, though, since I've been reading books by Mother Angelica, that line of thinking quickly segued into a type of thinking that I like to call "God as giver of pain," since facing difficulties as trials to improve character can lead you to think of the difficulties themselves as providential.

"God must love me to make me suffer like this," I thought to myself, after setting down the Mother Angelica book and feeling these huge itchy welts on my back, buttocks, and thighs.