A Relief: BEDBUGS.

So, a few days ago I wake up and have my coffee and whatnot, and late mid-afternoon I go to change clothes, and right then I notice an itch on the side of my body, and what's there but like two smaller bites in a row and then a space and then one larger one, and then like an hour later I feel something on that shoulder on that side of my body, too.

Now, the night before there had been a mosquito in my room that I hadn't been able to kill, and it was around that afternoon, too, but something about the shape and the placement makes me think that these bites are actually from BEDBUGS, where the infestation candidates would be a hotel I stayed in when my parents visited and we did a sidetrip like six weeks earlier, and then like three-to-four weeks earlier when I had one overnight at a hostel on a trip to the city that I used to live in, when I had been there to see a temporary museum exhibit with my one (lawyer) friend who's originally from (Missouri).

On the one hand, it does kind of suck to have to wash bedding and get rubbing alcohol and spray down my room and "be on guard," though I know *exactly* what to do from two different infestations years ago at two different apartments in the city that I used to live in, and what with the way that my cottage is set up where it's just me there, I don't have to worry about any negligent neighbors causing reinfestation. There's not too many places for the bedbugs to hide there what with the minimal woodwork and tightly-grouted tile floor, either, so it should be fairly easy to eradicate them and end the cycle of the bites and the fresh births through the eggs that they leave, even though it's kind of a pain-in-the-ass and a timesuck, overall.

On the other hand, though, I realized, I actually don't mind the bedbugs, this time, since they're not only going to be fairly easy to resolve, if that's what they are, but also this anxiety is much less worse and much more controllable than my anxiety from what's happening with the Supreme Court and in national politics, and actually experiencing it leaves less room in my brain for that other kind of worse anxiety.

So, in its way, my getting bedbugs now has actually been a kind of RELIEF.

I never would have thought!

It's actually kind of crazy, how much it makes you just forget about the larger political instability.