TOW: Feeling Helpless

I've very sorry I haven't blogged since I-don't-know-when.  Between my move and work, life has been very busy.  And I thought it would be good to share here my feelings over my new apartment. 

I loved my apartment the first week I had it.  It was quiet here, the people seemed to keep to themselves, and I was looking forward to living in a nice, new, safe area.  I had made myself a new home, and it was a liberating feeling.

Then I discovered my apartment was infested with bedbugs.  And, my life is officially over for the next year and a half.

For those of you who aren't aware, bedbugs are a small, non-flying bug that feed on you in the middle of the night, much like a mosquito.  The only difference is that mosquitos are noticeable and have a fairly short life cycle. Bedbugs, on the other hand, can live for years and breed at a rate of up to five bugs per day, and are resilent and nearly impossible to kill unless you see an adult bug, and you kill it, right then and there.  Even better, they hide in your mattress, destroying it as they infest it, since they will defecate right after they eat, then breed in the same spot.  In a word, they are vile.  Vile beyond words and images.  Very few creatures, even in the kingdom of bugs, crap where they eat.

I discovered them 10 days after moving in.  A day after my birthday.

I have thrown out half of my belongings, everything else is in garbage bags, quarantined.  I am sitting here, in my only ikea chair, which I have sprayed with chemical before, and I have just found out today that bedbugs are living inside of the cushion of my chair.  I now know why I would see them crawling across my pant leg as I worked on my computer.

They were definitely here before I moved. because my previous landlord has had no complaints about bed bugs in my previous apartment.  I have never had them.  The new landlord has been very...threatening.  He will not pay for pest control.  It's been a rough couple weeks.

I'm going to be out several thousand dollars by time this process is finished, with or without a lawsuit, and I haven't slept more than 3-4 hours a night in a week, without waking up, turning on the lights, and searching for bugs.  I can't go anywhere without ironing the inside and outside of my clothes to the point of nearly burning them for fear of them leaving the apartment with me.  I have no idea what I'm going to do if another tenant blames me for them, even though, it is not my fault, and I handle everything I do with the utmost care within my unit.

And this week, I want to think and write about how helpless I feel.  Not quite at a breaking point, but helpless.  I'm sluggish, indecisive, and more emotional than I'd care to admit.  Going to bed is a coaching process.  Pretending everything is alright so I don't have panic attacks is also a process.

Being in this situation has started to remind me of one of the books that has most impressed me, The Plague by Albert Camus.  In it, Camus writes about a community that is quarantined and the medical workers, priests, and mafia that exist in the hellish space of dead bodies, searching for a cure, all while the people die and no one is allowed to leave.  Anyone who attempts is shot by the outsiders, who are keeping the town quarantined.

The defining moment in the novel for me was as Dr. Rieux, the protagonist, attempts to treat a young boy, Jacques Othon with a serum he is developing.  The child is in his death throes, and the scream he lets out as he dies is so horrific that it affects both Rieux and his colleagues.  The serum is ineffective for the youngest, the most vulnerable, perhaps the one most in need.  The scream, the feeling of pain, the moment of death, all wrapped together in a sad moment of sickness. 

My apartment is like a sick person.  Everything that it touches becomes sick with this problem.  Everything that enters this apartment slowly goes from 'clean' to 'infected.'  Much like the plague, I am isolated and contained, and I have not yet developed a cure, if there even is one available.  Some of the characters involved are innocent bystanders, wondering what could happen.  At times, I regard people around me in the apartment building with both suspicion, fear and paranoia.  Some observers of this issue tell me I have nothing to fear, while others within are completely oblivious to the dangers present. 

Such is my situation, a plague of my very own to contend with.  I am my very own narrator in an absurd encased world with very little hope of making rational sense of why this happened to me, or where this problem could have arisen.

The one beautiful thing, if still absurd at the end of The Plague, is that it ends.  The plague ends, partially due to careful medical care by professionals, and partially due to the absurdity of life, in that eventually diseases go away, even epidemics.

So, too, do I consider my situation to be one like The Plague.  It is a situation that promises to be a true trial, no matter what path I take.  Nothing good can come of this situation.  The only good thing that might arise it things returning to the way they were, or could have been, before I had this problem. 

The other scenario is that they follow me wherever I go, much like the plague.  For I too, am now part of a general infection that no one wishes to speak or think about.  I too, am something to be cleaned, cured, and fixed.

And such a feeling can only leave one feeling helpless.


 

Getting ready for brother's wedding

TOW: Getting Older

So it was my birthday last Sunday. 

And like most birthdays, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Starting with the worst of things:  One of my best friends got embarrassingly drunk at my party and left in the middle of it (while alienating all my other friends), I was both hungover and puking from food poisoning on my actual birthday, and I discovered bed bugs in my new apartment the day after my birthday.

The best things:  I had 14 people come out to my birthday.  And they all wanted to be there and they were all really happy to see me.  I can tell you how much that meant to me.  When I first arrived in Toronto for the first two years, I had the same people come out to my birthday, every time.  And every time, it felt a bit sad because I felt like I wasn't trying hard enough to make new friends.  Now I know lots of people that I can trust and that I care about deeply in this city.  (Even if I don't care deeply for this city.)

I got tons of phone calls and texts.  So many that I couldn't answer them all on my birthday, and so many happy birthday wishes on Facebook it just made me feel really, really great.

I got to sleep all day on my birthday.  It felt amazing.  (Although I was sick as a dog, I still loved it)

A random friend showed up on my birthday to crash at my new place and he brought me food and drink and we had a little picnic in my furniture-less abode.

Overall, it was one of the best birthdays I've ever had.  It had a little bit of everything:  Friend drama, feeling close and loved, a party for many, a party for two, a day of rest, a day of sickness good things, bad things, birthday presents, birthday cake...it was all good.

And all this time I'm getting older, I can only think of one thing:  I like being older.  I like most of the things that being older brings.  I will always miss certain things from my youth, but I think we all miss things we don't have anymore...but generally speaking I'm really happy with the way my life is, and somewhat happy with the direction it's going. 

And I think the key to happiness for me these days is to enjoy the getting older bit, and to treasure the moments as they pass, and I feel like I've been doing a really great job of that lately.

Now if only I could get rid of those bedbugs.