The Kitchen War

I didn’t know that I hated/slightly feared cockroaches until I moved to Taiwan.

They are everywhere here, just everywhere.

And it isn’t just their appearance (which is like a creepy trilobite) that gets to me, its the way I discover them.

It’s never like, I am outside walking around and a cockroach crosses the sidewalk perpendicular to me and I see it come and go and think, “Wow. That’s a nasty little thing. Oh well.”

It’s more like I am putting clean chopsticks away in our SILVERWARE DRAWER and then all of a sudden this mother-of-all, prehistoric, 4-inch job is racing across the spoons towards my hand.

Or I am getting ready to wash some dishes, so I reach down into the sink and pull out a wooden spatula, which happens to be a new-found haunt for the glutinous Brother Roachystein, the four-foot wonder, who then scrambles up my arm towards my shoulder and my delicious brain.

Nick said that he woke up to one on his pillow once, too.

I’m getting the shivers just thinking about it.

Like the Goosebumps book of the same name, it came from beneath the sink. It really did. There’s legions of them down there, waiting for me to unsuspectingly put something away.

The screams and psychological damage I’ve undergone because of these critters is unmeasurable.

When I open the cabinet beneath the sink, I can NOT grab anything unless it is right against the door or in a very, very plain, very very reachable place.

I get nervous when I put utensils away.

I practically start crying when a cockroach scurries into my life.

I can hear the crawling along the plastic bags under the sink.

They are just so fast, so disgusting, and so all over these ’sacred’ places like the clean, dried knives and forks and the measuring cups. Not to mention the poor, violated can opener.

We went on an extermination mission last November or something. Took everything out from beneath the sink and used a “smashin’ stick,” a pair of bonsai tweezers, and an empty two-liter bottle to wage our little war.

When the kitchen carnage ceased we counted 27 little bodies.

Let me say that again, we found 27 cockroaches, alive and well, making their home under our kitchen. What could possibly be more disgusting?

This isn’t Joe’s Apartment. They don’t get together and sing me songs about towels and love. They are just really, really creepy and I don’t want a part of it.

Nick says we can re-claim the kitchen cabinets tomorrow morning–it is a lot easier in the daylight, as they can’t hide as well in the shadows and surprise shank you when you reach for the Windex.

I hate cockroaches. Feel my pain.