The Last Post About Mice Ever
As documented extensively on this blog, I do not like mice, but mice LOVE me.
So even when I'm DETERMINED to go home—as in, "Cat, you are going to face your fears and reclaim your apartment TONIGHT"—I find myself walking highly unmethodical circles around my neighborhood at, say, 8:25 PM on a Thursday, when everyone else in New York City is watching 30 Rock without having to sit next to their vacuum cleaner and turn it on at every commercial break JUST IN CASE something is planning a Viet Cong-like sneak attack—ANYWAY, I walk my circles, casually desperate for something, anything, to divert me and delay the inevitable.
Swiftly, I've become addicted to discount shopping. I live near stores like the DSW shoe warehouse and Daffy's ("High Fashion, Low Prices"), which stays open until 9 PM; I halfheartedly try on dumpy skirts from the clearance rack and buy $3 underwear hung on tiny plastic hangers. Even discount shopping becomes prohibitively expensive, however, if you do it every night, so I've taken to perusing the beauty products—which always sit on a dusty shelf near the linens section—because they're the only things I know I won't buy. That's where I recently found a bottle of Elizabeth Arden's Sunflowers, my fragrance from junior high. The floral scent is sweet and clean and pretty; it reminds me of a time before mice, before I experienced cold, hard emotional depravity as I tried on sequined jeans in the dressing room of Filene's Basement at 9:55 PM on a Monday. And it gives me hope. —Cat Marnell, beauty assistant
When mice start interrupting your viewing of 30 rock, that's when it becomes personal.
Ugh I feel your pain - My college apt. had roaches! I will never forget the horror of seeing one perched on my toothbrush (a brand new $25 Sonicare head!) Plus there was the time my roomie poured splenda onto her grapefruit and a roach came out too. Or the time I looked in the mirror and one was sitting on my shoulder like a pirate's parrot!
My middle school was also Sunflowers, plus Vanilla Fields! In high school I graduated to Allure by Chanel.
ew ew ew ew ew!!! And I thought things were bad when my parents' house was undergoing an Old Testament-like gnat swarm. Cockroach is a million times bigger and a BILLION times worse. Im sooo sorry