3:36 pm I'm just saying.
Okay, I'm back. The blog is back. Meaning has been restored to your lives. For those of you who weren't paying attention, I am now living and working in New York City. I am a 22 year old woman living and working in New York City. I upgraded myself from 'girl' to 'woman' because when you move out of your parents' house, move into your own closet in an unknown city, and start a job, I think you deserve the upgrade. When you're on your own people don't give you A+'s and gold stars for the day. You give them to yourself.
Anyway, since I'm not going to talk about my job specifically on this blog (except to complain about how tired I am, of course), I came up with a kind of general theme for the week. A week. I've only been living here for a week. That's hard to believe because it really feels like it's been a month. Maybe that's because in the past week I've had about a month's worth of experiences. I don't know. It's all relative. Anyway... the theme is...Patience is a virtue. Now, I know Jesus or somebody said that long before me, but I'm finding that lesson to be very relevant in my life right now. Basically what I've found is that I'm most interested in instant gratification. And when you're living on your own and taking care of yourself...instant gratification is rare. This applies to your home and in other environments. I will explain.
If you've seen my tweets at all, you know I have roaches in my apartment. Now, I know I'm being a girl - I should probably just get over it... but I can't. I hate them. I really, truly do. There are un-girly things that I don't mind. I'm not scared of snakes. I don't mind mice. In fact, I would prefer mice to cockroaches. I really think I would because I HATE ROACHES. There's something about the way they scuttle that makes me want to cry and vomit and scream all at once (this is really hard to do). So, okay, I have roaches and I hate them and I want them to go away. So what do I do? I clean everything. I spray everything with Raid. I set out these little roach poisoning bait traps. And I call the landlord and tell him I need an exterminator. And I've been doing all of this almost every day for the past week, so I ask you...
WHY DO I STILL HAVE ROACHES?
Now, I totally get that this is very much a little rich girl problem to be having: 'Awww the girl from Connecticut doesn't like the icky bugs. DEAL.' Obviously there are bigger problems in the world (health care, Haiti, etc. - I get it). But as I mentioned before, these things are all relative. And I'm used to living at home where these problems didn't exist OR they were fixed for me almost instantly. I'm realizing now how much my parents took care of.
And then there are the "other environments" that all this applies to. Do you ever do the right thing and feel like it goes unnoticed? And that's fine except... there's someone doing the exact opposite, the 'wrong' thing, and that goes unnoticed as well. I realize I'm being vague here, it's just that it's driving me crazy. I'm okay with doing the right thing and not being commended for it. I don't need someone to give me a hug every time I recycle. It's just when I'm recycling and there's someone next to me dumping their plastic bottles into the gutter I WANT THERE TO BE CONSEQUENCES. To be clear, the recycling thing is a really obscure metaphor, but I hope you get what I'm saying. I want things to be FAIR. I want good to prevail and evil to fail. Is that so much to ask??
I feel like this post is getting cynical, and Conan O'Brien said not to be like that, so I'm going to wrap it all up with what I think the moral of this whole story is. And it's within this story...
A few nights before I moved to New York City, I was sleeping when a noise suddenly woke me up. My room was dark, and I lay there, confused and wondering why I had woken up. I listened for a while and heard nothing. I pressed a button on my phone to check the time. It was 3:30 in the morning. Why was I awake?? Then I heard the sound that had awoken me. It was a buzzing coming from by my window. I turned on the lamp next to my bed and saw that there was a fly (What is it with my life and bugs??). This fly was clearly on it's way out. What it was doing buzzing around my room in the middle of January I do not know, but it was not in good shape. It would fly really fast and then slam into a wall. Then it would buzz to life again and fly into another wall. Now, flies don't gross me out (See?? I'm not a total girl!), so I wasn't so much disgusted as I was annoyed that I was awake at 3:30 in the morning. So, I put on my glasses and grabbed the 'Self' magazine that was on my night stand and swung at it. For 45 minutes (no exaggeration) I would wait until the fly landed on a wall and then THWACK! But somehow, I kept missing it! Spastic and swearing I ran around my room, stood on my bed, even knocked over my lamp trying to kill that stupid buzzing sound. At 4:15 am, I sat back down on my bed. Wide awake, I watched as the fly did loop-the-loops around my ceiling fan. And then, as quickly as it had started, the buzzing stopped. I watched as the fly fell from the ceiling onto my bed in front of me. Dead.
I had just wasted 45 minutes on a problem that had worked itself out. I'm not saying that cockroach infestations magically disappear or that we should look the other way when people are doing bad things. What I am saying is this: You can run around your room like a crazy person at 3:30 in the morning, chasing a fly that is going to die on it's own, or you can take any obvious, necessary steps to solve the problem and then wait. There's only so much a person can do. Sometimes you just have to wait while these problems wear themselves out. The litterer will eventually be caught. The exterminator will eventually come. These problems will wear themselves out. In the mean time, we just have to be patient.
And in the mean time, I've worn myself out...
Tara
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