Ice cream, puppy dogs, bunny rabbits, large paychecks, football games, animated monkeys, real monkeys, grilled cheese sandwiches, fellatio, hot cocoa, sunshine, oversized bicycles ridden by little people, cockroaches, and dogs that do adorable tricks.
Which of these "happy things" doesn't belong in the happy category? That's right. Cockroaches.
I hate cockroaches. If I could rid this planet of one thing, I'd easily pick cockroaches over "evil" or "terrorists". Unless cockroaches count as terrorists. Because then I'd totally pick terrorists. Though that's kind of a vague term, and I'd hate to lose my friend Tom, who once peed on a church while discussing the Intifada.
But he was drunk, so it doesn't count, right?
Back to cockroaches. At work, myself and the other construction laborers have been cutting and removing sewer pipes from a wing of a hotel we're renovating. Since this section of the building hasn't been used in 15 years, the cockroaches we've seen have been dead. Today we removed a few pipes from the basement, which is still used by the housekeeping staff for washing clothes. So when we cut open the pipes this time around, the cockroaches we found were alive.
I cannot describe the feeling one gets when removing a pipe and seeing 40 live cockroaches spill out the end of it. It was like "Indiana Jones and the Temple of OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD WHAT IS THAT".
Some of the cockroaches are big and some are tiny, but they're all horrifically creepy and covered in dried feces. Dried feces from fifteen years ago that smells as if its odor has been preserved like a fine wine. A fine wine made entirely of feces.
One of the cockroaches was about the size of my thumb. I had to stamp on it four times before it finally died. This happened around 11:59am. Needless to say, when I sat down for lunch a minute later, I wasn't very hungry. It didn't help that my peanut butter and jelly sandwich included chunky peanut butter, which crunched when I bit into it.
Later in the afternoon, as I was cleaning up the roach corpses and dried excrement (There's a task that should be included in the "worst jobs" list: sweeping shit into a bucket), I began to get paranoid. There was one cockroach that escaped through a crack in the floor. Where did it go? Was it now breeding?
"What're you doing, man?" my co-workers asked as I suddenly began sweeping everywhere for no reason. "We're just gonna mess it up when we work on the ceiling this afternoon. Skip it for now."
"Yeah, leave the floor dirty," I muttered under my breath. "That's just what they want us to do."
I don't necessarily have a phobia about cockroaches, but they do freak me out a little.
A lot.
Okay, I freaking hate them.
Thankfully, our work in the basement is done, as is my time with live cockroaches (until I move to Los Angeles in January). But if given a choice yesterday of working with cockroaches or working in a stag movie, I probably would have chosen the humiliating porn job. And I'm not even much of a "working in groups" kind of person.
Cockroaches with dried poo or stag films. My career options have certainly taken a dive lately.
