Undrwo

Do not fuck around on number three.  Ask your landlord how well they know the place.  The landlord needs to cover this expense, but it will be worse for you if they cheap out on it.  Do not do raid or bug bombs or anything by yourself, do not do anything like the earths or the vaseline tricks or any other internet remedies.  Just wait for your exterminator.

What I did to prep for mine-

-freaked out and searched my entire apartment- there was no sign of them!  I found one skeletal hull, a shed adult skin, but other than that and the one bug and my little scratchy bites, I would have never been able to recognize the signs of the infestation, not in a million years.
-I moved kitten to the boyfriend's place (after getting him a new bag of food and litter, and treating his carrying case with bleach in the bathtab to be sure it had no stowaways.)
-I treated my fabric and sealed them out of harms way.
-I threw out my crinkly foam mattress pad, after marking it 'bed bugs.'  It may have been treatable, but I didn't want to add to the pain of treating the mattress itself.

When you fuck around with the home treatments and barriers, you risk diffusing the bugs.  Nine times out of ten, it won't kill them, they'll just run for other meat in the building.  Moving to an air mattress surrounded with duct tape for the night will keep you bug free FOR THE NIGHT but they'll be back the next night, or the next.  They live up to a year without food.  They'll hunt for blood in neighbouring suites and the building will get fucked up.

SO.  Once you've treated your fabric, wait.  Clean up as much clutter and bullshit as possible, move the furniture four inches away from the walls in prep for the exterminator.

Mine arrived and was lovely.  He bid me goodbye for eight hours, sprayed my place top to bottom (I should also note I had to turn off my fish tank filter and cover the top with a towel to keep them getting poisoned!) and when I came back, I put my apartment a tiny bit back together, just enough to live in.  Leave the fabric away, and still, forgo the home treatments and barriers!  Above all, do not give in to the temptation to go elsewhere!

Here's the gross but crucial thing about treating bedbugs.  You have to stick around.  You have to get bit.  The bedbug guy left poison strewn all around my floor and bed, and gave me strict instructions not to vacuum it. I slept in my bed the next week and a half knowing that the little fuckers were crawling through it to get to me, and dying, hatching and crawling through it and dying.  If you leave to go somewhere bite free, they don't walk through the poison, the infestation remains.

The first spray kills all the adults in the apartment, either at the time of or crawling through the detritus to feed.  Then, there's a very specific window- imagine that ten seconds before the exterminator walked through the door, a bed bug laid an egg.  In egg form, they pretty much aren't going to be poisoned.  You need to spray again AFTER that very last egg has hatched, and BEFORE it has had time to lay more (poison impervious) eggs.  That's where the two week spraying thing comes from.  A day early or a day late, and you're fucked.

      The garbage truck wakes me up early this morning.  This isn’t anything new.  The garbage truck always wakes me up Fridays; what was different about it this time was that I was too jittery about it to get back to sleep afterwards.  I tossed and turned in bed for about a half hour before getting up to shower.  The morning is wasted compulsively cleaning the house, de-snailing my fish tank (seek out and squish) and reorganizing the bathroom cabinet.  A lot of time spent furiously accomplishing nothing important.  In retrospect I realize I was too nervous to have an appetite, and didn’t have a bite to eat.

At one thirty I leave the house and walk through the park to catch the bus up the hill.  It takes me three tries to get out the door.  I have to check if the garbage can has been brought in off the curb.  I remember I’m supposed to put a skirt in my bag for the evening’s plans after the protest.  I can’t remember if I turned my alarm clock off or not.  I lock the door and check the knob behind me, and make it out onto the street, still fighting down anxiety.

The indecision extends to the music I’m playing on my headset.  I can’t settle on anything, flicking through my usually favourite with angry dissatisfaction.  I’m half-way to campus before it occurs to me that the only thing that’s going to be listenable is clearly Queen.  Don’t stop me now.  R has class until two twenty and I get up to campus at two, so I move in circles.  I go to the pub and ask about tickets for the party that night.  I go to the cafeteria and buy a bottle of orange juice, a bottle of water, and two granola bars.

I go to the concourse computing facility.  We will rock you.  Killing time is agonizing somehow.  I check my email, and fire off a few replies.  I take a sip of my orange juice and realize it’s ‘the official juice of the Olympics.’  Idly, I google-news ‘olympic protests feb 12’ and read the articles that pull up.  I stick the orange juice back in my bag and realize I’m hungry, but I can’t really eat in the computing facility.  I move out into the hall and eat one of my granola bars.  Robin calls and says to meet him at Cornerstone.

I talk to my mother on the phone while waiting for him in the coffee shop.  The conversation is vague, and surprisingly ordinary given how anxious she’s been about all this so far.  We hang up quickly.  I want to break free. R shows up, bouncing on the balls of his feet and waving cheerfully, playing with the strings hanging off the ear flaps of his hat.  We get on the 135 together and bus down the hill to his apartment, where he drops off his books and I leave behind my things.  The pile of stuff I leave on his chair include my credit card, the damn Olympic orange juice, my day planner, a pair of high heels and a skirt.  The plan is that we’ll finish with the protest, come back, warm up, and go up the hill to the rowing party fundraiser tonight, since the organizers are mutual friends.

      He grabs his camera, and we hurry out the door.  The bus starts to go by as we reach Hastings, and we chase it for half a block.  The sprint is just long enough that my heart is pounding by the time we do board.

The ride down town is interminable.  People get on and off at almost every stop.  Everyone around us seems to be talking about the Olympics.  We’re next to two VANOC volunteer girls, who are discussing their postings.  We run into another mutual friend who tells us happily that she’s going to the opening ceremonies tonight.  She has a temporary tattoo maple leaf on one cheek.  R glances at me sideways, and neither of us mentions that we’re headed to a protest.

By the time we reach down town, the bus has nearly emptied, and we’re running late.  The protest is due to congregate at the Vancouver Art Gallery at three, and it’s nearly three thirty.  We turn up a street and the bus very quickly slams on the breaks; the entire road is at a dead stop.  The march has already begun.

Of the ten or twenty people left on the bus, one woman rushes to the front immediately and asks to be let off.  The driver answers that he can’t legally do that until he can pull up to a curb.  We’re actually parked at this point, and to make matters worse, someone has decided to install the bus with an extra-loud anti-crowd horn that sounds like something that belongs on one of the BC Ferries.  The driver honks it periodically as his passengers get more and more fraught.

R and I glance at each other.  The march is maybe a city block ahead.  We can see signs being waved, but can’t read them.  Someone is carrying a torch.  The man in the seat behind us leaps to his seat and stalks to the front of the bus.

“Fucking protesters,” he snarls as he goes, obviously furious with the situation.  The bus lurches forwards a few feet, and he begins to get into a shouting match with the driver.  He’s a reporter.  He starts swearing loudly about the event ahead, but garners no real support from the rest of the passengers other than an unhappy mutter; the aggressiveness towards the driver is really what does him in.  No one seems to be on his side at all, and he realizes it, shortly.  Still, he asks out loud, “Why don’t they just call the police?”

At this point, R snorts and pretends it’s a cough.  Later, out of earshot, he’ll perform a fictional conversation with a police officer.  ‘Um, sir, there are three thousand people on the road blocking traffic with signs and fire.’  ‘Oh shit, I had no idea, son, I had better get down there.  To the batmobile!’

As the angry reporter sits down into a seat, someone on the bus pulls the string to let the driver know ‘next stop.’  We’ve been sitting at a dead stop begging to be let off for fifteen minutes at this point.  The bell goes, and the entire bus bursts into uncomfortable laughter.  The reporter mutters that he’s late for work, and one of the poor VANOC girls is babbling an explanation into her cell phone.  In all, the lot of us are stuck on the bus until about ten to four, until we can finally get to a curb.

At least R and I don’t need to worry about finding where the protest is?  We sprint down the street after it, ignoring the blaring car horns, and approach it through the crowd.  I overhear snatches of conversation that seems to echo the sentiments of the people on the bus with us.  A woman reassures her partner that “Well, that’s what having your say is,” and he agrees a little too hurriedly, obviously as an amendment to something critical he’d just said.

Well, it wasn't st pat's, but it was the saturday before, and my friend Lauren's boyfriend, who plays in an irish punk band, was performing at the Railway Club.

That was obviously the place for me.

I'm not a barbie-attractive person, you know?  I'm a little too busty/hippy to ever fit into any of the Fashionable Clothing.  My hair goes to my ears, and curls crazily, and all my blonde Jennifer Aniston haircut friends tell me that I should totally let them straighten it, but I never, ever will.  I have the greek nose.  I'm not willing to back down in an argument, I'm not SHORT (5'6) and I STILL wear three inch heels.

So that, on top of being at an all girls school, on top of being a vocal crim major who's not afraid to speak her mind, has kept me kind of out of luck in the men department.  I've had two two-week dating adventures since June, and both of them were dicks who in retrospect, I should have known better than to even really bother with.  And who, friday night, both happened to be at the same party with me, and made my life miserable.

This said, we were going out saturday.  So I was like 'what the fuck, I'm single, and I'm going to be empowered and enjoy myself.'  I got out the high heels and the black tights and the little black dress, and the dark green eye shadow (yay st Pat's) and I put a curl intensifyer in my crazily curly hair and I went out to have some fun with Brigit, Kody and Lauren.

Apparently, I'm the irish man's ideal.  Or at least, the fakely out being pretend irish on St Pat's.  I had one follow me out to the band-balcony, where Lauren and her boyfriend (from the band) and I were taking pulls out of a whiskey bottle, and be niiiiice and attentive.  Then, when I got back in, he vanished off somewhere (to have a smoke, I think) and another one asked if he could buy me a drink.  He did.  A chocolate martini.

So we then went back and sat down with Lauren and another band member and one other guy, who'd been smiling at me too and was a teeensy bit sloshed, and we converse, and at some point the band member looks at me and says 'hey, you look like the girl from dirty dancing' and the one who got me the drink says 'BUT HOTTER,' and then for the first time in my life, someone tries to make out with me in a bar.

The only problem is that both of my first times are at once, and I end up smushed between two attractive, greenclad redheads who are trying for a kiss.  It was like 'GENTLEMEN, PLEASE.'  And so Lauren dragged me off to play coy and dance a little, and the one who bought me the drink (who I shall now refer to as Patrick, as it is his name) came and danced with me for the rest of the night.  And we fucking JIGGED, not slowdanced, and did the swing and when he found out I knew how to charleston he made me start teaching him, but it was too crowded to do properly.

Then, he asked for my phone number, like a good gentleman, and we made out a little (because, although I can hold my liquor like nothing else and was only slightly tipsy, I HAD had seven drinks (combinations of cocktails, beers, and whiskey,) and that is enough to get even ME just a little bit happier than usual.)  And I'm NOT one of those drunks who's like 'i shwear to god guys, tooooottally sober.'  I talked to Brigit on the bus on the way back and she asked me how much I'd had and couldn't BELIEVE IT.

So, even if Patrick doesn't phone, and it'd be nice if he would, my night was completely fabulous, and I felt very beautiful for the first time in a whiiiiiiile.  Since the guys my age are all a little too young to be attracted to anything other than what the media flashes up in front of them.  Apparently, my answer is twenty three year old third year poli sci majors who will have a perfectly earnest Clinton-vs-Obama discussion with you over a chocolate martini and a guinness.