Oh, Whoops. More Things

And now for some things that have happened:

• I was on a train and there was a fly trapped inside our crowded car. The thing really took to this one particular guy and it made his entire ride a living hell. It showed no interest for any other person, and all of our eyes followed the fly as it buzzed around this guy's bald head. So he's harumphing and shooing his poor arm off and finally he just snaps and starts rolling up the newspaper he's been trying to read. He sets down his bag and goes, "I'm gonna hit 'im!" You know, giving people fair warning to get the hell out of the way. So he's got his tube of newspaper and sees the fly land on the window. He winds up baseball style, his elbows near people's chins, pretty good form actually, and explodes this juicy bug all over the door. He was sweating and concluded with a big, "Thanks!" The rest of us went back to thinking about other things.
  
• One night I turned on my bedroom lamp to see the biggest centipede I've ever seen. The thing was the size of a goddamn kielbasa, not including its legs. Pretty gross. Had it not been so close to my bed I might've let it live. Might've. So I quietly got out the vacuum and connected the hose attachment. I wondered if the centipede could see what I was doing, or if it even had eyes for that matter. I got the hose right next to what I believed to be its head and hit the switch. The hose started sucking in air loudly, but not quickly enough to unglue the centipede from the wall. The ugly thing really had that much mass. So I had to guide him in, sort of using the hose to slurp him up. It was a pathetic death. He didn't even try to fight me or at the very least run away. I went to bed feeling superior.
  
• While my neighbors were moving out of our apartment building I heard them talking about me in the hallway. I got to wondering: Is this eavesdropping, or talking behind someone's back?
• I asked my landlord to fix my leaky bathroom sink, and came home to find my kitchen covered in a film of sawdust. The floors, the counters, the sink, my cat's food - all of it dressed in wood shavings. I opened the back door and saw part of the staircase had been rebuilt, and concluded he used my kitchen as his personal wood shop for the day. Guy didn't even try to clean up. Obliviousness, or DGAF-ness? Not sure. He did fix the sink though.
• I didn't ask my landlord to fix anything, and came home to find a huge black streak running across my bedroom wall. It ran waist level around my bed, which is strange because there is less than a foot of space between my bed and the wall - and nothing on the other side of my bed. So what someone was doing shimmying around my mattress, to get closer to nothing, is both lost on me and concerning. Not to sound vain, but my logic was soon in the gutter and I started checking crevices for video cameras and audio equipment. It made me paranoid for a few days, but mostly I just reverted back to living my life as I did before. If they really, really want to, let 'em watch, y'know?
  
• This pair of pigeons moved into my apartment, into the small spaces on either side of my AC unit. I found sticks, feathers, pigeon crap and other bird belongings on the inside of my window sill, and my cat playing with it all. So I kicked them out. Sure enough the next day they were back, building and pooping in their new home simultaneously. I evicted them again! By the end of the week they would hear me come home and pretend to not be there. Right. Because that works. That's when I started going out onto my porch and throwing ice cubes at them, every night, for the subsequent week. At first you could tell they had no idea what an ice cube was, but then one of them got hit in the face. Now they don't come around anymore, and I can once again drink my drinks cold.
  
• This summer I went to my family's cottage in northern Michigan for eight days. There is a dining hall there, filled with families clad in Polo sweaters and whatever argyle accessories their country clubs had left in stock. They eat there three times a day, and by the end of my stay a young girl was openly flirting with my cousin and me in front of her parents - using milk as her calling card. Yes, she flirted with us via milk, taking multiple unnecessary trips to the dairy bar and consuming close to five glasses of milk per meal as she eyed us up from behind her tilted container. That's 15 glasses of milk a day. We thought of asking her if she had a calcium deficiency but agreed the odds of that actually being true were rather good, and plus we didn't want the flirting to stop. Ever. So we kept on watching her watch us as she worked on her bones.