We have a serious fly infestation in the apartment right now.
And those little fckers are nibbling away at my sanity.
Twice now, someone has spent more than an hour zapping every fly they could find with our handheld bug zapper in my room till they were all dead, and yet three hours later they were back again in just as thick a mass as before.
Seems like my bedroom is the epicenter, which is…. unsurprising, given what a slob I am, but my slobbiness is an insufficient explanation unto itself for this attack.
After all, I’ve been a slob for a very long time and nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Not a full on fly infestation in February.
If my dereliction of duties re : cleaning is to blame, then somewhere there has to be one whopper of a mess and I can’t imagine anything I eat being able to generate the sort of pestilence we are experiencing right now.
Like, did something die in here??
Eating is particularly stressful, what with having to shoo flies away from my food all the time making me paranoid and insecure.
I am worried that we will have to escalate to chemical warfare, in other words, pesticides. Something that promises to kill the bugs AND their eggs.
I hate, hate, HATE the thought of filling my room with nasty chemicals. The very thought of it makes my skin crawl. Even though I know that if it was toxic to PEOPLE it would be illegal to sell, on a deep superstitious level that kind of shit is bad mojo to me and I would rather solve the problem by other means.
Maybe we can find some super eco friendly stuff that’s made with herbs and leaves and therefore less offensive to my senses. I dunno.
There’s a grain of sanity to my aversion this time : harsh chemicals have been known to set off the latent eczema in my hands.
I say “latent” because it’s nowhere near as bad as my mother’s eczema. Hers was so bad I have actually seen the skin on her hands crack and bleed during an attack.
Could have done without that sight, to be honest.
For me, all it has ever done is make my skin feel tight and itchy and turn slightly more red. Maddening at times, given that I know better than to scratch it, but it is more of a nuisance than anything else given how infrequently it is triggered.
It’s always some kind of cleaner that has done it in the past. Like whatever it was on new clothes in the store that would set it off. And sometimes whatever they are using to clean the floors and surfaces in a public place has set if, along with certain kinds of hair products of old.
Thank goodness for the rise of hypoallergenic everything, right?
Nevertheless, I don’t want to risk having my eczema severely triggered by pesticides.
See? I remembered the point I was trying to make!
I’m as surprised as you are.
More after the break.
The dirty truth of bullying
Julian was watching a news piece about some poor girl who committed suicide when she was only twelve years old due to bullying, and it got me thinking.
That could have been me. I was a very depressed child, and bullying played a huge role in that. Instead of learning to connect with my classmates, I learned to hide from them.
Imagine how things might have been different if my bullies had been identified and punished and made an example of.
I might have learned how to feel safe with people instead of only feeling sort of safe when I am all alone.
And my mind is occupied enough that the bad thoughts are locked out.
But that was never going to happen, and I hope the kids at the school where that poor girl was a student don’t expect the adults to be of much help despite this tragedy because extra training for teachers and school assemblies ain’t gonna do jack shit to address the problem.
Because the real problem with bullying is that teachers become of the exact same social structure as their students and therefore do not truly see bullying as a problem.
Just like the students, they are unwilling to buck the system by sticking up for someone they view as extremely low status and therefore worthless,
Such a move could only lower their own status in the eyes of the students, and teachers and admins quite enjoy their role at the top of the food chain in their schools and are unwilling to risk it for someone as worthless as the bullied student.
That’s how a teacher who will say all the right things about intervening to protect a child if they saw bullying happening will nevertheless be right there, in the room, when a child is being outright tortured and assaulted and not even register it as an event.
Just like all the students who were also in the room and would give all the right answers about bullying and yet also did absolutely nothing to help the bullied child.
We want, at least in theory, teachers to stand outside the social structure of the students and act as a form of honest law enforcement to keep kids safe.
But they don’t. They follow the herd just like the rest, and our herd instincts tell us that low status means low worth and that means said people aren’t even human.
Take it from one who knows.
I guarantee that if one of the high status students had been assaulted, they would have acted instantly because that would violate the real rules of the herd ergo they would react like a royalist would when someone attacks the king.
Attacking non-conforming weirdos, on the other hand, is the system working exactly as it is supposed to and deep down, all those silent witnesses feel like the victim deserves what they get for bugging everybody by being weird and gross.
They should have gotten the message and learned to conform like everyone else. Then the system would have left them alone.
After all, that’s what they all did.
And that very much includes the teachers.
That’s the real dirty secret of bullying, and until people are willing to confront the real; truth of their complicity in these crimes, nothing will change.
And everyone but the victims and their families will be totally okay with that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.