Bleghttttttt........

I'm a creature of routine. I suppose most of us are. When my schedule/lifestyle/activities change drastically; my entire being gets thrown out of whack. Having moved to a new state...new house....doing nothing like I was doing previously on a daily/weekly basis has thrown me so far out of whack that I can't even see the whack anymore. (I can make out a smallish, blurry something that looks a little bit like "uwek"...and that's it.)

This out-of-whack-ed-ness has been apparent in many ways, and one of most prevalent ways it appeared last week was in my eating schedule. I don't know if it was so much that I wasn't hungry, or just that I forgot to eat meals when I normally do. Either way, I went about 5 days without eating anything much at all. Towards the end of week, I realized this and decided that I was, indeed, quite famished. My roomate had a large bag of cheetos in the pantry. They're a neato kind of cheeto that turn your tongue a nasty black color when you eat them. Their shape (supposedly) resembles a mini tornado, or something equally as corny, but they really look like orange dog turds.

Yeah...so I was stuffing my face with these things one night when my appetite rushed back to me. I wasn't stopping to lick the artificial cheese powder off my fingers or anything....just reaching my hand into the bag time after time. For some reason, I eventually paused and looked down. What I saw was one of the most disturbing sights that has ever been before me. I ginormous dead roach, or something resembling a roach, was nestled peacefully among the 'tos. I screeched a multitude of explicitaves, flung the half-empty bag at my roomate's head, and ran out the front door of our house. The only thing that seemed helpful at the time was to jump up and down in the front yard while frantically waving my hands. Helpful.....yes. In fact, I think I'll try that every time I get upset from now on. I'll send out a memo to warn the neighbors.

I managed somehow to not puke, brushed my teeth until my tongue was numb, and then brushed them some more. Visions of roach eggs developing and hatching in my bowels clouded my thoughts and I knew I MUST kill any possible trace of bug in my body. ( Wasn't it in Nightmare on Elm St. Part 27 that the chick from "Just the 10 of Us" turned into a roach? That's an image that still invades my sleep from time to time. I'll have to write about my ever-lasting fear of Freddy Kruegar some time. scary.) PineSol seemed extreme. The pistol I keep in my closet has no bullets. I couldn't quite figure out how to squash bug eggs in my esophagus with a baseball bat. So I resorted to chugging a large whimsically decorated cup of rum. Chugged it like a bottle of Aqua-freakin-fina (which, for the record, I quickly regretted).

The whole event prompted me to wonder about the bug content in all the foods we eat. A week later, I'm still wondering. From the feel of my pants on my butt today, though, it appears this paranoia hasn't kept me from returning to my usual gluttoness routine. Next time I munch the remains of an insect, I certainly hope some long-term good comes from it.