Digital Alterity

Yesterday, I finally got around to playing with iDVD and ended up making the most craptastic DVD ever. It was nothing more than a collection of random web movies that I’ve collected over the years. Some of them had such great resolution that they looked perfect on the TV. Allyson and I were both pretty impressed by the quality of the slideshows you can make, and we’re toying with the idea of giving both of our parents a DVD with slideshows of our wedding pictures.

I picked up Something to Write Home About by The Get Up Kids at Best Buy yesterday after listening to it at FYE. I fear that I’m lame for liking an emo band.

Last night, I had real trouble sleeping because I got to thinking about the bedbugs. Allyson and I have received random bites on our bodies, but we can’t determine whether they might be mosquito bites or what. Last night, I had a terrible bout of insomnia. One of the things that I figured out as I was laying there sleeplessly in the dark last night was why I’m so freaked out by the bedbugs. Those of you who have read this article already know that I’ve been plagued by a terrible paranoid fear that something is after me at night for pretty much my entire life. The problem with bedbugs is that they tap into that nearly unmanageable native fear, making them far worse than they actually are. I understood logically last night that, even if we do have bedbugs still, the worst I was facing was a few little bites similar to mosquito bites. It just didn’t matter though. I ended up passing out for only about three or four hours last night, and this morning, I just feel foolish about the whole thing.

I want a new cell phone. This is hardly a new development. I’ve wanted a new cell phone ever since I got my current vanilla white-bread Kyocera 2325 for free when I sold my soul to Verizon Wireless. You see, what I really wanted out of life was a phone that had Bluetooth capabilities and was able to sync with my OS X Address Book using iSync. Unfortunately Verizon has yet to get off their collective asses to offer such an offering to be used with their service. Some online snooping, though, has showed me the promised land. Verizon will be offering the Motorola V710 very soon, and depending on the how the review go, I probably intend to get it. iSync probably won’t sync with it until Apple finalizes support for SyncML in iSync, but I’m nearly positive that it will eventually do so. The Bluetooth features alone are really enough to make me salivate.

Sweet Lord with a side order of transubstantiated wine…I’m one of those cell phone people, aren’t I?

In other happy news, we slept in our bedroom for the first time in over a week, and neither one of us was bitten by the little insect vampires. The chemical warfare seems to be working (at the moment anyway).

Having worked in customer service for the entire first part of my professional life, I have an extremely low tolerance for bad service. I’m not the type that screams and yells; I, being a good libertarian type, tend to take my business elsewhere. As such, I have no intention of entering into another contractual agreement with the management of Sun Bay (née French Quarter and Village Park) Apartments once my existing lease is up. They have completely mishandled the whole bedbug situation. I don’t expect them to fix the problem by any means. However, I do expect them to maintain a positive attitude in all of their dealings with me. Allyson and I ended up in a shouting match with the office staff at the complex because they kept telling us to make other arrangements to dispose of our mattress without helping to specify what those arrangements might be. The arrogant young woman kept saying that it wasn’t their problem, but quite frankly, it is. They don’t have to fix the problem, but it is their problem. If we didn’t kill the bugs, they would spread to other apartments. When there’s an entire building of bedbug-infested apartments, I would say that it would affect the management’s bottom line, wouldn’t you? Some simple human kindness paired with the slightest inkling that they have pretty high stakes in the situation would have gone a long way toward maintaining my business.

Oh, and the instructions they gave us? They’re just the standard instructions for head lice. We don’t have head lice. Bedbugs are ladybug-sized creatures who are only active where there are helpless humans about. They can’t live on you. Hell, they can’t even hold onto you if you were to suddenly stand up. There aren’t a whole lot of exterminators who have experience dealing with bedbugs (yet), so if you get them, it would behoove you to do some online research yourself.

I had the best night of sleep that I’ve had since we first discovered the bedbugs. We’ve been sleeping on an inflatable air mattress downstairs ever since we found the vermin, but the air mattress seemed to transmit every wrong motion that Allyson or I made. Also, since we didn’t want to trust any of our sheets before washing them (and didn’t want to wash them until they spray the house), we were forced to deal with the sticky velvet-like surface of the mattress that seemed to grab your shirt and hold you uncomfortably in place. Well, yesterday, I decided to fix both issues. I broke out the pump, inflated the bed until both my back and my legs hurt, and then covered the mattress with a comforter we usually have slung over our wonderful but butt ugly couch. While I only slept for about seven hours, it was a restful seven hours. I would have probably slept longer, but Tux was having a little feline panic attack. Poor cat doesn’t understand why we aren’t sleeping in our bed. He continues to do so, but he has little fits every morning until I get up. I decided that Allyson would sleep a lot better if I just got up and played Final Fantasy X or something.

For three nights running, I haven’t gotten any bites at all. I can’t tell you how wonderful that is. The little bastards are apparently isolated to just our bedroom. Even if the pest control people don’t come by today, I’m think I’m going to toss the mattress and box springs. After all, I get to go into work late to accommodate end-of-term processing (which delays the start of flow and usually keeps me at work until quite late).

For weeks now, I thought we had fleas. When Allyson and I went on our little mini-vacation in Orlando, we got several insect bites that we at first assumed to be mosquito bites. After getting back home, we figured that we had picked up fleas and brought them back to live on Tux, our beloved little bitch cat. I went to the vet and picked up a supply of Tux’s flea meds and played the part of the mean cat owner by way of applying the medicine to the back of his neck.

Well, the fleas didn’t stop. They would fade, but then we would get up one morning and be all bitten up—sometimes five or six new bites on each of us in a night. Last night, Allyson decided to do some research online and became convinced that we had bedbugs. I knew a fair bit about bedbugs from an etymology course I took back during my undgergrad years, and I wasn’t convinced that they were our culprits. After all, there were no real blood spots on our sheets. Bedbug bites bleed slightly after the bug has left, and they also excrete blood all on their own. In trying to disprove the bedbug theory, however, I have actually validated it. You see, I found them.

At first, I found just an exoskeleton from molting. After Allyson left for work, however, I uncovered three live bedbugs in the seam of our box springs. I went immediately to our apartment complex and left them one bag o’ bugs to show the exterminator tomorrow.

Things I’ve learned from this ordeal and the ensuing research?

Bedbugs are undergoing quite the renaissance. In 2000, Atlanta-based Orkin reported a 300% increase in bedbug calls, and that number of cases per year has continued to rise steadily since then. Researchers at University of Florida’s Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) have speculated that there are a number of factors leading to this boom—increased international travel and pest-specific control techniques chief among them.

Getting bedbugs isn’t a reflection on the cleanliness of an abode. In fact, ritzy hotels in resort towns with lots of international travelers are one of the places being hardest hit. Heck, that’s where Allyson and I seem to have picked them up.

From a disease vector perspective, bedbugs are relatively harmless. They’re not really disease spreaders—presently or historically. Basically, they bite you, and those bites make you itch fiercely. Now I can’t really figure out why, but in spite of this, the idea of bedbugs bothers me way more than the thought of having fleas—which are notorious disease spreaders. In fact, the thought bothers me so much that I was unable to sleep more than an hour or two last night. And those were on the floor downstairs.

I find myself wondering what the next thing to go wrong is going to be.