Terror After Dark

Well everybody, the smoke on the birthday candles has cleared. Instead of indignantly yelling, "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY" when someone asks me why I'm drinking rum punch and eating pizza rolls while watching an American Idol-athon on a weeknight, I must simply sigh, "it's my life."

I feel like the same sort of thing happens to me every year. I wake up on the morning of February third and realize, "Holy crap. I'm a twenty-something. I'm the same age as the people they make sitcoms about. I should be living in an unrealistically expensive looking loft in Manhattan -- across the hall from my unrealistically good-looking and witty pals. I should have a job as a chef, fashion buyer or soap-opera star. I should be sweetly yet assertively eye-flirting with handsome men who buy me pom-tinis in trendy nightclubs. Instead, I spent a whole day last week reading internet plot summaries for horror movies I was too scared to see. Then, I couldn't sleep because even the summaries were too scary so I watched three bootlegged episodes of Fraggle Rock in a row. WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE???"

So what do I do. Do design a life plan? Do I research grad schools? Revise my reading list? Vow to exercise more? No, of course not. I come crawling back here to my beloved, spurned Unnecessary Anxieties. At this point I feel like a negligent movie-dad. Every year or so I Stumble back to the wife and kids after a particularly rough night of, say, smarmily betting on underground cockfights. I have my hat in my hand and I declare that this time it will be different. This time I'll stay for good and we'll all go get ice-cream in the morning! In my heart I really do believe it, but I can never keep my promise. I have a roguish wanderlust in my soul that cannot be contained for long. (Or maybe just a lazy-ish American-Idol-lust. This could be where the metaphor breaks down...) Anyway. I know I've talked about "weekly updates" before and it's been a "load of crap." This time, I'm not making any lofty promises. I'll do my best, but I'm not asking you to believe that it's going to last this time. I'm just saying we might as well ride this wave of post-birthday-glow blogging guilt for as long as it lasts.

Now that that's out of the way, do you guys want to hear a horror story?

It's a psychological thriller that -- I'll warn you right now -- has a pretty unsatisfying ending. But! the first part is full of tension and fear and the heart-thumping threat of apple-seed-sized nighttime invaders.

It all began a few months ago. I don't really remember what the weather was like but, for the sake of the genre, lets say it was idyllic. Shortly after I arrived at work, I noticed three small itchy bumps on the inside of my elbow. Without thinking, I asked my co-worker, "huh. What do you think bit me here?"

She raised her eyebrows "When did you notice the bites?"

"Just this morning."

If we had been in a movie, this would have been the part where the ominous violins in the soundtrack would have swelled to a screechy halt.

Betsy said, "Bedbugs?"

Dun dun DUUUUUN!!!!!!

At that point, I should have gripped the edge of the table, leaned forward -- intense Jack Bauer interrogation style -- and growled, "I'm sorry, I must not have heard you properly. Did you say bedbugs?"

Then, Betsy would have gotten the message and been all, "did I say bedbugs? I meant...Fredbugs. That's what they call mosquitoes in...Australia? Or something. Those bites are definitely the work of Fredbugs."

Then I would have leaned back and forgotten the incident within a matter of hours. But no. The seed had been planted.

I spent the rest of the day examining all the potential "bug bites" on my arms and legs. At that point, all I knew was that bedbugs bite people at night, and I remembered our LVC city coordinator mentioning that bedbug bites tended to show up in rows. I needed more information. My internet searches started innocently enough. I just wanted to find out what bedbugs looked like and how to identify their nests. I figured would be immediately assuaged and the whole matter would be put to rest. But you've met me. You know where this was headed.

The websites I visited gave me little conclusive information. Sure, they showed pictures of bugs and bites and listed signs to look for, but they also all said that the bites look different on everyone and, though there are some common signs, they aren't present in every case. They also said that it might take a trained professional hours to confirm the presence of bedbugs. Now, if it worked properly, my brain would have taken this information and put it through a mental mill of rationality and come up with something reasonable like, "I don't seem to see most of the common signs of bedbugs. I probably don't have them, but I'll wait a few nights and them call an exterminator if I keep getting bites." Instead, my brain put this information through a mental mill of paranoid CRAZY and spit out a red alert that went something like, "If you have any sort of bug bites or itchiness, it could be bedbugs. Actually, it's probably bedbugs. They leave no trace, they just invade your home and your nightmares without warning. Call an army of exterminators NOW. They probably won't be able to help but IT'S YOUR ONLY HOPE!" My brain is the Fox News of brains.

And this is all from reading un-exaggerated facts from respectable sources. As it turns out, those sites were just gateway pages to the hard stuff: forums and testimonials. Once I became completely and irrevocably convinced that I had bedbugs, I figured I'd better read some stories from others who had dealt with them before. Once again, I expected to find encouraging stories from people who had fought difficult battles against the critters, but ultimately emerged victorious. I am an idiot. If the internet could have talked to me after I delved into this murky abyss, it would have been like, "Dude. What did you expect? I convince adolescent girls that they can get pregnant by holding hands with boys when their hair is wet."

I found no comfort. Rather, I found something like what country songs would be if Wes Craven wrote country songs. I read dozens of stories from people who broke up with their boyfriends, gotten fired from their jobs, lost all their friends and abandoned all their earthly belongings, including their homes and the clothes on their backs. Sometimes twice. All because of bloodsucking bugs.

Now, if you know me well, you may have already guessed that all this "research" was interspersed with a series of phone calls to my mother. They escalated in panic-scale like recordings on a doctor's found tape recorder in a zombie movie, where the first recording is like, "There's a patient on the fourth floor who keeps trying to eat the doctor's brains. Interesting." Then, recording five is like, "AAAGH ZOMBIES!!!!! *gruesome chomping death sounds*"

Likewise, my first call went, "Mom? I think I might have bedbugs. I'm kind of upset about it but, worst case-scenario, LVC will pay for an exterminator and they'll take care of it."

Fast forward to call six: "MOM I HAVE BEDBUGS AND I'M NEVER GONNA SEE YOU AGAIN!!! *hysterical sobs, a la Van Der Beek* I'll send you a postcard when I've selected the park bench that will serve as my new home."

Other than these calls to my mother, I kept my fears to myself for a few days. Eventually though, I knew I was going to have to have a professional exterminator perform an inspection. To do that, I was going to have to tell my housemates that I suspected bedbugs / that all of their lives were permanently ruined. I approached them one Saturday morning and took a deep breath: "Um guys? There's something I need to tell you. I didn't want to scare you, but it's been bothering me for a while and, um, I just really need to get it off my chest...I've noticed some mysterious nighttime bug bites and I think it may be...um....bedbugs. And this is why I didn't want to tell you because I didn't want to make your faces do that." Granted, their faces were probably doing "that" due to the fact that my cryptic windup had convinced them that I was about to tell them I was pregnant. But I didn't understand that at the time. At the time, I just hung my head.

Now, this is where it gets anti-climactic. That tends to happen in my stories when I get to the part where I reveal whatever X-Files have been gestating inside of my head to real people. Real people don't try to convince me that I'm going to have to relocate to Mongolia nearly as often as the internet does. I called my city coordinator who sent an exterminator to do a free inspection. When the exterminator came, I would have felt a sillier if he hadn't been on the phone with another hysterical client who was begging him to preemptively bedbug-proof her home. With my room, he was quick but thorough and firmly declared it bedbug free. It took me a few weeks to stop checking my sheets for bedbug poop every morning, but I got there.

Now for the epilogue: A few weeks ago I had a meeting at work with a Baltimore City government employee who does presentations on a number of public-health related topics, including bedbugs. He brought a vile with him that contained a few dead bedbugs for me to see. I was surprised at how tiny they were. Whenever I see them marching across newspaper articles and TV news segments, they're blown up to look like they're the size of hamsters. No wonder bedbug hysteria is sweeping the nation. Yes, there is something innately scary about parasites that live where you sleep and feed on you under the cover of darkness. But, these news outlets certainly aren't NOT feeding into that fear by making bedbugs look like they're big enough to give a Shi-Tzu a black eye.

Don't worry guys. I've learned my lesson about sensationalist media this time. No more internet "research" for me. Well, no more after I read this one thing on Yahoo News about Cat Flu.

What?