What next?

One of my fellow Fulbrighters, Adelina, is infamous in our group for her fearlessness of and acceptance towards the critters that make daily pilgrimages to her room. And she seems to have it pretty bad. We're talking disgusting creatures here: giant half-foot-long centipedes, snakes, hand-sized furry spiders, ants. You name it, it's probably shown up in her blog for all of us readers to see.

My life in Ha Tinh is relatively serene with regards to unwanted visitors. There was that panic-attack night before going to Dalat where I found a rat in my toilet and my dad had to talk me down from the proverbial ledge. And there was that other panic-attack night on my very first day in Ha Tinh when I saw several cockroaches and one furry spider, all within a few minutes of each other, and cried to my mom that I wanted to come home. Other than that, though, I've been pretty lucky.

Today, though, I was cleaning my room in anticipation of MJ's visit when one of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen scuttled into view. Unlike Adelina, I still do not have the sense of calm to ignore these pests, and I panicked a little, even after all these months of acculturation. What should I do?


My thoughts instantly went to one of my all-time favorite books, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, where one of the characters, Orin Incandenza, has a debilitating fear of cockroaches. His solution to the pesky creatures is to place a glass tumbler over them and to asphyxiate them to death, a gruesome process that takes several days and leaves the insides of the glasses coated in cockroach CO2. Once the tumbler is on top of the cockroach and Orin is safe, he resumes his business and walks around the apartment like they're no longer there. Eventually he disposes of both the cockroach corpses as well as the glasses, and simply goes to the store to replenish his drinking glass collection. Wallace's description of Orin's apartment as a mine-field of fogged-up glass tumblers with cockroaches in varying stages of death throes is, well, pretty vivid.

Luckily, there was only one cockroach in my room, and not a mine-field's worth, so I needed to sacrifice only one of the two drinking glasses in my whole apartment:

However, after capturing this huge guy (and accidentally crushing a few of his legs with the edge of the glass), I realized that David Foster Wallace (and, incidentally, Orin Incandenza, himself) is unclear about the what's next? phase of the cockroach battle plan. Not wanting to come back from Hue to an asphyxiated cockroach in a ruined glass, I decided to drag the glass along the floor until I got to my door, where I promptly flung the half-dead cockroach over the balcony.

In the words of George W. Bush: mission accomplished.