The spring quarter return to our dingy Court Street apartment came with as little fanfare as possible. I was the roommate anxious to get away, leaving late on Wednesday of finals week and reappearing Saturday before classes started. I know Emily left, but I’m not so sure if Alex retreated home for an extended period of time or even left at all.
In my haste to remove myself from Athens after a lengthy, brain-numbing winter quarter, I evacuated two bulging bags of trash and washed a few dishes. Em cleaned some after I left and dragged out four more bags of refuse, leaving two. She claims her assumption was that our third roommate would hoist them out to the trash area.
It’s like she’s learned nothing during the previous months of our current cohabitation circumstance.
Sitting inside and beside our red trash can were two neatly tied white trash bags. Hovering above the crude blue plastic bows was a plentiful abundance of gnats—a swarm. A horde!
The gnats had returned.
Our first encounter with the winged pests was during the summer when Alex had been the lone resident for a few weeks, specifically the lone resident of the two-legged, two-armed and standing upright variety. The apartment also housed a bold mouse, an army of ants, big fat black flies and, of course, the gnats.
This renewed invasion was heavy on the offense. The kitchen sink and a few dishes had attracted the pests as well as the five mostly empty beer cans, remnants of a party past, which perched on the bathroom counter. I had rounded up the cans to pour out the sloshing leftover liquid before break. Deterred by the bustle and anticipation of going home, I remembered the collected cans after an hour of driving. Fail.
Also dirty was my large clear bowl. I left a neon-colored sticky note attached to the bowl in the fridge just as a reminder: “Please make sure this bowl gets clean.” Not to be mean, just to be clean. It’s a weird circle where despite who dirties a dish, glass or pan, only those blessed with ovaries are expected to clean. I’m not sure if chivalry is dead, but chauvinism isn’t.
This teeny tiny Post-It caused quite a reaction.
“I’ll clean it when all the gnats are gone,” he said and thrust the dirty bowl in the sink.
For an exchange of cleaning the entire apartment and extinguishing the gnats, we would get one clean bowl. Is that a deal? A favor? Challenge?
In the spirit of Barney Stinson, challenge accepted. Besides, I was a little embarrassed for our new cross-dressing Beta fish Maya Rudolph to come back to such filth. Maya Rudolph, for the most part, remained indifferent.
We mopped, we scrubbed, we squirted cleaner in places that hadn’t seen it in a long time. Plus we bought fly strips—an instrumental tool in the summer invasion of gnats and flies. In fact, up in the sky light is a clear sticky strip with a few beastly dead flies stuck to it. You know, to encourage other flies to move on or else.
Fly strips in themselves are very unusual items. First of all, they’re absolutely disgusting. There are no objects covered in dead and dying insects that are anything less than repulsive. Secondly, they’re sickly thrilling. Holding the box in my hand at Wal Mart elicited a satisfying knowledge that this simple strip would solve my problem—at least partially.
As the end of week two closes, the gnats have not won but haven’t completely accepted their defeat either. I squashed a gnat in the shower with the bottom of a shampoo bottle. However, I do think that the bathroom gnats might be drawn to the urine-y smell that we can’t bleach away. All I know is I’m not the person missing the toilet…
Not only are the pests interfering with our sanitary wants, but also with any uncovered alcohol. You know you have problems when gnats enter your social media life as proved by my tweets:
“I’m going crazy yelling at these gnats! #leavemywinealone”
“This other gnat is so scared..yeah that’s rig