Oddly this post is mostly about mice

[eruthros]

1. I deleted my facebook page a couple days ago and was so happy about it. They've been eroding privacy rules and controls steadily, as long as I've been there, and I've never really done anything with facebook, and it's not really my ideal internet social network because I don't really want to talk about politics with people I went to elementary school with and haven't seen since. But I kept being like, oh man, people might be pissed or think I'm a weirdo if I delete. But connections was the last straw, and anyway I am a weirdo. So now: delete delete delete! And I just felt this great relief, that I could now get angry at facebook's privacy policy changes without having to go and change all my privacy settings or delete stuff from parts of the profile or whatever.

2. Today in Dangling Modifiers:

"Keith learns that three of the Lilith House girls were in the area of the Dean's office around the time of his murder, which was egged by unknown assailants."

From the wikipedia Veronica Mars episode guide.

3. We had a mouse or possibly mice in the house! We just discovered it this morning, although it's likely been in off and on for a while -- the problem with rentals is that landlords often don't cover holes in the foundation, so in this house a mouse can come up from the basement where the pipe for the sink goes down. And so we cleaned everything and took everything out from below the sink and swept and moved the oven to clean behind it and promised to live lives of purity and cleanliness henceforth and not leave dishes out overnight for ... at least the next couple weeks. And also we bought spring mousetraps, which is perhaps more to the point. And caught the poor thing in, like, the first hour -- sorry to kill you, mouse, but I can't do humane trapping, I don't have a car to take you to the middle of nowhere, and also you are a house mouse and wouldn't like it there. Twings took out the mouse after it was killed, and she was like "aren't you going to come witness my bravery?" which is kind of hilarious because she lived on a farm and dealt with mice a lot, but I went and held out the trash bag and witnessed her bravery, so.

Anyway, this involved going to buy traps at the drugstore, which reminded me of how much I hate the household-pests narrative, right. Like, when I say "live lives of purity," that's exactly the point -- if you have mice (or cockroaches, or fleas, or whatever) the assumption is that it's because you're bad at cleaning, that you're a slob, that you don't care about cleanliness. And it's a narrative about poverty, too, because mice and rats and cockroacahes are so associated with certain kinds of poverty, so it becomes this "dirty poor" thing. And so I'm supposed to be embarrassed to be buying mousetraps. And so of course they don't carry them at our "good" high-end grocery store, only at the little local drugstore. And actually I used to buy mousetraps and roach traps at the dollar store, which, well. I'm supposed to be properly ashamed of myself, for being such an awful, dirty, poor person.

Only the thing is, it's not just about sanitation, it's not actually about being dirty and disgusting, it's not of a sign of failing as a human being or not being educated enough to understaaaaaand how you get pests or that they're bad for you or whatever. It's a sign of living in rental housing where the landlord doesn't care about maintaining the building (class), it's a sign of living in certain climates (race), it's a sign of living in multiple-apartment buildings and row houses and whatever (class), it's a sign of living in certain houses and neighborhoods where everybody has cockroaches so no matter what you do you can't get rid of them (race and class), it's a sign of lacking time because of working too much (class), it's a sign of not having enough spoons to do the incredibly hard work of getting rid of pests when the entire neighborhood is full of them (ability and its associations with race and class). I lived in an apartment in Philadelphia that had roaches. We never didn't have roaches. The neighborhood was full of them; they lived on the sidewalks and in garbage cans and in the bins out behind bars, and we could put down traps and we could keep the kitchen impeccable and I could sweep every day and we still had roaches. I couldn't move the fridge or the oven to clean behind them, but we got the landlord to put traps behind them -- and we still had roaches. But barring, like, tenting the building neighborhood, that apartment still has roaches.

And I hate the scorn people would give me if I mentioned it. And I hate the scorn that doctors and social workers and whoever directed to women who didn't clean "well enough" in Philadelphia -- weren't they concerned that their BABIES could get SICK? weren't they GOOD MOTHERS? didn't they know about SOAP? And the health care clinic I went to had these awful brochures about How To Keep Your Home Healthy, with a pretty strong subtext of you bad bad dirty mothers. It's just such shitty and harmful rhetoric, the whole thing, and it makes me so angry.

Anyway, that is a story about household pests.

Comments

[toft]

I am very impressed by both of your bravery.

Huh - that's interesting, about pests. I have never really come across that in England, I think maybe because it's maybe the other way around - like, most more upper/middle class people live in older houses, which were built before 1920 and so have mice. Recently we (that is, my mum, in England) had mice for the first time ever, and they had multiple kinds of traps in the top-end hardware store that we went to. Also maybe because England is less of a friendly climate to pests and so it's harder to get them (we don't have cockroaches), so they're more considered a freak accident than related to any particular living situation, I think at least in general. Anyway, I am interested by the differences.

"Keith learns that three of the Lilith House girls were in the area of the Dean's office around the time of his murder, which was egged by unknown assailants."

Maybe that should be egged on. As in, the murder!

[eruthros]

Yeah, in several of the places I've lived in the US there's been this whole "uneducated immigrant mothers endanger their baaaabies by not cleaning properly!" Which is full of assumptions about time, houses, spoons, education, etc that I just find so frustrating. And it is supposed to be embarrassing, and it's supposed to point out what an unclean person you are -- though I totally forgot that today until we were heading up to the counter to pay for the traps and I suddenly went, oh, wait, this is supposed to be humiliating.

Anyway, I am also interested in the differences! I don't know anything about pests in the UK, but it's so weird to think about pests as a freak accident rather than a consequence of bad behavior.

[toft]

Yeah, I mean, I think mostly the correct response that I've always seen when people say, "We've got mice," is, "Oh no, how awful!" Because it basically happens to everyone, no matter what kind of place you're living in, because of all the old houses with the bad foundations etc, lots of floorboard space, attics, the works. A lot of people got them this winter because it was so freakishly cold. Like, mice are just as much a feature of old mansion houses as they are of council flats, and are possibly even more common in the old mansion. And, like I say, mice are the most common household pests, probably, since we don't have huge ant or cockroaches. Flies would be considered a sign of poor hygiene, but you don't really get fly infestations for any other reason, do you? I mean bluebottle flies, not fruitflies, I guess they like damp and stuff.

To be fair, that I've mostly only seen this reaction is because I've mostly only mixed with English people of the higher class stratum since being in high school. But I don't feel like I've gotten any contrary impression from the media or marketing or anything like that.

[nixwilliams]

you don't really get fly infestations for any other reason, do you?

how different things are in australia! though since almost every door and window has a screen (something i always notice lacking in the uk when i'm there) most places manage to keep out all but the most persistent flies (maybe half a dozen a day)...

[thingswithwings]

yeah, reading what Lim said above, I'm reminded of some nineteenth-century English journalistic narratives about what's threatening about the lower-middle-class and immigrants, and it's all about how they're unclean, probably incestuous (oh Victorians) and are covered in flies and roaches and rats because they don't practice proper hygiene or have decency. So it's certainly been a sign of moral failing in England previously.

[lim]

lololol, they pretty much treat you like scum in England, too. In terms of infestations, the hierarchy goes: bats -posh! mice - shabby genteel! flies - slovenly! roaches - delinquent! rats - SCUM!

[eruthros]

Ahhh, then the only basic difference with the US would be mice, I think! Where I've lived, the hierarchy goes: bats - wtf, who does that even happen to! (fruit) flies - oh dear! flies - messy student! mice - slovenly! roaches - disgusting!

I don't know what rats are supposed to mean here, but I have had them - giant Norwegian roof rats that came in one really bad winter. Ugh.

[lim]

I'm quite enjoying this branched conversation.

I know, right! Who gets BATS? People living in like, thatched cottages in Wiltshire, or castles and shit, I think.

[eruthros]

Yeah! I know people who have had bats, mostly bats who've come down or lived in their chimneys. So I think of them as being a more rich-people problem: you have to have chimneys that you don't even use to heat the house, or attics, or whatever.

[lim]

We do have roaches in England. They can live outside, too, so you're basically fucked if you live in an area with them - which is generally somewhere with connected attics/cellars/vents. Like tower blocks and back to backs! *knows roaches well*

In Manchester, though, the council do extermination, so it's pretty cheap (£16 for a full course and free if you're really hard up), and they will do a whole terrace row or a whole block of flats if it gets bad. But here. in Moss Side, they live in the alleys so you'll never be completely rid of them.

[eruthros]

Wow, council extermination! That's pretty amazing to me, because I've always had to pay myself, or hassle a landlord for a long time to get them to pay.


Also, it sounds like perhaps some of the same class problems that I think of when I think of roaches? I think of row houses and cheap apartment buildings as problems for roaches.

[lim]

Aye, class - it's inner city areas you get them.

The council does it because the council is also the biggest landlord, and realistically if you've got roaches, you're on a council estate or near one. You might be a private tenant because of people buying their council houses and then renting them, but if you have roaches then your neighbours will get them, and they have to do council tenants for free so they may as well get you to pay for it. Manchester has quite a lot of poverty and is pretty socialist, so council services are quite cheap. I gather that in other cities the council services are more expensive. Oh! In fact it's gone up. It's twenty quid now. Not that that is relevant. I've got lost in pedantry. *clambers out*

[toft]

Ah, well, I am showing my privilege, then! Huh. I guess if I'd thought about it I'd have known we have roaches in England, they're the universal insect.

[sasha_feather]

Maybe that should be egged on. As in, the murder!

The office was actually "egged"-- people threw eggs at it.

:)

[pocketmouse]

I keep wanting to delete my facebook, but I think there's 1 or 2 people who do use it to maintain contact with me, and I don't trust them to delete my data off their servers, so I'm just kinda sitting on a nearly empty page. It's basically got my name, phone number, city, and photos others have tagged of me. I kinda want control over that, too.

Man, the last place I had had roaches like woah, and yeah, there was nothing we could do about it. It really sucked. Fortunately, I only ever (AFAIK) had mice when I lived places where we also had cats. Which was how we knew about the mice, most times.

[eruthros]

Yeah, apparently facebook mostly wants you to "deactivate" your account, which lets them keep the data, but there's a way to delete it that they just don't publicize. I don't know how well it works, but it felt good!

Cats are very useful that way :)

[pocketmouse]

I mean past just deactivation and the actual deletion process. With their data-collection goals and their licensing and content rights stuff in their TOS, I don't trust them to delete my info off their server if I ask them to. It's one of those 'yeah, no one can see it, we'll delete it eventually' data purge type things. But I'd rather keep my hand in by deleting the content from the account than by hoping they'll get rid of everything.

[livrelibre]

I stopped using FB out of laziness, context collapse, and fear f/disinclination to speak in public (my mom, my work colleagues, old high school people and that person I met at a conference once all in the same place! And you think I lurk here:) but I've been more and more alarmed by them. But I kind of can't delete because of work. Grrr. . .

As for mice, yeah. We regularly did battle with them. My roommate was already a cleaning fanatic but mice would pop up and then it would be all out chemical warfare for awhile but then they'd be back again. *salutes you in the effort*

[eruthros]

Yeah, me too! I used to use it a little, but then as you say -- context collapse.

I have usually been able to get rid of mice because I've never had a really bad infestation, so it's usually like they're gone for several months, or until the next floods or whatever. Which is good, because I really don't have the knees for cleaning like this all the time!

[harpers_child]

i live in new orleans. i hear you on the roach thing.

[meghanc]

Oh, god, roaches. I used to live in an apartment that was completely infested with them, and it was awful. Nothing I did was good enough, and I was poor enough that I didn't have a bed, I just had an air mattress on the floor. The second night I was there, I woke up with roaches on my face and in my mouth. I spent the next nine months (until I moved) shaking borax in a circle around my bed every night.

The cultural baggage that goes with having any sort of infestation is appalling. There's so little that tenants can do about it, but they take so much crap over it.

[eruthros]

Yeah, exactly! Tenants are caught in this awful bind, especially tenants who can't afford to move, or pay for exterminators, or etc.

And that sounds awful -- I really hate bugs crawling on me. And I also hate that feeling that I must be a total slob because I can't get rid of them, even though as you say nothing you do is good enough. Ughughugh. I'm glad you were able to move out of that apartment!

[nixwilliams]

welcome to the world of the facebook free! i never had one, and i'm glad i didn't.

alas, mice. i think we've had one that's visited (and left droppings in the cupboard with the hot water service), but it's never been a nuisance/stayed long/made a family, which is lucky. i would feel sad having to catch/kill one.

[eruthros]

I am very pleased about it! I know some people have to have facebook for work, but I'm so glad I'm not one of them.

I do feel pretty sad having to kill them! I wish they could be released somewhere, but if I released them anywhere with houses those people would just now have a mouse.

[nixwilliams]

yes, a mouse sanctuary!

[twospots]

Huh. It would never have occurred to me that I was supposed to be embarrassed by having mice. One gets mice because one lives in an old house, and one gets cockroaches by living in a tenement in New York, and one gets ants by being a student in student housing. But then, I learned about mice by growing up in an ancient farmhouse, and about cockroaches by listening to Ani diFranco, and about ants from having students friends with ants so... yeah. I am not sure I can safely assert that it's a Canada/US thing rather than a Rachel-grew-up-in-a-bubble-of-socially-conscious-hippies thing. I would be curious to know whether TWW's Canadian experience agrees with mine.

And congratulations on leaving facebook! I feel much about facebook the way I do about LJ: I would like to leave, but there are people there who make it hard. But way locked down, yes--and I keep hardly any info posted there anyway. Ah, well.

(On a side note, I have heard all my life that you have to take mice faaaaaaaaaaar away or they will come back... but I am under the impression that their territory is teeny tiny, so this doesn't make sense to me.)

[eruthros]

I have also heard that you have to take mice far away or they'll come back; I'm not sure if I believe it, but I do believe that if I put a house mouse down somewhere with houses I would just be making it their problem. :)

[twospots]

Hmmmmmm.... now I have yet another research project!

[But house mice *are* field mice, no? They just prefer houses when they are available, what with them being safer and warmer and comfier, and all. I thought? More research for me! Anyway, that doesn't mitigate the becoming-other-people's-problem though...]

[eruthros]

Ah, no! This is an interesting thing about house mice -- they're a commensal species with humans that sort of domesticated themselves. (Though not to the degree that cats did.) House mice really are dependent on human structures for protection, on human food and grain storage, and all that; you can track the beginnings of agriculture moving west through Europe better by looking for the first signs of house mice than by looking for the first grain storage or plowing tools or whatever. Which is ... kind of cool, but also makes them pretty much just a pest!

[thingswithwings]

yeaaaaah, I'm with you on the mice for sure, because I grew up on a farm and all my classmates grew up on farms or near farms, so mice were pretty common for everyone - we had to just have traps all fall/winter/spring (which is like everything but august in Manitoba) and were constantly disposing of mice. But since I've moved to cities, I've felt more like mice are a moral failing, or seen as one. And I think even in farm country everyone thought of cockroaches or rats as something you got from being dirty, and specifically something you got from being a dirty native, as my extremely racist family members would say. And when I think about the image of New York tenements with cockroaches that I got from the media, I don't think of white people. I think it's one of those cases too where if you're white and middle-class to begin with and get mice or rats or cockroaches, it's assumed that you probably didn't do anything wrong (though you are suspect) but if you are poor or seem poor or aren't white, and in Canada especially if you're Native, it's assumed that you're disgusting and dirty.

[twospots]

Eeeeenteresting. Clearly, my perceptions are derived from my bubble. I think you are right about how it depends on who it happens to--even within my bubble!

Also, in my head, ny tenements are inhabited by plucky 13-year-old girls who live in poverty with supportive families and have Challenges and Adventures. And if they don't have supportive families then they have a really nice plump neighbour lady who helps them out. Either that or they are inhabited by 18-year-old folksingers. Ahaha the brain of a bookworm: not always connected to reality.

I am going to be really disappointed if I ever visit england, because it is probably not filled with roving bands of adventurous children and farmhouses full of nice farmer's wives who feed you lots of cakes and cream. Probably also there are not actually that many hedgerows or carriages.

[thingswithwings]

haha, awww, I like your YA-style view of the world! never change.

I can testify to the existence of plenty of hedgerows in England.

[isagel]

Roaches thankfully don't like the Swedish climate, so we don't have them. Which means that the narrative about them is linked to narratives about exotic/poor/non-white foreign places where scary things live. Mice I don't think is really associated with any stigma: you're unlikely to ever see them in the city, but if you live in the countryside, their appearance is random and un-linked to class or hygiene. Rats are really bad, but not common, either. And I think mostly linked to garbage placed out-doors, which stigmatizes local authorities or businesses rather than individuals. Head-lice, though, that's a stigma (been there, done that), but I get the feeling that's changing for the better - certainly my boss talks about head-lice epidemics at her son's school very freely.

Anyway, I do think that the kind of pests that are seen as really bad here are the ones we don't ourselves have as a national collective, because of the cold climate, and so they are markers of unknown, threatening, incomprehensible, inferior far-away other cultures, where people less fortunate (and for the most part darker) than we live. Be that Calcutta or Marrakesh or slums in New York. Sometimes it's an orientalist narrative, sometimes it's a narrative about how, say, the American social system is a failure since obviously the state can't protect its citizens from living in rat- and cockroach-infested poverty, whereas in Sweden we are safe from dirty giant bugs and filthy disease-spreading rodents because our social system is the greatest in the world, hah! We are as a nation insufferably smug about these things, and like to think that everyone else is doing it wrong and should be pitied.

Hm, that was interesting, thinking that through.

Facebook is a tool of the devil. I am still refusing to touch it with a ten foot pole.

[eruthros]

That's interesting! And it totally parallels the narrative that I associate with pests, except for the part about nation-states -- it's all about dirty immigrants and dirty slums and dirty people of color.

It's quite useful, having a climate that takes care of many pests for you! In terms of maintaining that narrative, I mean -- I've never lived anywhere where the city or state paid for extermination, so obviously part of it is true, but there are places where you'll never get rid of roaches.

[isagel]

I think mostly what our relative buglessness in this region does is make us extraordinarily ill-equipped to deal with the reality of 90% of the world. *g*

I've been thinking a lot about Scandinavian isolationism, lately, what with this being an election year and the anti-immigration party Sverigedemokraterna being on the rise (it makes me almost physically ill every time I think of actual people voting for them - they're also the only party in Sweden to be anti abortion rights and the only party to be vocally homophobic, and they make me so furious I want to scream), and being in the process of reading Lena Sundström's book Världens lyckligaste folk (The Happiest People in the World) about the development of the insanity that is the current xenophobic/racist/fascistoid state of things in Denmark. It's an excellent and funny and upsetting book, and I'm not just saying that because I have a major crush on Lena Sundström (item #7 in a href="http://isagel.dreamwidth.org/182821.html">this post). My local paper is making an explicit political statement by running it as a serial (I also have a crush on my local paper). Anyway, these issues are at the forefront of my mind a lot these days, because of local Swedish politics, and I feel like I end up talking about them all the time, so feel free to hit me when I get annoying.

Oh, look. I googled Sundström's book to see if there might be an English translation I could rec (there isn't), and the very first link that showed up is a YouTube clip of a radio debate about it posted by someone calling themselves "SverigesFramtid" (Sweden'sFuture), where all the comments are about how she is a "disgusting Asian" and should "go back to Korea" (which makes total sense when she was adopted by a Swedish couple at age two). Why am I not surprised? Also, I really loathe how "PC" has become an insult to use against anyone who believes in equality and human rights.

[thingswithwings]

fwiw, I find your talk about Swedish politics really interesting - one of the things I like about the flist and the dwircle is that it helps me learn about politics elsewhere in the world.

also, the "PC" thing makes me so angry sometimes I could spit. The right won a huge victory when they got it called political correctness, rather than what it is, which is "not being a fucking racist sexist transphobic heterosexist asshole to people who are already often treated like shit." Oh I could hit things oh.

[eruthros]

Also, in thinking about headlice, I'm reminded of basically the same story again: head-lice are brought into classrooms by dirty brown people/dirty immigrants/dirty poor people, and then because they're hugely contagious they spread to all the other innocent children. Which is one of those stories that relies on the fact that people have those stereotypes, because otherwise people might ask "okay, but if it's hugely contagious, then couldn't [Person X] have gotten it at daycare?" And American public health agencies have been running this "no seriously, lice prefer clean hair to dirty hair" campaign for years, but nobody believes them.

Truefact: the pharmacay I shopped in as a kid put white-people shampoo on the front shelves, top to bottom, and then hair dye on the next shelves, and then at the end of the aisle there was a section with relaxers and shampoo for kinky hair and lice shampoo.

[isagel]

I do this weird mental double-take when I read "white-people shampoo". Because it is such an alien concept that shampoo has anything to do with race. Because I grew up in a society where there was only white-people shampoo and nothing else. It had never occurred to me until the subject turned up in LJ discussions that black people needed different things for their hair. It's this huge blind spot I think all Scandinavian people probably have, which is scarily indicative of just how predominantly white and isolated out countries have been. I have still never seen hair-products geared towards black, kinky hair in real life. I have no clue where black Swedish people might get them. (But I pray it's not with the lice shampoo.)

[fish_echo]

I have never had a Facebook. I have been maintaining that Facebook is evil for years, I just wish I wasn't being proved so right :/

Yay dangling modifiers :)

[eruthros]

Yeah, I also wish I hadn't been proved right! Siiigh. I hate the giant privacy-busting companies.