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!

[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.

[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*

[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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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 :)