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Anxiety and the way it toys with one.
Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.
The weather’s dropping and it’s getting cooler and even cold outside, which means that once again we have mice in the apartment. Which means once again we have mouse shit everywhere, especially on our counters and, you know, the places where we prepare food. Also, for some reason, on the part of the floor near our bed where pillows slip off the bed and land. Which is totally awesome. Lose a pillow at night and it’s gone forever, tainted by mouse poop. Yes, we sweep the mouse poop up. The mice keep shitting. We’ve put out poison, but there’s a limit to where we can put it and any traps because we have a verrrry inquisitive toddler who picks up everything, examines it, and puts it in his mouth. Can you see why we want to limit the use of poison and snap traps both? I’m pretty pissed at mice right now, and can’t even comprehend people keeping rodents as pets. Seriously. Shit. Everywhere. Every place. We’ve been working for months on accumulating vermin proof containers and putting our dry goods in them, but we still have some stuff that the mice can get into and ruin and let me just say that we really can’t afford to lose food to rodent damage.
I was helping Niko draw with crayons and paper, in his highchair, when I looked out the window. I thought I saw a very fat and mottled squirrel, but it turned out to be a calico cat who was chasing squirrels around. As I watched, it pounced on something small and dark. I squinted a bit and saw that it was a mouse, and instantly I was cheering the cat on. Because seriously. There is shit everywhere. All over the counters. All over the stove top. We clean it up and the next morning it’s back. And now it’s weird green shit because they’re eating the poison and shitting it out before going off someplace to, hopefully, die. Green poison shit all over my cook top. Disgusting.
This cat was apparently not very hungry because it played with the mouse for a really, really long time. It’d pounce on the mouse, carry it around in its mouth, drop it, sit back, watch it, turn its back on the mouse, the mouse would run, and the cat would flip around and go after it again… or would watch it run off and then, at the last minute, right before the mouse reached a chink in the fence that wouldn’t admit the cat, pounce on it and drag it back. And then drop it. And the mouse would fall on the ground and go limp and pretend to be dead and the cat would watch it and then feign disinterest and the mouse would think it was safe and go scampering off only to find the cat hot on its ass again.
Which is pretty much what living with Anxiety is like. I go about my daily routine, my life, trying to escape this massive THING, this fate or hand of god or bad luck or whatever, and if I relax it comes bashing down and Gets Me. And I’m aware of it, constantly, that there’s something hanging over my head Out To Get Me. So I try to hide, try to go limp, try to play dead, and sometimes I can fool it but I’m constantly tensed and waiting for something bad to happen, something to go wrong, something to strike me down. Every good thing is spent in tense Anxiety waiting for the bad, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I started really identifying with that mouse.
But I still wish they’d all get the hell out of my house and stop shitting everywhere.
(Yes, we’re in the process of caulking and great-stuffing and putting steel wool around places. It’s an old building and we’re finding new mouse holes that weren’t there last autumn when we did the last caulking go-round.)
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That being said, I have had rats as pets and absolutely loved them to bits. My pet rats were nothing like the rats and mice that infest houses. My rats were clean and lived in cages. And they were hilarious and adorable. My girl rat taught herself how to beg for treats. My boy used to fall asleep on the top shelf of his cage and fall off the shelf while he was sleeping and wake up in time to catch onto the edge with one paw.
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THERE IS NO EMOTICON FROWNY ENOUGH FOR ME.
I keep finding new mouse holes chewed in things. Little bastards.
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Cages.
If I had a guinea pig infestation, I would not want a pet guinea pig because those things poop everywhere, too! They are indiscriminate poopers! But with a pet that lives in a cage, it's very easy to confine it to a small area and disguise the poop in fluffy little puffs of bedding. Which is completely different from finding mouse poop in your cereal bowls.
When I lived in Philly, my apartment had mice something fierce. All of my yarn lived in plastic containers, my clothes lived in plastic containers (or the fridge), and all of my kitchen everything lived in the fridge. I keep chips in the fridge, still. Everything not in a tin can goes in the fridge. I have talked myself out of keeping dishes in the fridge, but that was my preferred storage facility back in the day. (I have a two mice stories for you if you are ever in the mood. Until then, I'm mum.)
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I grew up in a semi-rural area and we got mice every single winter. It's frustrating, but not traumatic. LAY YOUR MICE STORIES UPON ME.
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LAY YOUR MICE STORIES UPON ME.
Mouse vignette the first: When I first moved to Philly, I lived in the office of the organization I worked for. It was a free room, and I only made $400 a month so this was a Good Thing™. Until I woke up with a mouse standing on my chest. I knew then that it was time for me to move out.
Mouse vignette the second: My next apartment was nearby, and the landlords didn't give two and a half shits about it. It wasn't a hovel, but it wasn't very nice, either. Still, the price was right and I was happy. (Even though I kept all of my food and most of my clothes in the fridge.) One day, I came home from my shift at Ben & Jerry's, dropped my work uniform on the floor, and crawled into bed, exhausted. I'd been on my feet for 10 hours, serving ice cream and making cakes for the 27 birthdays we had that week. The next morning when I got up and found my uniform to wash it, I found that the mice had chewed holes in the shirt where I'd had ice cream splattered across it. They'd only eaten the ice cream bits, and they were pretty precise. I got a new work shirt, and I started keeping it in the fridge. That pissed me off a lot.
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In the house I grew up in, the sewer backed up into the basement and we had to rip out walls. One of the walls we busted into was full of nests of dead mice. Like, there were five or six nests with adult and baby mice, all dead... most likely from poison (I grew up using and still use D-CON). It was pretty gross. They were all mummified, though.
In the first apartment my husband and I lived in we got mice (when the weather got cold, of course) and put down poison. When we were packing up to move we moved some large pieces of furniture and found several mummified mouse corpses under them. While moving one piece of ungainly furniture I actually stepped on a fairly fresh dead mouse, stumbled, and fell. It was gross. (the mouse remained intact, thank god)