A Single Girl’s Guide for Dealing with a Cockroach

Preface: Before judging, please know that regularly Lysol, swiffer, and vacuum, but I am utterly shocked to find that my surface level cleaning with happy smelling products has not eradicated my 100+-year-old building’s inner walls of dust and bugs.  Biannually, one somehow emerges and scares the pants offa me. 

Sequence:

1.   Stop dead in tracks when see something from corner of eye on kitchen floor.
2.     Pull body out of catatonic state and swivel in direction of suspected movement.
3.     Be disappointment and horrified upon confirmed discovery of cockroach.
4.     As unattractive creature crawls on floor, resume pseudo-catatonic state while loudly wailing, “Nooooo” as if it were ex’s new girlfriend showing up to house.
5.     Watch in state of paralysis as uninvited guest casually makes way across floor under dresser.
6.     Chant, “Oh God WHY?” (repeat 3 times)
7.     Locate Tupperware, Gladware, or Rubbermaid item in ineffective wooden dish rack.
8.     Upon reemergence of building-dwelling lobster ancestor, trap in clear plastic Gladware dome.
9.     Stare.
10. Practically cry, “I’m sorry!”
11. Find Oprah magazine and tear off back cover page perfume ad featuring Julia Roberts.
12. Anchor top of plastic dome with one hand while stealthily sliding magazine page underneath entire open base of Gladware bug conservatory with the other.
13. Find tape and secure ¾ of circumference of upside down recyclable bowl onto perfume ad page.
14. Chuckle with total disgust as cockroach now has flooring made of Julia Roberts’ 2D exquisite face.
15. Think to self, “If I had a man here, I wouldn’t have to do this s*** by myself.”
16. Apply pressure to top of dome-magazine apparatus and slide across wood flooring all the way through front door and down common hallway to trash chute.
17. Wave to neighbors.
18. Open door and pull chute open.
19. Fearfully and rapidly pick up ¾ secure contraption and fling down chute with piercing shriek.
20. Slam chute shut and imagine cockroach happily finding freedom and fulfillment in giant basement dumpster eight floors below.

-End-

And the Oscar for best man goes to...

My sister and I decided to go to a bar together the other evening.  "We're DOING this," we verbally high-fived before enthusiastically tapping the red "end call" button on our cell phones.   She had gotten her makeup done at the MAC counter and I finally wore an outfit that went a little more appealing than my typical Frauline Maria collection.

And like moths to a subtly curvy flame, there they were.  Men.  The formula was that simple.  Two chicks alone at a table in a room full of dudes.  Guys watching football checking us out during commercials.  Hooray, right?

Now I am not one to sit around with my homegirls man-hating because I really do like me some mens, but before we get ourselves all hyped up about these particular suitors, let me 'xplain a couple of details, k?  Mom and Dad, hope you're reading.

First, very kind Indian guy approaches.  Thick black hair that looked so good it could've been an ad.  Warm, subtle accent that resembled that of Northeast Hyderabad (i.e., I had no idea where he was from in India) sweetly offered us to join his table with his friends.  My sister is actively dating someone, so it was up to me to open myself up to...forcing myself to be open.   As nice as he was, I just wasn't feeling it, but thanks to my pretty profound reserves of female guilt I considered accepting.  Until the moment he cut through my forced open-mindedness with a desperate gasp:  "Please don't say no. My friends are videotaping this." My sister and I peered around either one of his shoulders, and sure enough, there were his American work friends(?) looking over with obnoxious smiles, one of which holding up the back of an i-phone to us that was no doubt blinking "record."  I felt for the guy, but it was clear to me that it would be four courtesy laughs for the price of one.  "Thank you so much.  We'll come over in a bit," is what my sister and I managed.  "It'll be more fun over there," he tried to convince more out of fear for returning to his "friends" empty-handed than actually wanting our company. "My buddies over there are funny, especially if you like racism and sexist jokes," he said.  We smiled up at him in such awkwardness that even our cocktails winced.  When they sent over a couple of drinks a few minutes later, my sister and I rallied ourselves over there to say thanks to the supposed racist sexists, who all turned out to be named Matt.

I'd say "A for effort" but it really was more like a D+.  But great, great material.

Next (yes! there's a next), our waiter who was a triple-win: Cute, sweet, and excellent obvious dental hygiene left us his number on the bill.  Fun!  So there was the mantra in the chorus of my parents', friends', and bosses' voices in my head, "Rina, just see what happens!  Stop holding yourself back, sistuh. Own it."  So I went with the i-phone times (in spite of having a Blackberry) and sent a text.

"Hey, ___! It's Rina. You were cute and nice," I typed.

"You too!  We will have a great time," he responds.  Not bad.  Grammar is ok.  Until he sent...

...a photo of himself shirtless biting his lip.  Here's the most wonderful part.  It was night time. The photo was clearly shot in daylight.  Like it was on hold and archived for moments just like this.

No biggie.  I'm sure my mom dealt with the same kind of typical behaviors from her marriage suitors back in the day.

I love how hard I cackled by myself on the subway steps and immediately made a note on the 3 train to write out this story when I got home.  And who knows? Perhaps one day it'll become a film.  Or perhaps, it already is.   On Youtube.  Two Indian women, guiltily letting down an Indian man with perfect hair with the sounds of laughter from his drunk buddies behind the camera.

"When Rina became Sally"

Like any long weekend for a single 30-something in NYC, I listened to the latest Billy Crystal audiobook (geared toward our nation's AARP population) as I cleaned and lightly feng-shui'ed my studio apartment.

Naturally, the thrill of sucking up five bags worth of hair and dust bunnies combined with Billie's narration of how he "now pees in Morse code and his lady may need Depends" got me excited to pop in one of my all-time favorite movie classics, "When Harry Met Sally." It had been a year or so since I last watched it - a perfect, comfortable close to a successful cleaning day.

So it's coming to the scene where Sally is tossing around barely-used tissues crying about the news of her ex getting married.  I've seen this movie over and over since I was eight; I could perform it for you in my sleep.  Which is why I never, ever anticipated to experience the realization that paused me in my decaying robe and fuzzy slippers as I watched the scene while getting ready for bed:

Sally: "And I'm gonna be 40!"
Harry: "When?"
Sally: "Someday!"
Harry: "In eight years."

I stopped in my tracks.  My God.  I am Sally Albright.

Maybe not cute and blonde and endearingly quirky, but I am the age of Sally Albright's character.  Somehow, a time-warp has taken place and twenty-four years have gone by.  The concept of being a woman in New York experiencing difficulties in dating and struggling to drag the Christmas tree by herself to her apartment always seemed like a distant fantasy of some future adulthood.   But the present is now what was once the far-off future.  And what is even more unbelievable is that in the next year, it will soon be the past.  I will become Sally Albright's big sister (adopted, obviously).

Here it is, the final New Year's Eve scene.  She's in her blue strapless gown faking a great time, he's eating Mallowmars at home in bed.  But whether I'm fifteen, twenty-three, or in my thirties, it still strikes me as if I've never seen it before.  I forget where I am or what year it is, and I am who I've always been - presently rooting for Sally's and Harry's love. That won't ever change.  Even when I'm wearing Depends.

An Unintentional Model of Humility.

Over the last decade, I have come to realize that there's a fine line between sharing day-to-day conversation with friends and family and unintentionally imposing myself upon them as a free and all-knowing life instructor.  We teachers love to hear ourselves talk and advise.  When I was three years old, my uncle labeled me "Pati Rina," which translates to "Grandma Rina."

It's for this reason that I am humbled and awed when I interact with someone who embodies truest humility without meaning to.

My dad has been a devout and practicing Hindu for his entire life.  I'd wake up as an angsty middle-schooler and high-schooler to the sound of his meditational ocean breaths (which I now know as pranayama) in our "God room."  He commits to prayer each morning, and is the only person I know who is literate and fluid in Sanskrit.  Before acknowledging anyone, his first step is to open the east-facing door of our home and greet the rising sun.  

I, on the other hand, have spent years catching myself checking morning text messages with my eyes half-closed even though I know better.  My morning practice for the larger part of my adolescence and adulthood has involved racing out the door to catch the [fill in the blank: bus, train, plane, ride] without a moment to appreciate the miracle of dawn.

When I moved to New York a few years ago, I began to practice yoga at first so I could look good in a swimsuit (unfortunately for us South Asians, a fleshy stomach is just one of those things we'll have to accept and somehow call a gift). But in one class early in my experience, we began with the ujjayi ocean breath.  In it, I heard my father. Over time, I'm slowly coming to understand.   

I recently completed a yoga teacher training program.  Still a novice in all aspects.  But over the holiday break, my dad approached me one morning.  "What is a beneficial kind of pranayama for me to practice?  Please teach me," he said.  My dad, asking to learn from his kid without a wince.  Didn't even cross his mind to feel differently.

Sure, he's got his imperfections.  Far more than a subtle amount of "selfies" on his camera.  But his unintentional humility is the very purest kind.  It is humility itself.

Revival.

Well if this isn't yogic, I don't know what is.  I just spent hours exploring the bumpy terrain of internet in search of the perfect, shiny new blogspot.  And here it was all along.  Well, tucked away since 2009 at least.

To new beginnings!

Oh my God, it's starting to work...

There's this girl that I've known forever, and I realized that for a long time I've been treating her like crap. When we were very little kids, it was fun. We'd do some drawing and then we'd change our minds and do some counting, play house perhaps, maybe even some pooping in training underpants. It didn't matter what we did. We were fine and happy and went with the flow.

But then, starting in grade school I remember hurting her feelings by comparing her classwork to everyone else's and making her feel like it wasn't good enough. And then in high school and college, I more or less told her she wasn't that smart. She derived a lot of joy from doing art, but because some other Indian ignorants devalued it and I began to agree with them. She still drew a picture now and then, thankfully, but she never called herself an artist. Or a writer. Or smart.

What a bitch I have been to myself. For 20 years.

Every single book on my shelf that I've read and put down- Stop Self-Sabotage by Pat Pearson, The 7 Keys to Happiness by Deepak Chopra, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle- say the same thing. And after spending years of wanting to be happy and trying to do what they say as if they are homework assignments but feeling like the magic never happened, I finally felt an glint of a glimpse of a fleeting shimmer of progress.

I was nice to me today.

That's all that it was. When I should've looked up directions more clearly before heading to an unknown destination and spent time getting lost, I was about to berate myself. And then I didn't. Instead, I just forgave myself.

I'll remember me for that moment. The way I remember when my second grade teacher gave me a teddy bear cushion to rest under my broken arm, when I had been angry at myself for having broken it at all. I will give myself teddy bear cushions.

Reunited.

A great friend and I just hung out after a long while, and it came right on time. It's sometimes hard to believe that someone can know the thoughts that flow through your brain. It's like seeing past the doctored photograph, beyond the Clinique foundation that still does not quite match your Indian skin tone (though please keep trying, Clinique Lab people, as I do not want to continue to look orange or yellow, depending on the lighting), through the Givenchy mascara, and into the windows of your being.

I love the fact that we connect through our senses. Like when I creepily stare at NYC dogs that I wish were mine- the way my mother often obsesses over little Indian kids who play the role of grandson in her mind- the way we make contact is through the looking at each others' eyeballs. And not just looking at them the way you'd look at the surface of a marble, but looking through them, even into them. It's almost frightening because we don't have a way to measure the link between our minds, but I believe it is there.

Or when I used to fall asleep on my dad's chest as a little one, somehow the sound of his voice softly vibrating through my heavy head as he finished his tales from Indian Chandamamma Magazine (about stubborn kings with 13 wives who couldn't produce a son, but I digress) made me feel like I was in the safest place that I could ever be.

It convinces me that whatever the answer is to the meaning of life, or even the afterlife, it must have something to do with our connections to each other.