It's been over a year now...

and therefore I feel safe telling this story.

It's one of those stories that you think is really awesome at the time, but it would take a while to make sure it actually was awesome and not a complete disaster.  Therefore, thirteen months and no parasitic infestations later, I present to you the story of my Hawaiian trash mattress, as I relayed it to Laura Taylor on 3 August 2012:

Can I tell you the story of my trash-mattress?  It's one of those things where you'll either be appalled or impressed (hint:  the right answer is "impressed").  So the [coworker] who gave me the mattress was like, "it's still in the shrink wrap (i.e. it's new!)", but when I got it into my apartment, I looked at it and was like, "this is NOT new." There were little things on it that may have been bedbug things but I wasn't sure.  It wasn't "shrink wrapped" so much as wrapped in Saran wrap or something (which optimistically was the old owners saying, "this will protect it from the elements in case someone wants it" but pessimistically was the old owners saying "gross...this thing is infested and I don't want it further infesting my home so I'm going to wrap it in plastic so that the bedbugs don't go elsewhere." 

At first I was like, "this is kind of sketchy...maybe I'll get rid of it," which made me really sad (feeling stupid for bringing this thing into my home, and such), but then I was like, "but wait!  I am the queen of getting things clean!  'Ask A Clean Person' is one of my favorite internet columns after all!  I can save this thing!" (mostly because I really don't want to spend >$200 on a new mattress that I'm only going to have for ten-ish more months).  So I ordered a pretty snazzy (but still only a quarter of the cost of a real mattress) bedbug protector and bought this little bottle of "all natural" bedbug repellant (basically a mix of cinnamon oil, citric acid, detergent, and diatomaceous earth) from the drugstore. 

So I left it wrapped in my room for about a week, keeping tabs on the surrounding areas to make certain there were no critters escaping (thank goodness for off-white carpets!), and it seemed okay.  Also, the fact that it was wrapped tightly in plastic in my hot apartment probably baked/suffocated anything that was living in there.  The bedbug protector arrived yesterday and then (and only then) did I take it out of the plastic.  I vacuumed the whole thing really well, and then "steam-cleaned" it with my iron on high heat/full steam.  Then, I sprayed it with the Lysol-brand version of Febreeze (kills smells AND bacteria), let that dry, and then vacuumed it AGAIN.  Then I sprayed it with the cinnamon oil stuff, and my bedroom now smells like the cinnamon bears from the BYU bookstore.  Kind of nice, but you don't want to breathe it in directly.  If I had any bugs in my nose, they are all gone.  It's currently in my room drying out completely, and when I get home tonight, I will put it in the bedbug protector and put it on my bedframe (which I will spray a bit with the cinnamon repellent for good measure).  Then I'll put my featherbed/mattress pad thing on top and then I'll put sheets over that.  I'm certain all of that will be safe, especially as nobody else would probably have gone to that much trouble--they probably would have just put it in the protector and been done with it (or worse!). 

So anyway, that's the story.  Also, I am awesome and so good at making gross things gross-no-longer.

I thought about blogging this story shortly after it happened, but I didn't want to have to redact it or make a new post saying, "update:  I have bedbugs."  But no bedbugs, and therefore, I am awesome. 

Get Smart(Phone), or, The Droid I Was Looking For

I'm a pretty old-fashioned kind of gal.  I like my books in paper form, I like my buildings made of bricks,* and I like my music played on my clock radio CD player that I've had since 2004.  I also really liked my flip phone.  It was a little LG Accolade and it served me beautifully for probably over three years.  It was also fun because it was the same phone that my friends Matt, Ashlee, and Sarah all had.  We were like a little club of archaic phone friends.  

However, like most old things, my phone started to show that it was old.  The inlet where you plug in the charger was loose and you had to jiggle it in order to charge, and when it was charged, it would only stay charged for a day and a half.  The keys were starting to stick so it was hard to make spaces between words in text messages.  Last week it developed something comparable to trigger finger, such that it wouldn't flip open in one motion, but would get stuck halfway and have to be pushed further.  That was when I conceded that it was probably time for a new phone.

I had been contemplating the switch to a smart phone for a ridiculously long time.  Even though I am not super tech-savvy and I don't care for Angry Birds, I saw the merit.  I especially saw the merit when I was lost somewhere and didn't know when or where a bus would stop.  All of these things were minor issues that could not be used to talk me into sifting through an insane amount of options to pick out a phone, however.  The final straw was when my sixty-odd-year-old father, who types in all caps and doesn't know how to use the DVD player got a smart phone for work.  Back broken, I brought myself to the Verizon store and told the guy, "sell me a smart phone, dang it!"**

I decided on a Droid Razr M by Motorola.  All the Verizon store guys cheered me on as I walked out with it (probably because they were sick of me coming in and browsing and hemming and hawing for many weeks prior).  It was cheap and I got a fun purple case for it.  So far the only Apps that I've put on it are the LDS Gospel Library (even though I still lug my heavy hard copy quad to church), an Anatomy Study app (of course), and OpenMBTA.  Sometimes I still forget that I have it when I want to look things up, and I'm sure I haven't figured out half of the cool stuff it can do, but it's been useful so far (except for the one time it froze four hours after I got it and I questioned every decision I'd ever made in life up to that point--I'm melodramatic sometimes, okay?).

Of course, I have a way to go, vis-à-vis tech-savviness.  For instance, I'm still blogging on my laptop like a normal 20th-century type of person.

   

   

*I also like the Kate Nash album "Made of Bricks," but that's irrelevant here.

**Saying 'dang it' (or a harsher version thereof) always indicates to a salesperson that you mean business.

Crazy, Immune System-Destroying Life Update Post

This is a change from my boring life update posts (BLUP's) of the past.  It has been an INSANE couple of weeks.  So much has happened and the other day I commented how I was surprised that I hadn't gotten sick from all the stress and jinxed the holy heck out of myself by saying that.  So I'm sick.  It's nothing serious, just sinus and upper respiratory things, but it's enough to be annoying, especially during the first week of school.  But here's a very cursory rundown of what's been going on lately:

First of all, I moved to Brookline!  I talked about this earlier but I've been totally moved in for a bit over a week now.  The place is great and my room is 95% complete, so I'll post some pictures in coming weeks.  The neighborhood is great.  I kind of hate our shower, because it's like this:

Wtf indeed.

One of my main hurdles with the moving was the assembling of Ikea furniture.  I feel like assembling Ikea furniture is one of the ways that Hugh Jackman should prepare for a physically demanding movie role.  It could be an Olympic Sport:  Solo Women's Ikea Furniture Assembly.*  I had help for the second half of the 40-odd instructions for the bed,** but the dresser and bookshelf I did totally alone.  I felt pretty proud of myself!

The other major thing that happened was that I started school last week.  I'm only taking Medical Gross Anatomy at the moment, but I'll start grad school classes at the beginning of September.  I think I'm really going to enjoy it, mostly because I love anatomy and I love to learn.  It's almost an obsession.  Now that my hair is lighter in color and generally frizzy all the time, I've decided that I'm going to be the Hermione Granger of Gross Anatomy.  I am determined to rock all of my exams and basically be the best student there ever was.  Especially when it comes to pronouncing all those Latin names!

Just imagine the word "manubrium" instead of "Leviosa"

School will keep me very busy all the time, but I think that having a full-time job last year was beneficial in that I think I'll be able to keep a 45 hour per week study schedule and maintain some semblance of freedom on my evenings and weekends.  But as I've mentioned in many other posts, I am so happy to be in school again and I'm really looking forward to keeping the ball rolling on the whole PhD thing.

So those are the two main things that have been bubbling as of late and the reasons my cortisol levels were wonky and my immune system was being a giant slacker.  There are a couple of other personal-life things that have been going on as well, but I'm not quite at the "ready to blog about it" stage yet.  Stay tuned...maybe once I get over this cold...

*The Swedes (obviously) and Laura Taylor would dominate this.

**Getting a daybed with drawers and a trundle is an idea that I'm never going to have again.

  

Gross Anatomy (Emphasis on the "Gross")

When I saw the list of required upper limb osteology to know for medical gross anatomy:

This is so disgusting...but also hilarious.

I am a little sad that my vast knowledge of siding the metacarpals will be on the shelf this semester.

Last Day of Freedom

I have so much I could write about (although the amount that I actually will write about is significantly smaller), but my apartment doesn't have internet yet because Verizon is The Devil.*  So I'm in Starbucks nursing a tall Passion Iced Tea for as long as I possibly can whilst I take advantage of the free WiFi.  However, I did want to write one thing:

I'm starting PhD school tomorrow!!!!!

If you know me even a little bit, you know how big of a deal this is.  I've been talking about getting a PhD for over five years now, and after all of the letdowns and the lacks of funding everywhere and the constant questioning of every life decision I've ever made, it's finally happening.  Tomorrow morning at 8:30** I will be sitting down for my first class of Medical Gross Anatomy.  I'm nervous, but so, so excited.

*I imagine that when you go to the symphony in Hell, the orchestra plays the Verizon hold music.
**Let's face it, it's me; I'm going to be sitting in an empty auditorium starting at probably 7:45 or something.

The Credible Hulk

Last night I had a dream that I made out with Bruce Banner as portrayed by Mark Ruffalo.  That's neither here nor there.

Can you blame me?
(Source)

This is a post about something I realized yesterday.  First, can we all stipulate that I am very quick witted?  Anyone who has talked to me for any length of time can probably see that.  It's likely an artifact of 1) having lots of time to be alone with my thoughts so I can formulate them in clever ways and 2) watching too much well-written TV.

However, my quick wit, though one of my strongest selling points, has an unfortunate side effect:  when I am feeling angry or defensive, I have the capacity to be incredibly cruel.  I find exactly the right weapon and whittle it down to a true and unforgiving point.  Most often, I am the sole victim of my own cruelty, but I know that other people have experienced it as well.  If my cruel self were a character in a movie, she would be considered hilariously well-written, but in reality, she is ugly and I nearly hate her.  I am glad that I had recently seen The Avengers, because I know that this is how Bruce Banner felt about The Hulk, to have this monster inside of him that he must do everything in his power to control.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be invited somewhere, and the person who invited me understood that I might not want to go.  And I didn't.  Not because it would be uncomfortable or painful (although it would be), but because I knew there would be a strong chance that The Hulk would come out, and I certainly didn't want people who were just on the cusp of becoming my friends to see that person.

So my question to all of you is this:  what can I do, short of moving to some remote village in India where I will never ever feel provoked (isn't that what he did in The Avengers? I missed the beginning of the movie), to deal with unpleasant people/situations without my absolute worst self coming out?  If I can figure out how to alleviate this, something good will have come out of my Hulk revelation (in addition to a dream about making out with Mark Ruffalo, that is).

I'm Back in Boston!

The guy on the plane next to me had the worst B.O.  And now I feel like I smell like B.O.*  I could take a shower, but I'm just going to go outside in a bit and get all sweaty again.  I guess I just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm not going to smell good until October.


*Kind of like that one episode of Seinfeld.  I've seen very few episodes of Seinfeld, but I've seen that one a few times, I think.