My Motherboard, My Cockroach, My Self
On our primal instincts and hunger for power. Plus, a cathartic show for single women living alone, rats on the brain and fancy cannabis accessories.
“Your keyboard is your medium, it’s how you process, so it feels metaphorical that you’re without it right now.” My therapist tells me this week, her bright face the size of my thumbnail on the screen of my phone. The thing about dependency is you don’t realize how much you need something until it’s gone.
The flight home from Europe is my favorite. Anything shorter is not enough time to get work done. Past eight hours, my brain delivers diminishing returns. The six- to eight-hour flight is my sweet spot. So you can imagine my frustration when, in the first hour of my nine-hour flight back from Switzerland, I spilled water on my laptop. Within minutes it started glitching. So I was forced to sit with the weight of my mistake for the remaining eight hours, picturing the mountain of work that awaited me when on the other side of the Atlantic.
The flight back from Europe is not my favorite once I’m home. The long journey combined with travelling back in time makes for a day that never ends. Upon landing on American soil, a series of unfortunate events ensued. I won’t bore you with the details but one highlight was my cat puking and pooping on my bedroom floor immediately after I cleaned it (by-hand because of course my vacuum decided to break when I got home too).
After just a few hours of sleep, my worst apartment nightmare came true the next morning: a live cockroach in the most sacred area of my apartment; the one place I’ve always prayed I will never find one—the kitchen. I have a high success rate when it comes to killing roaches but this one was a gymnast. I now can report that roaches are capable of hopping, as this one leaped over my arm to disappear into the dark sliver of space between my counter and the fridge.
It’s just a bug, I’ve told myself repeatedly this week. And yet, I keep flinching at the slightest motion detected in my periphery. Every time I close my eyes to fall asleep, I picture roaches scurrying across my bedroom floor, under my bed, crawling up my duvet. Last night I opened my cupboard and thought I saw one, or was it just a shadow? Roach paranoia infecting a jet-lagged brain is crazy-making. Roaches are insidious, once they’re in your space, they’re in your head, and incredibly difficult to extinguish.
Why does the roach fuck with our mind more than any other creature? I pondered this when, seeking respite from the home that no longer feels like mine, I found comfort in the sound of crickets at dusk in Prospect Park. The bugs look similar yet have a completely different effect on our nervous system. For me, and I’d argue for many people, the roach mania is about control. We, as humans, have grown to believe we’re entitled to what’s ours. My space should be my space, and a foreign invader threatens my sense of safety.
This human instinct is why Trump’s wild words this week about aliens (‘resident alien’ is my legal term as an immigrant in the United States) violently invading the country, stealing jobs and eating people’s pets will actually resonate with some Americans. It’s why people back home ask me where I’m really from when I tell them I’m from Canada. We feel certain things—our possessions, our home, our country—belong to us more than they belong to others. Violating that sense of ownership makes us feel helpless.
And of all the emotions to be stuck in, helplessness is one of the worst. I’m someone who fixes problems and gets shit done. When I can’t, I seek mastery in other areas of my life to cope. After laying down pesticide, buying cockroach-deterring plug-ins and containers for my food, I resolved that I’d done as much as I could do. Normally, I’d then find comfort in my routine and regain a sense of control through my work. But with no computer, I’ve found myself completely defenceless, with too much mental space for my paranoia to take over.
Desperate to regain some sense of normalcy, I headed to our modern place of worship: the Apple Store. After running diagnostics, the genius bar technician told me my computer appears to be fine, save for a weak battery, which he said is from the near-15,000 hours I’ve logged on the laptop. The glitches just magically disappeared. “Are you sure the problem won’t return?” I ask. “In my experience, problems don’t usually just go away, they keep coming back until you deal with them.”
I returned home to a package from Amazon containing the roach-deterring plug-ins and a new cheap vacuum. I immediately start installing and vacuuming and within a few minutes, I spotted a roach in the shadow of the ledge of my kitchen bar. I froze. Given how fast the one the day before was, I figured I should have a back-up plan in case my one shot with a shoe didn’t work. I sprinkled the pesticide around the roach, coating the bug’s terrain with a toxic snow. How sick I am, I think, devising a murder plan. Despite my brief moment of compassion, I deided my sanity was worth this bug’s life.
After 30 minutes of hesitation and scheming, I killed it in one hit. With adrenaline coursing through my body, I then did something totally out of character: I started swearing at the flattened bug as my one final show of power. You would think killing it would put my anxiety to bed but my ruminating ensued. Best case scenario the roach I saw the day before was the one I killed, I thought. Worst case scenario, seeing the roach a second time means there’s many of them lurking in the shadows. Sadly I think it’s the latter case because two hours later, I spotted another one racing across my living room carpet and killed it. The sense of accomplishment and control I felt after killing both was fleeting because while I was fixated on the roaches, I didn’t realize my cat had run away. She had crawled all the way down to the first floor and my neighbor thankfully spotted her heading outside. The feeling of helplessness returned, this time laced with guilt. Power is like a drug, the high doesn’t last very long and once it diminishes, all you want is to get it back.
I’ve gotten some of it back, at least, by being able to return to my instrument: my keyboard. As I process this week through my fingers (thank you), the familiar feeling of control washes my body with calm. My problems haven’t gone away, but at least now I have one of my coping mechanisms back. Still, the exposure therapy of being tested without anything to fall back on was a good lesson. My therapist reminded me this week that the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is physiological: a person needs food, water, shelter and sleep in order to feel safe; and before they can even begin to seek love or self-actualization. I’m grateful to have a roof over my head and food in my fridge, but multiple of my physiological needs were compromised this week (for reasons I can’t disclose here), and I felt the consequences.
When our physiological needs are being met, we can handle unexpected stressors. But when the foundation is already compromised, all it takes is one small additional load for everything to crumble. We’ve so evolved so far as humans and become so dependent on technology that we forget we’re just primal animals with these very basic needs. This week revealed that satiating my desire for power and control will only get me so far. At a certain point, I have to humbly surrender to the reality that I’m powerless against the forces of nature.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
I’ve never planned a vacation around the filming locations of a television show, but if there’s one show that could convert me, it’s The White Lotus. Even before the announcement that latest season would film at the Anantara Mai Khao Phuket Villas, Phuket was already Thailand’s busiest island. As a result, visions of a deserted island surrounded by turquoise water, as depicted in the 2000 film The Beach, look more like crowded beaches. Phuket struggles to retain its original allure—which is why I’ve never wanted to go—until I discovered one of the last remaining pockets of unspoiled paradise: the island of Koh Yao Yai.
Instead of visiting the Phuket filming location—I took a 30-minute boat ride to its sister property, Anantara Koh Yao Yai Resort & Villas which offers the deserted island feel visitors to Thailand look for but rarely find. Read on for my full review.
Reading 📖
🦍 Do animals know that they will die?
😈 Why we love a hate-watch.
“Tech companies recognize an unfortunate truth: incentivizing our worst impulses is far more lucrative than harnessing our best ones. In this context-free void, an eyeball is an eyeball, whether the brain behind it is being flooded with dopamine or adrenaline. A click is a click, whether you’re glad or mad.” -Alissa Wilkinson.
🤳 Are influencers journalists?
“The idea that content creators producing journalism aren’t ‘real’ journalists is not just absurd; it’s dangerous. Journalism is not a club with exclusive membership; it’s a practice, a commitment to truth, and a service to the public. Content creators are fulfilling that role in ways that many in traditional media either can’t or won’t.” - Taylor Lorenz.
👀 I want people to look at me but not too closely.
“Just the right amount and in precisely the manner that I want them to. Nonetheless, offering yourself to the internet means risking lost context. It means risking ill-perception.” - Madison Huizinga.
🧳 Can Barcelona survive mass tourism?
🍜 An ode to Toronto’s longest-standing Korean restaurant.
🍗 The katsuification of Britain.
👨🍳 What was Parts Unknown?
🗽Self-esteem by NYC neighborhood.
🪳 To the cockroach in my apartment.
“Lately, whenever I enter a room you scuttle away, and whenever you enter a room I scream and spray Raid everywhere. What’s up with that? Maybe we could order pizza and binge-watch ‘Gilmore Girls’ like total nerds, ha ha. Unless, did you invite all your friends to hang out under the sink again? Totally fine.”
Watching 📺
The other night I did something I rarely do: selected a new show displayed on the homepage of my streaming service that I’ve never heard of before. In this case I was enticed by the title, How To Die Alone when I logged onto Hulu to watch my go-to feel-good show, Abbott Elementary.
Right away I recognized the protagonist Melissa as the actress Natasha Rothwell from Insecure and The White Lotus. Here, she plays a 35-year-old neurotic, broke JFK employee who has never been in love and leads a life of solitude. After spending her birthday working at the airport, she returns home with a new dresser she treated herself to. After successfully assembling the piece of furniture, she does a little celebratory dance. Her moment of joy is quickly upended when she spots a rat going for her crab rangoon takeout. Like me, she starts swearing at the rat and fights it for her food. “You stay on your side of the apartment,” she tells the feisty creature. What happens next is something I imagine many single women living alone worry about: she chokes on her food. As she does, the dresser falls on her and she loses consciousness.
This is all happens in the first half of the premiere so she obviously survives. At the hospital, the nurses ask for her emergency contact and she gives her own number (something I did this summer). She ends up sharing a room with an elderly woman who she discovers is very much like her. Their sweet moment of bonding is soured when the woman suddenly dies. The nurses rush in to get her CPR, very much like my own experience with my mom. The elderly woman has no family for the nurses to call. In that moment, Melissa realizes she will die alone just like this woman if she doesn’t turn her life around.
It always amazes me when television mirrors my own life, not because of an algorithm but purely by coincidence. I hadn’t realized until watching some of my own struggles reflected back to me on the screen, that a part of what made this week so challenging was having to do it all alone. It’s comforting to know I’m not the only single woman who is out here trying to assert some mastery over her own life (and fighting pests for her food).
This Vulture review sums up the vibe nicely:
“It’s a little bit of workplace comedy with its slew of hilarious employees, a little rom-com, and a sprinkle of scammer drama — Rothwell’s performance shines as the show builds to tell a relatable coming-of-age story about how terrifying it is to be in control of your own destiny.” - Ile-Ife Okantah.
Listening 🎧
To try to make myself feel better this week, I kept reminding myself it could be worse: I could have rats. And yet, while I don’t think I could listen to an hour-long program about cockroaches, I was totally into This American Life’s episode all about rats. The third segment was a story I’ve recommended here before, on how Alberta’s successful rat campaign made them the largest rat-less land in the world. The other acts were much more eclectic. Who knew New York City has a rat czar? We also meet a man who can’t quit rats, and learn about the fateful decision fifty years ago that led to New York City’s rat baby boom.
Snacking 🍌
I can have an addictive personality so I’ve tried, in recent years, to learn to self-regulate and sit with uncomfortable emotions rather than impulsively turn to vices like booze, weed and food. That being said, since I stopped drinking, I’ve grown more fond of smoking. I know it’s bad for my lungs but growing up in a family of smokers, I find the act of smoking soothing in a way an edible never is. With the cannabis market in Canada being exponentially better than here in New York, I’ve found myself smoking less lately because it’s simply too expensive and the quality is almost always a let-down.
Since most of my disappointment here has been with pre-rolls, I’ve been seeking out more dry herb, which means I need the right hardware. I got this super sleek gold ashtray that I wish my mom was around to gift to. I’ve been using matches to light my joints which feels like a fire hazard because I always have a stack of books and New Yorkers nearby, so I got this carbon lighter that has an adjustable temperature and angled flame port that even lights upside down. But I’m most excited about my new one-hitter because it has the ergonomic feel of a joint without all the hacking (thanks to its unique double helix design allowing for better filtering and cooling). Now I just need to find good flower in NYC—if you have reco’s, please send!