Fleas.

The two kitties I am living with have somehow brought fleas into the apartment I am living in. This does not make for an ideal living situation. The fleas have infiltrated my bedroom, and sometimes I can see one or two of them hopping about on my white bedsheets.

Fleas and mosquitoes make me angry, because as long as I can remember, itch-inducing insects seem to instantly sense that my blood is liquid E for them. Fleas are all the more frustrating because their stubbornly hard exoskeleton prevents them from being crushed by conventional methods--you have to take a small metal tweezer and squeeze them to death until their little bodies are completely torn apart.

I have bites all over my arms and legs. I look diseased.

I bring up the topic of fleas because I read somewhere that if you leave an aluminum pie tin full of water on the floor, add dish soap or olive oil, and light a desk lamp on the surface of the water in a darkened room, the fleas will be attracted to the light, hop into their extermination pool and drown to death. Leave it to flea infestation to add a new sick guilty pleasure to my list. I have done this experiment for a night, and seeing the little red-brown bodies floating in the water made me terribly satisfied.

I hate fleas, but I still love the cats. They are not mine; there's a little black one with white socks, and a big gray one with long, lustrous fur. I forgive them, because every time I see them, I want to pick them up and squeeze them until their eyes bug out. In three months, I won't have two cats as apartment mates. I'll be living somewhere else in LA and I won't have fleas, but then I won't have cats.