You know how sometimes in life you start out with these great plans, and then unexpected things happen and you find yourself in a place that you never could’ve imagined? Well, that is happening to me now. But not in a misty, nostalgic, “oh, look at the funny twists of fate” kind of way. It’s more of an, “I wonder how I could erase certain parts of my memory without causing myself actual brain damage” kind of way.

Because, through no fault of my own, and totally against my will, I am becoming…an Expert In Rats. Believe me-I have fought this tooth and nail (no pun intended). But these people keep on foisting off all of this unwanted knowledge on me, and unfortunately it’s the kind of knowledge that really sticks with you.

I wasn’t even going to write about this subject at all, because deep down, I feel like I’ve been tainted by the stigma of having a known association with rodents. Like somehow, the fact that I have a rodent problem means that it’s really my own fault. Like somehow my lifestyle is so shameful that its cumulative effect on the world is to explode into an actual, physical, nirvana-like haven for rodents.

That’s not actually true, but part of me is strongly tempted to think that it might be. It probably comes from being a girl, since we are conditioned from the womb to feel personally responsible for the Entire Known Universe. (But that’s a different blog post.)

But seriously, I am wracking my brains and trying to figure out exactly what it is I’m doing that is inviting all of this extremely unwanted knowledge into my life so I can make it stop. It’s like when you’re a teenager, (speaking of how girls are socialized) and your mother warns you about dressing a certain way or acting a certain way, because you don’t want to give boys “the wrong message”. But see, here I’m kind of walking a fine line, because I want to remain open and friendly enough so that the bug guys will still come and deal with these rats for me, but not so friendly that they continue adding to my increasing store of rodent-related information. And finding that perfect balance is still apparently a mystery to me, much like the mystery of how the [CENSORED] are getting into our basement in the first place.

So anyway, I’m sure I will have much more to post on this subject later, because apparently this weekend somebody, and by “somebody” I mean, “my husband”, has to go down into the basement and clean up all the old, uh, we’ll just call them “presents”, so that the bug guy can come back again next week and see if there are any new “presents”, which he can then track to see if he can find out exactly where these evil beasts are coming from. And maybe by the end of next week I’ll have convinced my basement to stop wearing such slinky, low-cut, rodent-enticing outfits and trashy eye makeup, and I’ll have convinced the rats to stop acting like elementary school boys who show their affection for you by hitting you, or teasing you (or poo-ing in your basement). And then the bug guy can make some new best friends.