I was remarking to Ted a few nights ago (over blueberry kuchen and red wine in his lovely Park Slope apartment) that sometimes you look around you, at how dirty your clothes are, say, or how grimy the coffee table in your apartment has gotten, and you think to yourself, "man, I am a filthy dude."
Case in point: I am a slobby programmer-type guy who needs to be eating junk food all goddamn day long while I am programming the computer at work. So if you come over to my desk, you will see a whole bunch of plastic kegs of pretzels and "party mix" and maybe a couple of bags of M&Ms or Starbursts or shit like that. Well, the office has a bit of a pest problem, and I left my snack foods a little bit too exposed, I guess, and now there is a mouse that comes and eats things off the desk and leaves mouse poops everywhere. It's gross.
So after a few frown-inducing incidents of noticing a poop on my desk a foot or so away from an in-progress lunch, I decided to kick some mouse ass. I picked up a bunch of wooden snap-traps at a deli on 7th Ave. and baited them with the semi-unappealing organic peanut butter from the office fridge. And then I waited. And several weeks went by and I didn't catch any mice and there were four armed mousetraps sitting on my desk -- mouse pad; floor; between monitors; behind tower -- waiting to snap an unobservant co-worker. I started to feel like... well, like a guy hunting a mouse that no one else can see and who's got cocked mousetraps all over his desk. The week before, though, I'd been at Tom and Colleen's house and they'd shown off a device they'd picked up for dealing with an apparently highly-visible infestation: An electric cul-de-sac in a box that Tom was eager to explain: There's peanut butter at one end and two metal plates on the bottom. The mouse winds up with his front legs on one plate and his hind legs on the other and he gets electrocuted. He said they'd killed two the first night they turned it on and nine in total since getting the thing. I went to a bunch of hardware stores looking for it but to no avail (the guy at Kove Bros. tried to sell me a $50 dealie he said the staff themselves had used to kill a cat-sized rat; he had Polaroid evidence), so I gave up and ordered it online. It is now baited and batteried and switched on, waiting in the storage closet in the kitchen, near where Tim and Libby'd seen a particularly brazen daylight mouse expedition sallying forth.
Then there's the roach situation in my kitchen at home. I'm not particularly squeamish about cockroaches (though boy am I not crazy about waterbugs) but things have gotten sort of out of hand. I've got a row of appliances (toaster oven, coffee maker, blender) between the stove and the sink, and an extended family of roaches has apparently set up a homestead behind them. It'd gotten to the point where I'd dislodge the carafe for my wonderful timer-automatic coffee maker from the heating element in the morning and there'd be two of the fuckers waiting behind it, waving their gross feelers at me. And the problem with these little-to-midsize roaches is that Kitty can't be bothered to chomp them up the way she does with the big scary ones (I guess they don't taste as good? Ick). So I took the nuclear option at home, too -- I created a four-block wall of roach motels next to the counter's power strip and deployed a couple of these weird sterilizing-gas-spewing devices that come with the motels under the sink. A couple weeks later and I've just swept, like, a couple dozen roach carcasses off the counter.
For the trifecta, I made vodka sauce the other night, using some stuff from a jar. (Didn't have vodka in it, but it did have cream cheese. Guh?) "Don't let her eat that," Nina admonished as I set my plate down on the floor for the cat to lick clean. "It's fine," I insisted. "Look how cute." Sure enough, Kitty ate all the vodka sauce off the plate. And then she got diarrhea. And she managed to get the diarrhea in her fur, dipping her tail in it like a calligraphy brush. It got on my hand.
Changing the subject.
I've done some important work on playing video games lately. First off, I finished Final Fantasy XII. It's sort of hard to have something to say about it -- it's just too big and too complicated of an experience. I think it's probably the best-looking Playstation 2 game I've seen, and also has the most content -- more than all those the two-disc games out there, even. The thing took me 160+ hours before I was satisfied that I'd done all I wanted to do. On the other hand, I found the story a lot dryer and less coherent than I'd liked, although it doesn't come close to the level of mindfuckery featured in Final Fantasy X. And the main narrative thread kind of peters out around the time you level 50, which was about halfway through, hours-wise for me. After that you're just doing shit like playing Simon Says against "The River Lord" and helping bunny girls fight ice dragons.
I also managed to battle through the two obstacles standing between me and "Freebird" in Guitar Hero II Hard mode: "Carry Me Home" and "Psychobilly Freakout." Man, those songs are difficult! My fingers and left wrist were aching for days afterwards. Promptly after I embarked on Expert, the game started locking up while loading songs, leaving me at least temporarily stuck behind Nina in the race to championship of the universe.
Nick's lent me a copy of Shadow of the Colossus; he'd brought it in to do some research for a paper / talk he's working on. It's a bit of an odd duck in that it's got all the mise-en-scene of a game like... I don't know, Morrowind, in which there's just so much to do, but in Shadow, there's really just a single mechanic, which is killing colossi. It's so pared-down it's actually kind of austere. And in between your battles, in the bits where you're riding around the countryside on Agro, you start to feel like, man, this game's kind of dull; it doesn't look that great; the controls're sort of frustrating. But five minutes later you're clinging to the back of a giant demonic clockwork bird-thing that's swooping through the air, and you can actually see your little guy holding onto its fur (which is rendered such that it is gorgeous and also distinct from other surfaces, like, say, feathers, which are also gorgeous) while you hack it to death with a sword, and you're like, oh, they skimped a little on that other part so they could do this.
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