Friday, June 3, 2011

Bedbugs and Beetles

I've never really known what a bedbug is, but I know it doesn't sound pleasant. And since, at a very young age, I made it a rule of mine to discard everything unpleasant from my life, I knew bedbugs were something to avoid.

So you can imagine my surprise when I rolled out of bed this morning and saw a dead beetle in my sheets. Were it's guts squished all over the sheets like it had tried to escape it's waking nightmare while I had slept dreaming of chocolate fudge cake (one of my better dreams, I'll admit)? No, rather it looked like it had suffocated to death. Like I had slept on top of it. All. Night. Long.

At first I felt disgust, followed quickly by a nauseated feeling as I tossed the beetle in the trash. But then, I felt a familiar sense of anger. Anger that this unpleasant thing had made it's way into my otherwise pleasant morning. And I had made it a rule of mine, at a very young age, to discard everything unpleasant from my life and this beetle dared to break my rules. Oh, no, his death was not surprising.

After gloating that I had won the battle I hadn't known was afoot, I started to worry, as I tend to do, about other unpleasant things making their way into my otherwise pleasant life. You know what I'm talking about...bedbugs. So I did what any normal person would do. I went online to dictionary.com, one of my favorite websites, and looked up the definition of bedbug (it is one word for those of you who wondered).

bed·bug

 [bed-buhg]

–noun
1.
a flat, wingless, bloodsucking hemipterous insect, Cimexlectularius,  that infests houses and especially beds.
2.
any of several other bloodsucking bugs of the family Cimicidae.

After looking up "hemipterous" which basically means a classification of bug/insect, I now knew what a bedbug was. And I was right. They did not sound pleasant. Now while the beetle wasn't strictly a bedbug, if we broaden the definition a bit, it was in my bed and it was a bug...so I'm pretty sure the beetle was a bedbug and it was definitely unpleasant.

Now I have an official reason to begin my war against the bedbugs of the world. Any bug that resides in, by, near, or within a .5 mile radius of my bed - you've been warned. I've got a bottle of Raid and a flyswatter that is silent but deadly.

xoxo,
Jessie

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