The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach

Date written: July 3rd, 2010
Location: Vancouver

This morning I got onto the bus at the ungodly hour of 7:00am, to make it to my new internship on time. My head resting against the window, I drifted in and out of sleep. During this semi-hallucinogenic state, I finally realized what was missing in my life: a clone. Or perhaps four or five of them, and each one would be sitting on a different bus, going to a different internship, while I’d be dozing off in bed. Gold. And what’s more, is that  I would no longer have to fuss over which career path to choose over another, because my loyal clones would be out exploring them all. If one of the clones should fail abysmally or end up dead, no worries —  it would just prove that that wasn’t what I (or any copied version of myself) was meant to do.

So during this lengthy bus ride, I thought of the careers that interest me the most. I conjured up a clone for each of them, and let the clone live out its life (inside my head, of course, because the bus was crowded enough as it was). Now let me introduce you to the happy family…

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Location: Vancouver (!!!)

This summer, I made a “Cockroach Chronology” and glued it to my closet door. Really it’s nothing more than a bunch of stickie notes and pencil marks, but it serves as mental map for what I’m going to write about, and in which order. So this week, according to this Cockroach Chronology, I am supposed to write a nice, soulful post about my return to Vancouver from my exchange abroad. I spent a good while simply staring at my closet door, unsure of what to do. Since the door flatly refused to give me any kind of hint or idea, I set about gathering excerpts from different sources (my journal, emails, letters, etc) and tried to figure out how to mush them together into some sort of coherent whole. It was only yesterday that I realized that the task is impossible. Leaving a country, coming back home, seeing everything with fresh eyes and going through reverse culture shock — there’s nothing neat or coherent about it. It’s a bumpy, awkward process with many different emotions at play, and trying to stuff the entire experience into a catchy thesis statement simply wouldn’t be true to the story.

So I’m going to be true to the story. Here are the excerpts — edited, but essentially undigested.

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‘

“I’m convinced that there’s a little cockroach in all of us. The part of us that is determined to survive. The part of us that adapts to new surroundings and circumstances. The part of us that stays hidden during routine life, but springs to action when there is a disturbance…”

The Inner Cockroach,
April 28th 2009

‘

Location: Brussels, Belgium
Emotional state: pensive/amused

I attended a rather curious dinner party yesterday evening. The guests weren’t jolly as they usually are (or pretend to be) during dinner parties. They weren’t wearing colourful clothing, and there was not one seductive cocktail dress in sight. Wine was being poured into elegant glasses, but the lips that sipped the wine were not relaxed, they were tightened — some were even trembling.

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