About
A canary-yellow attic. Twinkle lights. A faint smell of pigeons. An undergraduate student who lives there. (Pleased to make your acquaintance).
A black cat that loves dirt piles and cotton sheets, always in that order. A sister who writes music and hums along to electrical generators. Two hard-working parents who make enough wine to survive a nuclear winter.
A life scattered. Ukraine: childhood, collapse of the Soviet Union, emigration. Canada: life, universe open, vocation this way and that. Belgium: room in a student beehive, eyes wide mouth shut, rite of passage from known to unknown to a new known. France: a village, a contract, two hundred nineteen kids and a river named Slime.
Missions, fairy-tales, fuck-ups, and a blog to write all about it.
Welcome and I hope you stay a while,
Maria Pidgorna
Curious about the name?
“The Life and Times of the Curious Cockroach!?” What a vile name for a blog. You seem like a nice girl, dear, why not name it something a little more … pleasant? For example, The Life and Times of the Blissful Butterfly, or The Life and Times of the Merry Mantis, or … hold on, I’ve got it: The Life and Times of the Cheery Chipmunk. Oh, I’d love to read something like that. But Curious Cockroach? No, no, dear, that just won’t do.”
So went the argument of a freckled little lady I met on the bus last week. I had been feeling unusually chatty and began telling her all about my new and exciting plans after she commented on my hair clip. It’s too bad that she got off the bus before I had a chance to explain that unlike with butterflies, mantes, or chipmunks, cockroaches and I go a long way back.
My earliest memory of cockroaches goes back to my childhood, when I was still living in an old Soviet block building in Brovary, Ukraine. The apartment was infested with cockroaches, despite my parents’ repeated attempts at poisoning them. Eventually I had to accept their presence, but I was never able to break the habit of wincing in anticipation before lifting up just about any object – even the tub of cockroach poison itself.
Worse still was when the pests made an appearance right in my cottage cheese desert – well, at least that’s what I was fooled into believing for about ten years of my life. It turned out that they were actually raisins and that my dad had finally succeeded in ruining my appetite for desert. But that story is for another post. So if one of these days you find yourself bored of reading proper things with cheery titles, perhaps you will take a look through my stories – I promise you that soon enough you’ll be refreshingly disturbed.
So who am I, you might ask, and why do I continue to associate with cockroaches? I am a twenty-year-old, and, like many twenty-year-olds, I don’t know what to make of life. And I suspect most cockroaches don’t have the faintest idea on the subject either. Which is why I admire them for making the most of what they are given – three pairs of legs and a very thick exterior — and experimenting living in different surroundings and climates. Their adaptability has enabled them to find a niche for themselves as pests in human habitations (but surely they don’t view themselves as such), and as a result they are among the most successful insects on the planet. Who wouldn’t find their curiousity and bravery exemplary? So if by the time I am thirty, I too am able to find my place in the world, I will be very grateful to have had such great role models.
So from here on, I am the Curious Cockroach. Let’s see where I end up.
Yours truly,
Roachy
