"I mean, in the last few months alone, I've been pinned in a big set of white water rapids, been bitten by an angry snake in a jungle, had a close escape with a big mountain rockfall, narrowly avoided being eaten by a huge croc in the Australian swamps, and had to cut away from my main parachute and come down on my reserve, some 5000 above the Arctic Plateau. When did all this craziness become my world?"*

   Remember last week when I said Siri was the devil? Well, I was right and apparently she knows what I was saying about her because the very next day I got trapped in the elevator. I shouldn’t use a passive sentence structure, but it sounds weird to say “the elevator trapped me” because 1) the elevator isn’t a sentient being and 2) it was Siri that made the elevator do it: the elevator is entirely blameless in this event. (I know my logic is off here, as many don’t believe Siri is a sentient being, but she definitely has A.I., which is more than I can say for the elevator.)

   I went down to the garage to move my laundry into the dryer and then took the elevator up to the first floor to get my mail. My gay mailman gave me a friendly hello and went to work stuffing those horrible pages of useless coupons into everyone’s mailbox. I decided not to wait for mine, but took my mail from yesterday and got back into the elevator.

Look at the creepy elevator in my building.

   I pushed “2” for my floor and the door started to close. And then, just inches shy of completely closing, it stopped. I couldn’t see out. I tried to push it closed. Then I tried to pull it open. It wouldn’t move. So I started pushing every button inside the elevator (useful trick, that) and shouted to the mailman from inside, asking if he could push the outside button. He did it. I could hear him, even if I couldn’t see him. It didn’t do shit. Then I very methodically began kicking and hitting the door and pushing every button I could find and hitting the elevator alarm button over and over and over. I felt like I was dying. I could literally feel the oxygen being sucked out of the tiny room. There was a sign right next to me that said there was “little chance” of the elevator running out of oxygen. But it didn’t say there was "no chance". It was nearly 100 degrees that day, which made the elevator 175 degrees, so I started sweating and turning in circles and pushing the emergency button again and again. I considered crying, but I thought that if they found me crying, I’d probably be embarrassed. I also had to pee. It was a true emergency of the very most serious kind. What if I peed my pants in the elevator just seconds before they opened it, and then I’m standing there shrugging, going, “I thought it was going to take longer?" I would have to hold it unless day turned into night and I had to figure out a way to drink my own urine like Bear Grylls taught me to do in a life-threatening emergency.

It looks like someone was clawing at the door. It's like that scene in Silence of the Lambs where Catherine's in the well at Buffalo Bill's house and she sees all the bloody scratch marks and broken finger nails in there and freaks out.

This looks like the poster image for a horror film.**

   Hours later (it was probably about 30 seconds, total), Robert showed up outside the door and called in to me.

   “I’m going to reset the elevator, okay?”

   “Yes, oh god! Thank you, Robert! Thank you. Thank god!” I leaned my head against the door of the elevator, something I envisioned Meryl Streep would probably do in the movie version of this situation.

   “Is that you, Christine?”

   “No, it’s Lacey.”

   “Oh.”(Pause). “Lacey. Please don’t push any more buttons, okay?”

   It kind of sounded like he didn’t want to reset the elevator for me. Only for his precious Christine who most likely doesn’t call him once a week from work to ask him to check and make sure she blew out her candles or unplugged her curling iron.

   “I won’t! I promise!” I pounded every-so-slightly on the door with my fists, picturing how dramatic it probably looked.

   “Just don’t touch anything. This will probably take about 2 minutes.”

   “Thank you!” And as his footsteps faded away I said, “I love you…”

   He restarted the elevator within the next 2-4 minutes and I came out expecting the fire department and all my worried neighbors to be waiting in the lobby. But no one was there. Not even the mailman had stuck around. So I walked back to my apartment and I haven’t gotten in the elevator since.

   Siri: 1, Lacey: 0

*Bear Grylls, a man who drinks his own urine every chance he gets. 

**I shouldn't show you pictures of the elevator in my building, because it sort of reveals how crap-tastic my building is.

"And the only reason for making a buzzing noise that I know of is because you're a bee...And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is for making honey...And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it."*

              So, about those bees.

        The exterminator came on Monday afternoon and had a good look at them. I could hear Sir Robert T.L.W. talking to him downstairs so I hurried all the way around the building to the back to listen in on what was going on. Robert didn’t recognize me because my hair was down and I was wearing a different shirt (this seems to happen to me a lot with apartment managers), so I had to introduce myself, which was awkward, since I spent a good ten minutes screaming to him on the phone on Sunday. And we'd spent a good half-hour together earlier that day. But I guess I'm utterly forgettable in every way.

        The exterminator explained that his ladder wasn’t tall enough to reach the hive. It would have been tall enough if my downstairs neighbor didn't have a serious hoarding problem and state regulations hadn't forbidden us from moving some of his "things" (read: garbage) out of the way. I found it all dumbly ironic, since Robert has no problem popping into my apartment whenever he feels like it, despite the lease (and the state) specifically stating that he can't.)

        Anyway, the exTerminator was looking at my kitchen window and wondering aloud if he could get at the bees from there (an unappetizing proposition).

         I tried to explain to both Robert and the exterminator, whom I'll call Julian for reasons that remain inexplicable even to me, that they’d never be able to reach the bees from my window because of the side the screen is on: if they removed the screen, they’d be too far away to reach the vent. The vent is on the side where the immovable glass part of the window is anchored.

         Both being men and middle aged and one being Hungarian and the other Armenian, they completely ignored me. I am female, after all, and not yet old enough to slap them around like their mothers or wives would. So we trudged up to my apartment and looked at the window. And guess what? Julian couldn’t reach the hive because of the way the window panes and screens are positioned. Really? No kidding!

        Julian said he’d come back with a taller ladder. I asked when. He said, “Not today.” Awesome!

        By way of comforting me, he said, “The bees don’t want to be inside. They get stupid when they come inside and die within 20 minutes.”

        I said, “Well, don’t think I’m ridiculous, but I taped up the vent above the stove, just to be safe.”

        And I did right!! Normally, I feel like I’ve got some sort of twisted, moronic concept of how things actually work, but Julian said my instincts were spot on and pointed out a few other places I could tape as well. He said the scout bees sometimes get lost and then they head towards the light and wind up inside. That’s when they head for the windows (just like the Interweb told me!). So there aren’t holes in my walls: they were getting in through the stove vent. Excellent.

Duct tape. Not just for wallets anymore! Also good for ducts.

        So I was gone all day Tuesday and all day Wednesday, and sometime mid-afternoon Wednesday (yesterday), Sir Robert called to ask if I was okay, because he hadn’t heard from me in a while and wanted to tell me the hive had been removed and to make sure I wasn’t dead. I appreciated the gesture.

        And today, there were three more dead bees in my apartment. I guess they were stragglers from the now-defunct hive. Sad.

        Bee one is dead between the screen and glass pane of the living room window. Bee two was circling the drain (metaphorically) on the stovetop. He was under the burner grate in the midst of death throes, and I felt cruel spraying him with Raid, so I decided to quickly smash him and give him a quick death. But I couldn’t get the magazine into the depression of the burner just right, so I ended up needlessly torturing him for about 30 seconds while slamming my current issue of Vanity Fair on him from every possible angle and yelling, “I’m sorry, bee! I’m really sorry!” Julia Roberts’ face is covered in bits of bee corpse. And I certainly didn’t do that bee any favors. It was the equivalent of leaving it in a bear trap to gnaw off its own leg. I felt pretty bummed about that.

        Bee three was just dead on the kitchen floor. Sigh.

        And so it’s over, I guess. Or I hope so, anyway. My dad said I should keep an EpiPen handy, just in cases, so I guess if I ever do get stung, I probably won’t die a hideous death. Not this time.

Lacey: 11, Bees: 0

*A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh.

"What's the buzz? Tell me what's a-happening!"*

            I walked into my apartment on Friday afternoon and went to the kitchen to make a snack. There was a dead bee on the windowsill, so I freaked out (just a little) and went to grab a paper towel to clean it up. That’s when I saw bee number two, dead on the other windowsill. Number three was in the sink. I’ll fast-forward to the total body count: eight. Slightly unsettling if you’re a normal human being. Mind-numbingly terrifying if you’re afraid of bees (or spiders, cucarachas, beetles, bed bugs or those fake ladybug-looking things that are yellow or orange instead of red). Also, I’m a little bit allergic to stingy things. Not die-of-anaphylactic-shock allergic, but swell up like the Elephant Man allergic. (Just to be clear, the story of Joseph Merrick kills me, and I don't mean to denigrate him or anything. It's just that I look a bit like him when I swell. Also we share an astrological sign. Leo, in case you're interested.) 

        So I started crying, like a normal, grown-ass adult does, and called my friends Richie and Jerome, who were on their way to pick me up for a movie, and asked them to help me clean up the carcasses, as I’m a big, fat weenie burger who isn’t fit to live on her own or have a letter on her wall.

        Then I went to work online trying to figure out what the hell was going on. The answers ranged from informative to outright horrifying. One lady said they don’t come in through the windows, but through holes in the wall or air ducts, and then they head for the windows because they see the light. (Yay! My screens aren’t broken. But, boo! My walls are?) One guy said he found bunches of dead bees in his house each day and when the exterminator finally arrived, he unearthed a hive that was five layers deep and twelve feet high. (Can’t think about that today or I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.)

One of the many images that underplays the danger

 of both bears and bees.

        The most comforting thing I learned is that bees bed down when the sun sets, so I didn’t need to worry needlessly while I was sleeping (or trying to sit in my living room or pee or eat or drink water)—as long as I was ready to roll as soon as the sun came up, or, at the very latest, 10 o’clock, which is when the bees go to work for real. (Think of it as the post-coffee break, pre-lunch period, when everyone is really alert.)

        Richie and Jerome helped me by cleaning up the dead bees (Jerome even heroically killed one that was on death's door in the sink) and forced me to buy some Raid (more so I wouldn't be so nervous rather than because they expected me to unleash my wrath on the bees. I don't hate bees, I'm just a little jumpy around them.).

        I called my apartment manager, Sir Robert the Long Winded, on Saturday morning and explained the situation. I was headed to work (one of the few times I felt supremely grateful to be working on a weekend). He said that he’d try to call an exterminator and/or pest control, but that they don’t usually work on the weekends. Really? Don’t they? What if I had a family of tarantulas in my apartment (oh please dear lord never let that happen to me!)? Or a nest of scorpions? That would have to wait until Monday?

        I explained that I’m allergic to bees, though I may have exaggerated the extent of the allergy a bit, and told him that this was a seriously exigent matter.

        And guess what? He took care of it!

        Just kidding, he totally didn’t. And when I called him on Sunday morning, he said that he hadn’t seen any bees in my apartment, so he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. So I reiterated how serious the situation was: that I was afraid to go home and I didn’t want the owner to have to pay for a hotel room for me to stay in while I waited out the hellacious bees (Richie recommended The Roosevelt...it is close by). Robert T.L.W. said he’d call some more exterminators.

            Well, he did or he didn’t, but anyway no one came and I was super nervous when I woke up this morning. I could hear the hive buzzing in my kitchen—I just didn’t know where they were.

        Fortuitously, I ran into Robert on my way downstairs and he took me on a bee tour. And I took some pictures, which, like most of my pictures, are pretty bad. I don't have any fancy 18x zoom, so just know that the black dots are bees and the window in question is my kitchen.

Those blurry black dots are BEES.

        They’re in the air duct connecting my stove vent to the outside. And they’re having a blast.

        I will end this post now, as it’s far too long, but know this: I do not want to be responsible for the decimation of a beehive.

        I was super nervous putting honey on my yogurt this morning for fear they’d see me through the window and exact their revenge. And what if these bees are Africanized? What if they know that the exterminator is on his way and they come for me like they did for Winnie the Pooh? I cherish nature and all that, but I don’t want to die alone in this apartment covered in pustules and swollen up like an unrecognizable blimp. Aside from hoping to be an attractive corpse and, more generally, not die alone in my apartment, I’m still young and I have a lot of dreams for the future.

Africanized bee, raping a stick?

Honey Bee. Sweet and innocent and gathering nectar.

        More later.

*Jesus Christ Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973). I’m sorry, I know it’s cheesy, but Easter is just around the corner, after all.

"If that's what you have in mind, if that's what you're all about, good luck moving up 'cause I'm moving out."*

        Well….I got an apartment. Hooray! I will be living by myself finally!

        I’m just scooting in under the wire, too. I have always said I’d live alone before I turned 30, and since I’m turning 30 in August in 5 years, I’ve made it with time to spare.

        But I’m not going to lie like I usually do. I’m scared shitless. I’m 85% sure I’ve made the right decision and I’m just scared because it’s new and different. Not because it’s the wrong apartment and I should hold out and look at 25 more places before deciding. And anyway, there’s no going back because I put down the deposit today and I don’t exactly have tens-of-thousands of dollars to plop down deposits at every apartment in town out of panic.

        I did look at a lot of apartments, and met a lot of interesting people. Apartment managers seem, in general, to be an unappealing sort. Or maybe it’s just that they are in an unappealing position. They have to walk every dipshit off the street through the same apartment over and over again, usually to have that person (like me) show disdain and argue about décor. But since most of them are living next to rent-free, I don’t feel sorry for them one bit. My current apartment manager (a man with a gold medallion tangled in his copious and always exposed chest hair) spends his days driving to the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf that is one block away, drinking tea and reading the newspaper, and then driving back home. At least, if I ever get locked out, I know I can walk over and find him. And maybe score a ride back home. (That is, if he recognizes me, which he never does even though he's known me for 8 years.)

My manager's chest hair is like this, without all the sex appeal.

        But here I’d like to share a taste of some of the other apartment managers I’ve met over the past month.

        Apartment Number One:

        After waiting in front of the building for 5 minutes, Ron (who graciously agreed to come with me) and I finally realized that the apartment manager was in the back of the building waiting for us. Why? Because she was a painfully shy woman in her early-thirties, who clearly didn’t want to have any interaction with human beings. She was practically hiding in the bushes when we finally found her. She cowered in the doorway while we “explored” the approximately 400-square-foot apartment. She pointed to the applications lying in a stack in the kitchen and tried to scurry away, but seemed torn knowing that she really wasn’t supposed to leave us alone in there. Things became clearer when she explained that her mom was actually the manager, but she was out at the moment. We thanked her and left her to run back into her own apartment and slam the door.

        Apartment Number Two:

        Sadly, I never met this apartment manager, because when I drove down the street I was so horrified that I immediately turned around and went home.

        Apartment Number Three:

        John was a Chinese man in what appeared to be late-middle age. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and had a truly offensive set of teeth. The first thing he said to me was, “Are you looking at this apartment for your son or brother?” What the hell is that supposed to mean? How old do I look? And who looks at apartments for her brother?

        He kindly offered to let me park in the garage, since it was street-cleaning day, but that was pretty much the last time he was pleasant. He proceeded to walk me through a building in which every hallway and the apartment itself was carpeted in blue pile. I think there must have been a sale on blue carpet (it’s probably an ongoing sale) when the building was erected because the whole place reeked of smoke and mildew. I was almost willing to overlook that, because the apartment was fairly sizable, and a one-bedroom rather than a studio. It also had a really big balcony, which I loved.

        But there were a few problems. There was no overhead lighting, the cabinetry was cheap, dark, hideous wood, and there was virtually no closet space unless you count the “hall closet” which, while being 3-feet wide, was about 8-inches deep, so I’m not sure what you could keep in there besides a broom. Or many brooms.

        I asked about the air conditioning (there was a wall unit in the living room but nothing in the bedroom), and he said I could get one of those “portable” air conditioners. Hmm, I’ve never heard of those. Do you think he was referring to fans? He also suggested that many people don't use the air conditioner because they're concerned about saving the planet. (Don't you guilt-trip me, guy!) Then I asked how old the carpet was and he said it was “only two years old.” I said I’d need new carpet and I’d need it not to be blue. He was surprised. “You don’t like blue?”

The portable air-conditioner is real! And it looks like a spaceship! And it costs as much as a spaceship!

        Then he started acting like I might not even get approved. He started saying things like, “We accept, at the very least, a score of 650, which is average. You’d have to have good credit.”

        I started to get offended and a little mad. Why is the guy with the unfortunate teeth and the Hawaiian shirt who lives in the smelly building talking down to me? Do I not look like a person with a respectable credit score?

        I have to admit that the balcony kept me in that apartment longer than I should’ve been there. I’m a sucker for sitting outside in the California sun. But as soon as I got out of that building, I felt nothing but relief. 

The view from the balcony of my current apartment. Sigh. I'll miss this.**

        Apartment Number Four:

        Jocelyn kept rescheduling me for one reason or another, but that was okay, because I was kind of sick of looking at apartments, and this one was affordable enough to make me suspicious.

        While I was waiting for her on the day of our actual appointment, I looked at the list of names by the intercom. I knew my friend Justin lived on that street, so when I saw his rather uncommon last name on the call box, I was excited. Oh, Justin lives here!

        When I told Jocelyn about Justin, she said he was her “favorite tenant” but that, if I mentioned her, I should refer to her as “Seda” because she’d recently changed her name. Okay.

        Jocelyn showed me all around the building and in the apartment. The apartment was listed as a single, which I’ve since realized is a euphemism for “studio.” I had thought it meant “one bedroom” but it doesn’t. So when I walked down the hallway to see the bedroom, I was bummed to find only a bathroom.

        And it was a nice enough place, and I liked it a lot. I considered applying and even took an application with me.

        But when I sent Justin a text telling him that we might potentially be living across the way from one another, he seemed a little upset. “Wow, that is so weird.” Thanks, Justin!

        But it wasn’t meant to be anyway. I just couldn’t picture myself there.

        My Apartment:

        Robert, my new apartment manager, is a story for another day (perhaps many stories, as time will tell). He’s a very friendly man from Hungary (which is, coincidentally, one of the few places I’ve visited in Europe), and boy, oh boy, can that man talk. In four languages, as it happens.

        But my apartment is quite lovely, has hardwood floors, tons of storage, and lots of western exposure. I will go into more detail on it as I live in it.

        And in the meantime, I’ve finally found a place to hang my “L.” (And lounge around naked, if I ever decide to. But I probably won’t, because I get cold really easily.)

*Lyrics from "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" from Billy Joel's super awesome album/magnum opus The Stranger. 

**Photo courtesy of Emily Sommer.