I'm so vindictive it hurts to look in the mirror

I swear sometimes I feel little knives floating around me instead of an aura. I can't help it. There are some days when I just really, really don't like people. Most people. It's a rare day when I don't like cats.

I want to go home.

Thanks for nothing, Sunday

Fuck today. Fuck obligations. Fuck everyone.


I spent most of the first 18 years of my life being non-judgmental, friendly, and accommodating. I feel like that should be worth something, like I now have the right to be a bitch every now and then.

I'm going to be honest, I don't have any friends I wouldn't change. I don't know of any person I approve of 100%. I'm not saying that they should seek that approval, I'm just saying that I hold myself to exceedingly high standards, so it's only fair if I hold everyone else to the same standards. I wish I could have one day, just one, in which I could go up to every person with whom I have an emotional relationship and tell them exactly what I hate about them without their being able to retaliate.

I hate that you'd condemn me before getting the whole story from the source instead of through rumors.

I hate that you love her more than you love me, even when you claim to be impartial.

I hate that you loved me more then than you love me now, even though I'm still the same person, and you're the one whose perceptions have changed.

I hate that you accuse me of taking you for granted when you've been taking me and my sacrifices for granted all along.

I hate that you claim to be my friend, but only care about that which pertains directly to you.

I hate that you're such a whore.

I hate that you bitch and moan about your work when what you're doing isn't even half as difficult as what I do on a daily basis.

I hate that your relationship with your mother is so much more open than my relationship with mine.

I hate that you slack off and take good grades for granted when I work so damn hard for so little recognition.

I hate that you took away my dreams and then accused me of losing them.

I hate that you were such a shitty, unreliable friend.

I hate that you're shallow, but every time I talk to you, I still hold onto the hope that the conversation will be fruitful.

I hate that you made me doubt the only thing I thought I could count on.

I hate that you make me feel so damn stupid and like I'll never be good enough.

I hate how you poisoned my heart and made me just like you so that I would hate me too.

Because every day I go through the list of things I hate about myself, and it's not fair for me to have to suffer my own venom alone. There are so many things I hate about other people, and so little I love, it's really no wonder I feel so alone all the time. I'm not proud of housing so much resentment. I feel even more resentment towards those who tell me to "just let it go", as if it were that easy. I don't want to forgive people their faults any more, because too often it feels like no one's forgiven me. Like they've never forgiven me, and I'll always be a fuck-up in their eyes, beyond redemption.

I'm tired of being the good guy. I'm tired of taking the higher road. I used to be so forgiving and understanding, and all that did was it made me a whore and a failure. I still care about people, but when I voice my concerns, they take it the wrong way and suddenly I'm the bad guy for not being an enabler. So fine. I won't forgive anymore. I won't try to understand. I'll stop caring.

And just wait, I'll still be a bad guy. Except maybe this time it'll be on my terms, and I'll be able to choose my own labels. I'd rather be a bitch than a whore. I'd rather be heartless than a failure.

I hate that you said you'd never give up on us, but really, wasn't that just all words? Don't you give up every time?

Disappointing

Semester's almost over. Only one more exam to go. I'm not feeling that great about it, but what can I do? Just study as much as I can and lump through it and hope I get a B- or better. This last exam is for the class I'm least confident about, since I don't always show up for lecture and even when I do, I usually fall asleep against my will.

I had an exam today and the results were posted this evening, which is shockingly fast turnaround time and makes me wonder if the professor isn't in a hurry to be somewhere. He has an accent and I wonder if his summer plans involve being somewhere where he won't. Have an accent, that is. English is hard at two in the morning.

My score wasn't traumatizing. I had been hoping for better, but I was still slightly above the average, even though the increase wasn't significant. What caught my eye was the fact that two homework assignments from a month ago were showing up as zeros. (Zeroes? fuck numbers. fuck spelling.) I knew that I'd done the assignments and that I'd turned them into the drop box outside the department mail room, but I didn't remember whether I'd gotten the assignments back or not. I thought I had, but after digging through everything in my teeny dorm (twice), I had to accept that either I'd left it at my boyfriend's (unlikely) or I'd never gotten it back in the first place.

I emailed the professor, explaining the situation, and his reply was pretty much "No proof? Too bad, too late." I'm hardly paraphrasing. He didn't try to make me feel better.

What irks me is that I hadn't even realized they were missing until tonight. The grades just remained blank, like someone intended to put in a nonzero grade, they just hadn't gotten around to it yet, so when I saw the zeros tonight, it took me by surprise. My homework grades haven't been spectacular, especially since his wording is so vague and sometimes isn't even related to the lectures (now I'm just pushing blame), but I'd never received zeros for them.

No. Actually, what pisses me off is the fact that someone lost my homework assignments. Two of them. My grade was kind of borderline and their stupid mistake pushed it under. Even if I had discovered it earlier, what could have been done to avoid this mess of a grade that I have now?

It's been more than two hours since then and I'm still in a foul mood. I'm angry at the professor for not being more helpful or sympathetic. I'm angry at the graders who lost two of my assignments. I'm angry at my poor sick boyfriend for resting instead of looking for my homework at his place in case by some slim chance it actually did end up there. But mostly, I'm angry at me for letting this shit happen to me. This was the course that I spent the most time and effort on. This was the course I liked, because I was learning stuff that was interesting and useful. This was the course that was difficult, but didn't seem too difficult, and I thought my grade couldn't be that bad.

Except it was. I gave it my all (ok. 90%. I refuse to give up sleep.) and in return I get a shitty grade and no way to redeem myself.

Fuck you, universe.

SRSLY

I am going to take my suitemate's radio and stuff it down the toilet. If she were hearing impaired or possibly deaf, I'd forgive her for playing her shitty music so goddamn loud. But she's not. So I won't.

She takes at least two showers a day and every time, she turns up her awful music to ear-shattering volume and it pumps right through the flimsy wall that separates my room from the bathroom.

I'm confused in general by people who must have music when they shower, but I usually tolerate it because it's usually at perfectly respectable volumes. And hey, I like most kinds of music.

But any music, no matter what type, sounds like UTTER SHIT when played that loudly.

SHOWER IN SILENCE, YOU FILTHY GIRL. SHOWER IN SILENCE.

Definitely Friday

It's definitely Friday, and I'm definitely not sober. I hesitate to say drunk because I've only been severely drunk once, and anything less than that I regard as "sort of tipsy". Because I'm a girl and I can get away with shit like that.

Anyway, I caught myself doing that thing again where I write teeny blog posts by updating my status and then commenting on my own status in lieu of paragraph breaks. I find this a productive act of creativity, and besides, who doesn't like seeing long, rambling, non-sober status blogs in their newsfeed? But it's also sort of a waste because those things are hard to archive, and I'm nothing if not obsessed with keeping all my shit together.

So here's what I was thinking:

You know how people are always saying, in movies and TV and shit, how if there are aliens and they come to Earth or try to contact us, we should be friendly and inviting? Or at least tolerant? I mean, it's subverted in other shows like in V, or in earlier movies, aliens are just plain evil, but in general, there's this feeling that we should be tolerant. Just in case, you know, the aliens come in peace and whatnot. We shouldn't shoot up a store before we check if there's cash in the register.

It makes sense in my head. Fuck you. Stop judging me.

Well, my thought is, What the hell? Aliens? Shoot them up! Get 'em out of here!

Here's why:

We humans are pretty damn fucked up. It's 2011 and we still haven't achieved world peace. Far from it, in fact. Just look at all the shit that happened in this year alone, and it's only April. Most people, if not all, still harbor their own prejudices regarding race, sexual orientation, sexual identity, and some other shit that I'm too tipsy (ok, drunk) to form words for right now. If we can't even get world peace right, what the hell are we doing trying to be nice to aliens? We want to treat aliens better than we treat each other? What the fuck is that?

Fucked up shit is what.

I want world peace as much as anyone, but you gotta realize, things are complicated. People are complicated. We're independent thinkers, and most of us want what's best for ourselves and ours. Not many people (if any) are inherently evil, but most of us want to be in the better boat, and that means someone's gotta be in the shitty boat. We can't even make nice with each other; we're a long ways away from making nice with the citizens of another planet.

And that's why I hope aliens take their time getting here, if they're even interested in us at all. I mean, if I were an alien race that had accomplished intergalactic travel, I'm not sure how interested I would be in stupid things like humans. They might like our plants though. They'd take all our marshmallow plants. Bastards.

I've also discovered that I perform better on Angry Birds when I picture people I dislike as the green pigs. My internal monologue gets pretty ugly, but it's effective.

My elbows are getting numb, so I should stop typing. No one reads this thing anyway. Just me. That's the way it should be.

St Patty's a bitch

Guy 1: Dude, I wanna get high. Just once. JUST ONCE.

Guy 2: No, I'm not gonna let you get addicted.

Guy 1: I don't wanna, like, smoke it all the time. But I, like, wanna get high. Just ONCE.

Guy 2: Ok, but I'm not gonna let you get addicted.

Guy1: JUST ONCE.

Guy 2: I'm your friend, I'm not gonna let you get addicted. I would expect the same from you.

Guy 1: I wanna get high!

Girls 1 thru 5: WE ARE SO DRUNK AND DESPERATE. WHOO HOO WE ARE TEH SLUTTEH!

Girl 2: I LOVE YOUUUUUU.

Girl 1: It broke again. It broked more.

Girl 5: Aren't I so good sex right now?

Guys 1&2: We are cool and fighting!

Girl 3: You two can't fight because I LOVE YOU BOTH, Cedric.

Girl 4: Haha, I dropped my phone again!


Fuck you, Saint Patrick's Day. Fuck. You.

They come in shifts. When one drunk group drifts drunkenly away, another, rowdier bunch takes its place. The girls are inevitably drunk and desperate for attention. The guys are inevitably high out of their tiny brains with delusions of manly prowess. They all stand outside my window, bragging about how drunk and horny they are.

I've given up on wishing these people away. If I wake up tomorrow morning and the space outside my window hasn't been vomited or urinated upon, littered with remains of joints, or set on fire, I'll count my blessings.

Have dinosaur, will doodle

I have this weird habit where I doodle dinosaurs on all my test papers. Well, usually just one dinosaur per test. Dinosaurs can be super territorial, or so movies would lead me to believe.

As someone who used to be a perfectionist, I feel like I owe instructors something when I feel like I didn't do so well on an exam, or even if I do feel pretty good about it but fear the possibility that I'm completely off my rocker and accidentally read all the questiosn backwards. So I draw them a dinosaur. Not an outrageously accurate one. Most of the time I don't even shade. I'm almost sure no actual dinosaur ever looked as lumpy or apologetic as my dinosaurs turn out. But it feels like I'm writing my own extra credit question and answering it correctly.

Draw a dinosaur for extra credit.

DONE.

I have not yet collected conclusive evidence that the inclusion of a dinosaur doodle improves my test grades. There's even the marginal possibility that I'd do better if I used my dinosaur doodling time to review my answers one more time or attempt to properly answer questions that I BS'd the first time through due to utter cluelessness. But for now, I am going to operate under the assumption that these dinosaurs are awesome and they put a smile on graders' faces and convince them to be a little more forgiving when they're marking my test papers.

It could have been tragic

I went to bed a little later than usual last night, having napped intermittently throughout the day and then studying for my cell bio exam in my waking hours. I drifted off to sleep somewhat slowly, only to be jolted awake by the loud sounds of intoxication accompanied by the strong smell of tobacco product.

First, it must be understood that I live on the second floor of a dormitory that is on a hill. One one side of the hill, the first floor is level with the ground and the second floor is where a second floor should be. On the other side--my side--the first floor is windowless dungeon and the second floor's window barely peeps over the parking lot. At night, bright parking lot lights provide ample lighting in my darkened room to play chess by, and all manner of sounds and aromas originate, quite literally, right next to my window.

I usually keep said window closed, but I have noticed as of late that I, as a mammal of higher intelligence, prefer fresh air while indulging in my studies, so I leave it cracked open throughout the day. This is particularly necessary in the winter since residents are unable to adjust the heat, and the rooms are fairly boiling over without proper ventilation.

So, through my only barely open window, at three in the morning (of course I checked), two males and one female were taking a smoke break right outside my window, which I'm sure is against some nonsmoking regulation. I wouldn't bitch as much, except they were also talking loudly.

They said all sorts of things which I promptly forgot in my half-asleep haze, but I do remember imagining larger and larger rocks falling on them until one of the childish males made some sort of offensive comment to the female, and she squeaked "Stopppp!" several times before stomping away to what was presumably her building. The males tried to drag her back into their boozed out smoking party, but she insisted that "That's IT. The end. ENDDDD."

Whatever the hell that means.

When they finally got her back within range of my hearing, she was sobbing brokenly and saying things like, "People are always calling me chunky or fat and I feel like I'm ugly and..." She seemed to have a complete meltdown and then the males left with her.

I was completely clueless as to what had actually transpired, but I didn't really care. I was just glad that they were gone. And while, under normal circumstances, I would have felt sorry for the female's apparent body image troubles, at 3 fucking AM on the night before an exam, I was just glad they had a reason to go away.

I wrote a poem for myself

But you can read it. No, really, it's ok. Then we'll be the only two people in the universe who have read this poem. Until I become famous. Fame = all bets are off.

It's not hard to understand
the enchantment that I feel
when I crack open the window
and cold night air so gently
trickles and drips into
my room
bringing with it the smell
of wood fire and cigars

Ok. So I'm pretty sure they're actually cigarettes (my peers don't typically smoke cigars outside my window), but that would've thrown the whole poem off and I'll be damned if I let a couple of inconsiderate late night smokers ruin my dorm experience any further than they already have.

They're called thumbs, asshole

At a time like this, when I should really be studying for my stats quiz, I'm too distracted by my roommate's astounding inability to do simple things like comprehend basic bathroom hygiene to cram more lecture notes into my brain.

I may have mentioned before that my roommate once left out a dirty dish on the sink for over a month. Not just any dish. A dish that had previously held some kind of curry. Now don't get me wrong; I like curry. A lot. But curry that's left over from a meal, sitting in a dish, under a few inches of fetid tap water? Not a fan.

Anyway, I bore that for over a month, taking refuge at the boyfriend's on the weekends, where he and his roommate understand that dishes go in the kitchen sink, not the bathroom sink. After giving the roommate plenty of time to redeem herself (in which she failed to do so), I shot her a message on Facebook and was all, "Hey, remember that dirty bowl living on the countertop? Could you take care of that? Like...now?"

If she gets to be disgusting, then I get to be passive aggressive. I see no reason to give up my scant rights.

She did end up taking care of the dirty dish after week 6. Thank God. I was starting to feel twinges of anxiety, like whatever was living inside the bowl had evolved eyeballs and was judging me every time I was naked in the bathroom.

Then, a few weeks ago, I discovered that someone had clawed through the last of the toilet paper on the roll and, sitting on the incredibly scummy bathroom floor, was a somewhat-new, formerly-clean roll. It boggled my mind to imagine the previous toilet occupant rising from his or her porcelain throne, walking the two steps it takes to get to the cabinet under the sink, removing the fresh roll of toilet paper from its plastic packaging, and then planting it on the filthy floor instead of mounting it safely on its intended holder. Why the missing step? Why subject everyone who uses that roll from now on to cringing at the nasty crap that it picked up on the side?

I assumed it was the suitemate's boyfriend. He seems to be a grade A douchebag--I say "seems" because I make it a point not to talk to him. Some may say that this is judgmental of me, but I make it a personal goal to limit my interactions with douchebags, so maybe it's his fault for seeming like such a giant, gaping one. I hear them screaming at each other in her room late at night, and then she starts crying, and then he yells at her for crying, and then someone slams the door, and then I feel sorry for her. I'd cry if I had a douchebag boyfriend who put perfectly good toilet paper on the floor, too.

Except tonight, when I was diligently trying to study for tomorrow's quiz, I heard the bathroom door open on her side of the suite (there are two doors into the bathroom, one that connects to my room and the other to hers). I heard her use the toilet, flush, then go to the cabinet and remove the last roll of toilet paper from the package. I waited to hear the twang of her dismounting the tp holder (it's got a creaky spring) as she reloaded that shiny fresh roll for all to enjoy, but instead, I just heard the door on her side slam shut.

Really?

I decided to wait a few minutes before going in to check, under the pretense of collecting tap water for my late night snack of instant ramen. Indeed, staring guiltily up at me from the dingy bathroom floor was my poor roll of toilet paper, painstakingly purchased from Meijer. I sighed a deep sigh from the bottom of my soul. Then I sighed again, a little less deeply, because the bathroom did not smell good.

Now, loading toilet paper onto the roll is a little more difficult than usual in our bathroom. Our toilet paper holder employs the use of a stubbornly strong spring which is hard to compress enough in order to squeeze it out of its designated indents in the wall. I remember the first time I reloaded the toilet paper, the entire tube flew out of my hand and fell apart. It took me several days to recuperate from the disappointment in myself that the scenario generated.

However, this is not an excuse to not reload toilet paper when it is due. Nor is patent college student laziness.

You have thumbs, motherfucker. Use them.

I feel another passive aggressive Facebook message is due.

Blizzardpocalypzilladdon is futile

I just thought it would be relevant to point out that my university was one of the only ones in the state to not cancel classes this morning. I thought I'd walk to my early morning lab as per usual, even though I got a discouragingly teeny amount of sleep last night. By the time I had shuffled to the next bus stop over, I'd made up my mind to not walk any further than the cafeteria again this semester.

Then I forgot all about it this afternoon and walked all the way back from classes. Halfway through my waddle home, I was driven off the sidewalk by a vehicle scraping snow off the ground. Way to defeat the purpose, vehicle.

I should probably eat dinner tonight, but motivation to go out again is low.

They're not all gonna be gems

I just wanted to pop on here to say that I love purple eyeliner. I remember, way back when in high school, when I was trying to figure out this whole cosmetics business (not because I wanted to be more feminine or whatever, but because I needed the knowledge for the role of a drag queen but that's a really long, overtold story that I'll save for some other time after I've gained fresh perspective on it), I did an internet search and the internet told me that purple eyeliner was so great for me. I couldn't make it work back then, with a tiny stub of purple eyeliner that I'd stolen from the drama department's makeup stash, but now I have SO MUCH PURPLE EYE MAKEUP. And it is ALL AWESOME.

I'm sorry if you came here looking for a really deep post. But I looked at my blog stats not fifteen minutes ago and apparently I'm the only person who reads these posts, so that's ok anyway.

P.S.: I am really confused to why my suitemate's ex is still using our shower. Unless he's not an ex anymore? Still, it's disconcerting to have "boy in shower" worries when I'm living in a single for the sole reason of avoiding interaction with icky people.

P.P.S.: No, there is only one person writing this blog--me. Something confusing happened with Google accounts and when I tried to change the name I sign with, things exploded and now it looks like I'm two people. I'm not, really.

Duct tape

I get tired of shit a lot, but the shit I get tired of most is censoring myself on Facebook.

See, I joined Facebook back in the days when you had to have a .edu college email address to join. I wasn't actually a college student, but I took college classes and I wanted to impress this chick I had the hots for (ok, so it was more like platonic lesbo craving for affection) who had a Facebook account under similar circumstances. So I got meself a Facebook account, and it was pretty boring at first because most of my high school friends couldn't have one, but then Facebook did that thing where it ripped a hole in the belly of the then-muffintop monster known as Myspace and sucked all of those young folks out of its dripping guts and then similar things to older folks and folks in nursing homes and, my favorite, folks who make hiring decisions.

Yeah. Thanks Facebook.

Now I hesitate to even drop the f-bomb in my Facebook statuses. Which is kind of silly when you consider that I still left my somewhat questionable poems up, particularly that one about the rape of Persephone and birds pooing on everything.

But, what I mean to say is, Facebook being a literal tool for people to "spy" on me in my less professional moments takes the fun out of Facebook. Yay! It has Farmville! But wait! You better not be playing Farmville while you're being bored out of your mind working behind the front desk of the library. Your boss will get pissed.

So silly.

People like to have fun. Taking the place where they like to share their fun with their friends and turning into some kind of glass house into which potential employers can voyeur-stare? Not fun any more.

Please, someone make a replacement for Facebook. Someone who understands that professionals deserve to have fun, too. Professionals have the right to say "fuck" after hours. Professionals can do their fucking professional jobs, then roll off their pantyhose, stick their feet into big fuzzy fuck-off slippers, and get shitfaced.

But, anyway. What I wanted to do today, on Facebook, was to make the following comment on a friend's photograph of two half-gallon jugs of chocolate milk, side by side, on a desk:

"That shit needs to go in the refrigerator."

And then I couldn't, because I was struck with this sudden, paralyzing fear that I'd apply for an internship, and some dude would go look at my Facebook, which has privacy settings up to my ears but still isn't enough to really protect anything, and be all, "This chick isn't professional enough about chocolate milk. Moving on."

RIDICULOUS.

Facebook, please be fun again. I'm tired of being serious on you all the time.

Kinda like a raccoon

Is it a "thing" now to fill up whole notebooks with crap that you think sounds neat? One of my sister's friends was asking around on Facebook for quotes she hadn't heard yet, so that she could put them and some random poems into a notebook. I'm thinking, wut? What is the point of this? Are your own thoughts so boring that you have to paste others' into a notebook to, I don't know, look at while you're on the toilet?

Because, to me, that's kind of like a raccoon collecting shiny things just because they're shiny. The big difference here is that raccoons can't create shiny things on their own.

I'm not saying that quotes aren't awesome. They can be fun, inspirational, motivational, or a host of other positive adjectives. I just don't see the merit in filling a whole notebook with them.

Whoops. Irresponsibility.

So I was going to share the rest of the epic adventures with the ants and the roommate's dirty bowl that lives on the counter and how that week just sort of sucked and all the awful hole digging that went along with it. Like, literal hole digging. They dug a huge hole right outside of my pitiful window which is barely an inch off the ground and it sort of matched the hole that they smashed into my wall.

And then the pest guy came in as requested and lectured me on ants for approximately half an hour before getting on his hands and knees and smacking the shit out of those little fuckers with his bare hands. Because he's a professional. This is how professionals do shit, y'all.

I don't actually say "y'all" in real life. Unless I'm drunk. And I misspell it most of the time, even in sobriety.

And then my computer got one of those awful fake anti-virus bugs that hijacked my browsers and tried to convince me that I needed to download their fake software and give them my personal information. I had to call up my dad so he could look up the quick fix online and subsequently spent a full hour trying to restart my laptop in safe mode. My laptop's row of function keys is fucked up. You have to press Fn and the function key simultaneously to get the F1 thru F12. Otherwise the keys do things like mute and increase screen brightness, which is actually super useful, but less awesome when the laptop is new and you're not used to this newfangled "user friendly" shit. Since to restart in safe mode, you have to press F8, this was a serious headache until I figured out how it worked.

Quick tangent here: Why is it that every time I press "enter" to start a new paragraph in the blogger composing window, the cursor looks like it's jumped up to the previous paragraph even though it's where it actually should be? It's confusing and stupid.

Blogger.

And then things got slightly better, then slightly worse, and then better again. I totally had a more recent, relevant point to bring up when I started this post but now I've lost it while reminiscing on the past month. Whatever, no one's reading but me. No worries here.

Which means that if I wanted to give all my readers a hug, I'd be hugging myself. That would be awkward and super emo. No thanks.

I Think I've Been Here Before

Ok, let's be honest. Glitter isn't my first blog. It's not even my second. I think it's my fifth. Or maybe sixth, if you count Myspace. Seventh, if you count Facebook.

I don't have commitment issues. I just like to keep things separate.

I also like not having ants in my bathroom, not having a suitemate who believes it her sole duty to feed those ants by dropping crumbs like fairy dust everywhere she goes, and not having giant gaping holes in my wall.

I take what I can get. I can get as much blogging space as I want. There are apparently drawbacks to using Blogger, but in the five years I've been keeping blogs with it, they haven't been a real issue for me.

Last night, I came back after a riveting adventure of sitting and ordering books off my laptop from my boyfriend's place only to find small black dots moving along at a steady pace on the floor of the bathroom I share with my suitemate (and her boyfriend, who technically lives down the hall, but for all purposes never sleeps in his own room).  I was so freaked out that by the time I had run back into my own room and shut the door firmly behind me, I had convinced myself that the bathroom was overrun by ants.

I sent in an electronic request to maintenance, pest division, to come look at it first thing in the morning, and a pity party email to my RA, whom I've only seen twice in person but is pretty damn cool as far as I'm concerned. My RA consoled me and offered me a sleeping bag and floorspace, but I was too proud to leave my room to the mercy of the legion of ants holding the bathroom hostage. There's only a slight barrier between the bathroom and my bedroom, and I would be a fool not to fortify my defenses.

Armed with nothing more than a bottle of 100% tea tree oil (nature's most omnipotent natural remedy, to hear some speak of it) and a box of 200 ct. cotton buds (q-tips for those of us who don't believe our packaging), I dabbed, swiped, and dribbled the potent smelling stuff all over the threshold of the doorway, killing any ants that came into my room on sight.

I kept this up, re-applying and swabbing and stabbing with q-tips, for the better part of six hours before admitting to myself, sometime around 1:30 AM, that I would have to sleep for something like seven hours, and that I couldn't expect myself to catch every unlucky ant to brave the tea tree oil barrier while I was catching some shut-eye.

Little did I know, the morning had more unpleasant surprises to spring.