Comfortable Cockroaches

I hope everybody is enjoying their summer. It is winter here in Sydney, which means I’ve finally stopped sweating (at least at night)! After the unbearably hot summer, this temperate winter actually feels a bit too cold for me. I’m becoming such a wimp!

One particularly cold day I decided to make soup and do laundry. In our house the vent for our dryer does not bring the air outside. It vents the warm air into our kitchen! In the summer this is not such a good thing, but on a cold dry winter day this was wonderful! In one room I had a dryer pumping hot air in my face, the fire of the gas stove, and my boiling soup! It took very little time for the room to get toasty warm and humid! I loved it!

Everything was great until my landlord saw the windows steaming up and decided to walk over. He opened our large glass sliding doors and commented that the kitchen was nice and warm. I happily agreed. Then he very politely told me that if the house ever got warm and humid in the winter that I had to open up the doors and let all of the heat out right away. I much less politely refused. He then went on to explain that it was because of the cockroaches (which we had not seen since we cleaned up all of the messes he left in the house).

He explained, and I am not exaggerating or making this up, that cockroaches enjoy warm humid temperatures, much like humans do (this part is actually true). Because of this, the only way to keep cockroaches out of a house is to leave all of the doors WIDE OPEN. This way the house will get really cold and the cockroaches will get uncomfortable. Once they are uncomfortable they will have no trouble finding the open doors and walking out.

At this point my head started doing summersaults. He was being 100% serious. How does somebody respond to something so profoundly stupid?? My brain started screaming at him, but my mouth wasn’t listening to my brain and only managed to silently open and close a few times.

He seemed satisfied in explaining his point, reminded me again that I should always open the doors as soon as the house got comfortable, asked me to explain this to the other housemates, then walked back to his house leaving our door completely open.

I stood there gazing blankly at my soup and started questioning the meaning of my existence as the cold winter air brushed against my face. In my life, every time I get comfortable will somebody make me open the door and let the cold air rush in? Maybe the soup symbolized my life, producing heat in a futile attempt at comfort, sustainability, and prosperity? Was I the dryer, spinning confused in circles trying to combat the evils of the world? Maybe I was the self-destructive wind, sweeping in to destroying myself every time I became comfortable.

How was it possible for a person to say something so stupid? If I recorded the conversation and played it back for him would he realize the very large and obvious flaws in his logic? Maybe his point makes perfect sense and I am the one that is too stupid to understand it. Am I missing something? Am I wrong? Is my entire perspective on life also wrong? Maybe everything I’ve ever believed is just an illusion. Do I even exist?

I stood in front of my soup contemplating everything there was to contemplate until I came to a conclusion that I rather liked. I was not the soup, the wind, or the dryer. I was John, a stubborn American student that was now cold. My soup was my dinner, the dryer was just a dryer, and my landlord was an idiot.

I shut and locked the doors, flashed a one finger salute over to his house, and ate my soup while the warm air from the dryer kept me and the cockroaches comfortable.