Welcome Back Kotter

Do you know what happens to all the mice in your apartment when you go on vacation for two weeks?

They die.

They starve in your sink because your dirty dishes, their main source of nourishment, aren’t piling up anymore, and they’ve already licked the old ones clean. So they bury themselves among the wooden spoons and pint glasses and dirty plates and wait patiently for the leftovers that will never come.

This exact scene is what I found when I returned home the other night, and I’ll be honest with you, after I got past the “oh, that’s disgusting” phase, I felt sorry for the poor guys. My heart broke for them, whereas before, when I knew of their existence, but never saw them, I would walk around the house with my baseball bat, taunting them and joking about the things I would do if ever they dared show themselves.

I was cocky then, just trying to show off for my friends and make them laugh, but now, it was reality slapping me cold in the face. One by one, I took them out of the sink and deposited them in the trash (Not the most dignified final resting place, I know, but I wasn’t about to go out and dig through two feet of snow to bury them), as I did this, I discovered one poor fellow, trapped at the bottom of a drinking glass, was not quite dead yet.

It was clear that he didn’t have much time left to live -- almost completely paralyzed from starvation. I knew what I had to do, but it sickened me. I didn’t think I had it in me, but after a long conversation with myself, laced with many profanities flung out of fear, I finally worked up the nerve to do it.

I made it quick. I made it painless. After all my jokes of “splatting” the mice in my kitchen I had now followed through on my threat, and I felt terrible.

In my own roundabout way, I am getting to my point, and it is this: This is growing up.

After two weeks of spending the Holidays with my parents -- eating their food, watching their TV, spending the night in a house filled with people whom I cared about and who cared about me -- I now returned to face the harsh reality that there was no one waiting for me at my apartment. There were no fresh cookies cooling on the stove. The groceries in the fridge were bought with my own money, and half of them needed to be thrown out. And on top of all this lay the dead mice in the sink filled with dirty dishes that I should have taken care of before I left, and the awful realization that no one is going to take care of this for me anymore.

I have to make the hard decisions. I have to pay the bills. I have to clean up the mess. I have to kill the mouse.

The break is over, and it’s time to be an adult again.

And you know what? It kinda sucks.

But this is growing up. This is what it means to be alive, and in this world, you’re either living, or you’re dying, there is no third option.


So I’ll take the former. I’ll “Cowboy up” if you will (or even if you wont).



[When things start splitting at the seams and now the whole thing's tumbling down]