I have not yet, however, eaten cake out of the garbage can. So that's something.

There comes a time for every single woman when she realizes something: even though she is strong and independent, capable and happy to be makin' it on her own, living alone is, occasionally, not all it's cracked up to be. Miranda Hobbes bought her own apartment, choked on her takeout Chinese food, and had to give herself the Heimlich on a moving box. I had a similar moment tonight. But rather than choking, it was...the Sneak Attack of the Five-Inch Bug.

I went into the bathroom this evening and discovered, hanging from the ceiling like Spiderman, the biggest bug I have ever seen. (It was at least three inches long! Plus two-inch antennae! I am not exaggerating.) The kind of bug that you can't, say, squash under an 800-page issue of Vogue or step on with a shoe because it will a) crunch, and also probably b) ooze guts everywhere. Gnat guts I can handle. Fly guts. Even some spider guts. But not Five-Inch Bug guts.

My first thought was 'THIS is why people have boyfriends!!!!' To deal with creatures, obviously.

But then my common sense kicked in, and I gathered supplies: Collander. Broom. JCrew catalog. The plan was to use the broom to knock it off the ceiling into the bathtub, trap it under the collander--the big metal bowl would have been better for size and weight, but the holes in the collander would allow me to maintain a visual on the Five-Inch Bug, eliminating the chance of surprise escapes ( you know, in retrospect it's sad that I have this much experience with trapping bugs...but I learned a lot from the camel crickets in our house on River Road)--use the JCrew catalog for portability, and flush it down the toilet. The plan was foolproof!

Until the Five-Inch Bug, upon being successfully knocked into the bathtub, scurried into a hole in the bathtub and out of reach. (No need for alarm--the hole is supposed to be there. The bug is not.)

So I covered the hole with packing tape.

Anyway, it occurred to me, as I was thinking about boyfriends and roommates and how I should get myself one of those to deal with this kind of situation, that I had a roommate. And the division of labor was: "Allison deals with rodents. Hannah deals with bugs." (I am not afraid of bugs! Usually.) She sure as hell held up her end of that bargain (see: the Mouse Family Occupation of 2006), so I would have been on bug duty anyway.

But anyway, now I'm skittish and keep thinking that every dark spot--a stray blueberry in the kitchen sink, imaginary shadows on the wall, even the pine knot in my bookcase--is actually the Five-Inch Bug returning to eat me in my sleep.

UPDATE (Friday, 10:27am): IT CAME BACK! Not five minutes after I posted, the Five-Inch Bug returned! On my bedroom floor! (I don't even want to think about how it got from the hole in the bathtub to my room.) And then I spent 30 minutes--I am not exaggerating--chasing it around my apartment with a collander and a piece of cardboard, capturing it FOUR TIMES only to have it escape before I finally managed to flush him down the toilet.