(this is a nod to the Muse song Butterflies and Hurricanes)
My dog, Billy Jr., has a white coat and he is an adorable furball with a very cranky personality. He’s always been that way. But for some reason, he’s been extra cranky these days along with a sudden behavior change: jetlag (lol). What I mean is, he sleeps all throughout the day and then in the middle of the night at like 1-3AM he would bark and wake me up.
My wife and I were jokingly saying he must have visited Korea without our knowledge, because his sleep pattern was basically that of a Korean jetlag. But anyway, this has caused great sleep disturbance to me and my wife and we’ve been super groggy. Wanting to get to the bottom of this, we walked him more frequently during the day and I played with his favorite toy, the tug rope.
But even then, something kept him up at night and it seemed like it was restlessness. He would keep licking, licking, and licking. Then I saw two things: a sore spot on his skin and a flea.
This is extra frustrating to us because Billy Jr. had already switched up his flea medications TWICE. We went with what he used to have in Korea first, then even with that we saw fleas so we switched to another medicine. Then even THAT didn’t work, so we went to the vet and got a prescription for an edible one. And here I was, seeing flea on him yet once more.
So what was happening? I called my vet to ask him if the medication wasn’t working, but he wouldn’t return my call. So after many hours of googling I realized… I have a friend who’s a vet!!! Why didn’t it register to me until now? Anyway, I messaged Gunila and Gunila gave me some news…
Ok. It was time to get to work. I removed all the covers of the dogs’ beds, washed all the throw blankets, collected all the toys, vacuumed the shit out of everything in existence, and called the exterminator. Turns out my extermination contract already includes flea treatment, so they’re going to visit us on Thursday to work on the house. The dogs need to have a flea bath on the same day of the flea treatment so I made the appointment for the flea bath and the grooming and now all we have to do is… Wait.
Aside from all this flea stuff, something I’ve been thinking about a lot is “how clean is enough clean?”. Something I learned after getting married is people have very different definitions of “clean”. An activity I would call “cleaning” is not to my wife, and what my wife would consider “clean” I would occasionally consider dirty.
When I was doing temple stays or visiting India there were very different standards of hygiene. We were encouraged to not shower every day, but we were encouraged to clean our dwelling practically every chance we got. Is it a water conservation thing? Maybe, but if we’re in an environment where we live together isn’t it a bit important to keep some level of personal hygiene?
I also saw on Instagram about this study that was done. It stated that when women see an unorganized house, their cortisol levels increase; but for men it has no effect. That made sense to me, because men typically don’t feel responsible for unorganized houses while women typically do. The question I had was, “is having an unorganized living space something to be this stressed about IN GENERAL? Regardless of gender?”.
Well, now with this flea situation I see why it’s important to keep an organized home. All the little nooks and crannies I had where I just piled stuff on, that’s prime real estate for fleas. Now that I started seeing it as a flea party, I couldn’t unsee it. After spending 5-6 hours just straight up cleaning everything today I feel very, very beat; but this is exactly the karma I have accrued by not having an organized living space I clean regularly.
Cleaning now became personal to me whereas it was something generally nice to do before. It may still feel tedious and tiring, but I don’t want my family to live in a flea-infested home so what other option do I have? And if I’m going to clean anyway, why not feel good about it while I’m doing it?
Along with the whole flea situation, there’s a cockroach situation as well. Our neighborhood has a lot of cockroaches and they’ve been entering our garage to die because of the pest treatment. If you’ve worked with me before you will know I have a major ick with cockroaches. Why can’t I get myself to just pick up the dead bodies? Well today during meditation I suddenly had a realization.
Perhaps it was because I wrote about this topic yesterday. When my rabbit died I couldn’t pick its dead body up because I couldn’t get myself to face the fact that it died under my care. I had that same avoidance to any kind of animal carcass. This is why I couldn’t cook fish for my wife, because I had to basically prepare a carcass. Every dead body was a reminder of my crippling guilt.
I recently had a bird dead in my back yard. It was barely out of its egg, for it didn’t have any feathers at all. A wild animal must have picked it from its nest nearby. As the lifeless body laid in my backyard flies were already on it, trying to sustain their life and keeping the circle of life going.
As I saw the cockroach flailing around with its belly up, it reminded me of that bird. The bird must have struggled as much as the cockroach is struggling now. Suddenly the cockroach stopped feeling so viscerally disgusting to me, I saw through its visual form and saw life itself and its preciousness.
This guilt with dead bodies is not helping me achieve anything. So what is the responsible thing to do with a carcass? Instead of looking away at it as if it was something I must not face, I accept the frail nature of life, our inevitable mortality, and the responsibility of staying true to life. I put my hands together and bow to the dead body, and pick it up to return it to nature.
When I think about it this way, my home on Thursday will be like a mass killing zone. And such is the weight I must bear for it is my lack of diligence that led to this result.
