Your Friday Awesome: Ladybird's Bluebonnets

Yep, just bluebonnets.

I spent last weekend in Austin and the hill country visiting friends, seeing an amazing play, and being brought to wistful tears by a repaired sidewalk and a chopped down magnolia tree (more on that later), but April in Central Texas means bluebonnets. And they are awe-inspiring. Thanks Ladybird.

And thanks to Starr C. of Suburbtopia for the image and a fantastic visit!

Blogging for Choice

Remember when the the Supreme Court made good decisions?

Today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

Thirty-seven years ago, the US Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, Roe v. Wade, recognizing the constitutional right to privacy and a woman’s right to choose. Our supporters, the millions of people we serve, and those who serve them – we are Planned Parenthood, we stand in support of Roe, and we will continue to stand strong in the years ahead. - Planned Parenthood

While in graduate school in Texas, I had the privilege of meeting Sarah Weddington. She argued Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court at the age of 26, because as she told me "no one else would take the case."

As I've said before, living in Texas was part and parcel of my education. Growing up the in San Francisco Bay Area, raised by a feminist mother, and born six years after Roe v. Wade, the right to complete reproductive health was simply part of the fabric of my life. But, that does not mean I took it for granted.

In my experience, it was very clear just what Planned Parenthood and other women's clinics, offered to women and girls. Going to a Catholic college, Planned Parenthood was a place to get treated for a UTI without a lecture on the pre-marital sex you weren't having. It was the place I drove young women who came to the college's Women's Resource Center, because if I wrote down the address or phone number I would be expelled.

Once kicked off your parent's healthcare plan, in the middle of the post dot-com recession, Planned Parenthood was a place to receive basic medical care, your birth control, and your annual pap smear for free (or for the cost of a thankful donation as you left).

Which is why before leaving for Texas I volunteered as a community outreach member for my local affiliate. It was then that I learned just how fragile the necessary services Planned Parenthood provides were, even in California. I also learned how few women knew that they even existed (even outside my Catholic school bubble).

But when I moved to Texas, I truly learned just how hard people are working to strip women of their ability to access basic services.

The first day I volunteered at Planned Parenthood in Austin, the staff asked to see my teal Medical card (the program that allowed me to access services for free in California). You would have thought it was made out of gold. I soon learned why.

When I arrived in Texas, Title X funding had been reduced so only women 18 and under could access services on a sliding scale. Six months later only women under the age of 16 could.

I volunteered in the downtown clinic - the only one that could then accept what few patients could access the sliding scale, but could not provide abortion services. The North clinic could, but only medical abortion. Surgical abortions could only be performed in the South clinic - a feat of community organizing and architecture created after a fierce battle to provide services despite the efforts to make building it nearly impossible.

But, I knew a lot of this going in. I knew that there are counties in Texas without a clinic of any kind for miles, and that the efforts to limit access were immense. What shocked me most was how few young women in Texas knew that services like these even existed anywhere. The UT campus has an amazing women's clinic that provides basic women's healthcare. But once I stepped foot off the campus, whether at work or at Walgreens, I continually found myself, not an abortion counselor, but a biology teacher.

Young women quietly asked me about STI symptoms they were experiencing, not knowing they were an STI. Or they quietly asked me about normal changes in their body that they were sure were a sign that something was wrong - because they had no knowledge of their own anatomy. At 20 or 23 or 28 they had never had a pap smear. These women were not just experiencing a culture that made abortion a bad word. The extremely conservative lawmakers that had not only made women fight to access basic services had also succeeded in keeping them ignorant of their own bodies, thanks to abstinence only education and the pervasive culture that a woman's body was dirty and abnormal.

All of this is to say that the efforts to shut down clinics, make it impossible for them to provide services, difficult for women to actually obtain services, or perpetuate acts of violence against providers for providing a basic medical procedure, are not the only actions taken to strip women of their ability to choose.

The theme of this year's Blog for Choice day is "trust women." But, in order to ensure safe and legal access to abortion, it is not simply enough to trust that women can make the decision to have an abortion or not, to access Plan B or not, to take birth control or not. Denied access to abortion is a symptom of a greater mistrust in women. A mistrust that limits our ability to understand the biology of our own bodies, to know how to keep ourselves healthy and to be able to seek preventive services.

Read more posts as part of Blog for Choice day, here.

Image via PEP.

No, You Don't Need to Speak with My Husband

One of the people I met in Austin was the amazing Starr C. who has started the insightful and funny Suburbtopia. Some might call it a mom blog, but really it is about living as a feminist when you are also a wife and mother and graduate student and a veteran and work full-time and you do all of those things awesomely. Really. In the middle of Texas.

She recently shared her experience of trying to find a realtor whose gender norms were not firmly planted in 1952. After setting up the initial process on her bank's website, the bank-assigned realtor called and said this:

I'm sorry, I thought Starr was your husband's name. Should I discuss the selling of your home with him or is it okay to talk with you on these matters?

When Starr C. told her that she could more than handle the call, the realtor then questioned whether or not it made sense for her to work in addition to her husband, because could her salary really cover the cost of day care?

Yeah, that is how you start a good client relationship. By being totally intrusive and condescending. Oh, and the realtor was a woman. Who obviously works, and who works in real estate. But, of course she assumed that she makes more than Starr C. and understands real estate better. Obviously she hasn't met Starr C. That woman is probably smarter and more skilled than most people on the planet. Needless to say, she got a new realtor.

In a recent post, I talked about how I chose not to change my name when I got married, and that it has not caused the end of civilization. But, regardless of the fact that I did not change my name when I got married, the assumptions tied up in the grand idea of "marriage" are so ingrained that most people assume you have taken your husband's name, regardless of whether or not you have. Built into that assumption is the belief that along with taking your husband's name, you also relinquish your power to your husband, particularly your economic power.

Starr C.'s post reminded me of my first experience of working against this assumption. As I said, most people assume we have the same name. The only reason they know we don't is if both of our names our on a document. And in that case, there have never been questions of why our names don't match, but of whose name should go first.

The most jarring example of this, was when we filed our first taxes as a married couple. Since it was our first time filing, we figured it would be a good idea to talk to a professional to see if we should file jointly or separately and to make sure we got it all right. We gathered all our paperwork and went down to visit a very jolly man my family has known for years. All was going well. We asked if we should file separately or jointly. He said jointly would be our best bet. He asked if I changed my name. Nope. Okay, moving on. Then he asked who should be the primary name and social security number on the return and who should be the "spouse". Both my husband and I said I would be.

You would have thought we said to make our cat the primary. For a good five minutes the accountant tried to dissuade us and make me the spouse, "because that is what he IRS is used to." Really? I thought they were used to processing things by social security number. Oh, and they are also used to seeing my tax returns because I hadn't gone straight from being my father's dependent to my husband's, since you know coverture is over.

My insistence (backed by my husband) that my name be first on the return had nothing to do with asserting our feminist principles to the federal government. It has to do with the simple reality that our relationship is egalitarian to begin with. Each of us have different strengths and interests, and based on those strengths and interests we divide up the household responsibilities. Sure, no one likes doing the dishes, so we try and do our fair share. However, when it comes to the economic front, I am the one that makes sure bills are paid and we are getting the best deal on our cell phone and internet contracts.

Not because I am better and handling money, we make decisions jointly and my husband has managed his own finances and that of his touring band for years, but because I am more comforatble dealing with people on the phone when things having to deal with money don't run smoothly. A wierd charge on our credit card? I call to clarify it. Our internet is down? I call to see what the problem is. Our renter's insurance needs to be adjusted? I call to talk to them about it. Why? Mostly because I am more comfortable asking to speak with someone's manager when I don't get the answer I need or they continue to try and up-sell me.

So, if I am the one handling all this on a daily basis, wouldn't it make sense that I be the one to file our return? Afterall, the world revolves around social security numbers, or at least the last four digits. When we merged a few accounts where it made sense to keep my husband as the primary, it has been a pain to try and remember the last four digits of his social security number in order to get anything accomplished. And god forbid if something was wrong on our return, it would be me that ended up talking to the IRS.

Of course, I didn't share all of these details with our tax guy. Instead, I resorted to framing the discussion in terms of finance-speak and asserted, "I am the CFO of this household!"

It worked. My name is first. Now lets just hope I never have to talk to them.

The Austin Chronicles: The Language Barrier

As I've mentioned before, I was raised in California, a place with a temperate climate and non-invasive bugs. When I chose my college for undergrad, I had one requirement: it must not snow there. Obviously that limited my options, so when I applied to graduate school I thought I would expand my horizons.

When it came down to it, I had two places to choose from: Boston, Massachusetts or Austin, Texas. After my summer in Washingon, DC I thought I was ready to test my weather survival skills, but then I remembered that it wasn't just the weather that is different between the east and west coasts. There is also a language barrier.

Somehow I have managed not to be able to speak Spanish, despite three years of classes in school, growing up in a town that is almost 60% Latino, and parents who are fluent. However, while conjugating a sentence beyond giving basic directions or ordering tacos sends me into a brain-melting panic, I can understand quite a bit. The Spanish language (or perhaps more accurately in my home town, the Chicano dialect) is so ingrained in California culture that even if you are a gringa like me and can't physically can't trill an "rr", the basic rules of pronunciation are ingrained in you, since at one point in your life you will live in a city that begins with "San" or "Santa" (nod to imperialist history here), and enchiladas and tamales are considered comfort food.

As I was weighing my options (after living in San Francisco, neither snow nor heat sounded so great) I remembered what occurred shortly after I arrived in Washington, DC. And which is why I ultimately chose Austin.

After flying to DC, I spent my first night in the mid-Atlantic with my college roommate whose parents lived in Virgina. She was going to help me buy all the stuff that wouldn't fit in my two giant suitcases (like extra-long twin sheets and a pillow) and then drive me up to DC to settle into my dorm room.

The whole night she kept talking about how we were going to go this department store "Hecks" to buy things. It wasn't until we pulled into the parking lot the next day that I realized the department store was not named after a G-rated curse word, but after a family - Hecht's.

The night before we left, we had looked up directions to my dorm online, but they were a little odd so I called the dorm's front desk to double check. The directions were indeed a little off, so I wrote down the street names the receptionist gave me. Unfortunately, my California ear was not trained to German and Native American words and the way I thought they were spelled was not even close to their actual spelling. It took a couple of conversations with gas station attendants and folks on the street before we finally made it to the dorms.

With that (and the snow and tuition costs) in mind, I decided that going to a state with a similar demographic would be smarter because they would have the same pronunciation rules. For example:

• All double L's are pronounced like a Y (tor-tee-ya)
  
• If a letter has some kind of extra marking on it (like a tilde or accent) then it is a clue to the pronunciation of that word. They are also subtle hints: accents add flair which means that syllable is extra special. Tilde's are squiggly which means that isn't a boring old N but something with a little wiggle room (mon-yawn-a)
  

Okay sure, most non-Spanish speaking Californians will screw them up sometime, but I've only ever heard tortilla mispronounced by those poor souls who have never eaten an advocado. However, there are a few that are pretty basic rules that form the basis for pretty much every proper name or menu item in California:

• If there is an E at the end of a word it isn't silent, and is pronounced like a soft A (tamale)
• I sounds like E (fiesta)
• A is never pronounced harshly (like they do in Boston, or in flavor)
• If a word starts with a J then it is pronounced like an H. Again, there are clues. It is usually preceded by the ubiquitous San, Santa, La or El (San Jose or La Jolla)
• If G is followed by U is is pronounced like a W (Guadalajara)
  

It turns out I was very, very wrong. In Texas, the Spanish language has also gone the way of Mexican food - it has been bastardized.

To get to campus I took the (free!) shuttle that stopped just a block from my breakfast nook. While it was strange to get on a bus and not pay, or even have to show a student ID, it got even weirder when the automated voice began announcing stops. In the span of two minutes I heard the disembodied voice pronounce San Jacinto with a hard A and J and pronounce every letter in Guadalupe separately, except for the last E which they left off.

Weird. Maybe its like the disembodied voice in the San Francisco underground MUNI system that for some reason pronounces Embarcadero like Embarcadera, just a glitch in the programming. But, nope. Every single person in Austin says "I'll meet you on G-wad-a-loop" and "its the building on Sand-ja-sin-toe."

Flickr user, alycat

I quickly learned that I needed to pronounce these names the same way, or no one would know where the hell I was or where I was going, so I began saying "Okay, I'll see you on G-wad-a-loop."

A few weeks after I resigned myself to talking like a gringa, I was going to meet a friend at a bar. He called and said, "I'll meet you at nine. It's on the corner of 6th Street and Net-ches." At this point I had been in Austin a few weeks. I'd figured out that the 1 Loop was a freeway that was also called MoPac and didn't actually loop, that Martin Luther King Boulevard was strangely in a nice part of town, and that Koenig Lane was pronounced Cane-ig and turned into Allendale, Northland and eventually Ranch Road 2222 without warning. I had also been to 6th Street and to a street I was pretty sure a Texan would pronounce "Net-ches," so I decided it would be my first test to see how comfortable I was in the city. I didn't look at my Thomas Guide or Google maps.

Fifteen minutes later, I parked my car and was standing on the corner, but the bar was nowhere to be found. I called my friend:

Me: Its on 6th and Net-ches, right?

Friend: Yep, are you here?

Yeah, but I don't see it.

I'll come out and meet you....I don't see you. Where are you?

On the corner of 6th and Net-ches.

No, you aren't.

Okay, spell Net-ches for me.

N-E-C-H-E-S, what street are you on?

N-U-E-C-E-S.

In an almost perfect spanish accent he said, "Oh, you are on New-a-says. That is a different street."

The Austin Chronicals: A Brief Reminder

Ridding the house of cockroaches was not where my exciting adventures in the entomology of Austin ended. When you live in a eighty year old house in a hot and humid place, it is a good day when you can recognize what it is you are killing, scooting past on the porch, or (sometimes) scooping up and making it the neighbors problem.

Is that fuzzy caterpillar on the porch poisonous? Not sure, run away.

Should I leave the porch light on so I can see to put my key in the lock, or leave it off so I'm not accosted by June bugs before I can get in the door? Leave it off.

What the hell just crawled through the tiny gap in a closed window and is now on my pillow? Don't know, but kill it now before it bites you in your sleep.

However, not once did I see one of these:


That, was discovered by a friend's dog while she made dinner inches away from it. Evidently, the Texas version isn't poisonous, but they also come in pairs...

The Austin Chronicles: Duck and Cover

I'm a drought baby.

That makes is sound like I was born during the dustbowl, but really it just means I was born in California. California is always in a drought - or, at least has been since I was born. I've never seen a full reservoir. I thought those stair-stepped lines of earth around all "lakes" in California were normal.


It wasn't until El Nino came that I saw an honest-to-goodness downpour. At twelve I sat in the back yard with my mom, sister and a few family friends as the moms tried to talk down the kids under ten who were sure it was the end of the world.

Only that wasn't really a downpour, at least not what people in the rest of the country would call a downpour. It was really just enough rain to actually use an umbrella, with some thunder and lightning to send the cats under the bed.

I didn't see a real thunderstorm until I spent a summer in Washington, DC. As I was sitting in my dorm room, laying on top of the air conditioner, wondering if I would ever stop sweating, the sky started to turn a funny shade of green. My parents had lived in Michigan for a bit until they couldn't handle not being able to barbecue all year long, so my mom had told me about when the sky turns green. It meant run to the basement. To the south....south-something corner.

But, I was in the third day of living on fourth floor of a dorm. I could barely find the bathroom, let alone the south-something corner of the basement. So I called my mom.

Mom: Hello.

Me (barely concealed panic): The sky is turning green.

Mom: Oh, well what are the clouds doing?

Me: I don't know, I'm in a building surrounded by buildings and the fullest, lushest trees I've ever seen, I can't see the sky!

Mom: Turn on the television. Is there a read ticker on the bottom of the screen?

Me: No.

Mom: Oh, okay.

Me: Oh my god. Its started raining...no its pouring...I can barely see outside the window!

Mom: Oh, yeah. That's weather.

Me: Oh, my god! Lightening just struck the tree!

Mom: Hang up the phone.

Me: Why?!?!

Mom: Because there's lightning. It can go through the phone.

This was during the Clinton administration, when we still had land lines, kids. And, yes, it's true.

Me: What?!?! Oh crap.

So I hung up the phone. And I watched the rain pour down. Then it dawned on me. This was the mid-Atlantic. Rain didn't mean cold, it was still warm outside. I ran next door and was officially given the title of The Crazy Californian.

I knocked on the door of the girls from North Carolina and Texas. And screamed: "Who wants to go jump in puddles!" And we did. Or I did, and the rest looked at me like I was, well, The Crazy Californian.

So, when I moved to Texas in August, I figured I knew what I was in for. I had spent a summer in DC so I knew about humidity and thunderstorms and hot nights and feeling like you'd been slathered in grease for three months.

Yeah...nope.

That cute little clapboard house built in 1922 had survived 80 years of Texas weather, but the first night I spent alone in the house I wasn't so sure.

I was awoken by a horror movie thunderclap shaking the windows and lightning flashing through the curtains. I shot out out of bed and into the living room. I was sure the world was coming to an end. The living room had nine windows all of which were shaking as the thunder and lightening continued and the rain whipped branches against the house.

I turned on the television. And there it was. The red ticker.

TORNADO WARNING: TRAVIS, HAYS and WILLIAMSON COUNTIES UNTIL 3:00AM.

We did not have a basement and I still didn't know what south-something corner to go to. And besides, all those windows weren't going to do much to help. So, I decided that the best plan of action would simply be to continue to watch the news until 3 am. The ticker was going, but the weather wasn't breaking through the one o'clock infomercials, so it couldn't be that bad, right? And if they did break through, they would tell me what to do, right?

At 2:57 the warning was cut off. I peeked out the front door to make sure Armageddon had not hit (it hadn't). And went to bed.

The next day I woke up to Grace the landlady knocking on the door. Evidently the storm had been mentionable enough to take a branch or two off the trees in the yard and she was overseeing the handyman.

Grace: Quite the storm!

Me: Oh my gosh! Yes! I thought I was just being a baby since I'm from California. There was a tornado warning and everything, I didn't know what to do!

Grace: Oh, honey. That is what the bathroom's for. We put that in when that one touched down downtown.

Me: - - -

Grace: Yeah, that's why its got no windows. You go in there and get in the tub with your mattress over your head. Those pipes should hold up.

Me: - - -

Grace patted me on the shoulder and went back to overseeing the handyman, as I stood there. That was why the shower had no windows? Because somehow I'd transplanted myself to tornado country?

I went back in the house and tried to figure out how I would be able to fit my mattress into the bathroom. Then I called my mom.

Me: THEY HAVE TORNADOES HERE!!!

Mom: Yeah, the rest of the country has weather.

Me: I like earthquakes better.

The Austin Chonicles: Vote for Carter

So, remember that story about ridding my house of cockroaches? While they are much more prevalent in hot places, they can certainly be encouraged to stay a while, which they were, by the previous tenants of the house I moved into.

I found the house I rented through my department's listserv. Our fabulously awesome graduate coordinator (AKA: the person without the PhD who gets everything done) sent an email that had originally gone to the journalism department. I didn't have to see much more than the image below to immediately reply.

That, dear reader, is a breakfast nook. An honest to goodness breakfast nook in a house built in the 1920's. I can't help but be a sucker for architectural details. My first apartment had all the luxuries of a San Francisco Victorian: bay window, claw foot tub and giant closet that is the result of at one point having a Murphy bed. Granted, it was the size of a postage stamp, but it exuded the architectural planning of a time when people thought about style and functionality, not just how to make drywall and vertical blinds as cheaply as possible.

But, back to the breakfast nook. I had just returned from a trip to visit my future campus when that email arrived, so I never actually got to see the nook or the rest of the house in person until I pulled up in front of it three weeks before classes started. It really was adorable. It may have been August in Texas, but the porch swing would make up for that, right? Sitting out on the porch with only the screen door closed on hot nights...well, I would learn how wrong that fantasy was later.

But, the breakfast nook. It was even better in person. The window looked out on our neighbor's overgrown shade garden (yeah, they have those in places like that) and the table moved so you could actually get in and out and clean under it easily. Oh, and the table was unvarnished soft wood that held the 80 years of household history.

The only problem was that it was inhabited by grad students. I had been concerned about the house being too close to undergrad partytown, but I hadn't thought about the torment grad students could inflict. I mean they are so busy. How do they have time to take care of a whole house? Oh, and if they came in straight from undergrad, they didn't really know how to clean a whole house, did they? But, I can't blame everything on being lazy or self-absorbed. It wasn't just that the house had been inhabited by grad students, it had been inhabited by grad students for ten years and never completely vacated. One would move out, one would move in. One would call it quits at their Master's, one would start thiers. One would decide to leave ABD, one would decide it was time to finally finish theirs.

If a rental property is never completely vacated, that means that it can never be completely cleaned. That means your landlord can never hire a maid service to come in and clean up after you and then charge you 80% of your security deposit. The problem was that even though all three inhabitants were moving out at the same time, and I and my new roommates - whom I had only spoken to over email - were moving in, the old inhabitants were a little hesitant to leave. "Oh, but, can't you just stay in the other roommate's room until my boyfriend can borrow his dad's truck next week and then you can move into the room you want?" Sure. Why not. I'll just be over here praying that UPS hasn't lost half of my clothing.

Thankfully, they did leave (with my DVD player remote) and my mom appeared two days later. Yes, I was an adult and had moved myself multiple times without her help, but she wanted to see where in this "god-forsaken state inhabited by fake Texans who were ruining the world" I would be living. Thank god for Mom.

My mom can make friends with anyone: the checker at the grocery store, the guys with area codes tattooed on their necks at the gym, and even my truly Texan 78 year old landlady, Grace.* She liked me alright. She didn't quite get why I was studying "that stuff," but she thought I was a bit sassy and was flattered that I loved the house her father-in-law built. But, oh, how she loved my mother. She thought it only made sense that my mom move to Texas so they could be friends. Luckily, this budding relationship meant that my mom convinced her that the house really did need to be cleaned even if we had already moved in. But, when you've outlived your husband and have a rental property in Texas the only appropriate solution is not to call a maid service, but to call your hairdresser. So the next day, Grace arrived with the hairdresser and a the hairdresser's friend and got to work.

However, I am my mother's child and we hate sitting on our butts while other people do work for us. It makes us uncomfortable. In this case, we not only wanted to help out, we had to. We walked into the kitchen at one point and there was 78 year old Grace pulling out the stove. I'm all for independence at an advanced age, but not if you are my landlady with children who are eager to sell off the property. Not that I'm saying she couldn't do it. You don't tell a Texan woman that. We just offered to help. And Grace, my mom, and I ended up doing quite a bit of work together that day since the hairdresser and her friend had to leave to go bail the friend's boyfriend out of jail. Welcome to Texas.

I will spare you the horrors that we found under the bathroom sink - things that only someone who had raised two children could deal with. Oh, and did I mention that one of the old inhabitants, who I did not have the privilege of meeting, thought it was a good idea to have a compost pile five feet from the backdoor in a place with four sizes of cockroaches? Book smarts do not always indicate street smarts.

But, we did eventually get the house clean, and rewarded ourselves with glass of iced sun tea - the first thing I bought upon my arrival was a container specifically for this purpose - and I spent a lovely first year there. So lovely, that I resigned the lease for a second year.

Since I have graduated high school, I have lived in five dorm rooms and five apartments. I've become really good at moving, and more importantly have learned the importance of the yearly clean-out. Why take crap that you haven't used in a year or even six months? You'll just have another box to haul. Everything comes out, gets edited and donated or sold, the original storage space is cleaned and then (in this case, since it was just a pretend moving clean) all remaining items are reorganized and put into place.

I was in the process of editing the bathroom, having tossed all expired allergy meds, and partially used gift cosmetics in the garbage, when I reached up into the back of a shelf above my head with a dust cloth. When a house has 3 inches of dust in the closets, crumbs from 10 years of all-nighters in the breakfast nook, and plants who have made claims in the siding of the house, you tend to over look a few things. One of those was the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet. As I started dusting, I heard a soft clinking in the corner. Since I didn't use that shelf what else could it be then the dessicated remains of a cockroach?

I pulled my desk chair into the bathroom and teetered on it only to find proof that not only had the cabinet not been cleaned in the last 10 years, it had not been cleaned in my lifetime.



*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Austin Chronicles: Everything is Bigger in Texas

In San Francisco I lived behind a taqueria. Near many taquerias, an Italian restaurant and a handful of corner markets, all off an alley filled with the garbage, recycling and compost bins of all the aforementioned establishments in addition to multi-family dwellings, half of which were populated by twenty somethings with limited housekeeping skills and questionable hygiene. And I never saw a cockroach. Not once. Then I moved to Texas.

Texas doesn't just have cockroaches, it has four different sizes of cockroach:

There are the small ones.

There are medium sized ones that fly. Yes, they fly. And they like to aim for the head.

There are the large ones that you don't want to kill because it feels like you are squashing a small rodent.

Then, there are the extra large "tree roaches" that I did not have the pleasure of meeting until they hitched a ride with a roommate who moved in from Houston. These are the ones that are as long as a salad fork, and when you approach them with your good-for-you-and-the-planet bug spray, they flex their muscles and give you the finger.

I'm not afraid of cockroaches. I certainly won't run out of the room. You've got to keep an eye on these suckers before they disappear. Even the giant ones can squeeze under the baseboards, and then reappear in your sock drawer. Everyone from Texas told me that they are normal. It's a hot and humid place for most of the year, so they kind of come with the territory. Uh, uh. No way was I going to spend two years with roommates that ate my food and didn't pay rent. Besides, I'm a California girl. Cockroaches aren't normal. They are the harbingers of food poisoning. And, they are gross. Oh, and did you know they like to walk on the ceiling and then let go every so often? Hell, no.

Luckily my sister came to visit shortly after I moved in. She had gone to UCLA and lived off-campus. Few people know that four neighborhoods surround UCLA: Bell Air, Hollywood, Frat and Sorority Row, and the student ghetto. If you don't live on campus, or have parents that are willing to pay for an apartment next to the Starbucks that Drew Barrymore goes to, or tan yourself into oblivion in a sorority, you live in what once was a neighborhood of quaint California bungalows, and has since been soaked in decades of cheep beer. Which means that amidst all the underage drinking, you also have cockroaches.

My sister was also not willing to live among bugs that would survive the apocalypse, so she discovered the wonders of boric acid. Forget chemical laden sprays - good old fashioned boric acid. I mean, it even has a cowgirl on it - obviously meant for Texas, right?

So, we did what any good Texan does, we went to the Home Depot (that, dear reader is another story entirely). But, we weren't sure if the 20 mule team was enough for Texas roaches, so the two sisters from California who had been in Texas all of a few weeks asked an employee. I'm pretty sure they'd taken him off a ranch in Lubbock and slapped an orange vest on him that day:

"Does boric acid get rid of all kinds of cockroaches? Even the really big ones?"

"Nah, you need something stonger."

"Really, what?"

"Shotgun."

I swear to god, he shrugged his shoulders and spat out chew right there in the Home Depot. But, I kind of wanted my security deposit back, so we asked him to point us in the direction of the boric acid, instead.