Cheese Stands Alone

I have no problem living with critters- three years of East Village walkups and a childhood spent in the country give you a pretty clear perspective on who would win if Rodents and Man were ever to throw down- but I've always thought there was a tacit understanding that any animals not paying rent would stay out of sight out of mind, and limit their mooching to shit that falls under my stove (oddly, I once had a similarly parasitic roommate on whom I placed the same restrictions ).

Remember the plague? Still bitter about that.

However, in the past couple of weeks, I've had a mouse who's been outright flaunting his existence. The little guy must have balls the size of peas. Not only has he taken up residence in my living/bedroom, peeking his head out from under my dresser every night before disappearing into an invisible and untraceable hole that at this point I have to logically assume is an unstable tesseract that sporadically appears behind my furniture, but I discovered he ate my emergency off-season Cadbury Creme Egg stash, a Ferdinandian assassination if there ever was one. On top of that, for the past two nights, I've awoken in the middle of the night to the sound of a mouse pacing around the perimeter of my room, eventually settling under the bed to loudly gnaw on something that I obviously don't value very highly, having forgotten what or where it is , but will be pissed to find out I've lost nonetheless. Last night, as I lay feverishly awake waiting for the sweet, sweet lullaby that is the sound of its neck snapping, I realized how little credit we really gave Tom, and what a dick Jerry was.

Way to perpetuate a stereotype there, Jer.

Lacking the space and the carpentry skills to set up the elaborate, yet effective, bowling ball/bathtub/bootkicking contraption that I seem to remember working so well as a kid, I've purchased some of those classic wooden mousetraps (also, if I had a man just hanging around my apartment who would be willing to be catapulted into a tub of water at my beck and call, I could probably save a lot of trouble and just, like, ask him to kill the mouse.). Years of Disney Afternoons would lead me to believe that the best way to catch a mouse is through the use of a giant piece of cartoonishly fragrant cheese, but the country girl in me knows that peanut butter is the only way to go.

Wait, this was a game? For more than one player?

Though not afraid of mice or dead mice themselves- I'm more of a "string of borderline racist expletives" kind of girl than a "high-pitched shriek" kind- I am in fact scared shitless by the traps themselves, partly because I know that I'll inevitably be drunkenly stepping on them someday, and partly because it blows my mind that you can purchase little instruments of death from Duane Reade for about 50 cents a pop. On a side note, you can tell you've reached the point of needing to set out traps when you realize that as you're laying them down, there exists within you an actual fear that a mouse might jump out and just snatch the peanut butter from you before it even touches the ground.