I like to consider myself a fairly sanitary person, but I am just lying to myself.

I am not completely disgusting. I don't, for a wholly hypothetical example, dream of inviting tapeworms to live in my stomach or presently own purses that harbor mice, unlike some people, but I have had a brush or two with nasty critters in my past.

My college apartment could not have been more welcoming to vermin had we laid out a trail of jammy bread crumbs leading right to the door and hung a sign in the window reading PESTILENCE WANTED: NO REFERENCES REQUIRED. It was ex-HUD housing and it was surrounded by the apartments of various colonies of rugby players, all of whom cared more about drinking copiously and running around naked than about keeping their homes sanitary.

Fair enough. We weren't exactly superstars ourselves at taking the trash out. The dumpster was so far away--a full parking lot--and we were so lazy that the times we did haul the trash to the dumpster we threw it in the trunks of our cars and drove it, rather than walking. Of course, by that point there would always be at least ten bags piled up. We liked to make the trip worth our while to take.

I and my sweet Laura Ashley roommate, who color-coordinated all our furnishings with flowered drapes and every once in awhile broke down and vacuumed the place, were perfectly fine living with sacks of trash piled in the hallway (after all, had we taken the extra step of at least putting them on the front porch, it is not as if the bags would have evolved legs and walked themselves to the dumpster in the span of time before maintenance spotted them and yelled at us to move them). Our more highly-strung third roommate, however, simmered and simmered about our indoor compost heap and eventually left us a novella of a "You messy freaks!" note taped up on the kitchen cabinets. This was the summer two of our guy friends were also crashing with us, so the reaction of the rest of us to her disquiet went no further than a brief exchange of "Dude, why doesn't she take the trash out herself, then?" looks and a tacit general agreement to avoid her for the next day or two.

The apartment had cockroaches when we moved in--little food ones--and although an assiduous scattering of traps cut the cockroach population dramatically, getting rid of them entirely was impossible. For one thing, they had started cross-breeding with the evil brown crickets who had also infested the apartment (and destroyed all of my previously positive feelings towards crickets in the process). At night, as we tried to sleep, we could hear the soft scrabble-thumps of these half-cricket/half-roach monsters throwing themselves against the plastic wainscotting, always trying to climb higher and higher, either into bed with us or all the way up into the ceiling light fixtures, where they would then mill above our heads like a Fisher Price Corn Popper of blight.

So yeah, the day we discovered that one of our previous roommates had left behind in one of the cabinets a sack of fruit that had magically transformed itself over five months into a self-sustaining colony of maggots...that day wasn't even close to being the low point of our stay.