Linger

Yesterday's clothes smell like I spent all night in a bar where everyone was smoking turkey.

Night of the Drosophila

On Monday night, I had a few fruit flies. I disposed of the offending banana and took out the garbage and forgot about it.

On Tuesday night, my "few fruit flies" had blossomed into "mighty fruit fly swarm." All over the cupboards. All over the walls. All over my grandfather's crazy bullfighter picture. Not acceptable.

I spent the evening researching online -- and then built a few beta version fruit fly traps. This morning, I assisted two jars full of tiny, red-eyed, crawling monsters out to the garbage. Recreated the most effective trap for the stragglers. Hoped I wasn't selecting for the flies too smart to be trapped, which will now breed and soon be re-sorting my books and CDs to their own tastes, making it impossible for me to find anything. Do fruit flies make good cat-sitters?

All night, I had guilty dreams about small animals and insects I've killed, inadvertently or with intention. With occasional bouts of wakeful skin crawling.

How to win a turf war with the best lab subjects ever:

1. Acquire a jar, taller than it is wide. My favorite so far has been the Trader Joe's salsa jar -- about as tall as my hand is long and fairly narrow.

2. Put one tablespoon of vinegar (apple cider vinegar recommended) in the bottom of the jar. Add water until there's about an inch of liquid.

3. Drop in some fruit -- banana is the classic.

4. Make a paper funnel for the top. This is the only tricky part: the hole at the bottom of the funnel should be about half an inch, and when you drop it into the jar, the base of the funnel should be about two inches above the fruit/water. So you may have test a couple of times before you tape. The idea is that the base of the funnel is close enough to the fruit and wide enough that the odor can easily escape -- but far enough and small enough that the fruit flies have to really focus to get out. Fruit flies don't focus very well. Or fly in straight lines.

5. Tape the funnel to the top of the jar. Tape all around the edge of the jar, so there's no space for them to creep through. They're going to fly right up between the outside of the funnel and the inside of the jar, so you're blocking their main hope of exit.

6. Set the jar wherever the swarm is mightiest. Wait.

7. Change the jar whenever you can't stand to look at it any more -- and keep using it for a few days after the flies are gone, in case there's another hatching cycle lying in wait.

Superheroes.

I have conquered the limitations of linear time and economics -- but am using my powers only to make the work day infinitely long and my paycheck infinitely small.

Greetings, ginger ale.

Girl drama: the female tendency to expand the smallest details into a galaxy of significance and possibility. The world hangs on a word. Poetic, really. Questions like "what should I wear" aren't mere vanity; the crossroads of an entire future are in the choice between jeans and a dress. Play it safe in clothes your brother would wear? Or look pretty and tip your hand? The ramifications cycle as mercilessly as Vizzini's dissertation on which cup holds the iocane.

We're crazy, we are. Universes unfold from the tone of an email, the look on a face, the turn of a phrase. Everything is out of proportion. And yet -- women, most often, are the keepers of relationships. We maintain, watch, repair. Isn't it our job to be vigilant?

The bad news for us is that men are oblivious to most of the questions that fascinate us for hours. We'll kill bottles of wine chasing down a shade of meaning that doesn't exist anywhere but our heads. Meanwhile, great novels get written by our better halves, who trust us to let them know when it's time for bed.

But it's in this insane and magical world that women fall in love. Staying out of the fray means developing such a thick skin that flirtation is as dry as a lecture, and passes go right past. Some of the most datable women I know are so sensitive that everything is a pass to them, even a simple "hello."

I was walking with a friend this summer past a couple of men playing football. When we were about two feet away from one of them, he tossed the ball and hit me right in the chest with it. I gave it, and then him, a scathing look and then said "Pardon me" in my most schoolteacherish tone.

My friend started laughing, picked the ball up, and tossed it back to him. With a look of relief, he said "well, at least someone's willing to play with me." Score: Me zero. Pass missed. Ball dropped. But to pick the ball up -- that meant creating a connection that probably wasn't worth the effort. Not to mention the risk that we were just walking in the way ... looking ridiculous. Girl drama is all about looking ridiculous.

I need a version of Westley's iocane tolerance regimen, so that I can swallow girl drama without dying laughing.

And I need to know what to wear tomorrow.