what is wrong with me??

Have you guys ever seen the show "Verminators" on the Discovery Channel? I came across it during a channel surfing marathon after church today. I haven't even been watching for an hour yet, and I've already thrown up in my mouth like seven times. This show gives me the creeps - it makes me feel dirty. And not the good kind of dirty that I sometimes (okay, always) feel while watching Jack Bauer save the world without the blink of an eye in "24." The anxious kind of dirty that makes you itchy and afraid to sit on any of the furniture or eat any food from the kitchen.

I'm a clean person. I get a lot of satisfaction from a clean apartment, nicely folded clothes, and a shiny kitchen. But this show is seriously creeping me out. Some of the people they show seem a lot like me: mostly normal and clean, but not obsessively so. But these people's houses managed to somehow become infested with roaches, rodents, and the horror of all horrors: bedbugs. The idea that bedbugs exist in the world makes me want to crawl in a hole and rock back and forth in the fetal position until I die. And then the rats that are evidently EVERYWHERE ACCORDING TO THIS SHOW can have a feast. On me.

(OH MY GOD THE GUY JUST PICKED UP A COCKROACH WITH HIS HAND. AND HE HELD IT. IN HIS HAND.)

I had a mouse once. It freaked me out beyond all belief and spurned a cleaning frenzy the likes of which I never knew I was capable. It took a lot of convincing and investigation (mixed with a little bit of my more country-oriented friends talking me down from the proverbial ledge) to realize that the little guy wasn't there because I was dirty - BECAUSE I'M NOT - but had in all likelihood come across my warm little abode when my next door neighbors dug up their backyard and built a huge-ass shed. They probably tilled through his home, and he had nowhere to go except under my sink.

Nonetheless. Thinking about now - two and a half years after the fact - nearly makes me suicidal all over again.

(OH MY GOD THERE ARE ROACHES IN THE BABY'S CRIB. THEY'RE ALL OVER HIS BLANKETS. AND THE GUY JUST SAID THAT ROACHES CRAWL IN PEOPLE'S EARS.)

Why not just change the channel, you ask? Well, it's sort of like a "Gaper's Delay" on the highway. Morbid curiosity, I guess. I'm disgusted, and I feel like I need to take one hundred showers... but I'm not scrambling for the remote.

In conclusion, if you are at all squeamish, you should probably not put on the Discovery Channel for the rest of the day. Between this and the Dirty Jobs marathon that's coming on next, my day (and gag reflex) is in trouble.