Pet Friendly Florida

Florida is the most inclusive state in the nation. The Sunshine State welcomes not just people from all over, but also species that you’ve only encountered in nightmares, like termites, bats, snakes, and reptiles. If you want to live here, you need to know what you are getting into, though I have proof that the people of Florida are friendly to all these animals and insects. Take termites for example. After I signed the contract with the University of Miami, they broke the news to me: EVERYBODY has termites in South Florida. We promptly hired a reputable pest control company whose employees wore very nice uniforms and whose schedule was totally unpredictable. So friendly was this company to termites that for several years they totally ignored the fact that they had eaten 5 feet of fascia over our garage.

Needless to say, up until that day I had no idea what fascia was, in any language. As I was trying to explain the situation over the phone to the pest control company, they kept throwing at me words like sheathing, soffit, rafters, truss, underlayment, fascia and dormer which made me feel like an idiot. Several google trips later, I was able to confirm that it was the FASCIA that had been eaten. Do people learn these words in school? Do they take roofing 101 in Florida? Do they learn about termites in kindergarten?

When I confronted the neatly uniformed, bilingual, pest control general, he said that termites don’t do that kind of damage. They were still covering up for the insects. At that point I called two more pest control companies, and Manolo, my friend the builder. No question about it, unanimous judgment: termites. 

To make sure that no opportunity goes wasted, we decided to fire the pest control company and go instead with a “green” provider. The latter explained to us that it’s all organic and environmentally friendly. So friendly was their treatment of pests that for several months we saw an increase in the number of roaches munching on our fruit overnight. When I politely asked our green supplier if roaches can get used to their treatment, he said that they change the product every time to prevent inoculation. Oh, I got it. January was vanilla, February was citrus, and March was honeysuckle flavor. Our roaches couldn’t be happier.

In an effort to be supportive, Ora, my wife, had suggested that perhaps it was rodents and not cockroaches that had been eating our fruit. Our cleaning lady concurred, motivating me to sell the house and move to Alberta, which has been rodent-free for 50 years. I did do my homework.  

I consulted again with our green pest control guy, who said there was a definitive way to determine the culprit: Poop. Cockroach poop has a vertical edge; rat poop ends diagonally. He went on and on about sphincter anatomy in rodents and insects and the evolutionary causes of their differences.

Just when I thought that I knew way too much about insects in Florida, I had to take a magnifying glass to examine their fecal matter. I wanted to prove to Ora and our cleaning lady that there were no rodents in my house.

Sure enough, the poop, which was all over our fruit plate, had a distinct vertical edge, which proved beyond reasonable doubt that we had plenty of roaches. As if that wasn’t strong enough evidence, I picked up a grapefruit from the plate and out came crawling, from a hole the size of an igloo, a giant cockroach.

Looks, Smarts, Money

There are two main threats to interpersonal well-being: insecurities, and INSECURITIES. People have a hard time getting along with others because they fear that at some point they will be wrong, and God forbid, they may have to apologize. People hate to be wrong, but hate to apologize even more. As a social scientist intrigued by these phenomena, I developed a mathematical formula according to which the “need to be right about everything all the time and never apologize” is inversely related to looks, smarts, or money.          

     The more insecure you feel about your looks, intelligence, or pocket book, the more you feel you have to be right about everything else in life. This is called a compensatory model. You compensate for your foolishness by feeling that you are right about everything.

     Sometimes the need to be right about everything all the time is conflated with smarts. Take universities for example, where most professors think they are brilliant. In that case, our subjects compensate for being obstinate and underpaid by coming across as smarter than they really are, which only reinforces the need to be right about everything all the time, which makes universities as much fun as the inquisition.

     Sometimes, looks and money are not enough to conquer insecurities. People work hard to come across as smart. A wealthy acquaintance, with the intellectual curiosity of an ant, was spotted lounging next to a swimming pool pretending to read From Nietzsche to Foucault. Either pretentiousness got the best of her, or she thought Nietzsche and Foucault were the latest European shoes. But I shouldn’t be saying these things. It probably means that I have no money, or don’t look great, both of which are right, and for neither of which I’m going to apologize because I’m a university professor.

     Another acquaintance, big on money, has a very bad case of need to be right about everything all the time and never apologize, including things he has absolutely no idea about. But if might makes right, money makes wise. Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof got it right: “When you're rich, they think you really know!” Worse than that, when you’re rich, you think you know.

 “If I were a Rich Man” is the most evocative and artistic expression of my mathematical formula. “If I were a Rich Man……I’d see my wife…looking like a rich man’s wife…..supervising meals to her heart’s delight…..screaming at the servants, day and night.”

     Primal insecurities get in the way of enjoying vulnerability and the liberating ability to say “I’m sorry” or “I don’t know.” We fear that if we admit ignorance or mistakes something terrible will happen. 

    Sometimes I feel that if I make a mistake I will be fired, Anti-Semitism will rise, Jews will be deported to Iran, UPS will change the color of its fleet, and the pharmacy will run out of Senocot.  

    Beset by the need to be right all the time, and the obsession with money, looks, and smarts, humanity has two options: Elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- who is now available -- to replace       Barack Obama, or move to Miami, which leads me to a local corollary of my main thesis: Cognitive function in Miami is inversely related to the number of plastic surgeries, which says nothing about money, because in Miami Medicare pays for everything, including colonoscopies for dead people in Havana. 

     It is really too bad that we spend so much time compensating for our insecurities that we miss the entire point of relationships, which is to have someone who can love you despite your big ears, someone who can put up with your terrible real estate decisions, and someone who lets you think you are funny. What really matters in life is not how we look on the outside, but what happens on the inside, like your digestive system. If more people could talk about their bowel movements without feeling defensive, or self-conscious, we could reverse the divorce trend and bring peace to the Middle East. 

     To conclude, what I really want to say about relationships is this: stay away from university professors.