The pitter patter of tiny, parisitic feet

I seem to have created a vicious-nap-necessitating-circle, which goes as follows:  Take a lovely afternoon nap.  Wonder why you don’t do it Every Single Day. Go to bed that night.  Wake up at 4am and stare at the ceiling until 6am.  Curse the nap.  Require a nap the following day to make up for the lack of sleep the previous night.  Repeat.

It wasn’t all wasted sleep time, however.  Oh no.  I got to spend nearly all of it convinced my head was a seething writhing mass of lice, a direct result of having discovered a new batch of  God’s basest creatures on the Girl yesterday evening.    So, aside from exhaustion and napping, today has basically been a never-ending exercise in nit-picking.  First I combed;  then I picked – BY HAND, gah – then I conditioned and massaged and combed again.  Then I washed, blow-dried, and ironed the hell out of it.  Then I combed, thinking – this is totally unnecessary.  I mean  I had quite literally been through her hair with a fine tooth comb, several times.  But still there were bugs on the comb.  (All this was on the Girl, btw.  The rest of us are bug-free- as far as I know.*)

WTF?  Are they the cockroaches of the scalp?  When we’re all obliterated by Chinese pollution, will aliens find our skeletons being picked over by hungry lice?  They just won’t go away.  I’ve boiled and washed and ironed everything in sight (hahahaha, I did nothing of the sort) – except (lightbulb moment) the school hat. 

Anyway, all this will be repeated tomorrow, with the added benefit of toxic chemicals.  The non-toxic ones are, obv, useless.  I particularly like this direction on the packaging: 

I assume the alternative, if you don't desire to comb them out, is to just leave them in there, to eventually grow out.  (Or, more likely, hatch, totally unaffected and unscathed.)

It is 10pm, and I have to go listen to Serial. If you’re a fan, and you haven’t listened yet, have a look at this first.  It’s brilliant.  If you HAVE listened, shhhhhhhhhhh – no spoilers please.  (But -  WHO DID IT?? It was Jay, right?) 

(*Scratch scratch)