I have a problem.

There's an urban legend floating around regarding two poverty-stricken college students who innocently wanted to know if one really could live on top ramen and top ramen alone. In the name of science, they found themselves at their local warehouse superstore, hauling several flats of oodles of various flavors of noodles. Rumor has it that after a month one of the pair had died of scurvy; the other had eaten Skittles in a moment of weakness and obtained enough vitamin C to live.

Whether or not this is true is irrelevant; it's the fear of scurvy that drove my roommate and I to pick up a carton of fruit punch, a gallon of orange juice, and a sack of those little tangerines the last time we went shopping. We were deathly serious about it; our grocery list read "milk, eggs, bread, scurvy prevention measures." 

The fruit punch and the orange juice were the first casualties of the war against scurvy, mostly a result of my roommate's utter disdain for water. "It doesn't taste like anything," she'd whine over a glass of lemonade. "And it's better for me than soda. Maybe one of these days I'll move on to Crystal Light and then make the jump to water."

"Dare to dream," I'd say, and peel a tangerine. 

But here's the problem: those tangerines are a pain in the ass to eat if you're as anal about stringy food as I am. I don't know why, but string has always disturbed me. There's a home video of my third or fourth Christmas and my mother is yelling at my older brother to unwrap my present because I'm afraid of the yarn she used to tie the box.

A few years later, a friend of mine found a string in her milkshake and it only got worse. Bananas, spaghetti squash, even particularly stringy cheese on pizza made me recoil in horror. And if you've ever eaten one of these tangerines, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Once you remove the peel, it's all stringy horror. The pith, as it's technically called, sticks in veiny pieces to the fruit and requires ten to fifteen minutes of tedious pith-string removal before I can reasonably expect to eat it.

I suppose this is why it took us so long to get through all those tangerines. We were waifish with hunger one afternoon, fainting on the couch and complaining about how there was nothing to eat except the flat of ramen and, oh god, the tangerines. Remembering the college student of yore and his untimely demise, we both dashed towards the bag on the counter but were halted by the unmistakeable smell of rotting fruit. 

In addition to the smell, a few tiny fruit flies had begun buzzing in the proximity. We promptly removed the offending fruit from our apartment, as it had something of a mold colony growing in population and threatening to take over the island before intimidating the pots and pans into joining it in a coup against the small appliances.

The mold junta never got off the ground, but the fruit flies didn't follow their beloved tangerines to their ultimate fate in our complex's dumpster. Instead they were content to stay in our toasty two-bedroom, settle down, and start a family. This can be the only explanation as to why, one morning, I was being pestered by a rather curious swarm of fruit flies. I couldn't set down an empty yogurt cup without five of them dive bombing it. No joke; in my short walk from the sofa to put my cereal bowl in the sink, the Indiana Jones of fruit flies nearly met his fate in the Temple of Doom (my left nostril, at the time -- insert Crystal Skull joke at your leisure) after raiding the remnants of my Honey Bunches of Oats.

I declared war when I went into my bathroom and found a swarm had collected on the mirror. We had lived in a peaceful cohabitation up until this point; I had grown to enjoy their curiosity towards every stray piece of discarded food that found its way onto the counter instead of the sink. But they intruded my bathroom. My private bathroom. The reason I am willing to pay the outlandish rent that I pay for this apartment. And I just couldn't let that fly. 

No pun intended.

And so I became that cranky old man I hated who swore and clapped and smacked infinitely at those little nuisances invisible to everyone except him. If I spotted one, I'd drop everything to hunt it and not give up until it was squished between my palms. Our friends were disturbed when, mid-conversation, I would stutter to a stop and begin clapping at random intervals in the air, running around the apartment and jumping on the furniture in pursuit of my prey. But now, it has become a problem. I stand in the kitchen and wait to see a fruit fly flutter in my peripherals. I lay in wait and have debated what would make the best camouflage to match our linoleum. 

But if I do say so, I've gotten quite good at catching the little fuckers. I know their reaction time is slower than the average fly, but still fast enough to keep me on my toes and remind me not to underestimate them. A kleenex is ideal for sqishing them against a solid, vertical surface; a flip-flop is overkill and a paper towel is too burdensome for such a small bug. Raid is out of the question.

There is a post-it note on the refrigerator door that tallies my casualties, although I don't think it's an accurate reflection anymore as I believe the ones that have starved to death at this point should count in my favor. It'll be only a few more days before the strongest and fastest of the lot are gone. There's one in my bathroom still I haven't quite been able to get.