We’ve had mice in our apartment for the past couple of weeks. It’s a rather cruel situation for the mice, since our apartment is so small that they don’t have many places to hide. But mice are pretty unobtrusive, I find. The last time I lived in a house with a rodent infestation was in 2005, when I lived over at the Vancouver School of Theology in a three-storey house. There, we had rats, which are much more aggressive. My roommate Kendal saw one on the roof once, threw something at it, and it hissed at her. They mostly stayed in the basement, and we had to ask their permission to go down there and do our laundry. Anyway, our landlord found out about the mice, and gave us mousetraps to set around. Our landlord is a gentle soul, and instead of giving us traps that would execute mice swiftly, he gave us glue traps that would catch our guests until we could take them out to a field somewhere and release them to be fruitful and multiply.

We caught a mouse last Friday. When we were deciding what to do with it, we realized just how ridiculous the live traps were for our situation. The instructions for the traps talk about taking them at least a mile away for release, so the mice will not re-enter. The problem is, a mile away from our apartment in any direction is still metro Vancouver. The second problem is, only one of us has a car, and so if most of us were to dispose of the mouse, we would have to take it on the bus. We were tempted to do this because of the high probability of comedy ensuing, but decided not to. And taking the mouse on the bus wouldn’t solve the problem of not being able to get outside the city. It would be a kind of NIMBY-ism to release a mouse anywhere near where we live, because there are houses everywhere. Even if it doesn’t get back into OUR house, it’ll get into SOMEBODY’S house, which is no good.

So what did we do? We disposed of it the best way we knew how: by taking it outside and stomping on it. Requiescat in pace, mouse. And I really do mean that.

• Autobiography