all vacuum bags are not created equal.

since the world was going to end last saturday, i didn't bother vacuuming the rest of my apartment once my vacuum bag filled up.  i found out (the hard way) that you aren't supposed to pull the crap out of the bag...you're supposed to get a new bag.  ugh.  still trying to wash the feeling of all that crap off my hands.  and you know how i am about hands.  bleh.

anyways, since i was house sitting last week, the vacuum just sat in the middle of the floor, sans a bag, waiting for me to figure out how to fix it.  i had made a quick run to the grocery store last weekend when i thought i'd have a clean apartment in case the rapture really was going down, but when i didn't find any bags immediately i decided if i was peacing out of earth saturday night, i wasn't going to waste my last precious hours sweaty and up to my elbows (literally) in vacuum bag gunk.

so here we are, a week later, and i finally made it home and decided i needed to tackle the beast that was the vacuum bag.  having never replaced it (which is gross because i've had it for years...but, umm, the last time it needed replacing i just pulled the gunk out of it because i thought that's what you did. it turns out that's not what you do...), i went to walmart because i thought the store that has everything is bound to have vacuum bags.  and have them they did.

this picture doesn't do the options justice.

roughly a million different versions of vacuum bags (luckily some options seemed to be out of stock so at least my options were limited to 999,987) taunted me as i stood clueless in the aisle praying for one of them to start glowing like things do in the movies when you're supposed to pick that option.  how was i supposed to know that it wouldn't be obvious which bag was for me?  and of course, since my vacuum has been with me since undergrad, it wasn't on the floor for me to check and see what bags went with it.  piece of crap.

as i'm standing there mulling over the choices (at least i could remember the brand name), i couldn't help but think if i had been more careful pulling the gunk out of the bag and not ripped it right at the end (i was so close to having an empty bag), i wouldn't be in this situation where the choices were endless.  that's right.  i was so overwhelmed i was wishing to have vacuum gunk on my hands again.  you know it's bad when you'd rather reach into a vacuum bag that hasn't been emptied in god knows how long instead of read the back of all the packages with the tiny print and guess what vacuum your parents bought you a thousand years ago.  growing up and doing adult things like replacing vacuum bags is so overrated.  i didn't feel mature and accomplished.  i felt confused and irritated.

why can't there just be a one-size-fits-all vacuum bag?  and why is vacuum such a hard word to spell?  to this day i have to google it to figure it out.  i can quote endless lines from all kinds of crappy movies, but i can't remember how to spell vacuum without the help of the internet.  sad.  also, the more you type the word vacuum and search different spellings online, the more the word looks weird.  i don't recommend this if you don't want to second-guess yourself forever.

lucky for me, the vacuum gods were at least kind of looking down on me (even if they were still laughing at my vacuum bag incident last weekend) and the option i selected turned out to fit on my vacuum.  granted, the bag will probably catch fire or something else terrible once i vacuum tomorrow, but for now it's megan-1, vacuum-0.  pray it stays that way.