my worms are trying to escape

Last week Stephanie bought a pound of red wiggler worms from the Union Square farmers' market and we drilled the word "CHRISES"

in Greek (for ventilation holes + to spite our neighbor, whose name is Chris) into a five gallon tupperware container, tore up newspapers, and dumped the worms with a fistful of brussels sprouts ends into their new home.

It's my first vermicompost effort, so I'm running up against a couple of problems that I don't know how to solve. Namely, my worms seem unhappy. I keep them in the hallway between my apartment building and aforementioned neighbor's, but there is a dim light on in the hallway at all times, so I worry that I am torturing my worms with perpetual day. The bedding seems to dry up so I mist the box with water once every two days. The worms should be able to eat a pound of food every day but they still haven't finished the meager handful of brussels sprouts ends from last week! And kale stems and carrot shavings are piling up all around them. Last night, in an effort to reduce their torture, I dragged them into the house at night so they could have full darkness - but when I checked on them this morning, a clump of a dozen or so worms had found their way to the top of the bin and were on the verge of pushing out! It was kind of disgusting to see a bunch of worms wriggling up and out the box and along my walls, so I hurriedly poked them all back in with a stick and slammed the lid shut on one of them, who was bruised but not killed, and then spent five minutes gingerly lifting up and accidentally dropping the butt end of a stray worm that had found its way onto the floor.

I am not the right person to be doing vermicompost because I am disgusted by worms. Cf. the picture to the left - that's what the ugly little fuckers looked like. They tumbled out all at once from the milk quart carton that the Lower East Side Ecology Center had packed them into. If you can believe it, it was even grosser than it looked, and I'm still not convinced that the ecological/curiosity-satisfying benefits of keeping the worms around outweighs my fear that I will wake up one day with little pink lines criss-crossing every surface of my apartment.