8.21.01

my own little personal nightmare:

i get home last night around 3:30. i’m tired and all i want to do is go straight to bed. i go into the bathroom, turn on the facet, and notice a tiny little yellow spider in the sink. i wash him down the drain. then i notice a second little spider. i wash him down the drain as well. then it occurs to me: there are never just two baby spiders. i look up at the ceiling and lo and behold! the ceiling is crawling with newly-hatched baby spiders! they’re the harmless yellow kind, but even still. so i got a can of insecticide (all i could find was “flying insect killer” but i figured bug killer is bug killer, right?) and sprayed the ceiling, which of course meant that the spiders promptly started dropping off the ceiling and onto my head, along with a fine mist of insecticide. i turned on the fan, slammed the door closed and plugged up the crack under the door with a towel. (given that these spiders are only 1/16th of an inch long, i realize that a towel wasn’t really going to keep them from coming through the two-inch crack under the door, but it did make me feel better.) then i took a shower (in a different bathroom) to get all the spiders and insecticide out of my hair. since i knew my father would be up for work in about an hour and a half, i left a note on the bathroom door:

TO ALL YE WHO DARE TO ENTER, BEWARE:

A MILLION SPIDER BABIES HATCHED IN HERE THIS NIGHT.

ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

when i woke up, my father had replaced the note with one of his own:

“great! just what i need! another family to put through college!”

in the morning the counter was littered with little curled up spider bodies and there were no creepy-crawlies to be found, so i guess they all died or escaped to the rest of the house. let me say here that i didn’t used to kill spiders. my mode of operation has always been to either escort them outside via a overturned glass, or to just coexist. but lately i’ve been getting tougher on the spiders inside my house – after all, this is MY HOUSE, damn it, and i’m sick of getting spider bites in my sleep or worrying that my cat will accidently injest a poisonous hobo spider. suddenly there’s something terrible and empowering about killing bugs in my own defence. i still don’t like to mush them if i can help it, but flushing them works marvelously.