Well Now They're Just Messing With Me

The last two nights in a row as I was getting ready for bed, I inadvertently started reflecting on the large lack of spiders in my house this fall. Usually that's when they seem to be lurking in every corner ready to suck my blood and feed me to their young whilst simultaneously escaping from the cold. But so far in the whole of this fall I've seen only one spider in my house, and that one was tiny and crawled out only because I was cleaning and I broke it's house. It was even tiny enough for me to kill it myself* by stepping on it (though I ground my shoe into the carpet for about five minutes as I was sure he was lurking in my shoe treads waiting for me to assume his demise so he could come out and crawl up my pant leg and GET ON ME).

I immediately tried to banish these thoughts from my mind. Spiders have the power of telepathy you see, so thinking about them not being around was just inviting an attack. At the very least it was tempting fate. I got my thoughts under control and went to bed feeling safe.

Well.

Waking up this morning and turning on the light, I immediately noticed a fuzzy looking spot on my ceiling over the bed. That spot was moving. Over the years I have developed the ability to immediately detect the motion of small objects in the vicinity of the ceiling or in corners of rooms. This motion is usually that of a spider and my enhanced abilities serve to give me more time to escape from their onslaught or avoid being ambushed. And without my glasses on the moving spot looked enormous. Certain that I had called this disaster upon myself, I lay there in mild terror waiting for it to move from being directly over the bed and praying it would not fall. I began mentally rearranging my morning schedule: I wouldn't be able to make the bed today, as I'd have to turn my back on it, and I would also have to gather everything I would need from my room before I got into the shower and bring it with me, including my coat, gloves, iPod, cell phone and shoes in addition to my clothes. Thus having finished organizing my crazy, I put on my glasses only to discover...

...one of those annoying fake ladybugs. You know, the beetles that look like a ladybug but are yellow or light orange and they bite and also fly directly at you kamikaze style? One of those. Little douche.

Initially I was relieved, but later two disturbing thoughts came to me.

1) Are the ladybug impersonators in bed with the spiders now? Did they sign a secret treaty? Have they decided "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?

2) If they have not formed an evil alliance, will the presence of a tasty (less wily/ easier to digest/ etc.) beetle bring the spiders that heretofore haven't come? Am I doomed by association, or perhaps just proximity?

Stay tuned.

*Later that day, when the agent came to pick me up I greeted him with this: "You are going to be so proud of me and disappointed in me at the same time." Because as a boyfriend he finds my terror of spiders quite tedious and annoying, not to mention ridiculous. So handling one myself is a huge step. But as a practitioner of Buddhism, you really ought not to kill things, so celebrating the death of another living creature is generally not typical of him. He was by the way. Proud and disappointed.