Right. It's May now, and I don't have a job anymore, and I promised you that I would start posting again when that happened, so I'm going to start doing that right now. I need to post about France, I need to post about the meet-up, and I need to finish reading that damn book so I can light it on fire. But as I'm just getting back into the swing of this, the first post you are going to get is one about a spider. Honestly, if you've been reading me for more than five minutes, you should have seen that one coming.
So yesterday, while I was waiting for StereoNinja to finish watching Doctor Who so we could Skype and discuss the fact that Vastra, Jenny and Strax need a their own spin-off show, I went into my room to sit on the bed and play Candy Crush Saga, again, because I can't fucking stop and should never have downloaded it to begin with, and as soon as I sat down, I sensed movement just above my window. I looked up to see a very big, very black spot that should not have been there and for one brief second I was hopeful - normal spiders that you find inside your house in Chicago are usually medium sized brownish- or greenish-yellow things, and this was big and very very black and so maybe it was just a beetle or something. But then it started moving. The one magical power I think all arachnophobes probably have is the ability to tell whether something is a spider or not based on the way it moves, because NOTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD crawls with such deliberate, malevolent evil. I can tell you whether or not something is a spider from the other side of the room without my glasses on and while crying a waterfall of terrified tears. And THIS, my friends, was a fucking spider if I ever saw one.
I immediately began a barrage of insane text messages to StereoNinja, who was ineffectively 4000 miles away from being able to solve my problem:
OMG WTF BIG FAT SPIDER IN MY ROOM HELP HELP
IT WENT BEHIND THE CURTAIN I CAN'T SEE IT
THIS IS BAD
IT'S BACK IT'S HEADED FOR THE FREEZER IF IT GOES BY THE DOOR I'LL BE TRAPPED
IT'S GOING TOWARD THE DOOR OH GOD
I'M TRAPPED
NOW IT'S COMING FOR ME WHAT DO I DO
FUCK IT'S CLIMBING DOWN
IT IS ON THE CEILING OVER MY BED THIS IS A NIGHTMARE
It was at this point that StereoNinja decided to call me. In the time that I have known StereoNinja, he has only ever seen me have a spider meltdown once. It was on the weekend we met when we were both standing outside waiting to have our photos taken at our cousin's wedding and the garden was fucking full of them. I was crouched in the middle of the patio in my bridesmaid dress hyperventilating, but doing my very best to keep it together long enough for the photos, and he had no way of knowing at the time how bad I usually am. Consequently he was unprepared, and I dare say slightly irritated to find that his normally extremely rational girlfriend who worships at the altar of science will lose every shred of logical reasoning she ever possessed when faced with an arachnid. "It's trying to get me," I said by way of greeting. "No it isn't," he responded calmly. It went downhill from there.
First he tried suggesting that I do things to it - hit it with something, a towel maybe?, knock it off the wall and then I can squish it, or failing that put a jar over top of it so it can't get out. His alternative solution was for me to simply leave the room. The relationship is still new, you guys, he just didn't know. I shot down every single one of his completely rational solutions based on my own insanity - getting close enough to hit it with anything might cause it to GET ON ME, I could not predict the trajectory it would take when it fell and I could lose it or it could GET ON ME, if I squished it it might escape and GET ON ME, ditto putting a jar on top of it, and leaving the room would be the worst of all because I might not be able to find it later but it will still be there, WAITING, and I will never be able to go in my room ever again. As I explained this nonsense, it crawled over my bed and started heading down the wall toward it, and I completely lost my shit. "See?!?!? It's trying to get me! It's trying to get on my bed! They are after me! It wants to kill me!"
He decided to try a different approach. "It's not after you. You know that, right? You know that it can't be after you because they don't have an intelligence to do that."
"I don't know anything right now. They ARE after me, why else would it be going towards the bed? Why are they only ever in my room?"
"They're not just in your room. They can be in any room."
"Yes they are. They are in my room MORE THAN CHANCE."
"No they aren't."
"I have NEVER seen one in the dining room. EVER."
He finally realized he was not dealing with a sane person, and came up with a suggestion that worked: I texted the bartender in his bedroom to tell him there was a spider in mine. He came right away to examine it, then came back with a jar and an index card. Normally I would insist that he squish it right there, then flush it down the toilet, then flush a couple more times, then wash his hands before he touched anything, but this one was big and black and not the sort of spider you normally find in the house. We didn't even realize what it was until he got the jar over top of it and it went nuts: it's one of those black jumping spiders you normally find on the outsides of buildings or sometimes on plants. Except, about four times the size as a normal one. I had a secondary freak out over the fact that it could have just jumped right ON ME at any time during the whole ordeal and WHY IN THE FUCK WAS IT SO BIG.
Crisis averted, I called StereoNinja back, who described to me his idea for the ultimate spider removal system for people like me, with a reach length of nearly an entire room and built in fail-safes for every possible escape attempt. It only had one design flaw: the fact that I would need it to be wielded by someone else for fear that the spider might GET ON ME.
