(Not for arachnophobes)
My mom, the badass she is, worked very diligently and very carefully to make sure I'd never be afraid of spiders. Since I spend a lot of time cooing over invertebrates, it seems she's succeeded (though after one awful incident involving a black widow and my favorite sweater, there are still some species I kill on sight). I'd rather pet a tarantula than a mouse, for instance, and I'm okay with spiders in the corners of my room, because they thin the mosquito population out come summer (and the fly population if a rat dies in the roof--yeah, I live on a farm. More on that later.). But last night, to my deepest embarrassment, I think I lost my badass invertebrate fan cred.
This being the 21st century, the solution for that is to blog about it. Here goes.
I'm at home. It's well after midnight. I'm getting ready to shower, and being vexed with the bathroom light because it isn't working too well. I go to the long-unused bathtub, and just as I turn the tap on, the biggest spider I've ever seen not out in the wilderness comes scooting out of the bath mat and makes for me. It's huge. It's black. I don't have my glasses on. The next instant, rusty water gushes out of the tap.
Rusty water looks a hell of a lot like blood. At least, it does at 12:30 am without your glasses on and a huge brown recluse/black widow/Shelob look-alike coming at you from the depths of the bathmat, with nothing but a pastel bathrobe between you and arachnid-inflicted eternity.
I uttered a wail of dispair and recoiled back against the toilet. (Spider: 1, Biologist: 0)The water gushed for a few moments, finally running clear. No enraged eight-legged war machine made its way up the edge of the tub to murder me for flooding its home. I waited a moment. Then the biologist took over. Oh no! I just killed a huge spider, and now I'll never find out what it was! So I went back to look.
Spider was still alive, clinging to the middle of the bathmat. I turned off the water. Then the spider and I looked at each other for a bit. I didn't want to get in there with it. I didn't want to kill it, because that would be admitting I was more scared of it than interested. But I didn't want to grab it with toilet paper because I didn't want it biting me through the toilet paper (an utterly unscientific concern, but it's almost one in the morning and I don't have glasses on). So I did the first thing to come to mind.
"MOMCOMESEETHESPIDERINTHETUBHOLYBALLSIT'SFREAKINGHUGE!
Then I ran away.
To get a paper cup to stick it in. Really. I thought I might be able to manage something with that and a bit of paper.
(Yeah, right. Spider: 10, Biologist: 0)
About five minutes later, I found out two things about my mother. Firstly, she is much more badass than I will ever hope to be. Secondly, that she really hates spiders.
She came out with that spider in a clear plastic cup, watching it with the sort of expression reserved for something that's begun to tick. I'm not sure, but I think the spider was cowering. Dad, who'd heard the whole commotion, looked at the spider and said, "Oh, that's not too bad. Remember that one in Florida that was this--" indicating a legspan of about twelve inches diameter "big?" It should be noted he further away from the spider than we did.
"I don't want to think about it," Mom snapped.
(Spider: 100, Biologist, Badass Mom, and Biologist With Doctorate: 0)
The spider turned out to be totally harmless. An inch across, but totally harmless.
So that is how a spider completely destroyed my self-image of a competent, non-squeamish human being. I shall drown my sorrow over the loss of my dignity by blowing virtual things up in a video game.
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