Momnesia

Buggin'

Everyone who has ever met me knows what an irrational and immature fear I have of insects, and spiders, and anything with an exoskeleton... and also slugs. I recognize that they don't have exoskeletons, but I still include them in the "bug" category. I mean, once I ate some escargot, trying to be sophisticated and all, at the now-defunct Le Cafe du Teau. And escargot, as we all know, are snails, and snails are nothing but slugs with shells. But then you take the shells off to eat them, so they're just slugs again... and excuse me while I go vomit.

But, anway, because this is the South, where the predominant lifeform is not human but Palmetto Bug, every once in a while something brown and chitinous will divebomb your head. It's just what happens and most people learn to deal with it by about age 12.

Not me. I have been running and screaming from tiny little terrorists since the day I could crawl. I've been screaming since the day I was born. So imagine how delightful it is to be stuck in a situation where I can neither scream, nor run, nor do much at all to get away from the weensy little wonders whose very presence can make me shudder to death (touching one gives me an instant heart attack). Today, in the middle of a bathroom break, I saw something out of the corner of my eye: a spider! On my scarf!

To put it delicately, getting up simply was not an option. I am proud that I kept the presence of mind to remember that, because normally in that situation there would be running, screaming and flailing. And that, my friends, would have been messy.

My heart beating like conga drums, I froze and reached for a wad of toilet paper. And then the spider moved! Ohgoditwasgoingtoeatmyface!

But it wasn't. I was safe. Because there was no spider. There was only a fuzzy thing on my scarf.

I think everyone I work with - or, at least, the women who use that bathroom - can appreciate the bullet that they dodged when I realized that. Because I wasn't quite "finished."