A Bug Story.

I'm kind of a...bug person. 

I know that sounds weird, but what I mean by that is that bugs don't normally creep me out. 

I'm just not the type of girl to panic when a little guy crawls across my bathroom floor, or a moth comes in the window. 

I usually try to scoop them up or shoo them out (sometimes even with my bare hands) and then move on. 

I have never, in my recollection, intentionally killed any kind of insect or spider. 

Just not my thing. 

HOWEVER....

...tonight Cj is out late picking up his cousin from the airport, making tonight my first time going to bed without him since we've been married. 

I wasn't really that nervous, although I did make him burrito-tuck me before he left, just to be safe. 

About 10 minutes after I heard the front door close, I rolled over in bed to see a giant...something...moving quickly down the wall and then across the bed. 

I jumped out of bed, grabbed my cell phone, and ran into the hall as I observed the thing move slowly across my comforter. 

I called Cj. 

I told him that it was a spider the size of my palm. 

He didn't believe me. 

He's right. 

I was exaggerating. 

But it was white, with brown spots, which is probably worse. 

I told him I was positive it was the kind that kills you. 

He told me to shake out all of the bedding and then go back to bed. 

I hung up and said "you are a mature adult" a few times out loud, then, I took everything off the bed and shook. 

Naturally I did this with my mouth and eyes closed so the spider couldn't come flying into any openings. I even made sure to blow outwards from my nose continually so that if it approached my nose holes it would be greeted with some kind of spidery-mount-vesuvius. 

My ear-holes were the real Achilles-heel in the plan, but sometimes a girl's just got to suck it up and go to battle. 

At some point during all the shaking I realized that the spider might not actually be in the bedding anymore. It might have actually moved into the bed frame itself. 

I asked Cj, but he said I couldn't sleep on the couch.

Plan B was organized. 

I made a bed for myself on the floor out of all the shaken-out bedding. 

I made sure to do this in a decently clear spot so I could see that thing coming. 

I continued work on my lesson plan for tomorrow morning. 

That's when it happened. 

I felt movement on my left shoulder. I looked. 

Nothing was on it. 

BUT, as if on cue, the spider came crawling out onto the pillow just above my shoulder! 

You've got to be kidding me. 

I then spent the next twenty minutes chasing it around my blankets and then the bedroom and then, the kitchen floor using mainly a notebook and my cell phone to steer it one way or another before I would panic when it would come too close to my hand with it's poisonous brown spots. 

What a moral dilemma. 

I couldn't kill it based on my gandhi-like approach to bugs, but there was no way I was sleeping tonight knowing that it was roaming the aging linoleum of our tiny apartment. 

Eventually, this is how things ended: 

I feel content knowing that Cj will come home to our largest bowl, upside down on the floor of our kitchen, left to deal with the moral dilemma I could not bring myself to face. 

The irony of all of this is I will probably be awake, worried about that poor spider, under that bowl, all alone, in the dark. 

You'd think I'd lose sleep over the more important ethical issues of this world. 

Like the fact that they made a movie about Katy Perry. 

And that it is in 3D.

Maybe that spider would be better off dead. 

Katie