Thursday, July 20, 2006
Arachnophobia
It’s very hot today. It’s actually been rather hot here for the last month or so, but today it seems to be taking a larger toll than normal on my work ethic (by work, I mean the work it takes to entertain myself for eight hours while trying to avoid doing real work). Rumor has it that it’s been very hot in Midwest and northeast lately too, but you all have air conditioning and Geneva definitely does not. The heat has made me so apathetic today that the internet is completely failing to entertain me. Every time I try and find something amusing to read or consider watching a video on youtube, the effort of having to watch my back to avoid getting busted seems too great an obstacle to overcome. So mostly, I just sit at my desk and wait for the brief glorious moment when the oscillating fans swings my way before it turns back to my breeze hoarding coworkers (by breeze hoarding, I mean that they refuse to let the fan blow only on me.)
So instead of searching the internet, I thought I would write a blog entry. Writing blog entries in Word is the best way I know to amuse myself without having to worry about getting caught slacking – whenever you’re typing in Word you always look like you’re working. So even though I don’t really have any stories to tell, I feel inclined to ramble a bit, to help pass the last hour of my day. Here goes…
My room is full of spiders. They don’t have screens in Geneva (which is especially irksome when combined with the lack of air conditioning that requires people who wish to avoid heat stroke to keep their windows open all day and night). When I first moved into my apartment swarms of small bugs would gather in the corners of my room at night and completely creep me out - so much so that I would spend a good twenty minutes before bed trying to crush them all – there are now a lot of bug guts on my ceiling. But then a spider or two moved in and did most of the bug killing for me, which I greatly appreciated. I considered naming the spiders and making them my pets, much like Petey in Costa Rica (readers of my Costa Rican blog will of course remember my dear, sweet Petey). However these spiders were bigger than Petey and more prone to moving around (I prefer spiders that stay in one place, so I always know where they are and don’t have scary thoughts of them crawling on me while I’m sleep); hence these spiders were not nearly as suitable to being pets as Petey. But even if they weren’t pets, I still accepted their presence and appreciated their job well done.
But now things have changed. There are about fifteen spiders in my room, and there just aren’t enough bugs from them all, so I’m pretty sure they’re going to start attacking me soon. In fact, one has already tried. Last night, I woke up to use the bathroom, and when I turned on my light, I saw the biggest spider of them all (think the giant, scary spider from Harry Potter), crawling down the wall right at my bed. He was clearly coming to attack me, so I had no choice, but to crush him with my kleenex box. I tried to explain to the other spiders the human-spider rules of coexistence, the first of course being that no spider may leave the ceiling at any time. Sadly, I do not speak their language (unlike with Petey), so I could not communicate with them, and I do anticipate more spider killings in the near future. But what can I do, you just can’t have spiders running wild in one’s room – there must be order.
