You know that feeling. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you're brave and calm and lethal. Maybe you're a quiet pacifist and also brave and calm. Maybe the feelings of dread and terror have never enveloped your soul and threatened to completely evict said soul from your chest cavity (because that's where souls live). This dread and terror, often accompanied by a HUGE dose of adrenaline, physical pain, loud shrieks, swear words and/or gibberish and a exceptionally large amount of second-guessing my next move ALWAYS comes upon me when I see a spider in my home or somewhere indoors. Sometimes, even when I see a spider outside.
Let me explain.
Dread and terror. This comes from the feeling that the spider I see is going to do one of two things. Hurt me or disappear somewhere quickly where it will hide so it can later come back when I am least suspecting it and...hurt me. These feelings are always proportional to the size of the spider and the thickness of its legs and body.
Adrenaline. The adrenaline is a by-product of the fear and terror. It's not always there. But mostly it is. When I pulled out the cat litter bag last weekend to fill the boxes up, a giant spider fell between my feet. I saw it and immediately lept off of the edge of the toilet where I'd been perched to across the bathroom and half out the door...IN ONE SWIFT MOTION. I'm not that coordinated when I'm not terrified. It has to be adrenaline. In fact, were I to ever run a marathon, it might help to have spiders along the way, leering at me from perches above me. So I'll run a marathon in the Amazon! Done and done.
Physical pain. This is a little more rare than the adrenaline. It is usually caused by a swift motion performed immediately upon seeing the spider OR during the catching and killing phase, when the spider unexpectedly drops, moves, falls, jumps, etc. It's not that I always bump my head or punch myself in the throat or any of those things (which it sometimes is), but more like an internal compression of all things important, so as to try to become smaller, tougher, more condensed and thus less prone to spider-related injuries.
Loud shrieks. And swearing/gibberish. These kind of go hand in hand. They are often one loud string like: noise-word-noise-kind-of-a-word-noise-louder-noise. I am not, nor have I ever been, a particularly quiet girl. This especially goes for times when I am surprised. It's not the being scared part that makes me yell. I have been scared plenty of times where I have kept quiet. Times as scary as spinning down I-87 in a blizzard! Or, you know, while making my way through a really sketchy part of Brooklyn at 4AM. I am abundantly good at being quiet while scared. But when something jumps out at me and I become surprised + scared? Well, then, my brain doesn't even enter into it. My eyes are connected to my mouth at that point and they cause me to pronounce the most helpful and logical thing that would accompany what just surprised me. Which, the last time I saw a giant spider was, (approx.) "AGHHHJESUS HELP ME HELP ME WAHHHHHHHTHEF*CK JESUS!" So you can see, I've definitely got a system for effectively communicating my needs and concerns to those around me in times of peril.
Second-guessing my next move. I would like to say that I am confident in most everything I do. And that holds true for most things. But when faced with something which, as I mentioned before, could either hurt me OR RUN/JUMP/FLEE to a location where it will remain until it decides to come out and hurt me even worse, I find that no course of action seems strong enough to rid my life of this destructive and terrifying creature IMMEDIATELY. I usually grab tissues first or toilet paper or a paper towel, then think- No! Wait! If I go to grab it, it could bite me through the paper with its spider fangs! So then I go for something larger. A shoe. A book. Something hard and solid. But then I think - No! Wait! What if it jumps just as I go to hit it! I'll miss it and make it angry! So then...I double up. I get tissues and a book and then I'm just uncoordinated and trying to double team the spider and end up squishing it into a corner and it's legs are flailing around and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs and the poor thing gets the worst last vision of all: Me, wild-eyed and confused by the mess I've made, stabbing repeatedly at it with a tissue, screaming for Mother Mary.
As I mentioned before, size and weight of the spider are huge factors in my fear. The tiny "whisper spiders" as I call them (those ones who look like nothing but cobwebs til you get up REAL CLOSE and see - oh yup! That is a spider), I have nothing against. I even let them live sometimes! In my home! I figure they can do all the good spider work, while their larger, beefier counterparts who probably are the ACTUAL ones eating the beetles and mosquitoes and flies, can die by my hand. Or my roommate's hand.
Like the time I beckoned her down to the basement. There was a massive black spider hidden among some old lint pieces from the dryer. It made sense to me that the spider would reside in the lint, as that seems comfortable and a nice place to transition from web to ground. (I think about how spiders think sometimes. It doesn't get me very far, but it does get me anxious.) She came down, obligingly, with a roll of paper towels. Two for squishage, and the remainder for clean up, since I did stress how GIANT this spider was. As she walked closer, I was truly impressed by her bravery. She wasn't even wielding a paper towel yet! She leaned down to the floor, leaned in slightly closer, stood back up and turned around.
Jess: "Yup."
Amanda: (terrified) "WHAT? WHAT IS IT? IS IT ALREADY DEAD??!"
Jess: "Yeah. Because it was never alive."
Amanda: "How did it grow to that size then!!! I've never! I don't want to! Agh!"
Jess: "No, dipstick. It's a spider ring from Halloween."
Needless to say, I was embarrassed and a little shocked that my brain couldn't tell that there was a) a ring attached to this spider and b) it was made of crude, poorly shaped plastic. But the mind sees what it wants. And apparently, my mind wants to be terrified at every opportunity.
Now to the title of this post. I said that killing a spider is not as scary as you think it will be, 95% of the time. That is because most of the time, either my tissue or book or shoe plan does work just fine...either immediately or eventually. There may be some blood and tears, but the job gets done. And there I'm left, one fearsome creature dead, one more tiny eight-legged soul on my conscious.
But occasionally, and I made that a number - 5% of the time - things don't go as planned. The spider does jump. Or flee. OR FALL IN YOUR HAIR. And there you are, wearing nothing but '70s running shorts and a bra, screaming for mercy at 3AM in your parents' guest room until your bleary eyed dad comes in and you make him groom you like a monkey for the next ten minutes to make sure that there truly is NOTHING in your hair. And then you start to wonder...if not in my hair, then where? In my bed? My suitcase? My MAKE-UP CASE?! Where is he lurking? Waiting to creep out at the right time...or lunge at me...or travel back to Philadelphia and get ever stronger and more powerful, breeding with other spiders and creating a spider army to avenge my attempt on ending his life!!!
Or maybe, he's on the end of the broom like I had intended, and it was all for naught.
You know, either one.
Spiders are creepy, yes, but I believe my fear truly lies in their capacity for intelligent thought and most of all, vengeance. So please, as winter slowly rolls in this year, and the bugs venture indoors, be careful. Be mindful of your implements. Be confident in your killing choices. And for god sakes, clean up after Halloween. You're going to give someone a heart attack with those spider rings.
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