EWW

When I was little and happened to see something black with lots of legs cruising its way up my wall, I would always run into the living room and hover there a minute before telling Mom that there was a bug and that she needed to come kill it for me. I thank God that my mom has been a biologist since before I came from the womb and was usually rather fearless about such matters, instead uttering a "My word" before dutifully grabbing a paper towel and marching into my bedroom. I couldn't believe the chutzpah. She didn't attack it with some nameless, hazardous spray cleaner or even whack it with a shoe, she went right up to it and SQUISHED IT just beneath what to me was always a much too thin sheet of Bounty. I mean the bug is practically right there when you do it that way. You can probably feel its insides ooze out from under it's soft exoskeleton. It gives me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. Eww.

"And it's an insect, not a bug," Mom would always say. Whatever.

I remember the first day I saw an insect crawling around my indoor vicinity and realized that I'd have to kill it myself, like some weird right of passage into adulthood. It was inevitable, and terribly sad for me, but the day finally came when I couldn't call a parent to come kill the Big Nasty. My heartrate jumped to 90 miles a minute, I jabbed the air around the BN with my flip flop, and got down on my hands and knees and stared at it for at least ten minutes, pretending to strategize. The thing is, you gotta be quick, because multi-legged creatures move freakishly fast, and losing sight of one is never an option. Sometimes, it would perch itself in that unreachable corner between wall and ceiling, and all I could do was stare at it warily as I lay in bed, praying it didn't move any closer to my pillows.

Since those heart-pounding days, I've encountered a plethora of creepy crawlies, not the least of which have made their debuts in my various DC apartments. If I thought going after thumb-sized flying cockroaches in Hawaii was bad, (and let me tell you, those things learned to run from me), that was nothing compared to my introduction to the standard house centipede; a thin, wafty looking thing with thousands of big beefy legs that ripple it across a floor in 0.00005 seconds. These things range in size from I-need-a-microscope-to-see-it, to the size of a baby chimpanzee. Yeah. Exactly. As a bonus, hitting them with a shoe (or anvil) dismembers the body from the legs which continue to twitch long after they have a brain to tell them to do so. I repeat, eww. At this point, I have to take my own paper towel and clean up the crime scene, something I've finally managed to steel myself against. Because one of these days, the cycle will repeat itself, and I'll be the brave one running to the rescue of my bewildered daughter. "It's an insect, baby, not a bug. And you better not watch this, it could get messy."