Bugs and spiders

I didn't know that ladybugs have some kind of superstitious, Virgin Mary is coming to get you element, but they do. I was always told not to kill ladybugs because they are friendly and cute, they will sit on your hand and they won't pee on it like a gecko.

Someone I know has an office infiltrated by an insane amount of ladybugs. Now me, I actually like and respect bugs, I would consider this some kind of compliment. Didn't you read "A cricket in Times Square" when you were little? Crickets are good luck. Ladybugs are even cuter - why wouldn't you feel blessed? But this shadowy dark office dweller wants to exterminate these poor little friendly ladybugs, and doesn't realize that fate has knocked on his door and given him some friends with like minded intellectual pursuits (eat the living, dammit!).

Arachnids are a completely different story. My sister has this God-awful tale of early childhood in the Lake Tahoe foothills. She awoke one night to feel something crawling on her chest. She peeks her head under the covers and DUM-DUM-DUM there is the biggest black widow she would ever see perched five inches higher than her navel. My poor sister kept squeeking, "Mommmmmmmm" and noone came. Finally, after an eternity or so, she gathered up the spider in her blanket, threw it across the bedroom, and screamed....

( The story gets worse but I have to finish it. Dad found the spider and left it in a mason jar on the bar in the living room. The next day, my sister comes home from school, and finds the jar empty. My Dad insisted that the spider had escaped and didn't cop up until my sister was in tears at bedtime, refusing to go to sleep.)

I had a similar event happen sometime in the '90s, but that was a little different. I was living in my parent's house for just about the last time, and I had decided to come home early (4 AM) because I couldn't draw my Escher pictures in my fuzzy hallucinatory state over at my boyfriend's house. They were too busy dropping things, playing UF Orb at an insane decibel, and playing with the laser pointer and the cats.

Anyway, I sat on my big virginal bed ( I kept that bed sacrosanct for a full ten years, thank you. Wanted happy dreams in that bed) with my happy turtle lamp on and drew my Escher drawings. My fingers were all smudgy and yucky but those boxes were awesome. I felt something tickle-tickle on my thigh and knew it was some horrific eight-legged freak. I ended up turning circles on my bed, around and around, hiding from the freak and my shadow for a full 3 hours. Finally the AJC man clunked the paper on the porch and I hid outside in the dawn, reading my paper, drinking my coffee, and dreading that hazy headache that always sets in with the dawn.