A Bug's Life

Bugs have invaded my life again. My home, the Kremlin, has been overrun with ants. In the past, the hippies that we are, we've learned to coexist peacefully with insects, but once it got to the point where the ants probably owed more in rent than us, we resorted to poisons and traps to annihilate them to varying degrees of success.

At work last week, I discovered that my classroom also has an ant problem, which is all the more aggravating considering I can't seem to catch a break from them. I left out a box of crackers under my desk and within an hour it was infested. The ants aren't the only bugs frequenting my classroom: a large spider made a visit, too. One student screamed about a huge spider; I assumed it was a case of being over-dramatic. I'll be damned, however, if it wasn't the thickest, grossest spider I have ever seen (and that's saying something) in the flesh, or whatever type of hairy outer-layer spiders have, unless that expression refers to the seer, in which case flesh does apply to me - covered in clothing, mind you.

Some students screamed while others teased them, until the teasing students moved closer to inspect and became freaked out in their own right. People told me to "be a man" and step on it, but I was too terrified to do it. This wasn't exactly a daddy-long-leg: If I stepped on it, it would ruin my shoe more than I would ruin it. Knowing class couldn't resume until the situation was under control and that I did not have the guts to do it, I offered five dollars for someone to remove it from the classroom. Suddenly, a student who was screaming about the spider earlier was not interested in earning the money and took care of it fairly quickly, though not without additional screaming.

Later, I thought we were fine, resuming the lesson, only to have a pair of bees fly in through the door and terrorize the students. "It's like A Bug's Life in here" quipped the $5-richer student. I almost mentioned "and you haven't even noticed the ants yet!" but figured that wouldn't win anybody points, so I kept it to myself.

Today, as I taught the same class of students, I periodically sipped from a bottle of water I left at work over the weekend. It tasted a bit stale, and made a mental note to refresh my water supply at the next break. On what was probably my fifth sip, I felt something weird on my tongue and scraped a dead ant off of it. I made a face, then looked at my bottle. I don't know how I could have been so unobservant previously, but that's when I discovered that there were no fewer than two dozen ant corpses floating in my bottle of water. Being so freaked out, I couldn't hide my disgust, and had to confess the situation to my students. They were more grossed out than I was. "You have to do something!" "Rinse your mouth out with Raid!" I told them that it wasn't my fault and that those ants were stupid for going on some sort of suicide mission into my water, but the students then chastised me for drinking "old, nasty water" in the first place.

All day, no matter how much clean, fresh water I've had, I still can't rid the taste of death from my mouth. I know that's something that's more so in my mind than a legitimately lingering taste, but it sure feels real. Fortunately, I'm about to head to Margarita Mondays. That amount of alcohol will certainly kill anything that ails me, or at least help me to forget about it anyway.