Boris the Spider

Some of you may know that I am a terrible arachnophobe.  The mere word makes my skin crawl.  I cannot even stand to look at pictures of spiders, hence am quite unable to identify the harmless from the not so much, or worse, from the run-in-the-opposite-direction-immediatelies! (Pretty much all of them have that effect.  Sometimes I am even dressed when the running starts!).  The one and only exception is the "daddy longlegs".  (I refuse to learn its scientific name and please, no one enlighten me) I believe they are highly poisonous but some kind soul told me that they are unable to bite humans for some reason or the other, so as long as they don't come looking for trouble, I leave them be.

Broken down to its various bits, a spider is simply a round, hairy blob.  Big, scary mouth, more eyes than any one thing should ever have and legs all over the show.  Why they scare me so much, I really don’t know. But they do. 

Some days I think it must be the way they move.  The bloody things were just designed to be freaking creepy, yet I seldom see them creep. Mostly I see them either sitting very still, just looking at me with that look in their eyes – all of them. "Hey, look at me, I can sit upside down on the ceiling and jump on your head at any time! Whoo-hoo! " If not doing that, they run around in weird patterns, very seldom straight lines, obviously trying to make the blonde dizzy so she won't be able to call out for help.* 

I have been suffering from a disgustingly weird, thus far unexplained parasitic infection since my return to Jordan, eventually spending a morning and afternoon in the hospital emergency room on Monday.  I feel like... crap. I am tired, in pain, uncomfortable, I don't know when/where/how I got this bug and am looking at all the food in the house with great distrust.  But most of all... most of all... Sob!  Nothing tastes or smells quite right.  Since Sunday, I have not been able to eat anything but one little piece of plain toast at a time, so why bother? 

As you know, I have a deep love for all things food.  I love to think about food. I love cookbooks, I thoroughly enjoy cooking and I am pretty sure I could eat for the Olympics, should the need ever arise. (please, please, please)  Not only do I not want to cook right now, since I feel really ill, I also don't want to eat. Anything.  That one piece of toast is so I can drink my medicine without it destroying the lining of my stomach.

So, on top of not feeling good at all, I feel emotionally hungry for food.  That little hungry spot somewhere in the food-section of my brain says "Feed me! Feed me, Seymour! " and oh how I wish I could comply.  But not yet...  hopefully the meds will all kick in very soon and return me to the foodie I love to be.

What does this all have to do with arachnophobia, you ask.  Well, let me tell you.  As we were sitting in the bedroom last night, I saw the familiarly frightening scuttling of a gazillion little legs, zigzagging in their creepy fashion like they do simply to freak me out, across the floor at the bedroom door.  Now normally I would yell for the Voice of Reason to  Hunt! Kill! Destroy! as he so valiantly does for the love of his life, but not this time.  No sir. Well, truth be told, I did yell " Spider! ", which set him off on a tangent about a song by The Who, called "Boris the Spider".  I suspect that after all this time, the man has learnt that the pitch of my voice is relative to the size of the spider.  Listened, processed and deemed it to be a small enough creature which did not require immediate action and proceeded singing the song to his now very irate wife.

By now, I have had just about enough of foreign goggas** running around where they are not supposed to be and causing all sorts of scary unpleasantness.  No more!  With hubby still singing about Boris, I jumped into my red-and-orange flip-flops, gave a very impressive leap for someone in as much discomfort as I was and squashed that little bugger like I do this for a living!  Ah... the things one will do when feeling ill, pissed off and hungry!

Uhm... I just hope that teeny-weeny itsy bitsy spider did not have a big brother currently climbing up the water spout...   

*  (Wonder if they watched that old Oprah Winfrey show as well, where a policeman guest of hers advised audience members never to run in a straight line if/when running away from someone shooting at you?)

**  Bugs  (Yes, yes, yes, I know, they are not technically called bugs. I don't care)

Click on the link below to listen to the song.

Boris the Spider - The Who