Charlotte and Her Damn Web

15 January 2011

This might sound ridiculous – don’t laugh. I’m serious. Don’t laugh!

Those who know me best know of my intense, somewhat irrational fear of spiders. In my mind, this fear is completely legitimate considering the baseball-sized welts from spider (or mosquito, not sure) bites I would find all over my legs as a child. I’m obviously allergic. And they are scary. And gross. Back off.

Now that matured a little, I’ve slowly tried to overcome the silly fears I’ve kept since childhood (i.e., in college I was finally able to accept that Umpa-lumpas aren’t real).

Consequently, moving into my new home in Dodoma, I’ve encountered many new and old bugs. One of charming things about Jana, my German roommate, is her German-influenced English. In the German language (or what I’ve learned from my brief stunt in high-school with Blonde Frau), everything is given a gender simply by the starter word that is equivalent to “the” (i.e., “die toilette”, the toilet – “die” is the feminine form… hmm, it’s hard to explain). Anyways, Jana says things like “she is very beautiful” when talking about the large cockroach in the Jesuits’ bathroom (she, I mean it is kind of pretty, I guess; she’s kind of shiny).

Back to Charlotte – SHE is the spider that resides in our bathroom. She’s been there for a while. I named her Charlotte because of Jana’s influence. I didn’t like her at first, considering she chose to weave her web right above the sink, really close to my face. Not cool. It was a tiny web though, and she was kind of small (small as in skinny – those small chunky ones are the worst). I thought about messing up her web for a while so she’d leave – I don’t kill spiders usually because the crunch really freaks me out. But I never spent enough time in there to worry about it. So instead, I decided to take this opportunity to get to know the spider-species and reconcile our differences. She’s a real nice spider. Doesn’t disturb me. I usually take caution when entering the bathroom if it’s dark, make sure she’s secured her spot so I can move to mine, and we’re golden. I’ve named her Charlotte so as to make her seem more friendly – I think it’s worked.

Why am I telling you about this? Well, tonight Charlotte started getting a little adventurous – testing her boundaries if you will. She’s slowly been expanding her web, like a lot actually. It’s in this corner but it now looks (or looked) like a little shelf above my head. She usually doesn’t move very much while I’m in there. I think her web must have gotten a little low because something startled her (like my head in her web) as I was brushing my teeth that made her move close to me, have me freak the heck out, and have her freak out and scurry in the other direction. She got too-oo-oo close. I was already getting a little annoyed having to clean up after her all the time (she leaves little bug droppings on the sink after her meals – ew). So I thought I’d remind her who was boss, and I took the strange duster thing on a long stick and removed a lot of her web. Charlotte was getting a little too comfortable in there.

I felt very satisfied leaving that room, but now after writing this story, I feel a little bad. I mean, she probably was eating a lot of those dumb mosquitoes that will eventually give me malaria (if not already). Why did she have to think I was dinner? We’ll probably have a little talk tomorrow and work out our differences…