Spiders are like little pieces of death wrapped in scary

My friend Julie introduced me to this blog called Hyperbole And A Half.

Check out this one on spiders (from whence the title of this blog post was taken.) If you're easily offended by f-bombs, don't go there and you probably won't want to visit Canada, because most of us are pretty relaxed with this word. I can't speak for every Canuck, but my circle of friends and colleagues certainly are. I think it's the hockey.

So if, like me, you are terrified of spiders despite all the logic your brain and your husband lobs at you, you will find this blog post funny. My husband tries to make me feel guilty by explaining that not only am I being silly for being afraid, I have now passed this "irrational" fear on to my daughters and I should be ashamed of myself, as a mother.

Bah, I said, the last time he chastised me. And then I directed him HERE where a recent article suggests a genetic component to our fear of spiders. That women are born this way, in order to protect their young. Ha. I posted this article on my fridge for a while to drive home my point, but the spider photo gave me the willies.

I can't count on my husband to kill any eight-legged interlopers in the house either (and they almost always choose our upstairs bathroom) because putting aside his view that spiders are not to be feared and should actually be protected because they're beneficial, his arachnid modus operandi goes like this:

He approaches very slowly, usually without benefit of his glasses, while holding a tissue like an old woman on a cruise ship waving goodbye to her cronies on the dock. The whole time he's approaching the spider, he's looking at me and delivering the same lecture about how silly I am. When he finally gets to the creature, he'll make a half-hearted swipe. One of two things always happens.

1. He misses the spider entirely. This results in it rappelling down the wall and skittering behind the toilet, bent on revenge which I know is going to happen at 2 a.m., in the dark, while I'm alone, with my underwear around my ankles rendering me unable to run. Or I'll forget about the underpants, run, fall, knock myself out and will lie there helpless until it crawls in my ear and makes babies.

2. He captures it but doesn't crush it in the tissue. He'll then shake it into the toilet bowl where it skitters on the floating tissue and escapes before we can flush.

This is why I keep a vacuum cleaner with a long attachment near the upstairs bathroom at all times. Over my lifetime I've probably vacuumed more spiders than dust or pet hair. (Probably? Okay, definitely.)

More recently, my car was the scene of a spider carnage. As I was leaning in to unpack the trunk of my car alongside my sister at her house in Toronto, I noticed movement at the corner of my eye. Literally, at the corner of my eye. A large wolf spider, a stowaway, was inching its way past my face. I screamed, and its legs shot straight out as it continued its descent, making it seem even more demonic. My sister got all huffy because I'd screamed, then she saw it and went batshit crazy. She had her shoe off in a micro-second screaming "KILL IT KILL IT" so I gave it a whack and splattered it, and all ten thousand of its orange babies, all over my trunk.

In case you want a visual, just Google what a wolf spider looks like. (I can't even bring myself to post a photo.) They're big. Especially when they're filled with spider caviar. They're described as "robust and agile hunters with good eyesight." Just reading that makes me feel woozy.

If you prefer, there's one on dogs.

This one on her dogs which had me doubled over laughing. And there were no spiders in it. Not one.