Chicken-Eating Spiders...No, Really

I'm sure no one remembers this post. The memory of the dinner (or, more accurately, the dinner conversation) is burned on my brain in letters of fire, because this was the first time I met someone who had personally seen huge-ass spiders in their natural habitat. So whereas before, my knowledge was theoretical, nature-channel knowledge, now it was urban legend knowledge--the spiders had happened to a friend of mine when he was visiting a foreign country. And I knew another friend whose childhood vacation home was infested with big roaming spiders she could hear walking on their hardwood floors. The spiders were closing in.

At the time I comforted myself by joking with my girlfriends about how the spiders might eat chickens. Oh, how we laughed. What a funny image. We laughed until we cried.

Well, the spiders in Peru actually do eat chickens. I can hear the spider saying, "Who's laughing now, girls?"

The spiders, they scare me. Excuse me, I have to go rent Arachnophobia.

Another Reason I Have No Business Hiking

Well, that's not true. I enjoy hiking, actually. I prefer walking, because it seems more civilized, and it typically requires less specialized gear. Also, there's less of a chance that my survival will hinge on having to eat a spider. And I simply couldn't eat a turtle. Because if I did survive, my cousin would never speak to me ever again. Ever. And life would no longer be worth living.

So it's a damn good thing I'm never ever planning to go hiking in French Guiana.

Read the whole thing, because the money quote is in the third-from-the-last paragraph. Yeah, the one about the amazing spider diet (better than Atkins!) and with cooking tips (hint--if spider were on a menu, there would be a little star next to it warning that it would be cooked to order but that the restaurant wasn't liable for what might happen to you if you ordered it rare).

Something tells me these boys are going to be more grateful than most for their Easter dinner today, even if they wouldn't normally have celebrated the holiday.

I Feel Bad

And not the guilty kind of bad I usually feel. Instead, I feel like I've been on a cycle of crack and downers for the last three days. Sometimes 3-day meetings do that to me. To any reader who was there with me over the last three days, seriously, it's no reflection on you. I just need things if I'm going to spend three days with a bunch of people. Like air. And possibly alcohol.

But at least I'm faring better than these little guys.

Ain't No Paradigm Shift Wide Enough

Naturally, during my meeting, I IM'd a buddy at work to tell him about the rooster crashing our phone meeting. He asked me whose rooster it was, and I theorized that it might belong to (or at least live near) the lady phoning in from the Philippines. I said that now my mental note card for the Philippines reads, "Contains giant spiders, some people obsessed with racecar driving, and possibly roosters."

He knows I've refused to go camping on the grounds that there are bugs out there in nature, so he advised me to hie myself off to the Philippines, there to conquer my fear of insects by communing with their giant spiders. (Later I shared his theory with some of the other women in the meeting, and we engaged in a lively debate over whether the spiders would eat the roosters or the roosters would eat the spiders--my money is on the spiders, personally.) My colleague's assertion was that it would be a paradigm shift that would alter my life for the better (possibly enabling me to go camping).

Let me tell you right now, ain't no paradigm shift wide enough to make a dinner-plate-sized spider okay with me.

But the rooster--he's all right. I hope he comes to more of our meetings in the future.

For the record

So I'm at a team dinner the other night (wherein "team" signifies a group of folks who do systems work, and not a group of folks who possess strength, grace, and coordination--some do, but on this team, I'm not picked last, if you get my drift), and one of the gentlemen starts talking about a nature hike in a forest in the Philippines. It all sounds extraordinary, and just when I'm thinking to myself that this dude is putting me to shame for not having experienced anything much in my lifetime, that's when he mentions the spiders.

"You don't remember any spiders?" he asks the woman sitting next to me, who is actually from the Philippines. She assures him that she's been there several times and does not remember seeing any spiders. "That's weird," he continues, "because there were a lot of them. They were in the canopy. They were pretty far away, but they looked big. Like this," he says, gesturing with his hands to indicate an arachnid the size of a dinner plate, or perhaps a charger. I make an involuntary noise indicating my habitual horror at any spider large enough to be detected without reading glasses. Then my imagination really kicks in (helpfully adding color and heft to the image based on some stories my college roommate told me about spiders you could HEAR walking on hardwood floors in a cabin from her childhood--"They sound like this," she'd say, drumming her fingers on a notebook) and I make another involuntary noise, meant to clearly convey that I would not appreciate being led on a friendly nature walk, only to look up and find the canopy above me festooned with enormous spiders.

And he looks at me and says, "What? They aren't on you or anything. I mean, I didn't see any coming down out of the canopy." He turns back to the lady on my right and says, "They must eat birds."

For the record, that's a sick and unhealthy attitude designed to lead someone to an early death. Spiders the size of dinner plates may be God's creatures, and they may be a natural wonder. They may be greeted with enthusiasm by a person whose job it is to discover a new species of spider, or to catalog all the spiders in the known world. But for an ordinary human to be immune to the instinctive terror that should immediately kick in upon seeing a spider who COULD NOT FIT IN YOUR SHOE is just wrong, wrong, wrong. I'd accept the argument that it's tough for them to hide and jump out at you due to their size and weight. I'd accept a mitigated reaction indicating that your fear has been conquered by testosterone or adrenaline--some kind of Indiana-Jones-style, "Spiders. Why'd it have to be spiders?" But claiming that the spiders are okay because at this moment they're too bored to try to kill you is just silly.

Look, in "Arachnophobia," there's a reason Julian Sands dies and Jeff Daniels lives. That's all I'm saying.