In Which I am a Terrible Person

I am a terrible person. Today, I climbed into the shower with the water full blast and looked up. I was not alone. There was a spider on the ceiling of the shower, one of those nasty long-legged ones that wriggle about unpleasantly. Dad was outside. Karl, who was tall enough (if not exactly brave enough), was upstairs in his room with the A/C on full blast, and thus unsummonable. Mom was getting groceries. The dirty work was up to me.

If you know me, you know I'm short. I can claim three inches over five feet, and that's not much when staring death in the eye from three feet over your head. My first instinct was to jump out of the shower at high speed, but luckily my logical left brain kicked in first. I climbed delicately around the shower curtain and stared at my nemesis. There were no long-handled things in sight, so I grabbed the empty soapdish sitting on the edge of the shower and chucked it a few times. All it did was get water on the ceiling and make the spider wiggle its horrible legs at me. Plan B: Chemical Warfare.

Our bathroom is also a laundry room and general cleaning-supply-holding-room. My eye landed on the lemon Pledge sitting innocuously on the shelf. Perfect! I grabbed it and whipped back the shower curtain. The spider (I fancied) cowered away in fear of imminent disposal. I drew my Pledge and fired.

Pledge smells pretty nice, but it's not much for killing spiders at long range. My enemy wriggled and danced in its little nest of invisible web, but not much else. Repulsed, I returned to the shelf. Aha. Bathroom cleaner (GreenWorks, thank you very much) was the obvious choice. Not only was it meant to be sprayed in bathtubs, but it had (I hoped) stronger properties than that of a dust-remover.

I whipped back the shower curtain once more. The spider had moved farther away - it had learned its lesson - but I was in a blood rage now. I attacked without mercy. (This is the 'I am a terrible person' part.) The spider wriggled some more, kicking its awful legs, and dropped to the soap shelf. I continued my attack relentlessly until it fell to the shower floor. Miraculously, it was still moving, trying to crawl back up its long strand of spider-silk. All futile. I switched on the showerhead (it has very impressive water pressure), and the spider was instantly doused in hot water. It curled up its nasty legs and floated gently to the drain, where it finally disappeared.

Needless to say, I spent the next ten minutes in the shower with my eyes on the drain, waiting for it to claw its way back up and devour my flesh. I'm happy to report that no such thing occurred. I still kind of feel like a jerk, though. Surely death by GreenWorks is less than pleasant.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my friend Brittany on the phone. We'd gotten close on a two-week art trip to Germany, and for once I found myself capable of holding a phone conversation without awkward minute-long pauses or sitting in silence while getting talked at for hours on end. Brittany was a year ahead of me in college and has just graduated, stepping right in to a (fantastically lucky) full-time graphic design position. In other words, she is An Adult, and to some extent I regard her with some awe and trepidation (except when she's fangirling over Harry Potter).

The thing I remember the most about that phone conversation was something she said about being An Adult: "Whenever I have to do something that scares me or that makes me nervous, I just tell myself 'I am a strong, capable, independent woman,' and that makes it easier." (Obviously a paraphrase, my memory isn't that good.)

Those very words were in my mind as I faced off with the spider (not the first I've killed on my own, but the first I've killed au naturel and dripping water all over the bathroom floor. It made me feel very Amazonian), and they're in my mind now as I sarcastically pen my first blog post. I turn twenty-one in twenty-nine days. More and more, I'm beginning to feel the pressures of growing up: what am I going to do after I graduate? How am I going to make enough money to live on? Should I get an online boyfriend so people stop asking me about it? Will losing weight make me happier?

All very mysterious, adult-y questions. Questions, I hope, that will someday be answered. And since writing is, like, my "thing" - and since everybody and their mother (including mine! The horror! Just kidding, Mom) has a blog now, what better way to inflict my daily life upon the world than through my own little corner of the World Wide Web?

So, to finish up, here are a few things I've done in my youth that I hope will be a benefit to me as I make the trek into Adulthood:

1. traveled to London, Paris, and Germany on the aforementioned art trips
2. held a steady(ish) partime job for two years
3. read an awful lot of books
4. written hundreds of thousands of words in really bad teenage fantasy fiction
5. failed to bake sourdough bread
6. inhaled more cat and dog hair than is probably healthy
7. slogged through three years of art school that may or may not be of use in my future career (and one more to go)
8. loved and been loved by a family I'm incredibly lucky to have

I leave you with this quote from casting director Russell Boast that I think everyone ought to hear, and adhere to:

Do anything – write, perform, sing, dance, paint, put on a play, and don’t wait for anyone to give you permission. You don’t need permission to do what you were born to do.