I’m a Red Sox fan. You kind of have to be, by default, if you live in Boston. I mean, there are a few miserly people here who stubbornly cling on to their Yankees love or Red Sox hate, but, if you come to Boston with no preference one way or another, you become an adopted Red Sox fan. Granted, I’ve only been to one game and I didn’t get to that until four years had passed, BUT I do support them and if baseball is ever on in a restaurant, I always check to see if it’s the Red Sox and what the score is. That’s about the extent to which I will pay attention to baseball.
However, I hate Red Sox fans. I mean, I’m sure most of them are decent people, and Boston’s sport fanaticism is part of why Boston is a great city. There’s just nothing like the town spirit in sports. It’s great. Until you have to go ANYWHERE during a Red Sox game. It’s wicked awful.
They take up the T, and they don’t stop coming for hours. Seriously. There’s just masses of them. I have the unfortunate luck to work in Kenmore Square, right by Fenway Park, and the even more unfortunate luck of somehow getting out of work at different times in the week and somehow EVERY TIME being mobbed by Red Sox crowds. Either coming or going. They’re always there. I go down into Kenmore Station and they’re all along the platform, jostling me as I try to get to my spot where I wait for the T. Then, they’re on the T I try to take, and me with my bulky backpack has to shove my way onto the T and breathe the heat and the stink of a way too full T and become friendly with unknown people.
So. No offense to all those wonderful people, but I hate Red Sox fans.
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I had at least three updates planned for the last week. But then work decided to beat me up a bit. Like, how my daily goal for the day I wrote the above was “go to the gym” but that didn’t work out…because I felt like I’d already been to the gym all day. That counts, right??
So, since I don’t actually have the time or brainpower to have a real update with goals, here is something related to the previous post: how to deal with fear of spiders!
(I like to think my actual writing is better than this, but hey, I wrote this in about an hour…)
Larry was a bookspider (as opposed to a bookworm, a rather insulting term which implied a spider was slow or over-gorging), and therefore he preferred staying home and reading his webs to exploring the world. Therefore, he was having trouble adjusting to his new web. He had not met all the neighbors yet, but the downstairs web hosted a rather large spider who seemed kind of sinister. Then again, all other spiders seemed sinister to Larry, who was bad at starting up conversation.
After reading all the webs he could in his hometown and earning the recommendation from his professors, Larry had set out to explore a new location out of necessity. He’d learned all he could but he still wanted to learn more. The only solution was to move.
Searching had been hard at first, because he didn’t know what he wanted. Did he want a bigger, airier space, a damp earth home, or a dry, cramped corner? He’d come from the open, a grassy area near some trees. A house was a big change. By the time he found his real estate next to the big machine the landlord had called a “washing machine” he was tired and ready to settle down, but he also genuinely liked it. There were loud noises occasionally, but they intrigued rather than frightened him. It was only that his downstairs neighbor was too close for comfort and the spiders down the ways in the basement were too far away to bother meeting.
Things were going well for the bookspider. The days were comfortably warm, though the air was getting cooler each night. He built his web efficiently but sturdily. Every once in a while he heard thumps above, but his home was snug. He began to think he quite liked living in a house.
“Aiieeeeee!” A shriek pierced the air, startling Larry from his musings about the origin of the cosmos. He looked up to see a looming figure with eyes larger than his own body staring at him. “Spider! How am I supposed to do my laundry now?” The voice was high pitched and shook Larry’s body; it was the most terrifying thing he’d ever heard, and he scrambled behind the white box, afraid to even peek around the corner to see what was going on. A mumble of voices continued for a while and then his body began shaking. It wasn’t just him; the entire box he clung to with all his strength was moving, rumbling, tumbling. With another jolt of fear, Larry scrambled back to his web which, thankfully, only twitched a little.
What was this devilry? How could he ever have believed living in a house was a good idea? And those eyes? Larry shivered remembering those eyes. They were so big…so…white…so…creepy. He’d heard stories of humans, of course, and even vaguely seen them from a distance but he had been told they were dangerous, deadly even, if you crossed the wrong one. He cowered in his web, waiting, even after there were no more sounds.
Larry must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to some shuffling of feet, a pause, then the noise of a door opening. The spider peeked around the corner and saw the human bending over, moving fabric from Larry’s white box into the other white box.
“Hello,” her voice came quietly. “Are you there, spider?”
Larry almost jumped off his web at being addressed. “Yes, I’m here!” he squeaked out.
She didn’t appear to hear him, but she continued speaking. Maybe his small spider voice was too quiet for human ears. “My name’s Melissa. I’m going to be doing my laundry here, sometimes, okay?”
“Okay,” Larry replied. This human didn’t seem so bad after all.
“I know I’m invading your home, so please don’t be mad at me. I’ll just be down every once in a while.”
“That’s okay,” Larry said, but she still didn’t act like she heard him.
Melissa left for a while, but when the second white box stopped vibrating, she came back down. “How are you doing today, spider? I’m doing okay. I don’t really like doing laundry that much, and I’m kind of scared of spiders, but I guess it’s okay since we had this talk.”
Larry began to think living in a house might not be as scary as he first thought.
Melissa left again, and Larry didn’t see her for a while. A few other humans came down; they were not as talkative as Melissa, but they left Larry alone. After several weeks, though, Melissa came down again.
“Hi, spider. It’s that time again. Laundry time. How has life been? For me it’s been good. I just got back from softball practice. We have a big game against our rivals this weekend. Better get my uniform cleaned up, eh?”
The next time she came down, she brought not only more news but also food. “My friend’s coming to visit after the game. Maybe you’ll meet her—she’s kind of messy so she might spill food on her clothes,” she informed Larry as she sprinkled some cracker crumbs on the floor next to his web. Larry had never had human food and was a little wary of it, but, though a little hard, the crumbs were fairly tasty.
Over time, as Larry studied his surroundings and continued on his task of discovering more about the world, he began to look forward to Melissa’s laundry visits, even coming to think of her as a friend. He only wished he could somehow speak to her. Every time he tried to speak to her, she acted as if she hadn’t heard.
Larry tried many things. He tried jumping around, making more noise than spiders usually did. He tried speaking in high tones and low tones. He tried screaming. Nothing reached Melissa. But then, one day, one of the other humans in the house left a book down in the laundry room. As the page lay open, Larry, with his bookspider tendencies, crawled over to the table and read the words written. It was a science textbook, and the page talked all about amplification of sound. Larry had found his solution.
He thought and thought for several days, then organized his web, remembering what he had learned about science and sound from the person’s textbook. Then, he waited for Melissa to do her laundry.
It was a cold, rainy day when Melissa came down again. “Hi, spider,” she said glumly, her voice strangely muted. “I have a cold. I hate being sick.”
“Hi, Melissa,” Larry replied, and he could hear his voice booming louder than it ever had.
Melissa paused and looked around. “Who was that?”
“Me. Larry, the spider you’ve been talking to for several months.”
“Is this a joke? Carol, is that you?” Melissa looked around.
“No!” Larry almost yelled, worried all his work would be in vain. “Look down!” Thankfully, Melissa did look down, and Larry waved one of his legs. The girl took a step back, clapping her hand to her mouth, then rubbing her eyes.
Larry felt sheepish. He hadn’t meant to startle her. “Hello?” he said again tentatively.
Melissa stared at Larry, then giggled. “Your name is Larry?”
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