we don't need no stinking gender roles

[dragonlady7]

lenine2 was writing about spiders and it reminded me of this incident.

So as the weather gets a little colder, we get more spiders. It's actually the height of insect season around here, it seems-- grasshoppers as big as your thumb all over the yard.
Anyhow. I was sitting on the couch on the sunporch and noticed that the coffee table beside me had a truly huge spider on it. Legs and all it was probably the size of a silver dollar. I blinked at it, it blinked at me, and after a moment I blew on it. It scuttled behind a picture frame, and I realized it had a web there.
Nice. Well, you know, I don't need to set my drinks down on that table. It's all good. Let it be, and I don't have to think about it.

A day or so later I looked down into the laundry basket on the porch. It's a big white plastic laundry basket, vaguely rectangular, that I'd left on the porch after hanging some clothes out on the line. It was empty-- except for another, even larger spider, who couldn't get out and was crouched in a corner regarding the world with some displeasure.
I exclaimed, pointed it out to Z (who didn't stir to look at it), stepped around it and sat down, regarding the coffee table with some trepidation. They're everywhere, but we'll hope they don't bite.

It must've been several hours later that Z got up and went inside, and when he came back out he let out a startled cry in a rather soprano register.
"What?" I asked, looking up in some surprise.
"Spider!" he said, clutching one hand to his chest and pointing at the laundry basket with the other as he shrank away.
"Um," I said, "yes, that's the one I just pointed out."
"It's huge!"
"Yes," I said, "that's what I said."
He gave the basket a wide berth and sat down uneasily, still staring at it.
Finally I stood up with a sigh, and picked up the basket. The spider jumped around a bit, but didn't seem terribly skilled at it, so I carried it to the door and dumped it outside. "There," I said. The spider, taller than the grass, strode away purposefully toward the garage.
"Thank you," Z said, uncurling a little on the couch.

Comments

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

...he let out a startled cry in a rather soprano register.

So he screamed like a girl?

I've dealt with rats and snakes and didn't bat an eye. But creepy things freak me out. Once I got a slug on my hand while I was in the garden and... oooh, I have to stop thinking about it.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

> screamed like a girl

He kind of does that. It's adorable. (Once, I showed up to visit during the limbo between when he gave me a key to his place and when I moved in, and I arrived at 5 am, and I let myself in, and I came to his bedroom and he was asleep and the floor creaked and he screamed like a woman, and I couldn't help but laugh but on the other hand, he was absolutely justified as I'd just broken into my house. Thereafter he had a policy of coming home from work and entering silently, just to startle me.)
He has a normal masculine low voice but it's prone to cracking, and so he doesn't even bother to attempt manly screams. They just don't happen.

Me, I'm pretty cool with most things unless they touch me. Ew ew ew ew. Can't deal.
The other big thing that disturbs me to the point of nonfunctioning is if I squish something. God I can't stand that. It's bad enough if I did it on purpose, but if I did it inadvertently I can't deal at all. I once stepped on a baby garter snake in my wooden barn clogs and I cannot get the image out of my head of its death throes. (At least I crushed its skull, so it can't have suffered long, but it was twisting sideways over and over and I had to run away.)

Rats, mice, snakes, bats, birds, cats, weasels, groundhogs, raccoons, spiders, millipedes... I freak out about millipedes in the shower, because I can't deal with the horror of legs (I think that's the number, like a gaggle of geese or a murder of crows or a pod of whales: a horror of legs). But most other things, I'm cool with, as long as they don't approach me or initiate contact. If I initiate contact, I can touch them. (Some things, I will not touch. Because, most likely, they will bite or sting me. So no spiders, no coons, no rats, no weasels, no bats. They gotta stay over there and I'll just stay over here thanks.)

Except for the Jabberwock. Twice ever have I done the girly scream and asked Z to come kill/remove something. And the first time, he screamed and ran too. We refer to it as the Jabberwock. It was a beetle larger than my hand, and was flying around the bathroom. No human could have withstood its fury. We shut the door and opened the window and just crossed our legs and waited. No idea what it was; rudimentary taxonomy (i.e. it had a shell like an exoskeleton) suggests it was neither bird nor bat, but it was large enough to be either.
(The second girly scream, it was just a millipede, and I had the decency to be ashamed, but I still asked him if he would please deal with it because I know they don't creep him out at all.)

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

No human could have withstood its fury.

Wow, I think I would have permanently sealed the door and then built a new bathroom onto the house. Or moved.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

What we actually did was close (and lock) the bathroom door, and then go out on the fire escape, open the window and screen, and set up a lamp on the fire escape. (Good thing it wasn't raining.)
We then waited like four or five hours until we couldn't hold it anymore and had to use the bathroom. (We didn't have any friends nearby.)

It was a scary bug.