Unlike a lot of people I know, I don’t like to be at home. I’m the only person I know who would want school to end later in order for lunch to be longer.

It’s not really that I don’t like my house, or my neighborhood, or my family. All of those are fine. The problem is that I get very bored here. I never get to be with people (other than my parents and brother), which annoys me. I’m always doing work. And there aren’t many people to hang out with here because most of my friends live pretty far away (and would rather do work than hang out with me).

I’m generally fearful of bugs, and try to kill whichever ones I find in my house. But today I realized that these bugs are actually a partial solution to my boredom at home: they provide company.

It started with a spider appearing on my light blue wall, in the office I work in. It was unbelievably small and brown, so I was very intrigued by it. I wanted to do something cool. Like take a picture of it or something.

So I left my room hastily, looking for my brother’s camera. He had gone to some business competition and I didn’t know whether or not he had taken the camera with him.  I couldn’t find it after walking back and forth between rooms several times.

I went back to my wall. The spider wasn’t there. My eyes wandered all over in search of the little thing, and found that it had climbed way up near the ceiling. I tried trapping it with my hands and blocking its way, but it would keep squeezing through. I didn’t know how to stop it.

I glanced to the right and saw my bottle of eyeglass cleaner spray. I decided to try to use the clear plastic cap of that to contain the spider. It worked.

Hence I was standing there, and at that point wondering what to do next. I couldn’t stand there all day pressing the cap onto the wall. The whole point of my endeavour was to take a picture, so I still had to get the camera.

I called my mom downstairs and asked her if she knew where the camera was. She told me she saw it near her. I asked her to get it for me, but didn’t tell her that it was rather urgent. After an endless few minutes of standing there, I realized she wasn’t gonna bring me the camera. I had to get it myself.

I knew I had to wait for the spider to climb onto the inside of the cap for me to be able to get it off of the wall without killing it. It was a tiring wait. Although at one point it looked like it was dancing, which was pretty funny.

Eventually it climbed in, and I hurrily pulled the cap away and tried to plant it as soon as I could onto my table. But I was too slow.

It started prancing all around in panic and crawled out onto my fingers. As I already mentioned, I’m a little fearful of bugs. I was standing there shaking while it was writhing all around. Thanks to its extremely small size however, I couldn’t actually feel it on my hand.

So I slapped my hand onto my desk to shake it off. It fell down to my desk, and it became even crazier.

I grabbed the cap, tried to follow it, and slammed it down at what I thought was the right time. It wasn’t.

I smashed it right onto two of the poor guy’s legs, tearing them off gruesomely. Ouch. I felt really bad for a few seconds. Not only had I put it through all that stress, but I had just ripped its legs off.

Thankfully it still looked rather healthy; almost as if nothing had happened. And at least I had finally encased it, and did not need to watch over it anymore.

I ran downstairs for the camera, grabbed it, and jumped back up. I turned it on. The screen stayed black. Nothing happened. The battery.

I went around the house again, this time looking for the charger. I couldn’t find it.

And now the poor spider is just standing there helplessly, with two of its legs stuck between the edge of the cap and the table. I hope it isn’t a mother. Or a little baby; that would suck.

All the while I’m waiting for my brother to come back from his pointless business competition with hopes that he knows where the charger is. He probably does. And every few minutes I’m lifting the cap with the idea in mind that it needs fresh air. I don’t know if it really does.

Can you see its two detached legs?

But through this rather exciting journey I have learned that I shouldn’t always kill these bugs in my room. They can be fun to spend time with. Not that I find spiders more interesting than people.

 

 

After a little while, my brother finally came back and gave me the charger for the camera. By that point, the spider was already dead. RIP, fella.