Flying Puppy

Question: What's worse than phoning your boyfriend at midnight-thirty to say that you have abandoned you room because no one is around to save you from the gigantic moth that slipped into bed with you?

Answer: Re-branding the nemesis from "fluttering menace" into a "flying puppy."


"Just trap it with your hands," he said. "It's soft."

"I don't care what it is," I said. "I tried to capture it with the tupperware, and it just started flying around!!" (Truly an outrage.)

The problem with moths, more so than other bugs, is that they're just as clumsy as I. Flies are easy to shoo out of the open door or window because they have a predictable trajectory. Moths, on the other hand, are all willy-nilly, and I find myself imitating their behavior, wiggling around as if I had no bones.

Let's be honest, I don't do well with other bugs either.

In college, I had two carpenter ants in my apartment. I had moved all of the lights into the affected room so that I could see their every move. It's debilitating. Like being a child that saw a scary movie too close to bedtime. In the end, I bought very hard soled shoes and mashed the ants into the carpet. Then I covered their little carpenter ant corpses with a desk.

One time, that same year, I had a big spider in my apartment. I was on the phone with Walter at the time, and I started panicking.

"Walter, what should I do!"

"Turn off all of the lights and hope it goes away!"

"Will you come over and kill it for me?"

"God no!" were his exact words.

Fastforward to two years after the carpet ant/spider apartment, and I was living in an apartment with straight up roaches! They were nice, because although very gross, the adults were very secretive. You never had to look at a live moving adult roach in my apartment. Just the little baby roaches would hang around in the sink, and the remedy was simple: Turn on the hot water, dump a cap full of bleach into the drain, and spend the night at a friends house for about a week.

Earlier this month there were two big wasps in our apartment. Wade lured them toward the screen door by turning on a nearby light. Then he crawled GI-style toward the screen door and slid the door open without getting so much as 4 inches from the ground.

It was pretty impressive, and luckily for me, his demonstration on how to rid the apartment of a wasp occurred before he left for his DJ gig. So when the second wasp was in the house and I was alone, I had the survival skills to get it out the door. Then I had the common sense to close all of the doors and windows and turn on the AC.

Well, I've procrastinated long enough... its time to leave the lights on in the hall, build a fort out of my blankets, and get some sleep.