Monday, 16 March 2009

• Currently Farmhouse By Phish dirt see related

  ...but i'm still afraid of bees (or, "why i never walk into the kitchen without looking").

  it seems to officially be springtime in south carolina. and springtime means one thing wherever you live: bees. this is my LEAST favorite part of the entire season. i'll take pollen, mud, cats mating outside my door, and the typical sudden influx of spiders with little problem, but i find bees (and all their flying/stinging-or-biting relatives) intolerable. for as long as i can remember i have been moderately afraid of them. i give flowering bushes and trees a ridiculously wide berth this time of year, and i will do nearly anything to get out of a bee's way. to my knowledge i posess no allergy to these antagonizers; i just REALLY don't like them. i realize and understand how insane this is. but the story i'm about to tell you probably makes it even sillier. i previously shared this story on my old site (www.xanga.com/firty_LB if you're interested in the last four years of my life or so) but have yet to share it with my current audience. since springtime has recently brought it once again to mind and i'm in a mood to write, i thought i may as well tell it here.

  i spent the summer of 2005 on the san carlos apache reservation in arizona for my college internship. the experience was amazing (and, as you may have guessed, hot) and i learned many things about myself, life, geronimo, and the way people live when they don't have hope or motivation. i can truthfully say that summer changed my life in a few ways. i had many first time experiences, one of which was being stung by any insect. here's how it went:

  i was at home with my host sister one evening and we were hanging out, watching movies, and eating dove chocolates. we had built up a small collection of those little aluminum wrappers with all the motivational sayings on them (like "take time for yourself today!" and "enjoy the moment", etc), so i decided to make a trash run. i scooped up a handful of disposable inspiration and headed toward the kitchen. i got halfway across the floor when i stepped on something. at first i thought it was a goathead (to anyone who's never lived in the west, that's a particularly nasty thorn/sticker that looks like...well....a small goat's head) and started to bend down to take it out of my foot. then the tingly burning started. i lifted my foot, looked at the ground, and there stood my assailant- a scorpion in a VERY defensive posture with a twitching tail. it took me a few seconds to realize this was indeed the source of my rapidly spreading discomfort. i hobbled over to the kitchen table to sit down and absorb the irony that now, just after my 21st birthday, i had been stung for the first time and that it had been by a scorpion, of all things. my host sister came in a few moments later, killed and flushed the vicious attacker, and went to work on my foot (ice pack, advil, and a pen to trace a circle around the injection site to contain the poison). that tingly electric feeling developed into a throbbing pain which lasted for eight hours and then gave way to a three-day numb.

  the odd thing about this experience (as if it wasn't odd enough on its own) is that while it served to make me much less squeamish about most bugs (spiders, for example, i can now approach without hestiation), it did nothing to lessen my fear of bees and their nefarious cousins. i realize in my head that these stings must be much less severe than the one i endured already, but this does not serve to diminish my irrational overreaction to most flying insects (just in case they happen to belong to the bee family).

  i now almost always stop and scan the kitchen floor in any house before i walk across it. strange.

  and that's probably the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me.

  cheers!

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