Should Scientists Discover That Bugs Have Feelings, I'm Going To Feel Real Bad

Last night as I was preparing to microwave my coffee for the fifth time (it gets cold, what can I say) I came upon some creatures on the counter which looked suspiciously like termites. I started yelling for Rigel, as I usually do when I see anything that is alive that DOES NOT BELONG IN MY HOUSE, this time mainly because we just paid the lovely folks at Orkin a dime or two to dispense toxins and I wanted him to see these invaders for himself, ask them for some I.D. and then smash them to a pulp.

And it took him forever. To get. To the kitchen. About as long as it takes to read. This sentence. Fifty times.

It has always annoyed Rigel, the girlish screaming of the wife at the sight of bugs, but I've explained to him that it's just my natural reaction, borne of decades of bug-phobia and I can't control it anymore than he can help dropping to his knees at the sight of the Led Zeppelin bin at Tower Records. He says his problem with my 'crying wolf' is that if there arose a true emergency, say my encountering a crazed ax-wielding man in our foyer, he wouldn't be able to discern my legitimate screams from my usual shrieking at having spied a gnat crawling on the shower curtain and would probably just tell me to "Buck up and show it who's boss." (Note to all of you out there: If I meet my fate at the hands of an Ax-Wielding Man In my Foyer [A.W.M.I.F.], please alert the authorities that while I was being attacked my husband WAS IGNORING ME FROM THE OTHER ROOM.)

So explains his thirty-minutes-in-the-making walk from one side of the house to the other, by which time most of the purported termites had long flown away, back to their ten thousand homies feasting on the insides of my kitchen cabinets.

I remember an incident when I was little and at home one day with my dad. I was sitting on the toilet when a waterbug the size of a yorkie crawled out from behind the laundry hamper and threatened to eat me alive with it's powerful insect jaws. I commenced my previously stated over-reacting and my dad, obviously worn down from years of false alarms by a wife and five children, started a slow shuffle from the couch, the entire time telling me to "Calm down and keep your pants on" to which, had I not been deathly afraid of getting grounded, I should have replied, "Can't keep my pants on when I'm peein', but maybe you could kill this bug SOMETIME THIS YEAR." By the time he got to the bathroom, even the waterbug had grown tired of waiting, did a victory lap around the bathroom scale, shook it's little scaly rear at me and then escaped behind the counter.

Conclusion: Men are damn slow sometimes.

But the termite story isn't over!

As soon as the girls heard my distress call they came running to the kitchen to see what was causing mommy's latest round of hysterics. Three hours later Rigel finally arrived, having determined that my life was not in danger of the A.W.M.I.F., and was preparing to heroically do away with the menace with a powerful paper towel. Kiyomi and I were dancing around him yelling, "Kill it! Kill it!" and banging pots and pans in a frenzied war dance. At this point Kira, obviously the more sensitive of all the females in this household and greatly influenced by movies starring talking bugs with feelings, started crying and begged us not to kill the poor pest, citing it's family and friends who would mourn its passing. Rigel spent the next fifteen minutes patiently explaining nature's delicate balance of life and death to Kira (He's good at the science lectures. Me, I think I told her "Kira, they're eating our house. They must die.") Meanwhile Kiyomi and I looked for some matches to torch the remaining termites and send them to a fiery grave. In the end Kira said she "sort of understood and wasn't so sad anymore" but I spent awhile comforting her in bed, still sniffling and teary eyed.

This is the same girl who every Saturday morning, while holding up her bacon says, "Aw, poor piggy!" Then proceeds to take a huge bite and exclaim, "But you sure taste good!"

Conclusion, as per Kira: Do not kill living things, unless they make a good breakfast meat.

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