It's Amazing that I'm Still Alive

I love being able to tell people what I am doing at any time of the day, whether they like it or not. It is for this reason that I love Facebook. With Smartphones, you can literally tell people exactly where you are and what you are doing, anytime, anywhere. And I know that most of you people reading this have been on your phone, checking your Facebook, Tweeting something oh-so-profound, or playing Words with Friends while sitting on the toilet. Don’t deny it, maybe you are even reading this from the commode. We’ve all done it. However, I try not to borrow other people’s phones too often.

So this is my tale of the time I Facebooked naked. Intrigued? Don’t be, although I felt that this story needed a certain imagery to accompany it, so yes, there are pictures. And I must say, I do look quite skinny in them. My vegetable and gummy bear diet must be paying off! Here goes…

I woke up around 6:45am from the bustling of the dogs and my mom around the house, but I kept my eyes closed, refusing to actually wake up at such an ungodly hour. Alas, my efforts were foiled when Sally walked into my room, saying, “You know what’s weird Linds? The past few days I have woken up at 5:03 every morning. But this morning I realized that your dog was sitting outside my door quietly whining for me to get up.”

I still had not opened my eyes, and from under the covers I responded, “Hmmph. You know what else is weird? The past few mornings I have woken up at 6:45am from someone walking into my room and starting up a conversation!”   

She laughed and apologized before leaving my room, but by that point, there was no getting back to sleep for me. I let Dave (my dog) get up on the bed and cuddle for awhile before Sally left the house and I finally decided to get up and shower.

Showering at Sal’s house is always much more pleasant in the summer. Since you don’t need the water as hot, you are able to take a longer shower, and since my left foot is (still) in a cast, I need a lot more time to take my unbalanced peg-leg showers than I do when I’m on two feet. So with my iPhone playing loudly in the background, I wobbly, yet successfully cleaned myself under the lukewarm spray.

It was after my shower that trouble ensued. Climbing over the tub wall, I reached for my towel and dried my arms, and then my face. When I pulled the towel away from my glistening cheeks, I noticed a large black spot on my bright green towel. Even without my glasses on, I instantly knew that I was face-to-face with a very large spider. Now, I’m not normally super freaked out by these eight-legged creatures, but that in no way means that I want them in my face. I had been given quite a start, which caused me to scream and throw the towel onto the floor. The spider somehow got knocked onto the bathmat that I was standing on, and was right by my feet, unmoving. I thought that maybe this was a dead spider that I was dealing with, and while I still don’t want it in my face, it was much more manageable if it was just a corpse.

My roommate in San Francisco has a severe fear of spiders. If Katie sees even a speck of one in her room, she doesn’t hesitate to wake me up at 2am to come remove it. I have horrible guilt if I ever kill one, so even on these damn crutches, I have to find a way to trap them in a jar and set them free outside without letting them touch me. It can be quite difficult. Anyway, my first thought after throwing the potentially dead spider onto the ground was, “Oh, my gosh. I have to send Katie a picture. This will totally freak her out!” (Guilt for killing spiders does not equal guilt for scaring roommates).

Laughing evilly to myself while sending the picture to Katie, the beast of a spider suddenly came to life and started racing toward me. The next two seconds of my life are forever engrained in my memory, but in a slow motion replay, over and over and over.

As the newly awakened spider dashed towards me, I screamed (yet again) and jumped back on my one good foot, into a small puddle of water that had dripped off of my hair and body, since I was unable to fully dry myself with my spider-infested towel.  I then slipped, falling backwards, arms flailing, crutch flying, and yanking a towel off it’s hook, all the while thinking that I can’t let my casted foot crash to the ground and hoping that my thick phone case works in not letting my airborne phone break when it hits the ground. It’s times like these that I wish I had my own reality TV show. Or a helmet cam (Christmas is just around the corner people).

After I gracefully landed on the tile floor (not gracefully at all, but my naked fall is awkward enough, so let’s pretend I looked pretty while doing it), I burst into a fit of laughter with the instant replay immediately going through my brain screen while simultaneously hoping that 1) the spider was nowhere near me, and 2) I hadn’t broken any more bones, because at that point, there was nothing that I was going to be able to do about either of those problems. But what I could do was dry my tears of laughter and immediately let my public know what just happened to me, by posting the picture of this huge spider to my Facebook wall. And I did just that.

Hearing my second scream, Thunder Dave had slowly wandered to the open bathroom door and sat staring at me, wondering what the hell was going on. That adorable dog-head-tilt wasn’t doing anything to save me, but it was cute. And I have mixed feelings about the fact that the spider had found a good hiding spot by then, because if Dave had seen it, he would have attacked and eaten it. The downfall is that I never found it and the next couple days at Sal’s house consisted of me in a constant state of fear and suspicion. Where did Spidey go? Is she hiding in the box of Kleenex for when my allergies act up? Maybe laying low near the sink so she can crawl up inside my cast when I’m doing my make-up? Or maybe she made the trek into my bedroom and is hiding under my pillow so she can crawl into my ear one night and lay eggs. Any of these are entirely possible. Maybe I should go back to killing spiders. I’ve been reading far too much about the peaceful ways of Buddha.

For now I will continue to ferociously shake out my bath towel before I use it, even though I’m back in San Francisco. There are still spiders here, and since I never actually found her, I really don’t know if Spidey hitched a ride back to the Bay with me, now do I?

Special thanks to Sally O'Malley for helping me with the pictures for this blog post. I guess that makes up for coming in to wake me up at the crack of dawn, just to chat.