Monday, November 15, 2004
on a lighter note...
Hey.
I just read over my entry from this afternoon and realised how colossally grim it sounded, so I thought I'd try to lighten things up with an incident from my day.
I was sitting in class this afternoon when I noticed that the woman in front of me had a silverfish crawling around on her sweater with great abandon (she was somewhat...er...husky, so there was a lot of room for him to move around in, and he seemed to be enjoying himself). For those of you who come from lands without silverfish, the aforementioned creature is an insect resembling a skinny cockroach, minus the exoskeleton, not surprisingly silver in colour, very fast-moving, with a squishy body and a liking for food left in desks over a long weekend. Let's call this one Jack. So Jack was having a grand old time on this woman's sweater, while she sat totally unaware, chatting with another woman about her age who was sitting beside her (both women were probably in their late 40s or 50s, and both are the type to find someone like me terminally unamusing and silly). They were both "mature" students, which is a technical term the university uses with complete disregard for irony, and as a result said students tend to be exceedingly self-righteous and socialize primarily among their own kind.
I was very much aware of these facts as I looked around to the people next to me, trying to tell whether any of them had seen Jack and planned to do something about it. From the looks of it, they were all in full Monday afternoon zombie mode and hadn't noticed a thing. I had two options. The first was to remove Jack and risk the huge embarrassment of having the woman turn around and ask me why I was touching her sweater. Somehow I figured the words "there was a bug," wouldn't suffice for her. The other option was to do nothing, and wait until Jack either crawled under the sweater, which would surely be most unpleasant for all concerned, or until he hit the floor to find his next victim, also an unplesant possibility. Either way I would be left feeling like I had violated the golden rule (and no, not the one where the person with the gold makes the rules...the do unto others thing) since if Jack or any other of his comrades had been on my sweater during Jewish History class, I would have wanted someone, anyone, even the snobbiest girl in class, to remove him (sorry Jack, but that's just the way it is. It's got more to do with trespassing than with hatred of the Silverfish race, so please understand).
So finally, reluctantly, I reached forward, in the guise of a casual stretch, and picked Jack off the woman's sweater, crushing his little body (sorry about that, little dude) and placing him gently into the radiator, fully expecting her to turn around and demand what the hell I thought I was doing.
She didn't notice.
I'd like to send my condolences to all 5,000,000 members of Jack's extended family. Please understand that desperate times call for desperate measures.
R.I.P little dude, R.I.P.
And on that note, to bed.
-N
