What phobia?

Journal Entry, 30OCT04

So I seem to have embarked on an inadvertent ¨cure my fear of bugs¨ adventure. When I was walking down the very beautiful roadway into the cabañas I saw some very beautiful and very large butterflies. During the course of my walk I started to think about how much bigger the butterflies were than the ones at home. Of course, this lead me to think about how the other bugs are probably proportionately that much bigger as well. I immediately decided that this was not something I should think about . . . Kind of like the mystery meat, its just better not to ask questions.

Well my ability to delude myself further came to an abrupt end just before supper when David (Seattle) showed up with his digital picture of the ¨large¨ tarantula he found walking up the railing to the cabaña. There was no frame of reference for the photo so again I managed to convince myself it couldn´t possibly be that big. So the very friendly and helpful staff went and got one for us to see. And the hairy 20cm (no kidding) ball of spiderness crawled around on the one guy while they explained how not dangerous it was.

Dinner was tasty and I very much enjoyed being able to speak English, and did very well considering the array pof bugs that joined us for our meal - the 12 cm green grasshoppers were definitely the highlight. Its ok though, I thought to myself, they can´t get into my room. So with my escort of small children I braved the wild and made it safely back to my cabaña. And I made the mistake of looking for bugs. So now I´m lying here on my bed frequently checking uip on the status of my new, way to close, friend the 10cm+ long centipede that is living on my ceiling. He has only moved once, apparently he is mor comfortable sleeping slightly curled up than as previously stretched out. I don´t think I have ever told myself how OK I´m going to be as I have in the last twenty minutes. The rather ?humorous? part is that I have very few options at this point in time. I can´t exactly leave and go find myself some 5 star hotel in the Arctic, and my only option, really, is to deal with it. I suppose that since all the big bugs in the world do have to live somewhere, the jungle is probably a fairly reasonable place to be finding them. And after having recently made the mistake of moving something in my room, I have decided that being on the bed is looking like a good option. Unfortunately this is one situation when being alone is not optimal. One idea I recently had was to use my sleeping sheet over my head in order to not leave any exposed skin, but I think I´d be too hot.

OK, the centipede left - through a crack in the ceiling. Apparently I was boring him. The cockroach just poked his head out, but realized it was light and backed off - which leads me to my next option of leaving the light on - which, although annoying, may stave off the creepy crawly things. This option is, however, not very conscious of the solar energy situation. Perhaps by ¨Deep Woods OFF¨ sprayed on the legs of my bed will keep things from crawling up them. I´m kind of thinking that ¨Deep Woods¨ is not particularly synonymous with ¨Deep Jungle¨. There . . . Six hours of protection guaranteed . . . So if I set my alarm for 4am . . . . . .