Spiders Continued

I’ve never really liked spiders. They are creepy, gross and just well….ug. But, I can handle American spiders for the most part, and the ones I can’t I can easily vacuum away. In short, I did not live in fear of spiders the way I do now.
I always knew I had an illogical fear of spiders but I never realized how bad it actually was until I was forced to face the creepy crawlies on an everyday up close and personal basis. It became most obvious to me how deep this fear ran on a Sunday evening when I was invited to one of the other English teacher’s apartments for an evening of junk food and movies. My apartment building has an elevator that stops at the first, fourth and seventh floors, but for whatever reason hers did not……and she lives on the top floor. That meant there were seven flights of insects between me and a pleasant evening.
I got to the apartment building and started up the stairs. The spiders were in mass, but most were overhead, and a constant ducking position was all that was needed to avoid a collision course with their webs. I rounded the corner to start up the 5th flight and came face to face with six or seven spiders who had built their webs across one of the apartment entrances and directly across the main stairwell path.
I could have slipped by the webs by scooting sideways around them, but it would be a close call, and failure would earn me a vicious attack by five or six writhing, wriggling, potentially deadly spiders. Okay, they probably weren’t deadly, but they sure look it.
Face to face with my enemy, I stared them down for maybe a full five minutes, broke into a cold sweat, clenched my fists and turned around and went home. I walked back breathing heavily and started to loosen up the muscles I had worked into a serious knot of stress just thinking about braving the spiders.
At home I picked up the phone and called the girl I was supposed to visit. “Tina, I can’t get to your place. There are too many spiders and they are blocking the stairs.” The response I got was a fit of laughter from the other end. Not really what I was looking for. “Well knock them down with something then. Use an umbrella or a broom.” “Oh, okay”, I replied. Right, like I can just knock down an army of killer monster spiders. Piece ‘o’ cake.
After hanging up I probably sat on the couch for a full 20 minutes working myself into a tiz over how on earth I was going to get by those spiders. I didn’t have a broom, and an umbrella was certainly not long enough to risk it. Plus I’d have to clean them off, I couldn’t just smash them with the umbrella.
I forced myself to get off the couch and I made my way back through to stairwell and reached the nest of creepy crawlies. Have any of you seen the movie Entrapment with Catharine Zita Jones? She is trained by Sean Connery to acrobat and bend her way through this impossible web of laser beams so they can steal something really awesome. Well I felt like her. I observed the near invisible webs, changing my angle to use the light like these super thieves would use an aerosol can to detect their obstruction. Then I bent and slid past those menacing spider’s webs like I was Catharine Zita Jones. Once I got past, I booked it up those stairs. Thankfully I had past the worst of the spiders and I reached my friend’s door safely. Once there I pounded on the door and entered hyperventilating, soaked in sweat and tears welling up in my eyes. They took one look at me and burst into laughter. “We didn’t think you were going to make it!”
Needless to say, after our movie I made someone walk in front of me so they could knock the spiders down and I could wait at a safe distance.