What if it flies into your mouth while you're asleep and gets stuck to
your tongue because its wings are covered in saliva and flaps around in there
until you wake up, thinking you'd just had the most revolting dream of your
life, but it's not a dream and there really is a huge hopping flying
insect struggling to break free of the very orifice that you consume food
with and rely on to sanitize whatever you consume?
It was the size of the last joint of my thumb. It had the legs of
a cricket, the thick shell and body of a beetle and the thin flaky wings of a
flying ant. The first time I saw it I only saw it jump. Jumping is
frightening, especially with legs like those, but not that frightening. I
could always move to the top bunk.
Flying, however is a terrible ability for a large sickening bug
like that to have. That means that it's a Freak-out Bug, a.k.a, a bug, that
when swatted at for landing somewhere on your body, will flap compulsively in
every direction hitting you at least three times in the face, sometimes
brushing you lips and in the end leaves you wishing that you'd let it sit on
whichever of your -extremities it had originally chosen.
I was led to believe that some of the most driven and successful
students attended Cal Poly. Driven and Successful students, so I heard,
required an enchanting environment. When I got to Cal Poly and was shown my
accommodations I recalled what most of my motivated friend's rooms looked
like, and understood that this matched them perfectly. The workaholics that
I've been exposed to are practical and have very little time for aesthetics
or comfort.
My roommate and I got extremely lucky space wise. We are in a
three-person room with two people. This means that three beds, three desks
and two dressers have been thrown in wherever they could fit, leaving a boxy
mess of looming wooden structures that we only half fill with our
belongings.
The beds are wonderful. If I were from a Sudanese refugee camp
where I'd been sleeping on a two by six board above and below four people in
the same situation, I would be crying with joy. However, being from a middle
class Victorian apartment in breezy San Francisco where I sleep with a
ergonomic neck pillow and a goose-down comforter, all wrapped in rose printed
flannel, of course, I find the accommodations a little distracting from
blissful sleep. That is, the pillow is about as squishy as a stale piece of
bread and the blankets are made out of the same thing that I scrub my dishes
with.
The bathroom is actually not bad. The floor is made of those tiny
little tiles that your feet stick to when you get out of the shower. There
are plenty of mirrors (which is an incredible feat) to accommodate four rooms
of girls with one bathroom. The showers are clean… most of the
time.
This morning, in fact, I was taking a relaxing hot shower when I
noticed something large and black stuck to the floor, water skirting it to
reach the drain. I looked closer, and sure enough, it had died. Cemented to
the tiles of the shower was a bug the size of the last knuckle on my
thumb.
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