A Motivational Spider

Spiders seem to be appearing in my life a lot lately. Not those meek little measly-spindly house-dwelling ones, the kind you see Garfield smacking with a rolled-up newspaper in the Sunday funnies. I mean those giant garden-variety spiders that spin big, gorgeous orb webs wherever they find a place to hang their hat. They've been in my yard, they've been in Delaware--the other day I caught a collection of students staring one down on my campus, coffee cups forgotten in their hands, completely awed. Maybe there's been an insect surge on the East Coast, and these guys have decided to drape their webs out and try their luck. (Or maybe they got wind of the reboot of the Spider-Man franchise.)

Wandering into the living room today to do nothing in particular, I happened to glance at a window, and I saw this orb web coming out at me like an air-bag. It nearly touched the glass, then slacked back as the wind died down. In the dead center, curled up tight as a nut, was a spider, and not a small one.

This fellow decided to spin his web right outside a window--a window, I need not add, that any one of us could crank open at any moment. It's not an up-and-down window, it's a window that opens out. That takes guts, I guess. He risked demolition for a pretty view. Either that, or he just doesn't know.

At any rate, that window's the least of his problems. It's the first truly blustery day of the season, and he happens to have placed himself right at the crux of the storm. Every time the merest breeze goes barreling by, that web of his bops around like one of those cheap old screensaver graphics, and every time it happens you're positive it's going to detatch. But when it calms, there he is in the center, utterly motionless, pretending that nothing happened. I think he's got a spidery stoic-philosopher thing going on.

Other spiders sprawl around in their kingly webs like Emma Lazarus's take on the Colossus, with conquering limbs astride from strand to strand. Not this guy. He can't afford to sprawl. He remains huddled against the cold, cringing in the way spiders do, looking like one of the test subjects for Mad-Eye Moody's Cruciatus Curse. It's all the odder because he's one of those spiders with a vacant smiley face etched on their inner abdomen, so all the while his top half buries his head in his hands, his bottom half looks on the verge of throwing me a merry wink.

One time a pine needle landed among the strands somewhere near the edge. The spider felt it and eagerly trapezed his way over, convinced that it was his dinner. When he got to it, he fished it out, examined it tremulously with his front legs, and finally threw it away with the same air of disgust a writer has as he flings his fourth crumpled paper across the room. Then he went back to the center of the web, to wait.

I wanted a photo of that beautiful web of his, so I went looking for my phone. (By the way, none of the photos I did get were any good. Glare too bright.) When I came back the wind had punched a hole in it and turned it from an orb into a work of modern-industrial art. And there sat Spider among the wreckage, looking subtly, stoically sarcastic, as if to say, why me?

But after a moment of this, he stretched his legs and went climbing out to the pieces where the thread had frayed, connecting a bit here, eating a bit there, until it looked--well, it didn't look the way it had before, but at least it looked like something that was serving its purpose. And he crawled back to the place that used to be the center to wait.

I like this guy. There's something valiant about him. He's brave in the old-fashioned sense of putting forth a good face. I dread the day that someone opens that window and sends his web floating into the atmosphere.

Though, knowing him, he'll probably just tack it to the nearest tree and keep on waiting.

It ain't all satin / And silk, this Latin

It's hard to know what to even write about anymore, because a lot is going on. I'm a college student now. Navigating a campus, lugging my books from building to building, taking a million notes, the works.

I'm also a commuter, and thank goodness for that. I'm simply not a dorm-dweller by nature. I need to recharge. I've decided that a shift in scenery is the secret to stimulation. (Also, I have this new college laptop, and if, after my studying, I couldn't use it to watch cartoons with Clair, I'd cry.)

But yes. Latin is a tricky business. I'm only just starting it, and I've been made aware that what I've signed up for is essentially a slow broiling in conjugations. I must prepare myself either to become gradually stronger or to experience a premature decline. (Decline! "A, ae, ae, am, a, ae, arum, is, as, is!")

In one of my crazier moments I developed a theory about British accents. In every English book you read, the characters are just about drowning in caffeine. They think it's perfectly reasonable and normal to have tea in bed, then go downstairs and have breakfast with a pitcher of coffee. Imagine drinking one type of caffeine to work your way up to drinking another type. (That's not even mentioning all the stress-induced whiskey-mixing that goes on in Jeeves and Wooster. No wonder this is the civilization that came up with Alice in Wonderland; their solution for everything is to find the right thing to drink.)

Thus I conclude that a British accent is like an app on a phone. Its constant use drains battery life faster, and the only cure is near-constant caffeine.

Taking this as a hypothesis and following it to its logical conclusion, no wonder these books always depict the Romans looking all bulky and muscular. Merely speaking their own language was the world's most efficient workout.

And, just as the bird too weak to crack the egg would surely perish outside the shell, those who can't lift their copy of Wheelock's Latin have no hope whatsoever of surviving the course it suggests.

[By the way, I'd just like my readers to appreciate the fact that I wrote this entire post without once using that cliché old joke about "it killed the Ancient Romans and now it's killing me." I bet it occurred to you, though.]

Good times

How to have a fun day in summer (if you're me, at any rate):

Head out to meet some friends at an outlet for The Amazing Spiderman. However, the two sisters who are accompanying you forget to mention where the outlet actually is until it's too late for Mom, your long-suffering chauffeur, to make an earlier start. Cue feeling of relief that you had nothing to do with the planning process and therefore can't be blamed for your sisters' communication problems.

Get there in the nick of time. Unable to find your friends, you resign yourself to seeing them later and sit down to get your ticket's worth. You spend the movie mentally writing a review for your blog ("Andrew Garfield's Pete Parker manages to encapsulate both dorky and dangerous," etc.), but you'll never be able to actually write it, because halfway through the movie some mad scientist fellow injects himself with DNA and undergoes a horrible transformation. You, unable for some reason to mentally separate science fiction from potential reality, get sick and have to be lead from the theater by your sister, face turned downward so you don't have to look at the screen and the horrors emblazoned thereon.

Fortunately it turns out that the rest of your friends came late and couldn't get tickets, so they're just killing time in the outlet. They're the type of people who are more fun than a movie anyway, so after you've stopped furtively examining your arms to see if someone rearranged your DNA while you were off your guard, you hit the outlets with them. And it couldn't be better. They try on sunglasses because they can. They buy you french fries. They run around in a Spiderman mask that Timmy apparently purchased for just such an occasion. Then they all hit the novelty candy store and get bric-a-brac such as Bertie Bott's Beans, to say nothing of a rather large gummy bear on a stick which you buy your sister Clair as a surprise for tomorrow. (You can post about this all you like, because Clair never reads your blog. Muahahahaha.) Chocolate? No, you don't buy any chocolate. Theresa and Timmy have already bought chocolate and are carrying it around in Theresa's bag, since they figure there's probably graham crackers, marshmallows and a fire in their future.

Then, find your sisters, wander around a bit, narrowly miss the Hogwarts Express (in reality a bunch of shopping carts linked together), and go to a record shop.

Then everyone repairs to the Fox's house and has an excellent dinner, followed by s'mores. You have tea, and you force Theresa to drink it with you as a thank-you because she made you cookies. (She doesn't even really care for tea, but where friendship is concerned this is totally irrelevant.) There are thumb wars. Then you talk books with Moira Fox, which makes your day because you like all kinds of relatively-obscure English novels and only she understands. Also, she's an (amazing) artist. This is a great thing, because art, like common sense, fascinates you even as it coyly eludes your ability.

The next day you write a lengthy blog post about all this for some reason, written in second person, and finish by thanking your mom for driving all over the place to make it happen. (Not that she didn't love doing it.)

NOTE: I'm mostly only posting this because I'm bad at keeping up a diary and I want to put my blog to use a little bit. If you weren't there, you may take it for granted that I wish you had been. :)