Family Ties

Today I accidentally referred to my roommates as my family. My slip made me pause for a moment to think about what it actually means to be a family.

I spend most of the year with these people afterall. We have witnessed each others best and worst moments; the absolute pinnacles of happiness and the absolute most heart-wrenching moments of sadness. We make small talk over the dining room table and argue about whose  turn it is to take out the garbage. We act as one another’s mother, sister, best friend, and weird aunt who offers to give you a nickel if you rub out her bunion…

Being a family it seems comes less from genetics than  from the unconditional love you can have for someone, even after you’ve seen them wipe earwax on the wall or pick particles of food from their fingernails or sleep with a giant Robert Pattinson blanket….

As weird as they are (and trust me, they’re weird), I think there are still stranger family dynamics than our own.

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The Reincarnationist’s Dilemma

Spiderman from fastcharacters.com

I believe bathroom time should be alone time. Door closed, blinds shut. Recently though I’ve discovered that I am no longer able to be alone in these private tasks. I am being watched. Not by some creeper hanging out around the house. No, I am being watched by a family of white arachnids who have taken residence in my home. I am joined when in the shower, while flossing my teeth, when brushing my hair…. I relocated a few to the great outdoors, by my new eight-legged housemates keep finding their way home.

 I have another option… the one most people I believe would take- crush  the tiny little bodies in a tissue and toss them with the garbage. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I had no problem taking out the colony of ants that decided to declare war on our kitchen counters with a can of Raid, and I didn’t feel too bad while eating my Asian chicken salad wrap tonight, but actually crushing the life out of a little creature seems too much.

So I decided to make a deal with the house crashers. If they don’t touch me, I won’t touch them… So far so good.

Then again, maybe the university has been up to some nuclear experimentation on the spiders and I’ll have Spiderman powers in the morning.

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