Bugs in the Night...

Has this ever happened to you? You wake up in the morning and go to brush your teeth, only to discover that some spider has used the bristles of your toothbrush as an anchor point for its recently spun web? Has it? HAS IT?

Well, it happened to me just this morning. I was in a rush to get to class and there it was, the web hanging off my toothbrush. And it wasn’t some beautiful, Charlotte’s Web kind of web, this was the web of some retarded spider who flunked out of web-weaving class. It could not have even been mistaken for a form of individual spidery expression. And did I mention it was dangling from the bristles of my toothbrush? The very part I have to put in my mouth?

I hate spiders. I hate them. They give me the heeby-jeebies and make my skin crawl and if I even think I can hear one in the house, I can’t sleep. I imagine it in my hair and on my face and then I have to run and take a shower. Two showers. With scrubby gloves from Body Shop.

And wouldn’t you know it, I needed to leave early and there is not a single place in my area to buy a toothbrush. For that, I need to go to another market and there is nothing open until 10am, the same time my class starts. So I was confronted with a choice… Either I could leave the house without brushing my teeth or, I could shake off the web and just bite the bullet, so to speak…

So, faced with these two options, neither of which I was really looking forward to, I asked myself what the guy in Man versus Wild would do. And then I did it. I dusted off my toothbrush (which was brand new, I might add, with all the latest and greatest tooth-brushing technology known to man), gave it a quick rinse and brushed away.

Then I realized something… I have no idea what happens to my toothbrush while I am sleeping… Any number of insects, spiders, cockroaches and other things could easily be using it as their preferred stomping ground, drawn to it by the hint of minty freshness left from the toothpaste.

I will never look at my toothbrush in the same way again…