Grotesque, malicious, hairy creatures.They leer at you, venom easing in the niche of their mouths, sending ice cold chills crawling down your spine. Their dexterous spinnerets knit edifices of destruction in the corners of your rooms, which cling in dutiful patience for its prey to fall victim to the macabre paws of its demiurge…

Or as wikipedia prefers to describe it, “Spiders (order Araneae) are air-breathing chelicerate arthropods that have body segments fused into two tagmata, the cephalothorax and abdomen,  joined by a small, cylindrical pedicel, as well as eight legs.

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… Yeah. That was… real helpful wikipedia. Thanks. ( to those of you who only understood that last part… I commend you for your normality )

I think it’s fair to say that most of us dislike Spiders. Or at the very least, draw sinister or negative associations with them- unless you’re some kind of eager Entomologist who would leap at the opportunity of an encounter with spiders. In which case, I would be most interested to know, what on earth are you doing on this blog site?

But aside from such anomalous people that I will now parry my attention from, I think we would generally agree that Spiders = BAD. And if you disagree with me, here is a quick test to confirm whether or not we’re on the same page.

Did you know that on average, every human being eats 8 spiders during sleep in their lifetime?

Now check your reaction upon reading that and see if you still think spiders are lovely and adorable.

That’s how I’ve always thought of spiders. That is, until a rather extraordinary encounter altered this precept completely.

Friday afternoon. The granite road was scintillating under the warm saturation of October sunlight, momentarily scalding my eye as I trudged towards the school buses. The experience was far from pleasant. The drive elongated with every step I took. Every eye beheld me as I  made my way towards the designated bus. Self-consciousness consumed my system. Has my shirt wiggled to a weird angle? Is my fringe looking funny? Does holding my bag like this make me look like a dork? In a futile attempt to look ‘cooler’ than I felt, I pretended I was as unaffected as can be. But in reality, every hormone inside my body was screaming, “WHERE ON EARTH IS THAT BLINKING BUS?”  It was basically like walking down a catwalk, except I suddenly forgot how to walk, the fashionable elite had metamorphosed into smoke-exhausting mechanical contraptions, and instead of looking glamorous, I was looking about as suave as having a devious segment of toilet roll getting stuck on the soles of my shoe as I walked along the reveling runway.

Then I finally get on the bus, just to have a rather disgruntled bus mother barking for my bus card. Immediately, some sensible part of me grew nervous, and for good reason as well: I didn’t have a bus card. Indeed. You see, I have been cheating my own bus mother out of the rare ride back to Repulse Bay by making her believe that I do in fact take her bus. After a rather befuddling conversation, she gave in. However, this feisty Mid-Levels bus mother wasn’t about to accept that too soon. When she asked me if I had a bus card, I told her I didn’t have it with me. Not a lie. Then she asked me which bus I took, and I pointed out the Repulse Bay one.  Not a lie… as I do take it, though illegitimately. But she didn’t need to know that for now. Then she asked for my name. Ah, crap. I hastily gave her my name, and nervously sat on my seat, awaiting my fate.

It was then that I spotted the spider. It wasn’t on my bus seat. Nor was it on the seat in front of me. Not on the window. No, not on the floor either.

It was on the bus mother’s butt.

As she walked back to the front of the bus, I watched fascinatingly as the poor creature scrambled its way hastily around her right cheek, then upon realizing that she was turning towards the right to sit down, darted desperately towards her left cheek and escaped just in time as the bus mother plunged her unknowing backside into the squashy (unintended pun) depths of the bus seat.

How. absolutely. AWESOME. 

This is a spider, who just executed a hollywood-worthy move there. No seriously, it was as pro as the dark freaking knight when he swung from the top of IFC 2 to IFC 1 with a cord, except this spider doesn’t even NEED a cord, cuz it’s faster, better, stronger and harder. I mean, just take some time to imagine how HARD it must be for the spider. The bus mother was wearing silky trousers which were tight on her. The natural curvature of her butt surface would be difficult enough to provide sufficient grip, coupled with the silky texture of her trousers, would further eliminate the friction that the spider needed to make a successful expedition over the expanse of her buttock. Now to realize its need for escape just based on a slight change in direction of the bus mother’s movement? I’m sorry, but with such agile speed and apt deduction abilities, I would find it hard to believe you if you aren’t in awe of this minuscule arthropod by now.