Wasps. Ants. Lice. The Joys of a Biosphere

Monday was The Day Earth Fought Back. Sunday, it started out innocuously enough: a few ants on the kitchen counter, a really, really big wasp flitting about in the living room. The wasp was dispatched with an electrified flyswatter. The ants were just there, as they are every late spring; Omaha and I left out borated honey overnight, and then the next morning I pried up the bar and filled this latest ingress of theirs with a combination of boric acid and diatomaceous powder-- poisonous to their insides, excrutiating to their outsides, and relatively non-toxic to humans. It's an effective dessicant (which is why it's so nasty to ants), and I got some on my hands, so I had to use a moisturizer afterwards. My hands have now experienced Extreme Oatmeal Relief! Damn, that sounds like something Zippy the Pinhead would say.

And then Omaha called me around lunchtime on Monday: Kouryou-chan has lice. We're not sure where she got it, but we both skipped work that day and went into the lice-management frenzy: everyone got the hairwash, and then I spent four hours with 2.00x reading glasses straining my eyes while I picked through Kouryou-chan's, Yamaraashi-chan's, and Omaha's hair. Both Yamaraashi-chan and Omaha looked clear and Kouryou-chan had no lice, but she had nits everywhere. She was amazingly tolerant and patient, and it was wonderful for her to be so given how much hair pulling and admonishment to hold still she put up with.

Everything was boiled, vaccummed, or hot-bleach washed as needed. Mattresses were flipped. Everything that couldn't stand the above, like stuffed animals and woolen blankets, have been put in black trash bags for two weeks; any nits on these items that hatch in ten days will starve to death without a host by then. What a pain in the ass. And tonight, we do the same simian ritual with the glasses and tweezers again.

It occurred to me how often we use words like "lousy" and "nitpick" without every appreciating what they really mean-- until it happens to you.

(How completely bizarre; Friday, at the gym, I heard a re-do of the current song, Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft, in a soft femme-lounge style. This morning I woke up with it as an earworm, and this morning when I sat down at my desk, out of a songlist of 9989 songs, this was the one currently playing.)

Yep. Grisword.

In a Worldnut Daily article, blogger Jill Stanek thanks the "anti-life lobby" for bringing an important issue to a head: "Contraceptives... are the root cause of abortion, because they establish a mindset of hatred rather than love at the prospect of conceiving."

Nevermind how bizarre the whole suggestion is that people who want to have a certain kind of intimacy must therefore suffer with the probability of an unwanted and unloved child. Stanek wants us to "return to a time of virtuous sexual behavior," a time that as far as the real world knows (the world outside the alternative history of Christian Nationalism) never existed.

In what is perhaps the most utterly surreal case of a worldview skewing perception, Stanek writes that "the anti-life lobby is pushing the morning after pill [because] they need income from this lucrative pill to compensate for lagging abortion sales, a downward trend they expect to continue."

I swear, the aliens don't need to land. They're among us already. They're just uglier and nastier than we ever thought possible.

Culturally Approved Bigotry

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