Potty issues
Only I could turn an innocent trip to the bathroom into a scene of emotionally charged high drama that closes with me vacuuming up broken glass in the kitchen.
To set up the action, I'll just say I have a pressing need that requires the use of a bathroom. When I walk in, I spy a very menacing looking spider lurking on the wall beside the toilet, no doubt hoping for a bare bottom to uh, bare itself so it can take a nice bite and have something to tell the family when it returns home and the wife asks "How was your day?" Every time I encounter a spider in our house, my instinct is to grab the nearest wad of anything and goosh it, giving the briefest moments' ceremonial pause just before dropping the works in the trash. And every time I'm about to act on my instinct, I hear a faint "STOP!" The "STOP!" would be my grandmother who thinks it's a very bad idea to kill a spider that's in your house. In fact, the way she tells it, killing a spider in your house could bring bad luck the likes of which have never been experienced by anyone on the planet ever. Whenever she's visited here and someone spies a spider, she tells us all not to kill it, so we don't. This belief has become so ingrained within me that now I have moral dilemma over spiders, spiders that lurk next to toilets waiting to bite me.
Usually I goosh, tonight, however, I took pity and got a glass from the kitchen. I also brought a very large piece of paper with which to cover the top of the glass. Once the spider was securely ensconced within the aforementioned glass, I headed for the kitchen door. Apparently I was jittery despite the precautions taken to ensure the spider could not so much as reach out and twang a knuckle hair, because after I opened the back door and kicked open the storm door, I fumbled and watched the glass fly through the air, finally meeting its demise on our sad self-stick linoleum tiles. Even worse than the prospect of stepping on broken glass was the fact that I was now holding a piece of paper with a spider on it and nothing to keep it away from me except for air. I ran outside and whipped the paper a couple of times, then ran back inside, suppressing the thought that maybe when I was maniacally flinging the paper around the spider landed on me, and proceeded to scoop up the big shards of glass, eventually bringing out the big dog (our old Eureka canister vacuum) to take care of the little bits.
Then, finally, I went back to the bathroom and closed the door on that particular episode of my life.