I hate spiders. Well, more like I fear them to the point of bursting into tears as soon as I see one, all the while grinning manically because I don't know how to properly convey my feelings. Not to mention, whenever I step into a room I do a sweep of the walls and corners (later I added looking in the air, you'll see why) to make sure its not a spider trap. So, here are a few of my run-ins with spiders.

This first one doesn't involve real spiders, but I don't care; it was still traumatizing, and I hold a grudge. My parents know about my arachnophobia (though they're always telling me to 'get over it') and hate that I always leave dirty clothes and anything I'll re-wear on my floor, so they decided to take advantage of my weakness and play a 'harmless' prank. When I come home, I always go straight back to my room to take off my jeans (I know I'm not the only one). So, as always, I went back and opened my door to the delightful sight of a humongous spider hanging on the window shades. Slamming the door shut, I waited a couple seconds, then slowly reopened the door. Again, my eyes zeroed in on that thing, so I did the reasonable thing and started hyperventilating and grinning like the joker while my hands shook from the adrenaline. I came out to the kitchen where my mom was, grilled her for a few minutes to make sure it wasn't a prank, and discovered (read: stupidly believed) that she learned our neighbors had a huge spider infestation, and she wasn't talking about the number of spiders. I immediately showed her a picture I had taken of the spider, freaked out all over again after she shoved a towel under the door to "keep the spider from escaping", and burst into tears when my dad came out of his office and also confirmed with a straight face that it wasn't a prank. After that my parents decided they had emotionally scarred me enough for one day and took the fake spider down. Except they neglected to mention the three other spiders they had planted around my room. I discovered one of the spiders in my backpack, and the other in a pile of clothes I was cleaning up. Try catching me cleaning my room again. They also replanted the original spider on my desk. After shivering in fetal position for a couple minutes, I forced my parents to take out any remaining spiders. Turned out the last one was in my dresser, meaning I would've found it while naked in the dark morning. They're lucky I only messed up their computer auto correct settings (I set over a dozen common words to be replaced with the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody), which my mom is clueless about, so it disrupted them for about as long as it took me to recover from their prank.

The other incident involves a real spider. At 2 in the morning. I'm a night owl, so keep in mind I was wide awake (granted, I was also wide awake the rest of the night). Normally you look in the corners and on the walls for spiders, right? Well, turns out spiders have more direct ways of getting around. I was cleaning up clothes (seriously, never cleaning up again), and as I was bending over I looked up, and saw a spider hanging directly in front of my nose. So I started screaming as loud as possible (remember, it's 2 in the morning) while flinging clothes out from under the spider while tracking its every movement. My mom came in with a bowl to trap it, but we ended up using it to smash the spider into the carpet. There's still a stain.

One other time I found a spider sitting on my pillow. It was as good as dead as soon as I saw it because of the unspoken rule that they can only climb the walls and not my bed. As soon as they step foot (?) into my territory they have no chance of redemption. Luckily I hadn't gotten in bed yet, but guess who didn't sleep that night?

Another slightly smaller story is that we would never use the side door, so one day when we bothered even looking at it, we noticed that around the door handle and the ceiling above the door there were tiny black dots. On closer inspection, they were actually little baby spiders. My parents had to stop me from calling an exterminator, and never will I view 'baby' anything the same again.