some pig

Here's a funny thing: sometimes, when you live on a farm filled with things like spiders and cobras, and you walk down the same narrow path every day, two different spiders will persist in spinning their webs across that path. Right at face level. Every single day.

Here's another funny thing: sometimes, when you're like me and have the memory of an aging goldfish, you will totally forget about the spiders and walk right into both webs. With your face. Every single day.


Speaking of spiders, we discovered that Charlie - what? Yes, I named our bathroom spider Charlie. No, that's not weird. No, you are a freak. Whatever! You don't know him like I do!

Anyway, Pippi and I checked on Charlie and discovered that he was still alive after about a week in solitary. He was hanging out on the side of the cup, so Pippi quickly slid a plate underneath, trotted out the front door, and hurled him, cup and all, over the hill.

"I thought when you said you were going to throw him, you meant you would shake him out of the cup," I said.

Pippi made a face. "Do you really want to use that cup again?"

She had a point. There is a fine but clearly defined line between lizard toast and spider tea.

Somewhere out there is the world's most disoriented spider.

My very favorite resident, Fran, had her baby last week. She named him Blue. I use pseudonyms for most everyone on this here blog, but that name is so perfect it deserves to be shared. Baby Blue has the most hair I have ever seen on any man, woman or child - a Samson-esque amount of hair, the kind of hair you expect to see on a Persian cat or a Yeti but not a six-pound newborn. On the night he was born, millions of bald men across the world wept fat tears of self-pity without even knowing why.

Fran is absolutely ass-over-teakettle in love with her baby, and so am I. The bottoms of his feet are like silk, and he scrunches them up and kicks his little frog legs whenever he yawns. His fingers are long, long, long, curled into tiny pink fists the size of walnuts. He is a remarkably pink baby, far ruddier than the average Thai child, which Fran says must be due to the fact that his father is white.

I would like to kick that father in the teeth, but Fran is in love with him, the sort of unqualified adoration that makes you think a voodoo potion must be involved. It kills me that such a beautiful, warm woman as Fran could pin her hopes and happiness to this scumbag European who's half a world away and obviously doesn't give two shits about her, but there you are. Of course, the unfairness of it isn't lost on me: if Fran were with someone who truly cared about her, she wouldn't be here. I would never have met her, and we would never have had the chance to sit together in her dim, quarantined room, tracing spiderweb patterns on her baby's unlined feet and prophesying the man he will someday become: terrific, radiant, humble.