where's a beehive hairdo full of spiders when you really need one?

[cerusee]

My pantry is infested with indian meal moths (this seems to happening to a lot of my Boston friends and neighbors, brought on in part by our recent humid, warm weather). I am deeply freaked out, only a little less so than when I had that infestation of black flies in my last apartment, and there were dozens of large, buzzing flies clustered on the inside of every window in the place for several weeks. The good news is, unlike flies, indian meal moths don't carry disease, and if god forbid I ate something contaminated with their eggs or larvae, it would do me no harm. The bad news is, they still freak me the fuck out; I'm terrified that every speck of dust will turn out to be an egg, that every itch is an egg that got on me, suddenly hatching. Plus, these little bastards can apparently eat through plastic and cardboard, and crawl up under the caps of sealed bottles, so if it's not canned, it might be contaminated and ready to spew forth hundreds of little insect larvae to re-infest a shelf that looks clean.

'Scuse, I need to get this out of my system: FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA FUCK FUCK FUCK OH MY GOD OH MY GOD BUGS CRAWLING ON ME FUCK FUCK FUCK.

IT'LL BE A BIT BEFORE I'M PSYCHOLOGICALLY READY TO CATCH UP ON MUSHISHI, THAT'S FOR SURE.

Comments

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

Oh, ick! We had those things a couple of years ago and for a long time I couldn't open one cupboard door without shuddering in horror at the remembrance of what I had seen. There is no emoticon for this!

Wait... there's gross bug stuff in Mushishi? I had just added it to the Netflix queue, as many people had identified it as great and it seemed like something I could sell to my S.O.. HOWEVER IF THERE IS BUG STUFF I WILL TAKE IF OFF. DX

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

It's not freaky bug stuff like Uzumaki, but "mushi" means "bug" or "caterpillar," or something like that. The mushi of mushishi are not actual insects, but sort of spiritual insects, or germs, or other microscopic organisms, stuff super-low on the evolutionary scale--the building blocks of life. But spiritual entities, not physical entities, nevertheless. Throughout the series, they appear in a variety of forms, never the same form twice, and to me, some of the forms don't really jibe with the whole "spiritual microorganisms" thing to me, although it generally holds up as a nature-based metaphor.

I deeply loathe insects and freak out when I find them crawling on me or, worse yet, living in my house, infesting my garbage or food, and Mushishi, which is ungodly gorgeous, both the anime and the manga, has never triggered any real negative reaction in me (they aren't ACTUAL bugs, no matter what the metaphor). I'm just feeling hyper-sensitive right now on account of the larvae crawling through my barley, making little wounds in the plastic bags that will not heal...