by Audrey Russell
We’ve all had to make hard choices over the last few weeks. Whether it’s traveling home versus staying on campus, going to work versus Skyping in, or blissful ignorance versus fully informed misery, we here at the Bardvark understand that no decision is easy during these uncertain times. To lift the weight off of our six to eight readers’ shoulders, though, we wanted to shed some light on one quandary we’re all facing: whether to eat or befriend the spiders under our bed. To help you make your decision, here’s what the Bardvark staff is doing.
Our extroverted copy-editor Frank Lambert says that what he misses most about life pre-quarantine is human interaction. “I find myself reminiscing about the days when I could grab a table in Kline with four of my closest friends and talk for hours,” he writes. “But I find that since the spiders under my bed have eight eyes instead of just two like a regular person, I can make eye contact with just one and recapitulate the whole lunchtime experience. I can even eat the dust bunnies under my bed and pretend I’m eating Kline steak fries!” Wow, Frank, good for you! Please quit with the Kline jokes already. This is why we don’t let you write articles.
Instagram intern Kenneth Brooks, however, has moved beyond eating his dust bunnies and has started feasting on the spiders themselves. “If it’s not venomous, it’s poisonous. And if it’s not poisonous, you can eat it!” he said through a mouthful of spiders during a Zoom conference. After being asked to elaborate, Brooks suddenly and conveniently lost his internet connection. No one has heard from him since.
Communications director Hattie Webb, a self-proclaimed hopeless romantic (aren’t they all self-proclaimed?), finds that her biggest struggle when it comes to quarantine has been the physical loneliness. “Who, if not a man, shall I hold tightly in the wee hours of the night?” she lamented at a staff meeting just a few weeks ago. Luckily for her, though, she’s found a worthy substitute in an immense tarantula, which had been quietly growing under her bed for years into the perfect size. Sources say that she’s been cuddling the spider every night, tenderly stroking the coarse fur on its segmented legs. She claims that it feels no different than the hirsute arms of a man, and recommends that lonely people across the globe take advantage of their spiders in this way.
Still not sure what to do with your eight-legged roommates? Here are some other ideas:
“Even though I live in Tacoma, I have one of those Australian bird-eating nightmares. I don’t know how it got here or what it wants. Since I’m too afraid to try to kill it, I treat it like a pet. We live symbiotically now that her name is Bessie!” – Deborah Hart, graveyard correspondent
“You got five little spiders? Turn them into living hairclips. Got a couple hundred extras? Turn them into a living fuzzy sweater. Congratulations, it’s 1997 again and everyone’s happy.”
– Heidi Rios, Free Press double agent
“Two words: spider art!”
– Fred Barber, font critic
Eventually this crazy time will pass, but that’s no reason not to cultivate a meaningful relationship with the spiders in our lives. When we emerge from our homes after the dust clears, we will not be crying or laughing. We will be both hopeful and stoic, with one or more spiders on or inside of our persons.