The spider on the ceiling above my computer has not moved in days. I guess I should kill it, if only to ease my mind. But I haven't been able to muster up the courage. You see, snakes, cockroaches, scorpions and all manner of undesirable creatures I can tolerate (or in the case of snakes, have a certain fondness for), but spiders have always made me scream like my gay friend Jay at a Britney Spears concert, only out of terror and not excitement. So this spider and I (I will name him George) have entered into a sort of implicit armistice. George stays in his little corner, and I don't kill him; he tries any funny business like dropping down in front of me on a little string of silk, and I will crush him harder than Eintstein's theory of relativity crushed my dreams of going back in time to save the dinosaurs. But I guess George isn't all bad. At least I know that, unlike an ant or a termite or a bee, George will not call up all his friends and say "Hey guys, I found this cozy little place in the Oburo family home. You should seriously come settle down up here. It would be wicked awesome!" No, George is a solitary being, and as far as I can tell, he has not had any 6 or 8 legged visitors. In a way, I guess I am his only visitor, since I'm the only one who actually uses the family computer with any regularity. It's too bad that George and I have to interact within such harsh limits, but that's the way it has to be. In another life, perhaps, I would be a fly and he could eat me, or I could be a bird and eat him, or maybe I'd be a female spider and we could have lots of little spiders, and then I would probably still eat him. So maybe our current situation isn't all bad: at least no one is being eaten. I haven't, however, figured out what I'll do if one day I go to use the computer and he is no longer there.