...when I flushed an ant colony down the drain.

Get ready, 'cause we're gonna talk about ants again.

A few days ago, I discovered that my gerbils had chewed a hole in their water bottle, which presented a problem, because it meant they had no more water to drink.  Knowing that gerbils will chew through anything, including PVC pipe, I had a second water bottle in reserve.

I went to dig it out of the cabinet in my desk.  Bear in mind it had to be no later than 6:45 am at that point.  I had to sift through a lot of things in the dark before I found the water bottle, but finally I did.

And what did I find?

That's right.  A colony of ants.  Inside my extra gerbil water bottle.  Just hundreds of them.  All up in there.  As cozy as you please.  You know how people say the word "seething?"  Well, have you ever really seen something seethe?  It's not a motion.  It's hundreds of tiny little motions all happening at one time.  Inside of a water bottle.  That was meant for gerbils.  But instead got taken over by a bunch of presumptuous, stupid little ants who also like to eat all of your food and hunt down your toothpaste.

I apologize in advance for the graphic nature of this blog post.  I know ants give some of you guys the heebie jeebies, so if you would prefer, think of them as hundreds and hundreds of little sprinkles, jingling around all jolly-like inside my water bottle.

Moving on.  My panic spurred me, giving me the mindless courage to act immediately.

Yes, it's true.  Once I was sure there were no ants anywhere on my body, curiosity got the better of me.  I observed the ants.  Until they started crawling out of the water bottle.  Then I killed them.

Obviously, I failed to consider physics.  When you fill a bottle with water using a stream of moderate force, but you don't move the bottle when it becomes full to the brim, water will in fact shoot up out of it.  Into the air.  Threatening to tumble down onto your arms, no matter how many ants it carries.  Water is blind.  I think ants are blind, too, actually.

I'd been spooked.  But there were still hundreds of ants in the water bottle, and my gerbils needed it.  They needed it or they would die of thirst, a slow and painful death.  And no, it could not be cured by running to Petsmart during lunch and picking up another water bottle before they had a chance to get very thirsty.  That's ridiculous.

It took me a while to build my courage back up.

In case you can't read it, that little bitty print next to the river of death is a tiny collective scream.

As I flushed those ants down, down, down the drain and out of this world forever (one can only hope), I tried not to think about what it would be like to die this way.  I was unsuccessful.  I also noticed two really, really big ants swirling away on the current.

"But, how can that be?" I thought to myself.  "Don't ant colonies only have one queen?"

The question haunted me all day, so, like the good little nerd I am, I researched it.  Meaning I googled it.  And this is what I learned:

1) Colonies will sometimes have multiple queens, especially new ones, as this helps them get started.

2) Queens produce worker ants, so at first, they're useful.  But when the colony is fairly established, it will kill off surplus queens.  Meaning the little worker ants that the queens put all that work into turn around and bite them to death, which takes kind of a long time and researchers aren't sure if the biting kills them or if they really just die of thirst.  Because queens only drink what the worker ants bring them, and if your worker ants are biting you all day, they are certainly not bringing you anything to drink.

3) Knowing this is a possibility, queens have evolved such that, if they are sharing a colony with another queen, they will produce fewer worker ants.  Because producing worker ants takes up a lot of energy, and if you might potentially have to fight for your life, you want to conserve all the energy you can.

4) HOWEVER, the more worker ants a queen produces, the stronger a chemical marker (or something to that effect) she gives off.  When the worker ants go all angry mob on the queens, they tend to keep the one that gives off the stronger marker.  Which makes sense--if they're only going to have one queen, they want her to be the good one.

5) But this STILL doesn't guarantee the safety of a queen ant.  Sometimes the little worker ants go so berserk that they lose control and accidentally kill off ALL the queens.  So, if Your Majesty decided to produce as many worker ants as possible to out-worker-ant-produce any other queens, you might still die.  And you'd die more quickly, because you'd be really, really tired.

BUT WAIT, THAT'S NOT ALL.

By researching further, I discovered the thriving community of ant farm enthusiasts.  And from them I learned that it is perfectly acceptable to populate your ant farm with ants you ordered off the internet, especially if you're just getting the ant farm started.  But if you REALLY want the real deal, you trap your own ants and populate your ant farm with wild specimens.  If you know what you're doing, you can catch ants.

And if the stars align and it's a full moon and it's also Friday the 13th on a Leap Year and your horoscope is favorable and the winds shift to the northeast and it's a good year for corn, you might just catch a queen.  And then you can create a SELF-SUSTAINING ANT FARM.

Reading this, I imagined all the ant enthusiasts of the world having a conniption upon finding out that I, haphazard ant hater, had washed not one, but TWO queens down the drain that very morning in my clumsy, half-asleep and horribly ant-hating state.  I didn't even know what I was doing, and plus it wasn't even a full moon, and I had caught two queens.  Two.  And killed them both.  And their little worker ants, too.

Really, I could see it.  Like Tinkerbell collapsing every time a kid says he doesn't believe in fairies, I could just see ant enthusiasts the world over.

In other news, it took one day for my gerbils to chew a hole in the second water bottle.

...when I refused to go to the store.

I've flirted with the topic of the grocery store so many times that I decided it was about time to talk about my irrational hatred and maybe make some personal strides.

In other words, it has now been exactly seven days since I've had any amount of edible food in the house, and because I should really be rectifying that situation, I'm sitting here blogging about it instead.  Because talking about something is sort of halfway doing it, right?

So I hate going to the grocery store.  Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the institution itself.  It's full of smells and colors and textures and temperatures and all sorts of fun things to observe.  If anything, it errs on the side of having too many wonderful things inside of it, so that I get a little overwhelmed.  But still.  As evidenced by this week, I'd rather grasp at any measure, no matter how thin, painful, or detrimental to my health rather than get in my car and go to the grocery store.  I don't know why the act of going is so untenable to me, but it is.  It is an obstacle.  We'll just leave it at that.

But it really is a skill, I think, to continue to live despite not having any food.  A modern-day survival skill, perhaps.  I am the Castaway of 21st-century Suburbia.  (I just realized how insensitive it might be to talk about this when there are people in the world who would give anything to be able to get in a car and go to a grocery store full of food.  I feel kind of terrible now.)

Nevertheless, I'm pretty talented.  And as I sat in my house, once again engaging in the familiar grocery-store avoidance scheme, I decided to compile a list.  Because lists are things I like to compile.  Especially when I should be going to the grocery store.

How To Avoid Going to the Grocery Store and Still Live

1) Fast food.

But wait.  It may sound like the easy way out (for you, not your heart), but there's a catch.  In order to rely on fast food for sustenance, you have to compensate by reducing the number of meals you eat in a day.  Otherwise, the mountain of crushing guilt will kill you before the calories even get a chance.

If you can handle this, then it's ok to get hooked on Wendy's chicken nuggets and for them to be the only thing you feel like eating for the next one week to three months.*

2) Cook weird things.

But be warned - this tactic is not for the faint of heart.  It typically results in the kind of homespun recipes that are not worth eating.  (Taco Sauce Noodles?  Please.  I think I got maybe three spoonfuls down before I threw the rest out.)

3) Live somewhere relatively near family.  Preferably family that have pantries.  If they are in a one-day round-trip driveable distance, this is acceptable.

4) Stock up on leftovers.  Especially when someone else (i.e. Dad) is paying.

A corollary: in times of plenty, refrain from throwing out a box of leftovers just because it's a few days old.  Leave it there.  In another few days, you won't have so much food lying around, and you'll be glad you didn't turn your nose up at it.  If it's a little stale or fridge-hardened, that's fine; microwaves work miracles.  However, if it smells or looks funny, do not eat it.  I'm not encouraging anybody to willfully contract food poisoning.  Even I'm not that stubborn.

5) Don't be picky.

Yes, we still have that ant problem.  Yes, we really have stopped caring whether they're in our food or not.

And all of that brings me to this past weekend, and my final survival skill/tip for never going to the grocery store/way to live more like a college student than you ever did when you were in college.

6) If you're invited, go.

This past weekend, I had been given a new medication by a doctor.  Before you get the wrong idea again, I am not a hypochondriac or a walking pharmacy.  I've just been really dizzy lately, in the queasy motion-sick kind of way, and so I went to the doctor to be sure I didn't have a brain tumor (no conclusive evidence either way, but my sinuses are more likely the culprit), and he said "take this stuff and see if it helps."  So I did.  On the plus side, I wasn't dizzy, but I did feel incredibly medicated.  Super loopy, that was me.  And I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed it.

Anyway, I was invited to a bridal shower.  Did I consider not going because I was high on a half-dose of over-the-counter motion sickness meds?  Heck, no.  Not only was my dear friend about to get married, but I had had nothing but brownies and cupcakes to eat for two days.

(Back story: my roommate and I both went on a baking frenzy independently but simultaneously, and so, while I had no real food in the house, there were Tupperware containers upon Tupperware containers of baked goods.  Sounds awesome, but you can only eat, like, one cupcake before you want to vomit, and then it's like being shipwrecked for two days - water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.  Plus between all the sugar rushes and crashes, my metabolism was starting to feel like a bad day at the stock exchange.)

So away I went to the bridal shower, bearing a collapsible colander and a craving for real food.

There was a table full of finger foods on one end of the kitchen, and platter full of petit-fours on the other.  I felt like I was going against the tide.

But I didn't care.  It was the only meal I was likely to eat that day, so I was shameless.

Like James Bond, I live to die and/or go to the grocery store another day.

*Re: the obsession with Wendy's chicken nuggets.  I do this with food a lot.  I get stuck on something, and it's all I want to eat.  I just came off a three-month jag of peanut butter and strawberry sandwiches.  And the only reason I stopped eating them was because I could no longer sustain the weekly grocery trips that a diet of fresh fruit requires.  Sad, I know.


Note: In the drawings comparing the distance from my house to the grocery store and the distance from my house to my grandparents', I wasn't exaggerating.  I live directly across the street from a grocery store.  Which only makes this whole thing more ridiculous.


A Second Note: I'm feeling wordy today.


A Third Note: I realized, reading through this, that I fixate on phrases just as often as I fixate on foods.  Like "In other words."  I seem to love that one.  I use it all the time.  But that's ok, because like a peanut butter and strawberry sandwich, it just tastes so darn good.


An Addendum to the Third Note: I also fixate on analogies.  Or rather, the act of likening one thing to another.  I mean, really.  I do it practically every other sentence.


An Addendum to the Second Note, Which Should Really Have Been Written Directly After the Second Note, but Which Makes More Sense Right Here Where I've Written It, So I'm Leaving it Here:   I'm also feeling obsessive today.


A Fourth Note:   :)