Giant Spider Attacks and a Feminist Rant

Last night when I got home from work my new plant stand that I had ordered from Target was waiting on my doorstep. Yay! I got it for a super reduced price because it was supposed to be a Halloween decoration; it’s perfect for me as a permanent furnishing because I like creepy things. It’s wrought iron with black metal spider webs and spiders all over it. I think it’s adorable. I love spiders. Although this turned out to be a little too portentious... It was nearly 9 p.m. by the time I got home, but I was determined to set up my new home for my Christmas cactus. So I un-mummified the stand from its box and set it up in the corner of my porch, and went downstairs to retrieve my plant from its current exile by the fence. There were so many thick spiderwebs on the outside of the pot that it took me several minutes of wiping them off with my hands to disentangle it, compounded by the fact that it was very dark down there and I was using my sense of touch rather than looking at what I was doing. Those were some heavy duty webs!

After I got up to the top of my stairs and set my Christmas cactus down on its new station of honor, I was cleaning away the remaining webs and leaf debris when I saw a HUGE black widow spider crouching under the lip of the pot. Right next to my hand. I had spent all that time clearing her webbing away in the dark with her right there inches (or less!) from my fingers. Yikes! She was more scared of me than anything, however, and just curled herself up in a tight little ball when I scooped her up and tossed her into the tree. If there were children living in my apartment complex or the one next door, I would have killed it, but I’m glad I didn’t have to. She’s just going to have to go spin another one of her unbelievably strong and messy webs somewhere else.

Today I had to stop at the auto parts store to get some new windshield wiper blades--they hadn’t been replaced since last year sometime. In southern California, it makes absolutely no sense to get new wiper blades until you’re certain it’s going to rain in about five minutes. Otherwise, they just bake in the neverending sun and are useless when you finally need them. A big rainstorm is blowing in as I write this, so I wanted to get those wipers taken care of before I ended up installing the new ones outside in a downpour.

Finding the ones I needed was easy, and they only cost ten bucks for refills. Putting them on was a bit more challenging than I remember. First of all, I have no tools these days, so after shredding my thumbnails trying to pinch the little metal clampy things together I admitted defeat and asked the nice folks in the store if I could borrow a pair of pliers. They loaned me some, which made taking the old blades off a breeze. But trying to get those new ones on was a bitch. Yes, I said bitch! It’s okay to say that as long as you’re not talking about anybody in particular and it’s an inanimate object that has no gender...Yeah. So anyhow, I kept having to re-thread them over and over because on one side the blade would slide in through the appropriate groove, but the claws on the other side would be in the wrong place. And the situation reversed when I tried again. It wasn’t my fault! It was those stubborn grooves. I know what I’m doing, even though I’m a girl! Sheesh.

When I went inside to return the pliers, the woman behind the counter (who had told me she herself does not know how to put on new wiper blades) said “Hey, we were just about to send out a search party for ya!” Very funny. And the entire crew of the store was gathered behind the counter watching me. Apparently, a woman who knows how to fix absolutely anything on a car all by herself is something of a spectacle. I have to admit that I have a fairly hefty chip on my shoulder about this. My sense of pride is in overdrive when it comes to being able to do anything mechanical--I feel like I’ve got something to prove, which is totally ridiculous. But it’s also ridiculous that we still seem to cling to this outmoded notion that Y chromosomes somehow bestow innate mechanical knowledge upon the men who inherit them. I know how to use power tools, dammit! And why am I yelling?!

I apologize for being defensive about this, but it does still pique my mood if a man asks me if I need help checking my oil. It’s a matter of what you’ve learned, pure and simple, not what kind of equipment you were born with between your legs. More women do need to gain their independence in this matter and learn how to perform basic auto maintenance tasks themselves. Otherwise, men will continue to assume (justifiably!) that we’re incapable and we’ll continue to be taken advantage of by auto mechanics, and all my bluster is for naught.