Behind the Scenes: Braised Tofu and Eggplant

You guys, this wan't cool.

While making dinner, a little spider, about the size of a quarter crawled in my apartment. I squashed it and kept cooking.

Four years in New York and having grown up in the South, spiders, insects, and pests are no strangers to me. I've handled roaches, silverfish, mice -- MICE as in plural, and spiders... within reasonable size.

I mean, at the moment, there's a spider that's setup shop outside the front door of my apartment, and you know, I just let it do its thing. Really, it's doing me a favor keeping flies out. After a couple days here, I realized there was another little one that lived under the step into my bathroom. It mainly would stay in the shadows but occasionally would pop out. Once I tried to step on it, but it jumped back into its hiding place, so after that, I was like, That's cool. You stay in your lane; I'll stay in mine.

Back to dinner, after I squashed that first spider, I put it in the garbage, then opened my front door to take the trash out, and a grasshopper jumped in. Nooooo! I thought, I don't feel like chasing you around. So I stood and stared at it for a bit. I turned around to pick up one of my muddy tennis shoes, which I've lazily left at the front door since getting back from WWOOFing, and chucked it at the grasshopper, who just hopped around more.

I don't know if it was in my shoe or if it came in while the front door was open, but a freaking GIANT SPIDER crawled in and over to the kitchen cupboards.

It was too big to squash, to big to allow to take residence in a corner of my home, and also too big to try and catch because it looked like Death. Like it might as well have been a copperhead as far as I was concerned. Like this wasn't even an "I wish I had a boyfriend" moment because I don't even think a guy wanting to display his manliness would have wanted anything to do with this thing.

I had a mini rush of anxiety and had no idea what to do, so I embarrassingly called my co-worker who lives in my building, but I think she was at a bar because her phone was answered but all I could hear was ambient bar sounds.

So I just stood petrified for a few minutes until the National Geographic specimen decided to crawl back out the door.

Not cool. Not cool at all. Guys, really so not cool.

Now that it's all over, the crazy thing is, I realized that this is the first time I've come close to experiencing anxiety in Korea, which is saying a lot considering how often I felt it in the States. I guess that's a blessing? I don't know, at the moment, my heart's still pounding. Ugh.