Blog written 10.14.09
If you don’t care to hear about ants, don’t read this post.
-Ants: there are many different types here in our house…
1) tiny brown with translucent body: aka “ghost ticklers”- they make you think you’re a hypochondriac because they crawl on you but it’s quite hard to actually see them on your skin. You do a dance trying to locate the sensory input initiators, swatting and rubbing the general area while looking like a fool. These little guys are daredevils, too. Despite putting the honey jar in a bowl with water in the bottom, some still manage to successfully make it to the honey. Others drown in the “moat.” The day a proper swimming coach graces their species will be a nightmare for us humans trying to keep them out of our food.
2) tiny black ones: aka “the moving service.” I’m not going to lie, I’ve spent many portions of my evenings watching these guys move things around: crumbs, grains of rice, stray pieces of apples, and my personal favorite, dead house flies. Their coordination is truly impressive. Five of them moved this house fly about 10 feet from the counter, up the wall, around the kitchen sink, and then tried to pull it into the pencil-eraser sized hole near the door between the chipped tile and the wood trim. It all happened in about 30 seconds. Sure, 10 feet in 30 seconds to a human isn’t much, but if you adjusted for body size, they’d definitely have us beat by a long shot. Their choreography getting the fly properly positioned to enter the hole was elegant, flipped on its back then pirouetted just so before a nearly-flawless entry into the darkness. Even Olympic diving judges would be hard-pressed to find areas for point deductions on that performance. These guys are the main traffic on the “ant highways” along our tiled kitchen walls, stopping at every other ant or so for an Obama-style fist bump (or so I’d like to think). I’m sure it has something to do with the chemical communication system they have going for them with some complex sensory exchange between propharyngeal, mandibular, and pretarsal glands, but let’s channel the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s method, ok?
3) Medium-sized translucent brown guys: aka “night-time amblers” (insomniacs?). I always see them whisking across the floor in the wee hours of the night. They’re tight-lipped about their business, though—none of this flashy moving service or bombardment of any stray food that’s laying around. I’ll report back on their activities when I launch a more in-depth study of their behaviors.
4) large black ones: aka “jitter bugs”. They’re creepy, and only found in dark alleys. I try to keep my distance.
A friend told me the following about spending time in Africa when I arrived here:
Stage 1: “Eww there are ants in my food”. You proceed to get a new bowl of food.
Stage 2: “Ugh. Ants again.” You proceed to pick them out of your food.
Stage 3: “Oh well, ants aren’t that bad for you.” You leave them in your food.
Stage 4: You have a friend from home come visit you who tells you there are ants in your food… you didn’t happen to notice.
I’m currently at stage 3. For example, I received a bag of dum-dum lollipops from a dear friend hours before I boarded my flight out of the US in June, and the ants have found my stash (stupidly, I didn’t put them in a zip-lock bag). How much are these now semi-melted sweeties worth to me? On the occasions where I need a sugar fix, is the sticky lollipop with at least 6 tiny brown ants stuck to it going to do the trick? Truthfully, yes, because my Smarties supplies are beginning to run low and they are for incurable cravings only (they are in the protection of a zip lock bag, of course). On the root-beer, butterscotch, and chocolate flavored lollipops, the ants don’t bother me as much because I can’t see them. Ignorance is truly sugary, sticky, (ant protein-fortified) bliss.
In other news, I’ve found a staircase called “ngazi mia” or literally, “100 steps.” It leads from the street level to the beach, where there is a Hindu funeral crematorium. It’s actually 104 steps, requiring an extra hop after steps 33 and 67 due to the landings there...believe me, I’ve counted. Talk about a workout. I went during Ramadan for the first time and enjoyed my workout very much with only 3 or 4 other people in the area. Now, whether I go at 7am or 6pm, it’s testosterone central with at least 30 guys there. A few pick-up soccer games on the beach, some capoeira, some guys using an old tire as a mini trampoline and doing flips on it, others running up the stair case, boxing, or doing various plyometrics & calisthenics. The sunsets there are exquisite. I have no clue how often the place is actually used as a crematorium, or what happens to the people who use it as a workout space when a funeral is taking place. Maybe over the course of this year I’ll find out.
