Unfair

I am currently battling a band of very persistant ants. They are streaming in through a crack between a window frame and the wall behind it. They are scouting out my kitchen, looking for a home in one of my orchid pots. This has happened in the past, where one day I am idly watering a plant, and out comes pouring a trillion ants. This is then followed up with a hasty trip outdoors and the inevitable repotting of the plant, amid the frenzied melee of a trillion ants rushing to safety and me freaking out over being part of the escape route of a trillion fleeing ants.

This will not happen again. I am determined and I am pissed off about it. I hate killing things, hate it. But not as much, apparently, as having ants in my house. I am annoyed at being forced into this ethical corner by these little insects. I especially hate it when I move a plate or cup in the morning and wake the little buggers up. Really, they sleep, I swear, and they jump smartly to attention when they are unexpectedly woken up. I hate it the most when I have to kill an ant carrying an even smaller perfect baby ant in its jaws. It just sucks.

As a vegetarian who rarely kills anything on purpose, excepting mosquitos, I resent that these creatures are not keeping their part of the bargain. You are being most unfair I tell them between gritted teeth as I first stun them with a blast of sprayable Murphy's Oil Soap and then swab up their tiny corpses with paper towelling. It's just not right. I would happily leave you to live your little ant-y lives in peace outside. Why do you persist in doing this to us?

The ants are oblivious to me and my squeamishness issues. They are even oblivious to the litter of  soggy bodies all around them, which you think might clue them in to the folly of their ways. They run to escape from me when they do notice my presence, but otherwise they march in a stubborn determination, wave after little black speck wave, a miniature diaspora on a journey to death.

Comments

[Barak]

Ants are difficult. I try to view the individuals as merely a part of the larger whole, the colony. An individual ant is capable of very little, but a colony can build a hill. Individually, they have nervous systems that are not as complicated as a 486 processor.

So when I have to kill of thousands, as I sometimes must, I think of it more like pruning a branch from a tree. I am not killing the cells in the branch, I am making the whole healthier.

That's what I tell myself anyway. Sometimes I believe it.

[Ms. Jane]

There's this stuff called chinese chalk, I think it's the same stuff that rock climbers use to powder their hands. Find where they're coming in, and pour the chalk around it - they won't cross the line. Swear to god!