The lesser of two evils
My workplace has given me the gifts of interesting assignments, creative freedom and collaboration with skilled co-workers – but it’s also turning me into a prune. As the hours in the edit room stretch into evening, I find myself becoming aware of my skin and my lips.
The building is dry. In all other ways, it is clean and warm and comfortably quiet, but the air in there is like the desert room at Phipps Conservatory, and I am a cactus – OK, a cactus flower, but still a cactus.
“I think I’m getting old in here,” I said to my editor as I spread on another layer of lip balm. He agreed our air is devoid of the moisture we need to stay ahead of sinus irritation and, more important, wrinkles. But what to do?
I think my phone was listening to that conversation, because later when I checked my messages there was an email containing an ad for a humidifier. A cold-mist unit that would breathe youth-enhancing and wrinkle-fighting water droplets into the air at night, improving my sleep and allowing me to wake with the plump, soft skin of a kindergartner.
I bit.
The unit arrived encased in a styrofoam box that required the farmer and a chisel to remove. But when unearthed, my humidifier was a thing of gleaming, white, plastic functionality. Just fill the reservoir with tap water and let ‘er rip. I climbed under the covers with a sly smile that comes only with the purchase of an item you just know is going to change your life. I fell asleep to the soft hum of cool steam.
And woke to the feeling of something crawling on my arm. I turned my head to find a spider on my right forearm. Crawling and black and large and leggy. I swatted it away and leapt to my feet. Not wanting to turn on the light, I used the flashlight on my phone to look around the floor for it, but nothing. The farmer said he would look for it “in the morning.”
I had no choice but to decamp to a different room. Spiders are known to curl themselves into invisible specks, only to unfurl and deploy later. They are also known to sneak into houses to get warm and, obviously, humidified. My wrinkle-removal item had attracted moisture to my skin and also spiders to my house.
It’s been said that most of us inhale and (in the case of mouth breathers) digest eight spiders a year while sleeping. I try not to believe that sort of alarmist guff – and maybe it’s a myth. (We all fell for that urban legend about the teacher with the beehive hairdo who died from the bite of a spider that had camped out on her head.) If the eating-spiders-while-asleep thing is true, I’m going to get one of those CPAP machines, even though I don’t need one. That would keep the spiders out of my mouth, but not, sadly, out of the room.
It is true that spiders like humid houses; I know because I looked it up. And there lies my dilemma. Which is worse – chapped lips and skin or midnight spidery snacks?
The farmer never did find the spider. I’m not sure he even looked very hard. He’s not bothered by critters. Or wrinkles, for that matter. For now, the mist machine is unplugged and dry, just sitting there growing old. Like my face.