Don’t judge me.

I’m kind of scared of bugs. Some bugs are worse than others. Mostly, I don’t like their multiple, skinny, creepy crawly legs. I don’t like the fact that there’s nothing stopping them from crawling on me — or God forbid, crawling DOWN my THROAT — while I’m sleeping. And I have a hard time killing them. Not for any moral reason. Just because I’m afraid that the very second I get close enough to smoosh them with a tissue, they’ll jump on my hand or my face or in my mouth and attack me.

So, you can imagine the horror I felt when, on Tuesday night, I walked into the bathroom to find a GIANT earwig on the ceiling, right above my head. Coleman had already fallen asleep. What was I going to do? I didn’t want to climb up to the ceiling to try to kill this bug. I certainly didn’t want to leave it on the ceiling, because surely it would see me walk down the hall into my room and quietly plot to follow that same path and crawl on me in the middle of the night. And I didn’t want to wake up Coleman, since he was sound asleep. What to do? What to do?

“Coleman!” I yelled.

“Ergh?” I heard him mumble from down the hall.

“There’s a giant earwig on the ceiling!” I yelped.

Silence.

“COLEMAN!”

“Huh?”

“An EARWIG! On the CEILING!”

“Get it yourself. I’m sleeping!”

“I cannnnnn’t!” I whined. “It will fall on my face!”

“Just leave it,” he said.

“We can’t just leave it!”

Silence, again. Great.

I stood there, staring up at the bug. Frozen on the ceiling, the bug stared down at me. Batman walked by and brushed against my leg. I screamed.

“Ok, focus!” I said to myself. “How am I going to get rid of this scary, terrifying, giant bug?”

I opened the cabinet under the sink. “Aha!” I thought to myself. “Air freshener!”

From a distance, I sprayed half a can of linen-scented Oust on the earwig. Nothing happened.

“Great,” I thought. “What am I going to do now?”

I looked around the bathroom. Could I throw a shampoo bottle at it? Whip it with a towel? I grabbed the plunger. Carefully, I fashioned a tissue around the rubber part (because who knows where that plunger has been!) and lifted it toward the bug, determined to smoosh it with the handle.

The plunger got closer and closer. The bug didn’t move. Maybe the Oust killed it? And just when I thought I would squash the living daylights out of that disgusting creature — WHOOSH! It fell from the ceiling.

I screamed again.

“Where did it go?” Behind the toilet? In the shower? In my HAIR?! No, no, no. I reached to pull a tissue from the box of Puffs sitting on top of the toilet tank. “Just in case I find him and need to squish him fast,” I reasoned with myself. Surely, arming myself with one Puffs tissue would save me!

And that’s when I saw him. Running around in circles. Like a mad man. Or bug. A mad bug. He had fallen from the ceiling and landed inside the tissue box! He fell with such velocity that his nasty little crunchy body fell from the ceiling, past a tissue, through those little plastic flappy things and into the box. It must have been the Oust. “He’s contained!” I thought to myself.

“But now what?”

How on earth was I going to get the bug out of the tissue box without touching him? I couldn’t kill him. He was surrounded by fluffy, aloe-y tissues, for Puffs’ sake! I could leave him in the tissue box. But no! He could crawl out and find his way into my ear canal while I slept! No, surely he wouldn’t be able to find his way out. But then there would be a bug in the tissue box forever! Surely, I would forget, reach for a tissue to blow my nose, and end up inhaling it, at which point, it would crawl through my sinuses and into my brain!

Carefully, I reached down into the trash can, which I had so elegantly lined with a plastic Kroger grocery bag. Using the tissue, I pulled the Puffs box off of the toilet and quickly threw it into the bag. “Tie it up! Quick!” I said to myself. I triple knotted the handles, then I shoved it into the trash can — opening-side-down as an extra obstacle, of course — and slammed the lid closed.

“Whew!” Satisfied with my work, I washed my hands, turned off the bathroom light, and padded down the hall to my room.

And on the way, I saw another earwig.