When Chandra left for Alaska, she left us her dragons to care1 for. They are babies and very cute. For the past few weeks, Fritz has mostly taken care of feeding them–the actual picking up of crickets and mealworms and tossing them into the aquarium2. I am content to sit by and watch. Today he’s not here, so I did it, and now I feel like there are crickets crawling all over. WHAT’S THAT ON MY HAND?! Just a stray hair. WHAT’S THAT ON MY OTHER HAND? A CRICKET! WHAT IS IT STILL DOING THERE /SHAKE /SHAKE /SHAKE. Crickets are kind of cute, so it’s not exactly the crickets themselves that bother me. It doesn’t really bother me that I am to touch them, either. What bothers me is feeling them squirm when I pinch one between my fingers, and the sickening crunch. I instinctively snap my fingers apart and it pops back down and scurries away, totally unharmed; what I can’t stand is feeling like I’m about to crush their heads accidentally. I guess I don’t like killing things.
It is, however, kind of fun to watch the dragons snap them up with their tiny mouths. They pose, bodies alert, and with the quickest motion dash forward and then sit back with a satisfying “nom nom nom.” Ok it’s gross. It’s gross and really cute. Ugh.
Also mealworms make my skin crawl.
I am going to have dreams of waking up in a bed full of crickets. Or I’m going to dream that I’m a cricket and a bearded dragon 100x my size is descending upon me in slow motion, mouth open. I stare into oblivion, unable to move, all angles and legs and quivering antenna(e). Gross.
1What essentially happened was that she offered to sell me her sweet new 23″ widescreen monitor, so Chandra traded her monitor to Fritz in exchange for a summer’s worth of beardie food, and Fritz traded the monitor to me in exchange for blizzcon ticket. Only just now, laying it out like this, have I entirely convinced myself that everything’s squared away. Haha.
2Even though it is specifically built to house reptiles and not water, their cage is glass-walled, so it occupies the category “aquarium” in my mind. Perhaps the correct word is vivarium?