A Barfy Devil Day

Today was weird. Let's start at the end. When I come home from work I climb a huge hill followed by 2 stories worth of stairs, 2 more smaller hills, and another 4 stories of stairs. I've mentioned this before. Ususally, I stop midway at the little gazebo outside my apartment and take a rest. I watch the big spiders catch bugs in their webs attached to the phonebooth underneath a big street lamp. Tonight as I was calmly replaying the day in my head, something landed on top of the phonebooth with a THUMP. It sounded big, and I waited to see if it would fly away again. As I sat there watching, a devil appeared. I thought, "Oh great, now I've got to face a demon," but I wasn't too surprised considering the way my day had gone down already.

The thing launched off the top of the phone booth and started flying right at me. It was scary! I shrieked a little and stood up to run away. (Yep -- Chicken!) But the demon didn't stay airborne and it fell on the gravel a couple feet in front of me. I went over to investigate and it was on it's back. I flipped it over with my shoe. It was one of these...

I didn't even know these suckers could fly!
I've seen them before. One little bratty kid in Japan used to bring his pet-demon-beetle to class and chase me around with it. They're scary looking beasts, and I was especially nervous about it's claws.

Here's one not flying -- but you can see it's wing sticking out from behind. The one that harassed me tonight had two big strong pincher things of just about equal length sticking out of its head.


It's actually not called a "demon-beetle" but rather a rhinoceros beetle, and it is the strongest creature on earth! Imagine that. Hercules-bug flying at me! It walked around on the gravel, and really looked like a black king crab claw hobbling about. It took off after standing straight up and revealing it's big cellophane wings. Scary shit.

The middle of my day was a bit demonic as well. I had about 10 minutes to go with my 3rd class, and I walked out to go get something in the teachers room. Elizabeth was on the phone and there was a little boy, Ken, from my next class standing in the doorway to the office. He had his hand over his mouth and his eyes were all watery. I thought maybe he had bitten his tongue or had a toothache, so I put my hand on his head and said "Ken, are you alright? What's wrong?" He shook his head a little and then (thankfully) turned away from me and hurled all over the place. It wasn't this shy silent puking either, it was forceful and he made huge retching noises. I ran back to the classroom to grab a garbage pail By the time I had returned, Elizabeth was off the phone and in the corner of the room, as far as she could get away from Ken, with her hand over her mouth, jumping up and down and screaming "What do I do? Jenny, what do I dooooo?" Ken was still barfing. I slid the bucket underneath him, patted his back, and went to get the boss.

You think I cleaned it all up? Noooooo. My 10 little impressionable students had rushed out of the class when they heard the super-retching and Elizabeth's squealing. I was a little worried we might have a sympathy puke-fest on our hands. (And no, I wouldn't have cleaned that up either.)

This morning, after eating, Kamikaze barfed a little. Before I could get a paper towel to clean up his puke, he ate it. I'm kind of losing respect for him. That's not cool. I kind of smirked today, though, wondering what the Korean teachers' reaction would be if I suggested poor Ken clean up his own mess by acting like my goofy cat. That's gross. I'm losing my self-respect too.