Summer is the worst

It's the time of year where I start freaking out about summer being almost over. There are probably only nine weeks left of it if I'm being incredibly generous, eighteen weekend days and you'll definitely waste four of them so really just two weeks of summer left.

It makes me sad and then I think "If I'm sad, that will be a waste of summer" and that makes me even sadder.

The only thing that makes me happier is taking out the garbage. Because to take out the garbage I have to go down this little locked alleyway behind my building, where two baby birds fell out of a nest a few weeks ago and have just been slowly decomposing. Maybe I was supposed to bury them when I first noticed their bodies, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, and now it's so hot and they're just slowly baking on the sidewalk like the grossest barbecue I've ever seen. 

I have to take wide steps around the birds and then I have to carefully maneuver the garbage can area because ever since summer started half a dozen huge spiders have started building this complicated six-part web, and they're using half the garbage cans as anchor points. You have to pull some Ocean's 12-type moves to navigate through them without any of the spiders freaking out at you, and Ocean's 12 was the worst Ocean's movie and I only like spiders from a safe distance, and after I throw away my trash and walk back through the birds I can't wait for summer to be over and thank goodness there are only pretty much two weeks of it left.

Go to the beach while you can, you guys.

Useful information if you hate spiders

I hope you never need to know how to not freak out about thousands of spiders in your apartment, but just in case you do.

1. Pretend they’re pets

My landlord doesn’t allow pets but I’ve found a genius workaround, spider pets. “Spider pets, spider pets, spider pets” I repeat to myself over and over again while I watch them crawl around in the shower or climb from the middle of the floor to the ceiling suspended in midair. These loving little adorable animals are under my care. I am so lucky.

2. Kill them

This seems in direct opposition to the first technique but it works just as well: spraying large amounts of poison on them or smashing them with my Doc Martens.

3. Think about bugs I don’t have

Last summer was the Summer of Millipedes which, as catchy as it sounds, was so horrible. Now the spiders eat the millipedes. They feast on them really, one millipede is like a table’s worth of steak for these spiders. So, good thing I don’t have millipedes anymore?

4. Have nightmares scarier than them

Last week I had a dream that I lost my face in an accident, and found a free face in the mail, but it was my coworker's face and the surgery went really wrong. Good luck scaring me now, spiders.

Here are pictures of apartments without spiders, to break up the text and to remind me to be thankful that at least I don't have cats.

here are the facts

You asked so here it is: the all-inclusive list of everything I know about kosher dietary rules, and even a few things I don't know.

Anything from a pig is bad news.

Don't eat soup with bugs in it, but you can take the bugs out and then eat it if you want. Same goes for spiders. No rattlesnakes. Fish are fine. Fish with weird skeletons or armor are not fine. Tarantulas are a no-go.

Cheese has cow stomachs in it and marshmallows have horse feet in them and lots of other foods have strange parts of animals in them you didn't know about.

You can't boil a lamb in his mother's blood or milk or something I always thought was literal but it's not, it's a way of saying not to eat meat and dairy at the same time, which sounds gross at first but people do it all the time when they're eating cheeseburgers or cheese chicken or turkey ice cream or turkey yogurt. You can eat salmon yogurt because salmon isn't a meat. You can eat eggs at the same time as meat as long as it isn't pig meat and you don't cook the eggs in butter. You can eat a lemon ice for dessert after eating some non-pig non-bug meat because lemon ice doesn't have dairy, unless you like eating lemon ice with melted butter on it, like people do with popcorn. You could put an egg on top if you didn't have taste buds or shame. Eggs are not a meat or a dairy, they don't fall into the blood and milk description in any way. If you're not hungry for eggs right now you're crazy.

If you have two heads you can possibly eat dairy in one mouth and meat in one mouth, depending on where you are conjoined.

You can eat meat while wearing ice-cream flavored chapstick, but you can't eat actual ice cream for three hours after, or a certain number of hours that depends on what country you live in and whether you're lactose intolerant. I wouldn't recommend eating the actual chapstick, I don't know if it has anything to do with kashrut but it might just make you sick.

Don't eat owls. End of list.