In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

B. v Mothra

Aunt B

Late last night, I looked up in the corner of my kitchen and there was an enormous moth. Like the size of a small station wagon. I could see little 1970s children looking out a window in that moth’s butt waving to me for help, that’s how big it was.

I know we’ve talked about this before, but Jesus Christ, if you were born between about 1965 and 1980, it’s really a wonder as many of us made it to adulthood as have. It was all, eh, throw the kids back there with the spare tire and I’ll drive them around town while I smoke and let the littlest one sit on my lap and work the stick shift.

I can remember being in the back seat of one of my friends’ mom’s cars and my door wasn’t shut tight (which, in those days, seemed to be a real concern–my cousin once went rolling down an interstate saved only by his pillow when he fell out of a car because the door wasn’t shut tight and my brother lost some beloved GI Joes when they fell out of a car) and she just reached back behind her, right cigaretted hand on the wheel, left hand grabbing for the door handle, and she just opened that thing, slammed it shut, and kept going, never dipping below 40 miles an hour.

And I still have that vision of the passing pavement practically beneath me seared into my brain.

Seriously, the people of my generation need to take my parents generation aside and just grab them by the lapels and shout, “What were you thinking? We could have died!” and also “Was littering a public sport back then or what?”

You can almost imagine that the guy tossing his little styrofoam clam from his Big Mac out the window just as my cousin rolls out of the car ahead of him was all “Damn, there goes my chance for victory!”

Anyway, the moth. It was huge. And I did the sciency crap where you turn off all the lights in the house and turn on the light in the garage to try to lure the moth into being fooled into believing that that’s the sun out there or something. But Mothra was having none of it. Mothra was all, heh, now that we’re alone here in the dark, let me fly right at your face!!!!

Thanks for nothing, science.

I got the broom out of the other room and tried to swat Mothra outside. But of course, Mothra just sat on the end of the broom and was all, “That’s right! Take me for a ride, tiny human!”

And folks, I am embarrassed to admit that it took me a good ten minutes to realize that the solution was to let the moth land on the broom and then take the broom outdoors where the moth promptly flew away.

So, victory for me! Kind of. I mean, ten minutes! But, in my defense, look at how my parents brought me up.

(cross-posted at Tiny Cat Pants)

20 thoughts on B. v Mothra

  1. Cute post. XD I used to be freaked out about moths but now I’m pretty chill with them, it’s only the really GINORMOUS ones that still give me the starts.

  2. This one was huge! When I saw it in the corner, my brain couldn’t quite make sense of it at first. I thought it was an oak leaf or something.

  3. I could see little 1970s children looking out a window in that moth’s butt waving to me for help, that’s how big it was

    Oh Aunt B., that was divine.

    We’ve got them so big here that one night I said to my friend, “What’s that hummingbird doing out so late? Don’t they nest in the evenings?” He said, “Hummingbirds might. Moths don’t.”

    At that size they’re just plain intimidating. I don’t wonder it took you ten minutes to unscramble your brains. It’d have taken me 20, easily. Bugs shouldn’t come in that size.

  4. Funny, I saw a hummingbird and thought it was a moth.
    Good story, I liked how the 2 elements–moths and road safety–were tied together.

  5. Large moths I don’t mind, as long as no one expects me to catch one in my hands to put it outside — in fact I rather admire the way hawk moths look like hummingbirds when they fly. But other big bugs, like paloverde beetles (it looks like a cockroach as long as your hand with huge long legs like a spider and big beetle-wings) freak me out completely, and my housemate fails completely to understand the visceral horror engendered by the thought that IT MIGHT GET ON ME.

    And in a minor digression, WRT the entirely understandable cry of “What were you thinking? We could have died!”, I think I want to strangle whoever it was that wrote this piece of shit. It’s an endlessly forwarded glurge implying that “we” — defined as “ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s !!” {sic} — survived just fine in a world of shared soda bottles, lead-based paint on cribs, no bike helmets, no child safety seats, and no childproof caps on dangerous medicines … and since “we” survived so well, kids today are pathetic overprotected wimps. (That “we” did not all survive intact — if we had, there would never have been any call for lead-free paints or bike helmets, would there? — escapes the glurge-writer completely.)

  6. Cactus Wren, I know! The professor in my first women’s studies class once said (in a completely different context, obviously), “They don’t tend to make laws against things people don’t do.” It’s not like life was fine with kids not wearing seatbelts. People died.

    Anyway, I felt good that the whole situation ended with both the moth and me still alive.

  9. How fun to read something silly and off-topic here on Feministe! I was expecting it to tie into something deeper, but that just made the last line that much funnier. I snorted my drink out of my nose. Thanks for sharing.

  11. Cara — same here. Maria probably has no magazines left to subscribe to, if she cancels a subscription every time she finds an article she doesn’t like. B-)

  13. If you live in a really rural area, you can still get kids having horrible accidents all the time! 7-year-olds rolling the car in the back paddock (survived), 3-year-olds riding unrestrained in the back of the ute, falling out and getting their head run over (survived), 9-year-olds running into the blades of a harvester (died), 8-year-olds riding horses with no protective gear (died), whole families riding in the boot of the car or sitting on the window ledges hanging on (pulled over by police at 90km/h), 13-year-olds driving the family car around at night (killed his friend) and that’s not even getting into all the kids who drink industrial chemicals from the dairy or drown in the dam.

  14. Oh honey, I feel you. We have Mothras in Kiev too, a great army of them terrorizing the city, and the cat is too lazy to go after them as of late.

  15. “Damn, there goes my chance for victory!”

    Still laughing here. Cecropia moth, maybe? They are huge, and they tend to cling, and they are oak-leaf brown; it’s possible to use their cocoons to make a type of wild silk. They’re rather handsome when they’re not threatening people in their kitchens.

  17. Don’t feel so bad about taking 20 minutes to get the moth out, my wife and I had a bat in our apartment last night (how it got into our place I have no idea…) and it took us easily twice that to manage to pull our collective wits together and get the cute little guy outside.

  18. See, moths like that are one of the reasons we have cats. Huge bastard moth comes in, we make chattery mother-cat-instructing-on-hunting noises, watch the herd tumble in excitedly and then just wait for one of them to catch and eat the damn thing.

    Of course, it gets interesting with the REALLY big ones, since apparently they don’t taste too great, but the cats are generally far too proud of how tough and hunterry they are to even THINK about not eating their kill. Which can be fun to watch.

  19. I often wonder how many of the cognitive/focus/memory problems I have always had might have been due to lead paint, mom smoking, etc. Sometimes wish I had died when that horse threw me.
    But t least I didn’t wind up like Maria above.

  20. Don’t even get me started on the pets in this house. No one eats scary bugs. No one does anything useful. Last night, when I was in the bedroom, the door between the kitchen and the garage slammed shut and the dog hid while I had to go check it out! Seriously, what is the use in having a scary dog who won’t go check out scary things for you?

    So, needless to say, I’m not surprised by the animals in this house leaving it to me to battle the moth.

Comments are currently closed.