My phobia is cured.

Back story:
When I was in my early 20's, I saw a hornet on my window sill. I ran out the door and five blocks to the restaurant I worked at. Once I got there, I grabbed the only other waitress who worked at Mega-Bytes and told her I needed her help urgently. She nodded in that way people do when they're deciding if they would kill for you. "There's a bug in my kitchen." She continued to look at me. I took a deep panic stricken breath. "It flies." Janet told the boss to take over for a few minutes. It was an emergency. That woman walked to my apartment and waved the hornet out the window. I had left the stove on and the macaroni dish I had planned was now a pound of mush in boiling water. So Janet walked me back to the restaurant and made me some comfort food.

The new story:
So I'm doing the whole fence adventure and this very light, very delicate something lands on my shoulder. Assuming it's a leaf, I lift and toss and look at the ground in curiosity.

What lands and scampers away is a good sized spider.

I watch it scurry, the poor thing having a bit of a limp in it's right four legs.

I should be screaming right now. I'm pensive. This is a weird feeling.

So I keep working on the fence and I get pretty dirty, but when it comes to bedtime, I don't care to shower, I just pass out in my clothes on top of my fluffy green blanket.

I wake up to a pincer bug on my arm. Someone else calls it an earwig. I really have no clue which one of us is right, but it's brown, about half an inch long and it has these pincers that are utterly disgusting.

I flick it to the ground.

No killing. That would be barbaric.

And I hop downstairs for some coffee.

Another surreal moment for a woman who once left her apartment for two hours with the shower running because a cockroach was in her bathroom sink.

We get back to work on the fence and my roommate does a girl scream when she accidentally places her finger on a spider while picking up a piece of wood. (This is very funny because she has no phobia and really isn't at all "girly." She's built sets for plays which is feminine machismo in it's coolest sense, I think).

I bend over, and touch the spider. It's dead.

I laugh and tell her that I would be empathy screaming two days ago in the same situation.

What happened? Was that spider on my shoulder some sort of trigger? Did it spawn some sort of courage? Am I now one with the spider?

Now to see how I get when around a bee. That's the ultimate test.