I still really like my Wednesday class at the resort, but a disadvantage to working in the jungle became apparent tonight: snakes. The freaking jungle is just lousy with snakes, at least in my imagination. But tonight this paranoia became more real. As I was getting out my key card to open my hotel room door, I looked down and there was a big snake. And I’m not exaggerating, it was really three feet.
When I saw it I said some choice –and surprisingly multilingual– profanity and got the hell out of there. I found a student of mine, who called someone, who called someone else. I guess it was something they called a “tuboa” (I’m not completely positive, since I was quite far away from them when they told me) and they said it was similar to a boa, but quite poisonous.
In the end, I guess I’m happy about how I behaved, since as you may know, I have a near-crippling phobia of snakes. I think it came from mowing the lawn when I was a kid, when they’d always dart out at the last minute. I spent a good decade of my life having snake nightmares wherein I’m cutting the grass and almost run over a snake, and when I step back to avoid it, I almost step on another. Pretty soon the whole lawn is covered in snakes.
Fortunately I’ve not had those dreams for a while but even now, when I see a picture of a snake in a magazine –I’d like to interject a hearty “Go to hell!” to the photographic editorial staff of National Geographic here– I get a sort of weird cotton-in-the ear sensation, like when you get too close to a campfire and inhale smoke. But this time, I just backed away. I didn’t roll into a ball and cry, and I didn’t shit myself. But just barely.
So who knows, maybe I’m slowly overcoming the phobia. But I’m still keeping my machete close at hand, just in case.
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Sitzman
Errand-Running Monkey at Sitzblog
Hey! I'm Ryan Sitzman, the person in charge of Sitzblog. If you want to know more about me, you can check out my profile on Google or go to my personal site, RyanSitzman.com. You can also click on any of the redundant little boxes to the left and it should take you to my profiles for all kinds of social networks. Thanks!
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Wow!! I am so glad you are OK, and even more that it did not happen when I went there with you.
just a question… What did they do with the snake? I mean, they killed it, right?
Angela