Southern California doesn’t have a lot of visible frogs. Lizards and snakes, yes. Frogs no. So, even though I was the kind of child that could usually be found head first in a bush with a bug in my hand, I have never ever caught a frog.
So imagine my sheer delight when we were out at Ben’s parents soon-to-be house and I got to meet not one but two frogs in the very same shitter.
Owing to the fact that their proto-house doesn’t yet have indoor plumbing, there is an exceptionally well maintained porta-potty in the driveway that I opted to use before we left on the twenty minute drive back to the current house.
As soon as I opened the door, I saw something that looked a little like a zombie lizard awkwardly flying across the wall into a crevice near the toilet and I screamed. I took a closer look and realized that I either scared a frog, or caught him mid-leap, so the zombie lizard part was actually his incredibly white and slightly shiny belly diving into the relative safety of the point where the throne met the wall. Scared, relieved, and overjoyed to have found a frog, rarest of creatures, I laughed and laughed. He breathed at me from his retreat, and we stared at each other while I peed.
Thinking that was pretty fun and a nice story to tell Ben in the car, I went to sanitize my hands and got not sanitizer, but a palm-full of frog #2, who immediately ricocheted onto the door. I’m not a stable person in the best of times, and I had just eaten what, for us, is a shit-ton of carbs these days. So I screamed again, and then I laughed some more. Then I went to open the door and Frog 2 took this opportunity to hop into the door crevice where he clung desperately in the exact place he would need to cling if he really really wanted his head cut off by the closing door.
I laughed some more. I also realized at this point that I am maybe a little bit afraid of frogs. Not in a malicious way, but in the way that some white people are a little bit afraid of black people. It’s unfamiliarity paired with deep fascination and maybe a little bit of excitement. In my case with the frogs, it’s not the sexual kind.
“You have to move.” I told Frog 2 “The door is going to cut off your head.”
He refused to listen, so I waggled the door. Nothing.
I tried to gently remove him from the door, but I was a little nervous, and he meeped at me in this really frustrated way, so I let him go while he crawled even deeper into the crevice, making it so the door would bisect rather than decapitate him. Frogs are not great at spacial awareness. I’m not either. It’s only my greater size that gave me the perceptive advantage in this situation.
Meanwhile, I was deep into my third fit of giggles because his little meep had been so angst-ridden and adorable, and of course I’d screamed a third time because how can you not? I mean, this one was more like a yelp. A sympathetic human meep, if anything. But I still had this frog in deep danger and Ben was yelling because this is getting ridiculous and what the fuck am I doing in there?!
So I poked him in the knees until he was safely on the total other side of the door, which I am sure was not his preference because all the bugs were in the piss box and all the predators were on the outside, but sometimes a frog has to live with the consequences of his own tragic unwillingness to be moved by any other means. Also, he figured out how to get in there in the first place, he could probably do it again.
Then on the drive home a bee flew face-first into my iced tea ice, so I yelled “what the fuck” and immediately tossed all the ice out the window (I kept the cup: I may be high-strung but I will die before I become a litter bug). It was so ridiculously perfect that this one little bee flew directly into our window at highway speed, avoided all other targets, and wedged himself exactly in the center of my cup of ice. I was staring directly at his angry little butt and I knew that as soon as he dislodged, we were in for some trouble so I did what had to be done.
Ben, who was driving, understood absolutely nothing about this weird freak-out and I didn’t tell him for about five miles because I was too busy scream-laughing. Honestly the best kind of laughing, I do recommend.
So for about three solid minutes, our little blue car was racing down I-5 with all the windows open so adjacent cars could probably hear me positively howling and Ben yelling “WHAT NOW?!” and “WHAT IN THE FUCK?!” It upset the dog, but I couldn’t help myself.
She’s fine now. She’s pretty used to me being irredeemably strange. Ben is as well. Being with me is, I think, sometimes a little like dating a broken glitter cannon.