The Ant-y Diaries

I don't like to be negative or badmouth-y. I believe in karma. But I am done being Miss Nicely Nicely*. I mean it. I'm coming out. No, not like that-- just out as a hater. I have to get this off my chest. So here it is. Ants are jerks. Little tiny six-legged jackwagon-y poop-faced fiends. I know it sounds harsh, but it's true. Anyone who says different has been brainwashed. Probably by the government. 

Photo courtesy of cozypad.com

They think they can just come on in whenever they want and make themselves comfy. Who even knows what they're doing?  They march in these crazy lines and run into each other and I stared at them for like a half an hour and you know what? I didn't see them carrying a freaking thing. Supposedly they are so super strong that they could get together and lift up a whole house if they wanted to, with their tiny disgusting ant arms, but they just go back and forth and even with my 300 mm (super big camera lens) I can't tell what they're doing. I feel like they are just trying to tick me off. They're like hey, let's make a line and march around like jackwagons, and not even eat any food, just to annoy the crap out of whoever lives here.  My house is pretty clean, but we have kids so you’ll find the occasional crumb or stray pea or Cheerio or Hot Pocket lying around. Ants are supposed to go bat crap crazy for crumbs. These ones don’t. They’re in the sink, on the counter, marching, marching, forever marching, but not swarming around anything in particular or carrying around crumbs. 

So I did some research and tried some stuff to get rid of them. Now I’m not saying this is true, but I have a suspicion that some internet savvy dude is sitting in his mom’s basement, eating Cheetos and laughing his ginormous butt off as I spray vinegar all over my house until it smells like pickles, and then sprinkle cinnamon in the corners like a complete nut job. I believe stuff people write on the internet. Maybe I am gullible, but I expect people not to lie all over the place and then put it in a website where God and everyone can just go read it whenever they want. I’m trying to kill the ants or at least convince them to find some place else to do their marching and mouthing off.  I feel like all I've really done here is season them and make them more delicious to whatever thing eats ants. I hope it's not spiders. I hate ants, but I don't think I would invite spiders over to take care of the problem, like the old lady that swallowed the fly. That is a freaking nutso song by the way. The Little One has a book with the song in it, and it's pretty disturbing and morbid. I feel weird telling my 19-month old kid about this crazy old lady who swallows a variety of animals and insects and stuff until she finally dies. So I changed it-- I just say "da dum da dum" instead of "perhaps she'll die" and then at the end, when she eats the horse and it goes "she's dead, of course" I just say she's full. Because she is. Full of animals. It's a cracked out song. But anyway I know that when one thing that comes in to kill another, which seems like a good natural food-chain kind of extermination,  it's a bad thing. That happened in Guam and now there are no native birds there. For realsies.

Anyway, back to the ants.  I researched further with my super awesome internet research skills. I'm really good at internet research, in case you don't know me personally. I do it all the time. One time, I had this friend who had something really weird happen to her, and I offered to investigate for her. The person thought she had been irradiated by nuclear waste or green gamma Hulk rays or something, but then I found this blog for her. Oh yeah, it's funny. Anyway, turns out if you eat a lot of black licorice, you have very green irradiated looking doodies. So my friend felt way better and vowed never again to eat anything with Blue #5 in it or whatever, because #5 affects your number twos. 

Anyway-- ant research.  I discovered that there are some sick maniac housewives running around on the internets as well. They comment back and forth to each other over the various ways to feed stuff to ants that make the ants explode and die painfully from being turned inside out by some chemical reaction that happens in their stomachs. And they are LOL-ing and ha ha-ing all over the place at the thought of exploding zombie ants. As I said, I hate ants too, I think they are jackwagons who just want to crawl around in my cereal and sneak into my bed at night so I can have nightmares about things crawling all over me or getting inside my ear and living in my brain. But I don’t want to see them turn into zombie death ants or explode or anything. That’s just cruel, and kind of sick.

 If I could I would just scoop them all up and take them to a nice field in the country somewhere, or maybe a farm where they could live out their days making friends with wise cracking owls or little pig ingénues a la Charlotte's Web. These are city ants, though, so they might not make it in the country. They might end up like the Donner Party, freezing and having to eat each other to stay alive, in which case my magnanimous act of charity would be a total waste because they would be dead anyway. The exploding deaths would be less trouble and use less gas money, frankly, if they're going to die anyway. But in the end I decided that I just want them to find another place to live, out in the yard and not in the house. So I put vinegar and lemon juice and cinnamon and chili powder on baseboards, which are supposed to encourage them to go somewhere else. The house is starting to smell like salad dressing and the ants are still far from gone and the internet-savvy computer geek is now wiping his greasy, Cheeto-powder-covered hands and settling in to add more tips to the already hilarious website o’lies he’s created and I’ve fallen victim to. 

Meanwhile, back at the farm, ants are now invading even my computer. I imagine these are very smart ninja computer programming ants. They seem to be trying to get inside the computer mechanism and actually rewire my computer. As it took me about three hours to fix the television from the split screen picture-in-picture thing after Little One got to the "momote" control, I doubt I could undo any tiny ant rewiring, and I simply refuse to buy them a new computer. 

I don't know if I will be able to make myself  try some of the sick and inhumane exploding techniques next. Maybe I can just do it to a couple of them just to scare them in hopes that they may just realize I am serious and give up. But what if the ants are smarter than people, and rather than doing the entire Jonestown reenactment, they will see a few of their jackwagon ninja ant comrades explode and stop eating the Kool-Aid and just pack up their tiny pants and go live on a farm of their own free will? 

*Note: Nicely Nicely is a reference to Guys and Dolls. I didn't spell anything wrong, I swear. I meant to do that.

Julie Simmons-Wixom is working on becoming an expert in ant relocation. If you are interested in talking to her about ant cruelty, email her here. Oh, and leave a comment below, just for funsies.