You're making a camel out of a mosquito

I absolutely love idioms. Because they're fun. Because they're amusing. Because they make no sense. Because they give me an excuse to show Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch, a scene from Patch Adams and assorted scenes from my mother's and my guilty pleasure favorite NCIS (check out Ziva idioms, they're hilarious).

I have a few awesomely fantastic advanced student that are translators that do mostly scientific and legal translation work. So they want some general conversational English; cause, you know, legalese isn't really conducive to chit chat. Because conversational English all over the world consists of so much slang and idiomatic phrases, we thought this would be a fun, and entertaining place to start.

One of the students, in our first lesson, mentioned that she thought English was a logical language, to which I replied "wtf?". But she went on to conclude that the tenses, grammar and its usages made good solid sense. This hearkened me back to my French I and II classes, when conjugating verbs was like putting together a puzzle, before all that irregular mumbo-jumbo. She recently noted that idioms make things slightly less logical.

We recently covered proverbs, and I learned this gem "You're making a camel out of a mosquito" which is the Czech equivalent of "You're making a mountain out of a molehill". And in one of those awesome and insane moments, things from my work life, crossed over, directly, into my personal life.

You see, last Sunday evening I scheduled myself for some much needed "skype" dates with my parents and my good friend DRJ (whose blog is linked).

I had the window open to create a lovely breeze in the room. One of my "beefs" with Czech apartments is the lack of screens on the windows, meaning that a window left open lets in all sorts of things, beyond a breeze.

Not sure if many of you know this, but I have a thing . . . about bugs. Spiders, and the way they move, give me the creeps. Mosquitoes (aka Minnesota's second state bird) make me want to claw my eyes out. Ticks . . . well they give you Lyme Disease. Flys, well, they're just gross. I've blogged about them before (that's right, this girl's been out in the blogo-sphere hitting up the interwebs.)

Not sure when or how it started, maybe the neighbor boys threatening me with worms in the hair on rainy mornings at the bus stop. Maybe I had a tragic bug swallowing experience that I have since repressed due to trauma. Maybe watching Arachnaphobia with my Dad (bad move on his part . . . kidding!). Maybe it was going to camp for a week and my brothers hiding extremely detailed and life-like rubber bugs EVERYWHERE in my bedroom, like a terrifying welcome-home present. Regardless, whatever the reason, bugs and I, we do not get a long.

As past house-mates know, I generally shy away from shuffling rodents and insects off the mortal coil unless I actually have to, I leave that to the more manly or more logical and rational (ie Miss Madeline and not DRJ) people. Like recently the large spider that just "appeared" in the corner of my bedroom late one evening. I nearly died of fear, and allowed my lovely and awesome flatmate to bludgeon it to death with a nice black shoe.

On this specific Sunday I was not plagued by spiders, but rather insects of the mosquito-like flying variety. They came into my room, and stayed. Hanging out in high corners and flying around and around and around and around. At first, during my conversation with my parents, I thought they would leave. But they didn't. The bugs (we'll call them Pavel and Martin) decided they enjoyed the minimalist interior decorating that is Chez Janine, and wanted to stay.

Conversation with Mom and Dad ended, and I called DRJ on skype (which including an amusing moment where our internet freaked out and began skipping as he was mid-word, and didn't stop until I took the battery out). I tried to stay calm, but the bugs were still bothering me.

Nearly 3/4s of the way through our chat, I had had enough. I stood, placed my laptop on my dresser, turned up the volume and began to circle my room on the hunt. I was armed with only a flip-flop sandal, the dry sarcasm and schadenfreude of my skype-friend, and my wits. Needless to say it was an epic battle . . . but flip-flop willed out.

Eventually Martin (the little one) settled on a spot high above my desk. With some quick thinking I launched my flip-flop against the wall, effectively killing him dead as a doornail and adding some new shoe shaped art to my otherwise blank wall.

Later, Pavel, the pesky large one, proved to be more of a problem. After hours (probably twenty minutes) of circling, I felt I had exhausted my efforts. I tried waving him towards the window, turning off the lights, changing the lighting situation to see if he'd be attracted to something away from the ceiling. But nothing worked. I followed him around and around, as he flitted from corner to corner and wall to wall.

By this point, Pavel was exhausted and my neck was sore from constantly looking "up" at the ceiling. In a rare moment of luck for me Pavel took off from the wall, and headed right towards me. I'm guessing he was living on borrowed time and tired of keeping body and soul together, he knew the end was nigh. I like to thing he wanted to give me some satisfaction in his last moments (or he really was a vicious bug and wanted to kill me or something). Finally, with some dive-bombing (on Pavel's part) thwacking and flailing (on my part), Pavel dropped like the flying bug that he was, and died on my wall.

I like to think Pavel and Martin died good and heroic deaths fighting for dominance in a world ruled by humans terrified of something 1:1 trillionth (I made that up) of their size.

Now, though I sat under this tree today in the square and I feel like their are bugs crawling all over me . . . I think Pavel and Martin may be exacting their revenge.