Yes, they're here, the Cicadas Who Invaded Washington (and a lot of other places, but I don't care so much about them), and I'm dealing with them much better than I expected. Assuming, of course, that we have seen the worst. Maybe I should wait to make that judgment until they are gone, once and for all.
I saw the first ones a couple of weeks ago, at 1:30 in the morning, when I couldn't sleep, because I can't sleep these days. Reports were trickling around the city that they were emerging, so I went out to my front steps to see what I could see, and what do you know, I could see them.
They come out in that brown shell. After running around in them for a couple of days ("running"=crawling very, very slowly), they climb up on something (trees, shrubs, grass, your leg) and bust out. Here's what things look like after they do that. (I should point out that all of these pictures were taken by me, in my courtyard.)
Immediately after they shed the shell, they're white (never found any like that). After a few hours of suntanning, though, they turn black, with red eyes, and their wings get unstuck from their bodies, though they never really fly very well.
Some of them don't even get that chance, because they're so damn slow they get killed before they ever get anywhere. And here's where I feel stupid. These guys hang out underground for seventeen years, waiting to emerge, for no other purpose than to mate, and their life span is only about a month if they're lucky. So when they don't even make it past the first day, you kind of feel sorry for them. Kind of.
But some of them do fly, and they bang into you, or your door, or window, or car, because they are not the world's most graceful flyers. The males make noise to attract the females, and they are loud, but it's not 24/7. It seems loudest in the morning, then they kind of take a break in the evening. I have heard them at night but not as much. And truthfully, I don't mind the noise. It's not an irritating or screeching call, just kind of a constant, white-noise hum. It's sort of calming, in a weird way.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'll be glad when this mess is over. (Except that, judging from the few who were out of the natural selection race pretty early, when these guys finally do die en masse in another couple of weeks, it's not going to smell very good. Baked Cicada. Ugh.)
And I am not kidding, to prove the peace I have made with these freaks of nature, just as I was finishing up this entry, one flew in my window and landed on my stairs, and I didn't even flinch. All I could do was roll my eyes. And, of course, take a couple of pictures.
(He had turned around and was starting to crawl up the edge of the carpet, and I was afraid he'd get stuck in the gap between the carpet and stair, so I scooped him into a paper cup and put him back outside. Not that I'm worried about the continuation of the species, it's just that they're too big to kill, smashing him would have just been gross. So, he lived to woo another day.)
Anyway, the males seem to die pretty soon after mating. (Ha.) The females will lay the eggs (400-600 each) in tree branches before they check out as well. In August, the eggs will be about the size of a grain of rice, and they will wriggle around until they fall out of the tree. They will then burrow into the ground until they find a tree root, attach themselves to it, and hang out until it's their time to take over the city, in 2021.
When I will be 49.
Damn if that doesn't scare the shit out of me.
It's been a little hard lately, is all I am saying.
A friend of mine from law school, Lynne, lives in Philadelphia, and she had to come down and work in her firm's DC office on Friday, so I invited her to stay with me Friday night. We got in touch with another friend of ours from school (Tracy) who lives in the area with her husband (Dan) and 13-month-old baby. Tracy and Dan both work in DC, but because I am lazy and they are baby-centric, we haven't gotten together a lot since I moved here. So I pick up Lynne at her office on Friday evening and we drive out to the burbs to have dinner at Tracy and Dan's and meet their baby for the first time.
(Tracy, Lynne and I met during our first day of orientation at law school and bonded pretty quickly. We were all 25, meaning we had spent a few years working after college, which set us apart from the majority of kids who were coming straight from undergrad. Dan was working on his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, and Tracy actually transferred there after her first year. He got his doctorate in some crazy scientific field, he currently works at a law firm as a patent examiner and the firm is paying for him to go to law school at night so he can eventually practice as a patent attorney. He's, you know, kind of smart.)
Anyway, they have a gorgeous house and a gorgeous baby, and dinner was great, we all got caught up on each other's lives, and as Lynne and I were leaving, they made me promise to invite myself over whenever I wanted. We got back to my house, Lynne got settled into the guest room, and we said good night.
And as I was getting ready for bed in my room, I absolutely lost it.
The lack of success in absolutely every area of my life is overwhelming. I really can't ignore it anymore.
I have failed at my career. I think, as we mark the four-year anniversary of my graduation from law school this week, we can all agree that it's time to use that word here. It is fact. I have, so far, failed at being a lawyer.
I have also failed at love. I hardly need to get into that.
I also know, as much as I know anything, I know that the failure in my chosen career path would be tolerable if I had someone to come home to. Just as the lack of anyone who cares whether I come home at all would be tolerable if I had any kind of career.
I harbor no illusions, by the way. These failures are my fault, mine and mine alone. I lack these things, the two most important measures of anyone's life, because of flaws in my own character, my own personality, that I haven't been able to repair. It certainly isn't anyone else's responsibility to figure out how to find the right job for me, how to open my heart the right way.
(I know that plenty of people have jobs that aren't perfect and plenty of people have relationships that aren't perfect, and they can try to explain to me how I shouldn't count on these things to bring me happiness, but they can't tell me that they don't prefer the imperfect form to none at all, because otherwise everyone would leave their imperfect families and imperfect jobs and choose to be like me.)
All I am saying is that it is just getting harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that I am leading an utterly insignificant life.
I mean, I have friends, and I know there are people who love me, but I am not the sine qua non, if you will pardon my Latin, for anyone, and that is the truth, it just is. And I do go to work, but if I were not there in the morning, they would have another body in my chair by the afternoon, and that is the truth as well.
I'm just not sure what to do with this. I will tell you one thing, though. Never before, not as a growing child who just doesn't understand anything, and not in the worst days of my relatively mild teenage angst, never, ever before have I wanted to run away as much as I do right now.
