Bug Eyed Monster
Or, More Childhood Rubbish...but, BUGS!
I've just spent the past few hours, on and off, Google-searching for the perfect cicada photograph to make an icon of. No luck - the cicada is a beautiful bug, but takes an ugly mugshot. I'm yet to find one that's just right.
Anyhoo, cicadas have long been my favourite bug - since I was at primary school in Sydney, and lived next to a huge park off Raglan street in Manly where they used to hang out. I also collected silkworms as a kid, but they are nowhere near as interesting, as they live in a shoebox and kinda smell bad. Whilst Googling, I noticed that there's a vast difference between Australian cicadas and the ones that live in America. I'm yet to dig deeper into this, and promise not to get back to you on it as I'm sure you all find it to be terribly uninteresting.
I remember the different species of cicada that I used to collect in Sydney - the Brown Baker (so boring there are no decent images), the Green Grocer (beautiful - a brilliant green), and my favourite, the Black Prince (also known as the Ruby Red / Ruby Prince, possibly due to the constrast of a black shell against its bright, sanguine eyes). It was kinda rare to find a live cicada, so you mainly saw evidence of their arrival by the masses of husks clinging to the trees. Their little claws were so sharp that you could gently attach these husks to your hands and arms, and chase other kids around the playground, hooting and waving your limbs around like a monster. Fun times.
The point of all this reminiscing is, I've been thinking a lot about cicadas. They're kinda symbolic to me for several reasons, but mostly because they hibernate underground for 6 months to 17 years (O, yes!) before emerging, crawling up a tree, and climbing out of their skin. Most people also find their obnoxiously shrill whine annoying in the summertime. You now see why I can relate. Also, Ms. sinndar recently posted a photograph of a beautiful cicada in her journal (where I shamelessly begged her to keep any discarded cicada bits she may happen upon, as I have to leave my collection here behind), but just before that I was delighted to find a necklace with two silver cicada wings on it that I fell in mad love with. So now I have one wing, as does my lovely Mars.
The End.
O, P.S. Is anyone else having major issue with MSN messenger right now? Not only has it not let me log in from home for the past 2-3 days, but my computer is not loading ANY MSN-related pages, whatsoever - including hotmail.com. I've tried running Adaware, using both Explorer and Firefox, removing my MSN from the computer (and now I can't even download it again, for, as said, no MSN-related pages are bloody loading), and temporarily allowing pop-ups for the duration of downloading another version. I even tried downloading Trillian, but the fucker only half-loaded. Not bad for a technotard (Wadehelped). So, how about a brick through the monitor?