Fear of Insects

My fear of insects has gone from virtually none to a constant underlying sense of paranoia. The monastery is insectopia. One day I watched my bathroom become infested with ants before my eyes. In the space of about a second they all pored out of a hole in the wall, each one holding a tiny little egg. But it's not really the ants that bother me.
One night while checking the practicalities of having guests in my room I found a little scorpion under my matress. Which was nice. I had been sleeping on top of a scorpion. It's gone now. Whether it's still in my room or not I don't know. I have pressed my matress quite firmly up against the wall though so it doesn't snuggle up next to me.

Before I came to India I knew that the most painful sting in the world belonged to some wasp which lives in the jungle. On a trek up a forest path I came across a small managerie of wasps. I didn't know if the wasp with the painful sting even lived in India, but I decided it propbably did, and therefore one of these wasps must be that kind of wasp. There was one big one which was yellow all over with long legs sharing a leaf with a huge red one, and one other circling their plant. (I later found out it wasn't the yellow long legged one since I watched one in the village which had landed on the ground on its back and couldn't get up again, so I decided that the most powerful sting in the world couldn't have been entrusted to something so stupid.) I tried to take a picture of them, but was scared in case I annoyed them with the flash and was stung by the vicious jungle wasp.

Today I was walking down a dried up river bed where I thought it would be nice to read, since it was leafy and shady and cool. However as I was walking along I got ensnared by a strand of spider silk. I stepped back, an looked for the web. It was next to my head and on it was a huge red black and yellow spider, about the size of my hand, sitting watching me from above.