Bad luck is real
Why am I so fixated on ants? Ants are, at the same time, the most pathetic and most dangerous creatures on earth (fine, that’s actually mosquitoes — but pretend it’s true). A single ant can’t do much; get ten together and they can cause a fair bit of damage; get a hundred and they can do serious harm; get a thousand and you can say goodbye to your pantry. Get a million ants together and you can say goodbye to your entire house.
But I’m not here to talk about ant life and the havoc they wreak on your strawberry wafers. Today, I want to talk about the death of the poor ant that had been living in my bathroom sink for the past few days.
I stopped to think about the odds of being hit by a meteorite — or of something simply falling on your head — given the full size of the planet and the tiny sliver of its surface we actually occupy. The chances of being mortally struck by a falling object are 1 in 1,309,920,920,281,821.42.
To actually get hit, you’d have to be incredibly unlucky, wouldn’t you?
Well. I was brushing my teeth this morning when I spotted the lady ant strolling across the sink, living her best life, practically humming to herself.
As you brush your teeth, toothpaste naturally splashes around the sink — all that back-and-forth of the brush. At one point, I pulled the brush from my mouth and, I don’t know, something like 1/1000th of a milliliter of toothpaste (already half-dissolved by the water) fell onto the sink.
Guess where it landed.
Right on top of the unlucky ant.
The sink is large — very large — and the ant was moving. Being hit by that is something like driving along calmly and being struck by a meteorite out of nowhere.
I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen, so I went to check if the poor ant had died.
Covered by a thick layer of toothpaste, the tiny body was already starting to decompose under the chemical reaction of the “whitening” formula. One little leg was already gone. I grabbed a needle and poked the ant to see if she’d move. Nothing.
I tried a mini CPR session with two cotton swabs. Nothing. What a day. What a stroke of bad luck.
I gave the ant a dignified burial: I picked up the tiny entomological corpse and fed it to my dog. Someone had to come out of this story happy.
