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hear her smoke-throttled voice saying, “You can’t want it more than they do,” and I will stop midharangue and say something along the lines of, “If you ever want help, let me know.”
    I’ve modified Medusa’s credo a bit over the years. If the outcome is something that affects you and the other person, you can want it as much as they do. You can even want it more, but only briefly. If two people are in something together, they each have to pull their own weight. But if it isn’t your goal, don’t take on the responsibility for achieving it. You can only help someone as much as they genuinely want to be helped.
    I think that’s what the spiders were trying to tell me.

Something Inappropriate About Canada
    WHEN CONSORT AND I FIRST STARTED DATING AND WERE shin deep in the Oh, aren’t you just the most wonderful thing! How amusingly you breathe! flush of romance, we attended a fancy party. Later, on the way home, he turned to me and said, “You know what’s so great about you?” I shrugged, hoping it wasn’t something like The way you hide those fat ankles.
    “How equally comfortable you are with everybody,” he continued. “Every time I looked over, there you were chatting away with some new person.” This was indeed a compliment. To Consort, thumbs and graceful small talk are what separate us from the animals. I modestly accepted this tribute to my outgoing nature as we drove through the shiny urban nightscape.
    About a year later, when Consort still loved me but the warm bath of bond-inducing chemicals had worn off, that previous conversation came up. He squinted affectionately and said, “I was wrong. It’s not that you’re equally comfortable with nearly everyone. It’s that you’re equally uncomfortable with nearly everyone.”
    Well, yes. There’s that.
    What separates me from other shy people is that I am an actor by training; I’m practiced in the arts of public deception and entertaining sound bites. In fact, a significant part of my energy is spent not appearing as uncomfortable as I feel. For me, appearing at ease and relaxed is exhausting. This is because nomatter how well everything is going, I know that I am seconds away from saying something horrible.
    I have never gotten high on pot. I don’t say this out of a desire to run for Congress (although I would appreciate your vote), or because I think marijuana is the demon leaf. Statistics prove that alcohol is a far more dangerous drug, and I’m doing my best to keep that industry vibrant. No, the reason I don’t smoke pot is because all through my adolescence I kept hearing stories about the effects of getting high; specifically, about getting stoned and fixating over whether you were not talking enough, or talking too much, or saying out loud what was meant to stay in your head, or whether you were making any sense at all. All I could think was: other people need drugs for that?
    Somewhere within my brain resides an eighteen-month-old child. I know this because when Alice was right around that age she became obsessed with mauling our then-dog Polly’s tail. Polly had come to us when Alice was six months old and Polly was about seven years old—the shelter wasn’t exactly sure. Polly had been owned by an elderly woman with whom she watched daytime television and ate snacks. This explained her build. When Alice first set eyes on her, she shrieked in delight. Alice, that is. Polly assumed a look of polite horror, which told us our new family pet hadn’t spent much time around actual children. Fortunately, for a dog with minimal small-child experience, Polly took quite gracefully to being loved well but not wisely by the under-three crowd. She was generally patient and accommodating with Alice and her elfin friends, except for one thing: no one—repeat, no one —was to touch her tail.
    As far as Polly was concerned, her tail was like the parts of one’s body covered by a bathing suit. She, and she alone, got todecide who touched