Summer in Tokyo. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s rainy. The weather can’t make up its mind. Ice cream is delicious and fattening. Metro stations and department stores offer temporary relief from the sweaty outside world. Overall it’s pretty tolerable.

And yet, there’s one thing that’s incessantly, annoyingly bothering me: cicadas.

Ginormous (seriously, Jurassic Park-scale excuses for insects) winged creatures that love to hang outside and impersonate tiny high-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers and paper shredders. These things are so confused about their identities. I almost never see any but this morning there was one on a building and I don’t understand how these things have survived so long. What evolutionary advantages do they have? What about their freakishly loud buzzing is necessary to their survival?

Oh. My god. I just tried to look them up on wikipedia and I knew there would be pictures but SERIOUSLY. The close-up on those BEADY RED EYES. I even held my hand over the first main picture but when I scrolled down to the text of the article it gave me MORE PICTURES. Why do we need so many pictures?! I guess I’m not sleeping tonight. 

But I learned cicadas are the same as locusts. Why don’t we call them locusts then? I learned that term from Passover. Man am I glad we got our shit out of Egypt. 

I’m just going to pretend that the Keebler Elves get hot during summer in Tokyo and they have to leave the safety of their tree houses to do their lawn-mowing, leaf-blowing, and paper-shredding outside. Not to mention hair-drying and shaving with electric razors. Because having to think about those MONSTEROUS CREATURES existing outside the sub-par safety* of my sharehouse bedroom is making me want to rip my hair out.

*Apparently my new bedroom is not safe from mosquitos, as the dozen-or-so red itchy bumps on my arms and legs will attest.