Ants are my life

From the time I awake in the morning until I go to bed at night, ants have become a part of my entire day. When I put on clothes in the morning, they are there with me. When I grab breakfast from the cupboard, they are busy working on my breakfast. As I walk out of the house and reach for my bag, they are already in it, awaiting for me to depart with their presence trailling behind. I feel them on my arms not with a worried suspision, but because they are actually charging down my arms and legs. At times they are in so many places that I doubt my existence before them. They make beautiful patterns on the walls of my bedroom, they create endless opportunites for toxic games in the afternoons, and at night they are always waiting in my bed for us both to leave the world behind in sleep. We got ants.

The other day my friend Gina and I got a craving for chocolate banana cake, so we set out in the early afternoon to collect all of the ingredients. We whipped up quite a batch in about 30 minutes, and after a good hour in the oven we pulled out our creation to admire its perfect smell. Because we had all finished lunch and felt full we decided to wait until after dinner to eat our cake. But then once dinner had passed and we were stuffed to the max, we decided to extend the treat only a few hours more, until after our nightly prayer.

When 9:30pm rolled around, we were all pretty pumped, not only to pray, but to get our prayers out quickly. As we approached the safely burried treasure that we hid sneakly in the oven, a prevaillig sense of horror and admiration came over us as we opened the door to find an entire army awaiting us. Now it is hard to tell you approximatly how many ants were on the cake, because ants are a quantity that is hard to see in your mind. If I told you there were 300 that might give you the same visual image as a person I told there were 1,000. Needless to say, the cake was almost covered, and the white pan had only spots of white left.

We don´t get many treats in Ecuador, as a matter of fact I believe this might have been the first desert in a month, so you can imagine the inner crying that was going on the entire time we discovered our partners. It was pretty rough, there was some whining, even some light wailling, and after such a long week, not many of us had anything left to fight with. However, deep in everyones stomach lives the desire to perservere against all odds. So we decided to do what any normal young college aged adult would do. We decided we would bake them off.

We put the cake in the oven, cranked the heat, and watched as the ants on the pan fell to their death 13 inches below, while those who were on the cake melted right into the gooey layers. When we took it out, after a brief discussion on protein and a little convincing on some of our parts, we set out to devour the same cake which minutes before had broken our hearts. Removing the cooked ants with some skilled knives and finger nails, we all dug in with two hands until we had licked the entire pan clean. I ate more ants than I know, but I am assuming somewhere around 30. Yum.

And that is how we coined our phrase for the year. ¨Bottoms up.¨