Tonight as I was leaving the cathedral of learning something small and yellowish descending rapidly in the stairwell caught my eye. It was a decent size spider slowly lowering itself down from the the stairs above me. The strand of silk it was hanging from was at least twelve feet long and I was quite taken by the beauty and audacity of this little guy. I'm not a spider person, you would never in a million years see me with a pet tarantula, but I'm not particularly anti-spider either despite some terrifying spider run-ins in my younger years (When I was seven I picked up a spider by the eggsack on its back thinking it was a miniature golf ball and the spider bite me. I was convinced I was going to die). I stood half mesmerized by the little fellow and half realizing that at any moment someone was probably going to burst through the door and break the spider's spell. After a few moments someone did come into the stairwell, a middle-aged man in a hooded sweatshirt. The spider quickly started back up his strand (do spiders just climb up their strands or does the strand go back into their silk hole? The latter seems kind of implausible but I've never seen a spider with a bunch of slack strand either). He looked at me and asked, "Are you a mugger?" (the man not the spider). As he asked this he continued walking and ran right into the spider breaking its silk strand . I told him he just ran into a spider and that it was on him but he kept walking and did not give even the littlest shit.