🫖 Thanks for your patience! My travels and travails have brought delays. I will be taking a substack vacation this Sunday, as well. Sometimes, I read philosophical texts and come up with decent hypotheses about places that feel fake. Other times, I type some loopy stories about bugs. Thanks for supporting Insecure Tea! 🫖
on spotted lanternflies
The spotted lanternfly hasn’t arrived in California yet. Neither has the casual resurgence of the word “retarded.” Without controlled management, the former is expected to arrive by 2033. The latter will flutter in by 2023. Linguistic plagues tend to spread faster than ecological disasters. “Having brown hair” will sadly never make its way to the golden state, at least not to the balayaged ‘burbs of Los Angeles.
One day in Brooklyn, I saw a familiar speckled red thing fluttering through the air. It landed on the ground and I pounced with the alacrity that my old cat Lincoln used to scoop moths right out of the air. I was shocked by my own determination and moxy as I tentatively lifted a Blundstone to reveal its squashed corpse. Some bugs get smushed to smithereens. Ants, for example, can be pinched between your fingers leaving little more than the memory of crawling. Others leave behind a bloated body in the corporeal plane.
Once, someone told me that when you get a shiver down your spine, it’s a ghostly manifestation of all the bugs you’ve ever killed. My family prefers to attribute chills to a moment that someone stepped on your future grave. And they say godless Americans have no culture!
The PR agent for the red lanternfly has been very busy these last couple of years. No press is bad press! As far as invasive species go, they are pretty high maintenance, kind of like how Mariah purportedly demands vanilla candles in her dressing room in order to be able to eat up the stage with no crumbs as she purportedly does. According to protocol, you’re supposed to kill the flies dead, take a picture and report the sighting to the local government. They even have a dedicated email address which is spottedlanternfly@agriculture.ny.gov.
Despite knowing all this, I was too overcome with the adrenaline of personally saving the world to remember to report the incident. I thought of taking a picture only as evidence of me “taking names,” but I decided not to be braggy. I told my coworker about my boss behavior, slaying the pest as I did and all he said was: “They are such a vibrant shade of red. They really are beautiful bugs. It’s a pity to have to kill them.”
Wer schön sein will, muss leiden.
on bees
For those of you who don’t know, up until Friday I worked in development at an environmental-adjacent nonprofit based in New York. I use such wishy-washy language because the mission is conveniently vague, pertaining to plants and gardening, rather than larger-scale sustainability or social service efforts.
Development, similarly, is one of those conveniently vague job titles that sounds official but fails to evoke a clear picture in most minds. Essentially, my job had to do with fundraising and organizational branding: email outreach, mailed appeals, social media, board relations, writing the occasional grant.
My major foray into grant writing was when I assembled the application for a special project that would support native bees in urban environments. The concept was that by installing food and habitats for pollinators at unideal locations across cities (like roadside tree pits and small public plazas), we could create better pathways for movement, reinforcing urban biodiversity. When we got the funding, I found myself taking on the role of Project Management Lite, coordinating biweekly meetings of entomologists, horticulturists, landscape architects and government officials. In other words: bug people, plant people, and city planning people.
Managing this project was one of the best parts of my job. It was different and eclectic and actually felt unproblematically good, which is a rare feeling in the nonprofit sector. It’s the one thing I’ll be kind of sad to leave behind.
After giving my two weeks’ notice, I was on a zoom call with a number of colleagues and our science partner—a bug expert from Rutgers. My Executive Director announced to the group that I was leaving the organization for a new job. I was leaving the bees to go work with the moths, she joked. The joke buzzed right over our resident entomologist’s head.
on moths
I didn’t notice how similar my last name is to my new company’s name until I saw my new email address, which separates the two words with the small stamp of an @ symbol. Muth and moth. It’s funny how my surname is one letter away from so many words,1 yet stands incomprehensible and alone. It has apparent roots in the German word for “courage,” which is romantic but doesn’t mean that it rolls off the tongue nicely. My family pronounces it like saying the word “youth” with an “m” put at the beginning. Like “m-yoo-th.”
In Germany I’ve seen one fly, two bumble bees, and one mosquito eater. It seems to be a pretty bugless country. Perhaps my courageous ancestors slew them all.
5 tunes for tiny things
“Slug,” Snail Mail
The last lines!!
🎶 And in moss covered springs you'll never find anything, so what's the use in hiding under our feet? 🎶
“Flutter,” Bonobo
Apparently this song was featured on SSX on Tour, a snowboarding game with honestly the SICKEST cover art. The connection here is that fluttering is.. what bugs do.
“Theme From Krill,” Krill
It’s weird. This song came into my mind, even though I only remembered the chorus (which is, naturally, all about krill). Famously a crustacean, NOT a bug. But then, upon listening again, I was reminded that the verses are all about a bug forming a band. I suppose krill are the bugs of the sea.
🎶 KRILL, KRILL, KRILL FOREVER! KRILL! KRILL! FOREVER AND EVER! 🎶
“Crackin’ Up,” Bo Diddley
There’s nothing like the way Bo Diddley say’s “You’re buggin’ me.” Heaven!
🎶 You’re buggin’ me (yeah yeah). You’re crackin’ up. 🎶
“Ghost Duet,” Louie Zong
A ghostly manifestation of all the bugs you’ve ever killed. Also try not to cry at how cute the video is.
🎶 oooOOo, OOooOO. 🎶
🫖 Have a nice day, fellow vertebrates. Thanks for reading. 🫖
Anyone up for a round of Surname Wordle?
Mute
Myth
Math
Moth
Muth
Mutt
Mush
Much
Please note that the same day I observed that Germany "seems pretty bugless," I walked through roughly 1000 clouds of gnats along the Main River in Frankfurt. Just a friendly reminder that I don't know anything!