I can't imagine a more awful present.

Last December, my brother came up with a brilliant gift idea. I think he found it in a Sharper Image catalog. It was similar to the Fly Gun, but a little more technologically advanced. It was the Fly Gun of the Nineties: a "Bug Vac."

I never saw it. But from my brother's description, it consisted of a vaccum-cleaner-type machine attached to a long, thin cord. You found a bug on the wall, and you pulled the cord over. Then, you sucked it up.

"Fwoop," my brother had said, in illustration. "It's perfect for you--you hate to kill bugs. Don't you want it?"

"No," I had told him. He couldn't understand why not.

Some facts about bugs: They make up a huge portion of the biomass (the total mass of everything living on Earth.) There are more species of insects than of any other animal. The cockroach has been around a lot longer than humans or even dinosaurs, and would survive a nuclear blast. Charlotte's Web was a great book. Bugs--at least in my experience--understand telepathy.

Plus, they're alive. They build complex webs, hives and burrows, and they have kids. They're smaller than us. They can't cry out for help or reason with us. And if it's a competition, I'd say we have a pretty unfair advantage.

Bugs aren't perfect, by a long shot. They're ugly, dirty and unsanitary. They really don't belong in a dorm room. But if an ugly, dirty, unsanitary person came through a crack in my bathroom wall, I don't think I'd deal him a death blow. I'd open the window and give him a chance to get out.

It's a little like God.

Joanna M. Weisss knows the difference between insects and arachnids. She has no problems with earthworms.