I am feeling a little tired and groggy today. It’s because I stayed up late…first there was the Dixie cup of cocaine I snorted off the lissome belly of a high-priced call girl, which totally makes it hard for me to sleep, and then there was the winner-takes-all poker game I played, and then I did some differential equations, and then it was time to shine up all my bling before hopping into my six person hot tub with the aforementioned high-priced call girl and some other individuals whom I can’t name here but about whom I can say that they should all be heartily ashamed of themselves. (That goes double for you, Mr. Mayor). Also, the cat decided it wanted out just when I was all snuggled down into bed and so I had to get up again and let down the drawbridge over the moat and the cat did the cat thing where it was like, hmm, do I want in or out, in or out, and I finally had to kick it out the door and then winch up the drawbridge myself because my evil lurching assistant was already asleep and then my alarm was set for six…well, you know how it is.
Actually I went for a walk in the Arboretum and out to dinner with Carl and then watched two episodes of a very excellent nature show. The part about the cat is true though. I hate it when he does that.
Right now my Netflix queue is pretty evenly divided between French and Italian movies, which I am treating as documentaries revealing the inmost secrets of Continental life, and nature shows. Specifically The Blue Planet series, which is just so great. I watched the first one over this past weekend and only had to hide my face in the pillow and fast forward through the parts where the polar bear tries to kill the beluga whale (yes! Can you believe?) and where the orcas kill the baby gray whale, which went on for like, fifteen minutes and which left me screaming the whole time. Oh, and then they show the carcass sinking to the sea floor and then there’s a bunch of hagfish scavenging its flesh. It was crazy.
Last night’s selection was mercifully short on marine violence, although there were several scenes where there’s a school of frightened sardines and a bunch of dolphins and swordfish and birds swarm in on them from all directions. That’s okay though. School of sardines doesn’t have the same emotional resonance as poor baby whale…okay, I can’t even think about that anymore. Instead I will tell you about the excellent manta ray and sunfish footage, and also how when there was a part about a pilot whale I totally recognized it before the narrator dude said what it was and I was so excited. And how during the part where they go down in Alvin to the deep dark abyss part of the ocean they kept showing all these great things like the anglerfish and I’d go “Sweetie! Wake up! Quick! It’s a dumbo octopus! Don’t you want to see a dumbo octopus?” and he’d go “Ruh?” and I’d go “Polychaete worm! Polychaete worm!” and he’d go “Snaaaaaaaaar.” It was very exciting. I love stuff like this.
I’ve always been really interested in people and have never been much good at math so I don’t think there was ever much of a chance that I’d have become a biologist or zoologist. Like many kids in Miami I wanted to be a dolphin trainer at Seaquarium and I got an A in my high school marine biology class, but I’m pretty sure I couldn’t really be a career scientist. I don’t think I would like to work in a lab and I have but limited appreciation for Monty Python and The Far Side. What I like is all the little stories about how various critters in various ecosytems work. You know, how the algae the grow in the three-toed sloth’s backwards-growing hair help camouflage it since it’s too slow to actually escape from a predator (and how its name in Spanish is gato perezoso or “lazy cat”). Or how leaf-nosed bats echolocate. Or how otters are into very kinky sex. Stuff like that.
I’ve been reading a couple of books about this sort of thing recently: I finishedNever Cry Wolf and this book about women primatologists last week and am almost done with this one about life as a tropical forest researcher on Barro Colorado Island in Panama. And I’m finally into the parts about natural history of A Short History of Nearly Everything which has taken me, by the way, forever to read. I’m thinking a lot about the natural world and the place of humans in it. I’m thinking about the place of basic science research versus the place of active conservation efforts, and I’m thinking a lot about what kind of people make scientists. It’s all very fascinating, and sometimes sort of horrifying. I like to think about what makes a person decide to spend a career (or really, a life) studying a certain species or relationship. I like to think about what I might study if I were more inclined to the actual work of zoology, instead of to reading and fantasizing about it: echinoderms? Coleopterans? Ctenophores? Annelids, hymenopterans, cephalopods, lepidopterans? Primates, mustelids, arachnids, ursines? I see myself surfacing after a dive on the coral reef, pulling off my mask and hoisting myself into the boat. I sit with a notebook and binoculars behind a blind to watch the spider monkeys groom and take copious, perfect notes that will become the skeleton of my best-seller next year. I wander in the rainforest, naming every tree and orchid and ant and bird I see.
I’ve been thinking about doing something like this turtle conservation project next year. I think it would be a cool way to travel: go to somewhere beautiful and do something interesting, right, something cool I probably couldn’t do in any other context. I’d get to meet some field scientists and other nature-show-loving dorks who can’t quite quit their new jobs to live out half-baked fantasies of being a National Geographic reporter. Plus, you know, turtles. Maybe I would get a pith helmet and one of those vests with all the pockets on them, just to complete the image. I would make sure to wear them every time I watched a nature show, that’s for sure.
Oh, and definitely in the hot tub with the high-priced call girl, but I assume that goes without saying.