Monthly Archive for July, 2008
Building a jungle in my apartment took time. I wondered whether it would last, at what cost a jungle would impart on my bank account and free-time, and if the finished flourishing product would recapitulate roughly the sensation of my ideal. That’s what I was after, of course, ethos.
I rent. And like most my age, have all my grown-up life. I even lease my cars. Since the start of college twelve years past, my address has changed as many times. It is not so much an uprooting, but, rather, staying unrooted. An existence which belies what I have come to realize is a deep-seated yearning for oak-like stability in other facets of life. Perhaps it’s my Middle American background where property ownership and a few sizable possessions like a pool, flat-screen, or SUV, are, if not hallmarks, then cairns along the path to being a grown-uppity.
These possessions, and there are others, serve as mile markers on what can only be called a developmental pathway in American society open to all soon after graduation, high school, college or tech institute. While I can’t exactly claim to be habitating in the underpasses and culverts, like a true under the radar rebel, or piddling by in the brake-down lane with my hazards on, I cruise along on the less-well-maintained county roads alongside. I’ve been watching for some years now, smelling the exhaust and hearing the engines whirring past, but I still haven’t found any onramp worth the merge. What will it take? Hopefully I’ll go happily, leaning into it a little nervously and unsure. Hopefully it won’t seem unanticipated via some ill-fated cause and effect scenario where I’m forced into a career upon siring an offspring or getting fired and finding how quickly my savings account dries up without a bi-monthly replenishment.
But I have steady income and the wherewithal to experiment with jungle design and maintenance in a small rowhouse. If I can convert a space, no matter how tiny, into something wholly idiosyncratic and unique, I’ll have at the least sequestered the desire to toward ownership, toward castle-construction, toward a Shangri-la of my own making.
The first thing I think of as intrinsic to the humid mysteries of a jungle are carnivorous plants. Well, first ferns, a complete groundcover of ferns, a Mesozoic prairie of ferns, then carnivorous plants. Since I don’t have an equatorial climate and other metrics in my rental—settling fogs, intense sunlight, a monsoon season—the best I can do is the wonderful Elk and Staghorn bromeliad. These I know are suited to my domicile’s specific atmosphere because they are sold in a local plant store and hail from the semi-arid tropics of Queensland, Australia.
Another hallmark of jungle environs are trees, trees with massive branchless trunks stretching skward, readily converted to nice knot-free lumber. I have a money tree from Ikea in a floor pot from Ikea, whose thick braided trunk and spearhead-shaped leaves, vaguely indica, resembles the giant mahogany trees of the Amazon or boab trees of Madagascar.
Now to the carnivorous plants. In the past, I’ve had little luck with these guys. The Venus Fly Traps grow in swamps as do the honeydew. And they don’t like chlorinated tap water or liquid fertilizer. You’d think I could keep alive the Carolina Sarracenia considering my geography, but no. I’ve also managed to kill a Nepenthes pitcher plant, but I’m giving it another go since the ones at the local plant store are still thriving after their Florida greenhouse deportment. I haven’t recovered from the first one that I killed, so this time I’m taking measures to ensure survival. Unfortunately, that involves not having it in my jungle.
Instead, my latest carnivorous vegetable is affixed to the bathroom wall in a basket overhanging the shower under a bubble window, a common fixture in rowhouse bathrooms. Both requirements are met: sunlight and humidity. I’ve encouraged everyone who sees it (after all the obligatory scrotum references are made) to feed the dangling appendages insects. Though not strictly a member of the jungle, it still serves as a great conversation piece after a guest has returned from relieving herself.
Throughout high school, I was afflicted with an especially nasty strain of a common ailment called puberty. That, thankfully, is over with.
Envision the most uncontrollable, unaccountable kid you’ve met and I was his best friend. After this incident the Dean “felt” (it’s truly a wonder how prone these practical people are to feel rather than to think) it best that the two of us never again sit in the same class. And let’s admit it’s never just one incident but a semester’s-long piling up that broke the camels back. Last period on Friday—to a sixteen year old what a full moon is to a werewolf—is when I killed Ms Wentworth’s chest high saguaro cactus with the 3rd–or was if 4th?–edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. But I didn’t heave this hefty and overgrazed pastureland of American thought; I merely redirected its trajectory. That’s a heavy book, after all, to get brained with. I merely antagonized and poked fun at my best friend’s excitable disposition and he swung the tomb in a whirling dervish of frustration. Ahhh yes, the days before special-ed segregation. I parried, the five pound bomb flew from the aggressor’s hands and went crashing into the cactus, snapping off the top quarter of its height.
Death by literature!
Ms. Wentworth’s halo of frizzy hair, which had something topiary about it, shuddered violently at the celery snap of impact. What we all learned about the saguaro that day is that it’s little more than a hollow shell save for an inner spongy material, like a sanguinated watermelon with stickers.
But it was also her child. She read to it when we lost complete interest in the conceits of dead white guys. Watered it fortnightly. Picked lint and erasureheads from its fierce quills. Extending one didactic finger, she corrugated her forehead and warned us that it would surely maim if we bumbled into it (for guys, these so-called warnings are always interpreted as open invitations to inflict suffering on one another). If you subscribe to Freud you might say that on some subconscious level we were all, including Ms Wentworth, aware of the threatening phallic presence the cactus commanded over the class. My friend, a high-powered mutant operating on minimal self-reflection, never paid mind to consequences and repercussions, and so, swung away knowing full-well that I would smack the text from his hands and possibly send it sailing toward her kitschy-cluttered desk, or, more fantastically, the swollen succulent posing stiffly nearby.
From behind her imposing wooden altar, Ms Wentworth, in one giant gasp, sucked all air from the room, looked at me like the murdering bastard I was, and in a single blousy flush, upended her chair, swooped up her circumcised baby, burst into tears and made for the teachers lounge; that furtive Shangri-la, that war room of the gerontocracy, that coven of hidden secrets, of huddled small talk where teachers murmur, plot, rumor-make and eventually regroup. Unaccountably, all blame was placed on me: a freshman suspended and then transferred to a different class full of “behavers,” and away from my best friend. For every other bad thing I got away with, I could hardly argue this unjust.
It was her first year teaching high school, and may have been her last for all I know, because she didn’t return second semester. Too busy maintaining a constant aura of aloofness (I was sixteen after all) to lose any sleep over the prospect, that coy Ms in her title forever shrouds any vengeful husband who may or may not exist.
Things worked out, for me at least. I ended up with a cantankerous English teacher cum painter-poet-singer-songwriter-playwright-thespian who warned me—and here I must paraphrase—that in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, you’ll find passion driving you to almost compulsively reach for perfection in writing, often—in fact, mostly—at the expense of everything else in your life. I’m now learning that the very hard way.
And today’s word is Titurate: to reduce to fine particles. As in, “you need to triturate the tissue 3-5 times in a 1000 microliter pipette to suspend the cells.” Or, “Spaceman Spiff grabbed his triturator gun and vaporized the vile slime monster.”
As usual, someone more entrepreneurial, more decisive, more certain of themselves, grabbed hold of that kernel of an idea, that nugget of insight and made a bit of cash.
Six years ago, while working in a pet store, I was busy cleaning tanks when a delicate crustacean, a decopod, flitted through the murk of dirty tank water and grasped my submerged hand. Tiny pinchers at the end of long, delicate foot-stalks nimbly maneuvered Lysmata amboinensis toward my fingers. Its thorace, yellow with two red racing stripes, swayed gently in the turbulent water like a commuter on the metro. Slowly, with a set of antennae twice the length of its body, the cleaner shrimp walked to the tip of my fingers and set its tiny claws upon a hangnail. The feeling was like a slight static shock, not uncommon in a room full of salt water and outlets. Then it moved to my cuticles, and finally, with a pair of chelipedic tweezers, grabbed at the grime from under my nails. And it was satisfying. I sat motionless, reveling in my first symbiotic relationship–with an invertebrate, no less!–and mentally arranged ways to have my fingers manicured every time I came to work, and then, how strange it would look when a customers saw an employee standing there with one arm in an tank and a blissful look on his face.
But then pet shops attract strange people. It is a refuge for the pony-tailed or tattooed and goateed male unable or unwilling to work at the Gap–preferring as it were to feed rats to snakes over folding jeans. The customers, mostly other guys, can be generalized as well. There are the shitheads in search of a frat house mascot that eats things. Then the forty-year old virgins who graduated from Dungeons & Dragons to a Bearded Dragon. In an opposing corner are the mulleted, sleeveless, toothless hilljacks who walk in with eight squaking kids, and a wife who remains in the Ford heap idling out front, to complain about the price of rats and then ask if their ten foot Burmese would eat a thawed chicken. Next, the fanatics who smell like the animals they keep, the bird lovers. Lastly, the no-nothing dentists and lawyers who want to recreate that time they went diving in Fiji right in their living room and want it to scale and would like it done this afternoon. This is the price one pays for running a pet shop that is against selling puppies and kittens. There is no further need to encourage a stereotype by engaging in socially awkward behavior with a crustacean.
Of course if I wasn’t the only one doing it…
What saved me from the next logical step all those years ago, the money-making step, was, perhaps, a lack of a business degree. I regret to say that John Ho, who runs the Yvonne Hair and Nails salon has started a trend in the US that’s likely to spread or at least earn him some revenue. The only difference between Ho and I is the difference between a Chordata and a Crustacean. Customers at Ho’s pay to have their feet soak in a tank full of flesh-eating fish. Ho admitted insecurity in regards to the idea , but was recently quoted in an AP article as saying “let’s give it a shot.” In the pat words of the reporter, “customers were quickly hooked.” Why? Because Garra rufa , the “Doctor Fish” as it’s known in Japan, apparently only consume dead or infected skin–like maggots in a gangrenous wound–such as calluses, corns, bunions and hang-nails.
One question: What’s this toe-sucker’s natural dinner time habits, certainly not primate epidermis? The ecology and phylogeny of this Middle-East freshwater fish would make a good follow-up post. Perhaps someone with an eye on evolution and phylogenetics could address it.
After watching Randy Olson’s first mockumentary, Flock of Dodos, where he placed both scientists and creationists on a level playing by mocking them equally, I can’t say I’m too enthused with his latest attempt to preach to us scientists on how much we suck at communicating science. Josh Rosenau, a staffer at the National Center for Science Education, questions the Olson’s purpose.
Yes, we get it, scientists are stodgy, most films about scientists rely on facts and figures and not on human interaction. Is it too much for me to suggest that Randy follow the classic filmmaking advice of showing us instead of telling. If the problem is that filmmakers don’t make movies that bring out the human side of scientists, it might help if Randy would make a movie that found scientists who do communicate well, and then had them communicate clearly about scientists.
I anticipated science writer and framing aficionado Chris Mooney’s unreserved blessing/defense of the film…and he did not disappoint. From this and previous posts of his, I honestly cannot tell the difference between framing the science and blaming the scientist.
There are a few of these diagrams out there on the interwebs. It is a representation of life on earth according to relative diversity by species group or taxon. The point being, to show the spindly branches of the mammalian shrub–represented as the teeny pachyderm hiding under the giant shroom grove.
That’s a fine point to make, but could be more effective with a biomass pictorial to see who the real heavyweights are. And then me holding a can of bug spray.
Hat tip to Larry Moran who pointed out a lack of lichen and moss. A few other complaints crop up in the comments section.
Dawn, or its German equivalent, cannot be far off.
DC crime is up. Maybe I should be more specific: there seems to be an uptick in homicide and armed robberies in the 3rd District.
I’m white, a Midwest import, college educated male of 30 surrounded by people, black and Mexican, most who mean me no harm—couldn’t care less. And likewise, except when I see them on the bus before and after work. Then I think we share a common denominator, the banal and redundant migration to the five days a week job. Some of us go willingly, others out of habit, and the rest because we’re told to. As I pass each group, I make eye contact with and smile at the old ladies
sitting up front with the vagrants, who I conspicuously avoid eye contact with, nod at the males, and ignore the youngins. It’s this last group I read that are perpetrating the stick-ups, the young and, more exactly, the inexperienced; quick on the trigger because they haven’t a feel for it outside a row of empty bottles. And it must be just as stressful if not more so to demand money from a stranger while you have a piece trained on their gut, the end of which deals death and consequences. That is until you’ve snatched enough wallets to factor in the unforeseens that would require actually using the weapon for its Aristotelian function. Who doesn’t want to be dominated by the steady hand of aged experience, never mind the situation?
The city bus is more intimate a transportation contrivance than the metro. Bent knees need to be navigated around on your way to an empty seat or pole, then bury face in book. According to the website, Stuff White People Like, I should be reading a New Yorker, and that’s typically so. It’s not quite as guilty a pleasure as Harpers, and I can keep telling myself that I’m getting a feel for the writing so I’ll know just what to submit. After five years, it’s amazing the foolishness I’m capable of speaking and hearing. But, if I were a writer for the New Yorker, I wouldn’t be David Sedaris as he’s on the website, too. Like I said, on a metro it feels natural to throw your bag on the adjacent seat cushion and claim the whole bench. While the bus is crowded and you’re forced to share the two by two foot square of hard foam. When I sit, I usually take an outside seat, so as not to be trapped when the terrorists attack, which means when someone already has the window seat, I let one ass cheek hang over the edge with a knee pointing out into the aisle. That is unless I decide the person is being greedy. This usually leads to me purposefully resting my knee against theirs until they retreat to a less oblivious sitting style.
Could it be the heat that causes the violence in the streets, the heat and crowded conditions such as those on a bus on its way somewhere opposite Wonderlust?
This is pretty depressing. According to Economics Unbound’s reading of Bureau of Labor Statistics data on wage and salary earnings college graduates made 5.5% less last quarter then they did a year ago.
The topline number was that median weekly earnings for all workers, adjusted for inflation, were roughly about flat compared to a year earlier.
But when I looked at the details and did some calculations for different subgroups, I saw something that shocked me.
real median weekly earnings, 08II percentage change over previous year high school
diploma only-0.3% some college or
associated degree-0.9% bachelor’s
degree only-5.5% advanced degree 2.1%
Why would that be happening? Is wage competition from outsourcing finally hitting the more educated classes? Did all those Indian engineers and scientists that used to answer phones in call centers in India start working in jobs that compete with educated Americans? Or is this just a weird hiccup in the “correction” that’s now occurring? Is there any way we can just blame this all on Bush?
Check out this amazing video (QT) of the transit of the moon as it moves past the earth.
Hat tip Economists View