These working weekends (I have to write one full freelance article on each Saturday and Sunday of this month in order to make my June deadline) are making me worry a little about being able to successfully carve out personal time when I’m no longer earning my living by sitting an an office desk for eight hours every weekday, released to the blessed winds at precisely four p.m. every Friday ready to flit about like a sprite enjoying late brunches and the morning crossword puzzle. I’ve seen the future, Brother, and the future is Potentially Fabulous! with Time for Projects! and Infinite Flexibility! Unfortunately, making that potential into reality requires huge doses of Self Discipline and Organization, as well as a useful shot of Not Fucking Around Quite so Bloody Much All the Time. We will see.

The other thing I have realized about the future? Is that if I take one class a semester towards that second Bachelor’s I want to get (the one that will be of the Science variety), I will have my degree in…

oh…

about ten years. I don’t know, does this seem like a good plan to you? Maybe I can take two classes a semester, and simply give up sleeping a couple of nights a week. That seems doable. Honestly, people, what is the point of having goals? They only cause you pain.

Not to worry though. I have a scheme. It involves getting my degree, pulling a wormhole out of the quantum foam, enlarging it so its mouth is big enough for me to fit through, stabilizing it with a tremendously powerful electric field so it doesn’t collapse into a black hole, building a spaceship that travels at very close to the speed of light, putting one of the wormhole portals on the ship, sending it rocketing off for 20 years, having it come back to Earth in a location that is very close to the other wormhole portal, and then using my time tunnel to go back to ten years ago with all the knowledge I now have from my BS.

Oh, yeah. It’s gonna be so sweet.

Jenn hasn’t had much time for blogging lately, but she sent me an email yesterday that I asked her permission to share with you, because… well, because it didn’t seem right that I should be the only one to read it. I know for most of us the reality of the world’s suffering is half a world away. It’s like that for me most of the time, at least. But some days it is as far away as my best friend. Which is to say, thousands of miles as the crow flies; as the heart aches, only the length of a sigh.

We started chronic care clinic in Rwinkwavu three months ago, which has opened doors into the lives of patients I see often; I have met their families, seen them through pregnancies and deliveries, been with them healthy and laughing and then on oxygen, lying still in hospital beds. Soon I will see a few of them through surgery and their return to a somewhat functional life. I know some of them will die because we cannot get them needed care soon enough.

Marie has her moments and she sometimes stops by the health center when she is feeling well, to say hello. Her accompagnateur friend has become one of my secret allies who always gives me a hug when she sees me. I haven’t really done much for Marie, or Dancilla the other young women with cervical cancer who presented one week after Marie’s first presentation. She is only 32 years old and the same day of receiving her diagnosis of advanced-staged cancer she learned that she was HIV positive. We did a vaginal exam on her when she presented with unstoppable vaginal bleeding. We opened her legs and saw a fungating mass emanating from her vagina. I closed her legs and started to cry.

I generally don’t like making posts that don’t have any sort of central theme other than “This is what I did today!”

However, on occasion the occasion arises upon which writing a roundup post actually has its merits, and this, my friends, is one of those very special occasions. Why? Because the Things (Various in Nature) that I am about to reveal are so very various that they allow me to file this little entry in not one, not two, but three categories. Why that makes me so happy is a question for another day.

I shall proceed:

Movies
My friend Kubhaer, who was already one of my favorite people in the world simply because of his vast stores of humor, intelligence, and curiosity, has gone and done something to raise my estimation of him even higher. It’s something I’ve certainly never done, and probably something you’ve never done either (although if you have, I’d very much like to hear about it).

He’s written, directed, and produced his first short film! Hooray! Not only that, but it’s one of ten finalists in a short film competition in Malaysia (where, fortunately, he happens to live)! Triple hooray! You can watch it and vote for it, if you’re so inclined (I am)—here—but you should know that unless you speak Malay you’ll need to spend a few minutes downloading it, because the subtitles will be too small to read in the steaming form. Oh! And you need to know what it is called, which is Westbound. Finally, I’ll tell you that the business with the tape is not only clever and amusing, it also turns out to be important to the plot. Which just goes to show you, that Kubhaer, he’s got all his ducks in a row. No guns on the wall that he doesn’t kill someone with by the last act.

(Special note to Avi: after you’ve watched it, dear, can you tell me if what that woman says about Israeli stamps is true?)

There, have I intrigued you enough? Get thee hence!

Oh wait, not yet. There are still two more categories. So hang on a bit before you go.

Science
Can I tell you why I love Ross so much? It is (in part) because he agreed that the best possible thing we could do to entertain ourselves on his birthday evening was to go listen to a lecture by Lang Elliot and Will Hershberger, the nature-sound recorders/photographers who wrote this beautiful book (another Houghton marvel; why don’t I work in Trade?). They spoke at the museum at 6, before we had our celebratory meal, so you can see how very much geeky excitement it took to sustain Ross (who is usually ravenous by 5pm) through the endeavor. Despite our distracting hunger, it was one of the most delightful events I have been to in a long time: they showed us excitingly large directional microphones, shared many charming facts about cicadas, crickets, grasshoppers, true katydids, and false katydids (which, really, get a bad rap), and played sound clip after sound clip of the most wonderful chirps, trills, and buzzes you could ever hope to hear.

Unless, of course, you are a little older and have lost the ability to hear at very high frequencies—Ross and I have since firmly resolved to go on as many insect-listening expeditions to the South as we can while we are still young and robust of ear. We’re also considering acquiring an insect pet when we move, instead of a kitten, but it makes me very sad to think about the fact that if we did own a singing cicada every time our little friend sang so sweetly for us he would be wondering why he wasn’t getting any feminine response. “Is my tymbal-pop really that grating?” he would sigh, and my heart would break.

Food!
I’m not even talking about the delicious Middle-Eastern/Spanish dinner we had at Zuzu’s the night of Ross’s birthday. I’m talking about fanfrickintastic homemade aloo paratha and a tremendous pot of dal that tastes like I ordered it from an old man in a sarong in a hawker center near my house in Singapore. When I say homemade, I mean made in this very home. When I say made, I mean crafted from scratch, sweat, fresh spices, and chapati flour over two and a half exhausting but oh so fulfilling hours. And when I say fanfrickintastic, I mean this:

Mmmm. I think it’s time to have one more.

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form and moving, how express and admirable; in action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

When I was eleven years old a friend of mine took a volunteer job at an aviary, and when I visited her I saw cages full of tiny baby mice, days old, in between the wild parrots and fledgling hawks. They were food for the birds. I don’t remember now if I asked her to do this or if she simply did it of her own accord after a cry of incoherent compassion escaped me, but for some reason she decided to ask the keeper who supervised her for permission to give me one of these doomed morsels of life.

“It’s very unlikely that it will survive,” she said as she placed it gently on a piece of cotton wool. “But you can keep it warm for a few days, and try feeding it milk with this eye dropper.”

So I did. It was an irrational act: the little pink comma was very small, and the odds against it very great. Its heart beat faintly inside its translucent skin; it was so light the whole of it was nothing but a faint tremble of possibility. Three or four days later, it died.

My parents were out, and my sister was in her room busy being fourteen. We still lived in our first house on the 8th floor of an apartment building, above a large green lawn of shared play space. I wrapped the dead baby mouse in tissue and took the elevator downstairs with it in my hands, careful not to crush its nothing body or its nothing little bones on the way. I walked as far across the grass as I could, until I reached a tree under which I was fairly certain no one could see me. I had no spade. I didn’t even have a spoon. I dug in the hard dirt with my hands and buried my bundle in a shallow grave.

I didn’t say anything. The mouse hadn’t been a pet, really; it hadn’t been much of anything. Not enough of anything to love, anyway. But my heart beat fast. It was a strange thrill to be burying a thing that yesterday had been alive and today was dead. I dusted my hands off on my pants and went upstairs.

Then, as sometimes happens when you are eleven, I found myself in the grip of an obsession I couldn’t shake, and twice before my parents came home I had to go back downstairs and dig up my tissue-wrapped mouse to see if it was still alive. It was an odd feeling that compelled me to do this, not really related to compassion or pity or fear. And it wasn’t hope, either—I didn’t want to discover that the pathetic little scrap of flesh had been reanimated.

I think I just conceived of the dead body, fragile and cold and unresponsive, as being extraordinarily bizarre. Lifelessness seemed like such an impossible property for a body to have that having buried the thing, I found that I just couldn’t be sure it would retain that property permanently. It was entirely possible—and indeed probable, I felt—that life would invade again.

I knew about death, of course, and I suppose I understood it, intellectually. I knew that everything died eventually. But what I think I must have felt that day was that life was the more powerful force, and that the mouse body simply didn’t make sense without it. A lump of matter that was supposed to be alive, and therefore qualitatively different from all the other lumps of matter in the world, was suddenly just the same: inanimate, insensate, incapable of protesting when you buried it beneath the earth. What a tremendously incomprehensible trespass of boundaries. Why wouldn’t I have been convinced that I might just have been imagining it?

In one way my feelings haven’t changed since I was eleven: seeing the dead human body on display, I feel in myself the same sense of odd displacement. These organs like paper flowers; these stretching muscles; this soft brain tissue; this strange fire of nerves; this skin flapping like paper; they are all fascinating, all beautiful in a way, even split open and stark—but cold, dead, preserved, none of them entirely makes sense.

Separated from the force of life, whatever that is, the body becomes nothing more than an oddly messy object. To be sure, it is an extraordinary object; an object of wonder and perhaps even of affection. But it is an object just the same. It is a bit of a crazy thing to stand staring into the eyes of a dead human being and realize that what you are feeling is not reverence or awe, but the same curiosity you feel when you see any other museum artifact.

I do wonder if Gunther von Hagen ever found himself tiptoeing back into his lab at night and poking his row of plastinated bodies one by one to see if life had, in fact, invaded again.

Some fish have skeletons that are made out of cartilage, like the hard rubbery architecture of your ears. Sharks do; that’s the fatal flaw that makes their fins edible (in a gelatinous sort of way) and has caused so many of the speedy beasts to perish for the sake of a peppery, viscous soup hungrily slurped up for centuries by half of my ancestral line. Ray skeletons are made of cartilage too, even the poisonous razor-sharp stingers some of them wear on their tails. Lampreys, those exquisitely creepy vampiric eels that don’t even have jaws, are all cartilage and teeth — teeth on the edges of their tongues! And the wonderfully absurd subclass Chimaera — also known as ghost sharks, also known as Elephant Fish, also known as Rat or Rabbit fish — all have that same springy ridigity, down to their snouty faces and drifting angel-wing fins.

But most fish — Osteichthyes — are made of harder stuff. They’re bony. They poke and pierce. They are composed of large numbers of tiny and intricate bones seemingly designed to stick in your craw on the way down your greedy throat. Lacking the long, unwieldy walking limbs we terrestrial creatures are burdened with, fish skeletons possess a certain sleek simplicity — their vertebrae lined up in pleasing parallel lines and their smooth, membranous fins like crinkled yellowed paper.

Gorgeous things. Next time you eat one, don’t forget to admire its bones before you swallow its flesh. It might be less likely to needle you.

In addition to the sensory information we receive about the external world from our eyes, ears, noses, tongues, and the millions of nerve endings in our skin, there is a sixth, and most noble, sense that we all possess. Erica knows what I’m talking about; as a dancer, she wouldn’t be able to make one revolution around a room without falling over if it wasn’t for the wonder of proprioception: the sense that tells us where all the various flailing parts of our body are at any given moment even if we cannot see them, that lets us know how our muscles and joints and ligaments and tendons are connected to each other — how they bend and flex and when they stretch. It’s the sense that keeps us aware of internal pressure and distension and temperature, prevents us from continually having to check which parts of ourselves are moving and which are still. It gives our nervous system — the nervous system is the arbiter of proprioceptive information — a basic road map of the overall shape and architecture of our bodies. Proprioception is so inextricably part of our experience of being human and alive that it’s almost impossible to describe — but if you lost it, you’d definitely notice. It would be a little bit — not quite, but a little bit — like losing your skeleton.

 ”She could scarcely even sit up - her body ‘gave way’. Her face was oddly expressionless and slack, her jaw fell open, even her vocal posture was gone.
 ”Something awful’s happened ,” she mouthed, in a ghostly flat voice. “I can’t feel my body. I feel weird - disembodied.”

from Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

I bring up proprioception only because I wanted to tell you a little bit about pycnogonida tonight, and I began to wonder (I hope you will wonder with me) what on earth the proprioceptive sense is like in other animals — particularly animals that, like arthropods, lack endoskeletons and have nervous systems that are so different from ours.

— from asbjorn.hansen - (?)

We’ll never know the answer to that question, unless the Hindus are right about reincarnation, but I’ll tell you a little bit more about pycnogonida anyway and then you can let me know what your best guesses are.

Pycnogonids, also known as pantopoda (”all legs”), are arthropods. That makes them related to (in the sense that they share a common ancestor with) both crustaceans and arachnids, so it only makes sense that the tremendously cool looking pycnogonid in that wonderful picture above resembles nothing so much as a cross between a lobster and a spider. In fact, as you might already know, pycnogonids

a) are commonly known as “sea spiders,”
b) usually have 8 legs, like true spiders (but sometimes have as many as 10 or 12), and
c) were classified until recently by most scientists as members of the subphylum chelicerata, to which belong such other long-legged dancers as spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs. These days, though, many progressive comparative biologists think they actually constitute their own, separate, subphylum.

Re: point c) — because sea spiders have essentially no fossil record, it’s very difficult to know exactly how old they are and what kinds of beasts their closest ancestors were. As a result, and also because their morphology is generally so strange and fascinating, there has been some scientific dispute (thankfully nothing too ugly) over the question of how sea spiders are related to other arthropods, and whether they do in fact deserve the distinction of being their own odd little category of creature.

I think they do. But what I think doesn’t really matter, so lets forge on. Sea spiders are bottom-dwellers. They spend most of their lives crawling upon the ocean floor; some of them can be found wandering slowly about at fathoms as deep as 7000 meters. A few pycnogonida species are good, if ungraceful, swimmers, but most are strictly perambulators (when you’ve got gams like they have, it would really be a pity if you didn’t stroll a lot). Their jointed legs often end in claws that they use to grasp the tiny aquatic organisms they feed on. Tinier than themselves, I should say, for sea spiders tend to be slight: the smallest have limbs as short as a few millimeters, though some species are said to lumber around on ungainly stilts that are almost a meter long when unfolded.

No matter how far their toes may stretch, however, sea spiders all have relatively small bodies (scrawny pebbles, mostly providing a place for all those legs to attach). A pycnogonid has a minute abdomen, from which protrudes a comparatively impressive proboscis that may have teeth or spine lining its interior walls. Once a sea spider has ground up its prey, the food particles get sucked into its gut — which branches out into long cavities in the creature’s walking legs, because really — in an animal this spindly, where else is there going to be room for digestion to take place?

Sea spiders don’t appear to have any excretory organs (although maybe we just haven’t been looking closely enough). Scientists (trying hard, and mostly succeeding, not to sound as if they’re making things up) think that pycnogonida simply excrete — and also respire — through their exoskeletons. Somehow.

So, my dears, take a moment now to close your eyes and note the way it feels to be inside your own body. Pay attention to the strange and inescapable sensation of having jointed arms and legs; straining muscles; a sturdy skeleton, creaky though it may be. Remember the delicious dinner you undoubtedly had, the remains of which you may be able to feel still churning in your gut. Take in a couple of deep lungfuls of sweet air. Proprioceive as much as you can. And then attempt, if you will — I am still doing so! — to imagine what it would be like to walk a few meters on the silty sea floor in the shoes of a sea spider.

First of all, they’re old. Older than the dinosaurs; older than the oldest mammal; older than corals; older than the continents as we have come to know them. Older, my friends, than bones.

The ancestral arthropods were skittering across the surface of the ocean floor about half a billion years ago, and already they were strange as sin, bodies hung together like exquisite corpses. Spiny things, the first knights — covered in a hard outer skeleton that all their descendants inherited and blessed with an abundance of identical limbs on either side that bent backward and forward like hinged oars and propelled them over the sand.

— from kevinzim - (?)

All arthropods have segmented bodies, and the segments — or tagma — of different subphyla of arthropods have the most fantastic names. Thorax, cephalon, cephalothorax. Pygidium, prosoma, opisthosoma. They are Lego-creatures, kings of specialized functions: each body part playing its part.

All arthropods have exoskeletons, made out of a substance called chitin that is soft and gelatinous when first secreted, and which then hardens to form a tough shell. Because they’re surrounded by this unyielding apparel, arthropods have to moult as they grow, shedding their carapaces and becoming, briefly, tender balloons of squishy vulnerability until their new skins solidify around them. Yes, even spiders do this. Last week I held a tarantula moult in my hand. It was thoroughly strange, and quite wonderfully complete.

All arthropods have many pairs of jointed limbs, which is where they get their name — from words with Greek roots that tell us they are the creatures whose feet fit together. Various evolutionary pressures have resulted in the basic arthropod jointed limb structure being modified into a thousand thousand different forms, from the crowbar-like claws of the coconut crab to the bounding knees of grasshoppers. Opposable thumbs be damned; no other phylum can claim such a glorious array of appendages.

So — older than bones, my friends. And still with us. Stay tuned for more.