March of the Armyworms

My parents had built a small house on Hilton Head Island, which they rented to some couples for a few years and, when Dad's turn came to retire, decided to move in.  This was the summer between years of my graduate school and since my stuff had moved down with them, I spent my summer there.

Yep, that looks like 'em!

It was the year of the armyworms' burgeoning, which, like that of the locusts is dependent on weather conditions, migration, etc.  It wasn't enough that they were out to eat every green thing they could find, but they made their way into the house and just dropped out of seeming nowhere.  The house on Hilton Head was built on a cement pad, so all the HVAC was in the ceiling.  Somehow they got into the ventilation ducts and would crawl out onto the ceiling and dive-bomb you.

They would drop on your head, onto the book you were reading, into the frying pan - it was a nightmare for a creepy-crawliphobe like me.  Worse, they didn't stop at night.  I had brought a lot of reading material with me (not really major-related - stuff like Vonnegut and Dos Passos) and I forced myself to stay awake at night, reading, so one wouldn't land on me and, well, crawl up my nose - the example that leaps to mind.

In the daytime I figured my parents could keep an eye on me to make sure I wasn't becoming a caterpillar hotel.  I was probably cruising for a psychotic episode from sleep deprivation, so it wasn't so surprising that the one time that one did drop on me while I was in bed (reading, but having gotten sleepy and let the book drop to my side), I nearly had a heart attack.

I didn't see it drop, I just heard a suspicious "click" - and looking around madly, I saw nothing.  That is, I saw nothing until it moved.  It had landed on the bookmark resting on my chest and was, coincidentally, the same approximate color as the graphics on the bookmark.  Everything went flying.   I'm sure I was much too traumatized to scream and only managed a "Ggglggllgglggghhhhh!" as I defended my honor against a helpless larva.  I spent the rest of the night pacing the house.

Although I moved to Hilton Head permanently (despite that episode, the giant flying cockroaches, and the spiders as big as the diameter of a tennis ball that were fast but very stupid and thought if they stood stock still that they were invisible while you went to fetch a flyswatter from the other end of the house) and stayed for about 6 years, we never had another infestation of the army worms.  I moved after that to New York City where cockroaches might have been abundant, but they were small and slow and squished easily under a rubber glove. 

Their natural history interests me, especially after reading Locust : the devastating rise and mysterious disappearance of the insect that shaped the American frontier by Jeffrey A. Lockwood.  But I really never want to have to go through the march of the armyworms again.

The Social Media Liberation Front

A few days ago I became disgusted with Facebook.  Yeah, I know.  Like, who hasn't?  But we keep going back to it, don't we?  It wasn't the site itself, the ever-changing policies and privacy settings that you don't hear about until someone tweets about it, it wasn't Zuckerberg considering lowering the age limit in order to broaden his advertising options, it wasn't even the darn apps.  It was my friends.  And perhaps the friends of my friends.

I was tired of seeing questionable, exaggerated, and totally fabricated political/social messages being sent without anyone stopping for a short time to verify any of the information.  And that was coming from both sides of the aisle, as it were.  So now I am out in the no-man's land that is Google+, of all things, a social thingummy I'd almost forgotten about.  It's not the same, which is a relief.

And what has happened?  Well, I'm still in mourning, but I noticed that I've started blogging again.  This may be my sixth blogpost this week.  In fact, I might be able to finish a novel before National Everyone Start A Novel Despite Having Nothing To Say month starts in November!

Free time I never knew I had has sprung up!  I washed and alphabetized my china teacup collection!  I've started making my own Chai Lattes.  I had three yesterday and by the time bedtime rolled around, my hands were shaking!  (I've been drinking decaf tea for several years now because I was having trouble sleeping.)  I've only had two this morning and I am giggling a bit much.  I got up around six to feed the cats and stayed up - watched a feature-length movie before breakfast!  I seem to have more energyevenifsomeofmywordsarerunningtogether now and then!  I'm using more exclamation points!!!!

It's only been a few days and I've had to cut down my furniture polishing to one item a day so I don't wear the wood down.

I can't wait to see my shrink! 

My New Love

I have fallen in love with Mr. Gently Benevolent.  Mr. Benevolent is the arch-nemesis of Sir Philip Bin, inventor of the waste bin and author in Mark Evans's radio series Bleak Expectations.  If you haven't listened to these, your life has been pretty nearly wasted (unless you've discovered a cure for cancer or some such). 

At first I was merely attracted by Mr. Benevolent's Evil Chortle, but recently, while he and Pip (Sir Philip) and Harry were in Outer Space, he recounted the story of his life (Series 3, Show #5 - An Evil Life Sort of Explained), I learned that he is capable of love and finer feelings and, in fact, had loved and lost his love.  A surge of sympathy erupted within me and ... well, love blossomed. 

You might well say that loving a fictional character is hopeless (if not insane), but people do this every day.  They fall in love with what they think a person is, which is pretty darn close to being a fictional character in my book, so they really can't talk.

I announced to my husband that I had fallen in love with Mr. Gently Benevolent.  My husband has only a passing acquaintance with the story through forced listening in the background as he valiantly attempts to complete a sudoku puzzle going clockwise from the outside to the center (because a one-star sudoku just isn't enough of a challenge).  I couldn't quite read his reaction.  It wasn't quite the crushing blow I'd feared but at least it wasn't the look of someone wondering where he put my shrink's business card.

I have no way to proceed in my love.  I know that Mr. Benevolent's first love fairly dripped with goodness and sweetitude and if he is still interested in that, my suit is lost before it is even brushed and pressed.  I am incapable of feigning swooning gentility, even after decades of college and community theatre experience.  Besides, I would be loathe to attract someone with a base subterfuge - even if that is their typical modus operandi. 

I am only capable of being myself ... at least until I am around someone.  I have always been a bit of a parrot, mimicking accents.  In relationships, I have always reflected the personalities of others.  If I appear arch and supercilious to you, well, I didn't lick it off the bushes.   Living with my husband has made me kinder and more forgiving, but perhaps I am internally rebelling and the allure of Mr. Gently Benevolent's evil calls to me like a lorelei, and will send me crashing to the rocks.

I have practiced my own evil chortle for my husband and was rewarded with a look of alarm.  He has a new job these days, a job that takes him away from home for a greater part of the day.  His influence will lessen and, perhaps, that of Mr. Benevolent will increase.  I will be rendered in my very soul, torn between my love of Goodness and my desire for Evil.

What can I hope from this?  That a real life Gently Benevolent will surface and, recognizing a kindred spirit, will sweep me away to aid him in his nefarious schemes?   Will our partnership end in world domination, or am I just some sad excuse for a middle-aged librarian with an obsession for British radio comedy?

They're Going At It the Wrong Way

I've been doing some reading recently about Evolution versus Intelligent Design.  I've read lots of articles and books about developments in the Theory of Evolution over the years and they are thought-provoking and interesting, but I've yet to see any articles about actual developments in a Theory of Intelligent Design.  There doesn't seem to be more of a theory to it than "this looks like it was designed."  Apparently, there was a think-tank created to develop this as a theory, but they haven't come up with anything - no scientific papers, no insights or discoveries.  In fact, the only success they've had is in the public relations angle. 

Granted, PR is much easier to accept than scientific explanations because it's catchy and doesn't require a whole lot of thought.  If there's anything humans don't want to do, it's think too hard.  Thinking is work.  Reading about Evolution is work.  It leaves some unanswered questions that might require more work to figure out.  The beauty of Intelligent Design is that you don't have to do that work, so I can see why this is so popular. 

Proponents of ID want to have it taught alongside Evolution (which shouldn't take long: "See this? Someone designed it - just for you! Pretty, isn't it?") as a preface to eradicating Evolution altogether.  Something they don't take into account is that kids only learn this stuff long enough to pass a test and then most of them lose all interest in it.  The only ones who will remember are the ones whose interest is piqued and want to pursue the subject.  What do you remember from high school?  The difference between ser and estar?   Logarithms?  The names of the nucleotide bases in DNA? (I didn't even remember their initials - I had to look it up on Wikipedia.)  What are these ID people worried about?

This is my Modest Proposal: It would save money and effort to have school boards propose guidelines to make science in general as boring as possible.  That way textbooks will not have to be rewritten or replaced, teachers would not have to keep up with the latest developments in actual science and could recycle the same lesson plans for decades, and parents would understand their kids' homework for a change.  Only nerds will have any interest in science regardless of how lame the instruction is and they tend to be self-directed about learning anyway.  No one has ever had anything to do with nerds, so the contagion of Interest in Science will not spread and will be confined to types like computer programmers - who actually have to design minutiae intelligently.