When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)
Or dress me in a mushroom suit that feeds the soil and plant me in the woods. Really, this is a thing.
Don’t preserve me or put makeup on me or dye my skin to prompt people’s lies: They did such a nice job, she looks so natural; keep away with the creepy mouth formers and eye caps that prop up a sunken face. I don’t need a big polished coffin lined with silk, or a concrete urn to keep the worms out. I don’t need anything at all. Continue reading →
All characters are fictional and should not be confused with real scientists. I especially ask that no bee researcher take offense. We science writers would shrivel up and die if you stopped talking to us.
I sat alone again in the cafeteria again today. Ordered the schnitzel. No one wanted to sit next to me. Of course. No one ever wants to sit next to me. They all want to sit with the bee scientists.
Stupid bee scientists, like they are all that great. All clustered together at the other table like insipid little drones, buzzing about who’s cool and who’s not. All the pretty evolutionary psychologists and ethologists at their table. Talking about complex social dynamics, solar navigation, and collective intelligence. Chicks love that stuff.
Then they just get up in their stupid little hive and all leave together. When they walk past my table one of them is like, “hey, how are the yellow jackets?” Which totally a dumb thing to say, since vespula isn’t even that big a part of vespoidea. But then someone else snickers and says, in a really low voice but not that low, “ants with wings.”
What a prick.
People don’t understand that wasps are so much cooler than lousy bees. Wasps are shiny and clean. Like a sports car. Or a really expensive espresso machine that’s never even been used. Wasps have jaws. Which is cool. Bees are furry and disgusting. Like a monkey, except without the tool use. They’re fat and can barely fly and have gross, alien mouths. Little assholes – they’re not even native.
My question began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote:
At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?”
Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even as evidence for it accumulates in their own backyards.
But my mind has circled back to Paolo’s question because it touches on so much more than just rainfall in the Southwest. It’s also about the scientific process, the line between data and interpretation and the role of story in science.
This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the distress, not the reason to stick it out, nothing at all has changed.
My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing. Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What are you reading?” and he’d get a funny look and say, “Oh nothing, just a paper,” meaning a dense, opaque, difficult scientific journal article. And when I asked him how things were going at school, this normally close-mouthed kid started talking and didn’t stop, and he wasn’t sounding cheery. He wasn’t relaxing, not one bit.
Freeman Dyson wrote: “The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow-area of specialization. . . . I am personally acquainted with several cases of young people who became mentally deranged, not to speak of many more who became depressed and discouraged, their lives ruined by the tyranny of the Ph.D. system.”
Dyson himself declined to participate in the system and does not have a PhD. But nowdays, he goes on to point out, not having one means not being a scientist. Getting one means years of school beyond college, then a couple of years each of one or two or three postdoctoral fellowships before finding a job in which your research is likely to be directed by someone else, or an academic post at which you can begin the years of working toward tenure. Middle-aged, overspecialized, mentally deranged, depressed and discouraged seems about right. The system is brutal.
My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over.
The road is a lonely straightaway that leads down from the high country and across mesa tops dotted with a few old ranch houses. Cows watch us from half-snowy fields. No cars come by as the tall young man leans on the wrench undoing lug nuts and I position the jack. It’s cold out, ground hard. He’s in a puffy jacket crouched at the back end of the car. I keep fixing him in the frame of my memory, watching him with the old tire in his arms, pulling it off its posts. I don’t know if this is his ritual or mine.
When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most
people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not
far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy
tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see
all the this-and-thats stacked high against the windows where the
curtains didn’t cover, all the way up to a shipstyle porthole on the
second floor. The overall impression was that the cabin sloshed nearly
to its brims with things.
Her airstream out front was full of dressers and armoires. Her
backyard was like a sculpture garden for the partially broken mundane. A
trampoline. Odds and ends of lumber. Stacks of salvaged tile. She told
me once that she was storing six clawfoot bathtubs. Sometimes, she’d
find a dress or a pair of pants she thought would strike my fancy, load
it into a salvaged plastic grocery bag, and hang it from my gate latch
for me to find when I came home from work.
Last week, on a day off from school for teacher planning, or something, I took my daughter to a daytime performance of Mary Poppins. It was the Broadway version and it was the highlight of her fall so far. And mine, let’s just be honest here. I love Mary Poppins. I love her ridiculous hat and I love her aphorisms (“enough is as good as a feast,” “we are not a codfish,” and so forth have been known to spill forth from my own lips) and I love her Firm But Kind style of child-rearing. And my daughter loves her too.
Mary Poppins is super silly. But she also, especially in Julie Andrews’ portrayal, is a serious escape for a kid who really does not like to listen to authority. I wrote about why in this post from last year, and please forgive me for running it again because I am sick and anyway it’s been on my mind.
There were many times when it wasn’t lice. It wasn’t lice that time a neighbor’s kids had lice, and all of our heads started feeling itchy. It wasn’t lice when the preschool had a lice outbreak. It wasn’t lice when our good friends had lice three times in a row. It wasn’t lice when we got the notice from school that a classmate had lice. There were so many notices, year after year, and they all made us itchy, but none of them were lice.
And then there was the time earlier this month, when one kid just kept having an itchy head. He had an itchy head after wearing a helmet—but he was wearing a helmet! He had an itchy head after playing basketball in the playground—but he was sweaty! He had an itchy head for weeks, but we looked at his head, and we saw nothing but hair. So much hair! He kept scratching his head while he slept. He even scratched while he slept through another kid going full Exorcist in a tent in the middle of the night. He was still scratching after that other kid was finally feeling better.
When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)
