bad metaphor

Juvenile member of the Felis silvestris catus species, also known in English vernacular as a “kitten”

According to Wikipedia (the poor person’s ultimate authority on all things that matter), cats in mature adulthood typically sleep between twelve to sixteen hours a day, the more torpid of the species spending up to twenty hours in slumber. In human world, we call that chronic fatigue syndrome or myasthenia gravis. For cats though, it is perfectly acceptable to spend most of their living hours unconscious, conserving every bit of precious energy.

My question is: what in the world could they possibly be saving all that energy for? There probably are notable exceptions to the rule, but in general, most cats are not going to be running marathons in those four to eight hours of wakefulness. In the case of my own specimen of felis silvestris, I’ve observed him do nothing more taxing than pounce on wayward leaves that blow in whenever my roommates and I go in and out, and meow in my ear at 3:00 a.m. when he is hungry.

An unusually active cat. Note the look of bewilderment observed in his companion’s expression.

Oh, yes, there is the occasional ‘freak-out,’ a phenomenon observed in most household cats. It is characterized by one or two high bursts of energetic activity, including but not limited to: dashing across the living room three times, attacking sweaters and furniture, running into walls, meowing plaintively. This episode can last up to ten minutes before the cat, remembering its primary purpose in life, settles back down into its lethargic routine.

Cat for purchase for $.10 along with monitor at flea market.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think the freakout can totally account for all the energy saved up by the feline during the course of a day. What, then, happens to all that energy? Is this a problem for the physicists, who are too busy trying to figure out whether the cat in the box is dead or alive to bother with such matters? Or is it a problem for the psychologists, who will analyze the cat’s dreams and relate them back to the suckling of the mother’s teat? Perhaps this is one of life’s mysteries that will go unsolved, as long as humans walk the earth (and cats sleep on their monitors).

So I am sleeping this morning, one of my favorite things to do, and I am having pleasant dreams about being attacked and having my wallet stolen, and being shot at with a Gatling gun, whereupon I awaken and realize that there really is a Gatling gun noise coming from outside. Bleary-eyed, I put on my glasses and reach over the boy, who would sleep like a rock through a volcanic eruption, and peer through the window. The construction workers were out there with their helmets on and their jackhammers laying our parking lot to waste. These are the workers who must have left a note on my car last night kindly informing me that my car would be blasted to smithereens if I did not move it by tomorrow morning. They weren’t kidding about tomorrow morning, it being ten minutes shy of six a.m. when I look at the clock.

I guess Lawrence has a serious concrete problem. I totally sympathize. I dislike concrete as much as the next person. It’s all non-porous and grey and rocky without having the virtues of being a rock. It keeps in the cold during winter and heat during the summer. Concrete is much uglier to look at than things like bricks or solid gold, something that the designers of Wescoe Hall did not take into consideration. Concrete is directly responsible for the blood shed and scraped knees of millions of little kids learning to ride bicycles. I agree that this concrete menace should end. These men are doing fine work, don’t get me wrong.

Couldn’t they maybe wait, though, until after the sun has risen? Like, after most of us have gotten that precious ten minutes of snooze sleep after the alarm clock has sounded? They could enlist the helpful light of the sun in their mission against concrete. The birds could sing sweet melodies set to the jackhammer rhythm, and everyone would be happy. Everyone, that is, except the people who didn’t move their cars in time.

In spite of my lack of fondness for things in nature, most particularly mosquitoes, I can’t seem to stay away from the wetlands. I’ve been leading groups of people out to the wetlands for nigh two years now. I question how effective I am at it, since I myself don’t know much about wetlands ecology, and am traditionally kind of bad about flyering and contacting field guides on time. I guess there are lazier and more inefficient people out there, but those people usually know their limitations and don’t sign up to be part of FIVE organizations in a semester. How did I get myself into this again?

Entrance kiosk to the wetlands. This area would be trafficway if KDOT had their way with it.

Anyhow, I went and took some reconnaisance photos last weekend. I didn’t take my camera along for the actual trips, because I didn’t want to slow up the group and/or drop my camera in the mud. Unfortunately, though, I missed some potentially great shots, like a well-fed coyote running down the road, a freshly killed (and partially eaten) beaver carcass, and – the odd thing – the intestinal organs of said beaver, a little further down the hill. Is that normally how coyotes eat beavers? Chuck the intestines a few yards away? I know I wouldn’t want to eat intestines either, but wouldn’t it be easier just to eat around them? I felt for a second that I was in an episode of CSI: Wetlands, with all of us standing around analyzing how the beaver was killed.

Area along the boardwalk. The wetlands has been…uh…much wetter this year.

It was quite chilly this weekend, especially after some hours of mucking around in the cold mud, with nothing but cheap thin-soled shoes to protect my feet. Last year, this same field guide had us wade through a flooded area north of 31st st. to get to the Haskell campus. The area was (and is) still flooded because it pleased some beavers to build a dam there. No other explanation really, beavers are just cool like that. He would have us do it again, if I hadn’t nixed the idea (I think the group would have mutinied).

Despite the chill, it was quite nice. I might have moved it earlier in the semester – we usually do these things mid-September, in the middle of the monarch butterfly migration. I got pretty busy then, though, couldn’t find any guides, and also, it’s been much warmer later this season. Only just last Friday, people were walking around campus in shorts and sandals. There’s no use trying to predict the weather in Kansas; it’s like trying to catch floating cotton seeds. Just when you think you’ve got a grasp on it, – BAM! The cotton starts spewing lighting and tornadoes and sets your house on fire.

A little ways further into the wetlands.

As I told my friend Krissy, who showed up for the Sunday trip, five years ago, I’d be the last person I’d think of who would want to lead a nature trip. A wetlands nature trip, of all things. I never did girl scouts and I mostly played indoors when I was little. I liked the distant nature that I found in geology textbooks and stuff, and the happy placebo kind shown on drug commercials, but real nature? Mud? Ick. I hadn’t even heard of the wetlands when the pastor at the ECM told me that they needed someone to coordinate the group, and that someone could be me.

I don’t really know what’s responsible for changing my mindset about things. Maybe it was being put in charge of this wetlands group. Maybe digging ditches in the red New Mexican dirt helped. I can’t say that I’m a nature-loving hippie now by any means – I couldn’t tell a poison oak from a pine tree – but I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll feel comfortable when I’m far from roads and gas stations and lights, as comfortable as I am on any quiet neighborhood street. Sometimes I’m perfectly happy to sit on my bum and stare at a computer screen all day, browsing Wikipedia and blogs and doing other enormously productive things. But sometimes I need to get out of the house and feel some wind on my face, smell grass and hear trees rustling.

On Saturday, it was cold, but quite bearable. On Sunday, the weather took a turn for the worse. The Sunday group consisted mostly of people who were going to get extra credit for an environmental history class. Some of the kids didn’t have a clue as to what the wetlands were, or what we were even doing. I guess it’s good they came. Sometimes I worry that the wetlands tours are just ‘preaching to the choir,’ targetting people that are already pretty pro-environment and against the Trafficway. Meanwhile, the majority of voters will stay home, maybe hear about the wetlands in the paper every now and then, and vote yes on Trafficway issues because they think it’ll ease traffic issues for them (it won’t really, but that’s another story). So I’m glad that they came, but I wish that the day had been a little kinder. It may have been a little too cold and horrible outside to fully appreciate the ecodiversity and history of the wetlands. I hope we didn’t inadvertantly make people anti-wetlands because of a bad experience!

One girl that went on the Sunday trip, a history major with little previous exposure or understanding of environmental issues, was most definitely a City Girl. The kind who has never driven on a dirt road before, or has managed to never see a cow despite living in Kansas. She admitted, when we were making introductions, that she wasn’t much of a nature person. So props to her for coming out in the cold, but I still couldn’t help get annoyed at her at times. Like when the guide asked if everyone recognized poison ivy, and she freaked out and hung back fifty feet from the rest of the group for awhile. Or, when we went past where we’d found the beaver carcass the previous day, and happened upon the intestines still lying on the ground, she shrieked and covered her eyes and said it was the most disgusting thing she’d ever seen. Evidently she’s never walked by the meat section at Checkers. Maybe it’s just me, but I would have thought history majors should be more inured to violence and gore. Do they not put pictures of wars in history textbooks? I guess they’ll never have to take biology or anything icky like that.

It’s hard to imagine I was like that once, too. I guess in some respects I still am. I’d never be able to skin animals and tan the hide to make my own shoes, for instance. I don’t think I’d last long living in the middle of the desert with no running water or electricity, and most importantly, no internet. At the same time, I’ve become more aware of things that can’t be replaced by technology. The smell of prairie grass, for example, or the wind against skin, or the crazy rush that you get when standing on the edge of a very high surface and realizing that where you were ten minutes ago is now a mere mote, a speck of red dust. I hope that if nothing else, my little wetlands trips spark some sort of awareness in people, an awareness of things that aren’t noise or commodities or speed.

I do wish that City Girl could have seen more of the positive sides of nature. Such as the spectacle that greeted us at dawn on Saturday. We’d been there for about five minutes, walking in silence and waiting for the sun to rise, when a faint incoherent noise coming from the tall grasses grew louder and more raucous, until we couldn’t hear our footsteps above the chatter. All at once, thousands of birds soared up, circling and forming tornadic patterns in the sky. We stood enrapt, for almost twenty minutes, and then the tornado birds dissolved into the sunrise. What a way to start the day.

So I mentioned earlier that I’m on the staff of a student literary mag on campus. I was a little worried when I heard that I’d be put on poetry detail – I am very, very picky about poetry and reading heaps of possibly mediocre to bad poetry failed to interest me much, well, beyond the potential fun of mercilessly bashing the really bad entries.

Okay, maybe at some point I might have been looking forward to the latter bit. I suspect that all of us, deep inside, have this seed of nastiness embedded within even the gentlest of hearts; the deep-seated desire to destroy the egos of others – the bigger, the better. It seems to matter less that you yourself are inept, incompetent, etc., as long as you surround yourself with bigger idiots and slacker-jawed yokels. This is why we have reality TV, for instance. This is why, when I was enrolled in a poetry workshop class, I attended almost every day, just to see what collosal lows this fellow poet (whom I’ll call Fred) would revert to this week.

The thing that made Fred shine in a universe of dull stars was his monstrous and largely unwarranted ego. He would blather on for twenty minutes after each poem critiqued, complaining that he didn’t quite “get” it or suggesting changes that would turn the poem into something more like what he wrote, thus the suggestions were mostly useless. As for what he wrote, it consisted entirely of “song” lyrics that brooded over his failures with the opposite sex (oh really? how shocking) and his oh-so-edgy outsiderness. His most expert masterpiece was called “Shipwrecked in the Never,” a tour-de-force of teen angst and mangled rhymes to fit non-existent rhythm. I showed it to my roomies, who are even more malicious than I, and that lovely angst-ridden message-from-the-heart gave us sufficient comic fodder for weeks.

I like reading bad poetry sometimes, but even the most maliciously sadomasochistic bitches have a limit when it comes to poetry. So I was happy when the editor-in-chief let me move over to fiction, as I have a much better time with bad fiction than with bad poetry. Mainly because all bad fiction requires at least some effort, however unapparent that may be. Bad poets seem to treat poetry as effortless and submit any verbal diarrhea that gushes out onto paper. Also, it takes less time to write bad poetry than it does to write bad fiction, hence there’s a greater volume of it.

Anyhow. I was a little wary of joining the Kiosk, because I’d formed the perception that the Kiosk was rather pretentious and prone to post-modern-wannabe, artsy-fartsy type of works. I guess it’s been like that in the past, but it seems that at least with this bunch, it’s not the case. They’re all very down to earth and acerbic and bitter-hearted when it comes to bad poetry/literature. Jack, the editor-in-chief, mentioned how he automatically rejected any poem that contained the word “soul,” and my view of him shot up astronomically afterwards.

Last night was the benefit show at the Jackpot. It was actually rather fun, even though I’d only been planning on staying out a couple of hours or so. The plans were kind of shot as Jack bought pitcher after pitcher for the magazine staff, and of course I didn’t want to be the snooty teetotaler and all…so I ended up staying for quite a long time. This guy Tim, who was also in the aforementioned poetry workshop, also had unkind memories of this Fred character, and we spent a good half hour reminiscing on his horrible poetry, like war veterans. This girl Lindsay and I talked for awhile, and made an impromptu trip to Burrito King with my friend Indie Dan. All very much more social activity than I’ve been used to lately. I’m getting kinda antisocial these days, you see. Although I’m not doing much writing lately, on account of being lazy and busy with other schoolwork and all, it’s really quite nice to be part of a literary community. Every nerd needs her niche, and I think I’ve found it.