Dracula's cousins: cooler in reality

Want to get a smidgen of an idea of what it's like to stand in the midst of millions of bats emerging from their cave? Observe:




Yes, you can hear their leathery little wings flapping. Unfortunately, the combination of being overly awed, and attempting to capture the whole thing with a crappy video gadget, means that the footage doesn't come anywhere near to doing this event justice. You can't, for example, feel the wind caused by this nightly exodus; neither do you experience the thrill-mixed-with-fear of having a flying mammal dive bomb your face. Just before you realize that this cave serves as nature's clown car (it took almost an hour for all of the inhabitants to come out, and this at non-peak season), you can feel something about to happen, a different sort of silence that no cinema producer could ever really capture.

One interesting fact? The poor little guys make their way out and up in spiraling motions in order to gain altitude; they're unable just to set out and zoom straight off into the beyond.

This wasn't my first encounter with this sort of reality; I come from a place that has an enormous urban bat population. It was, however, my inaugural peek at what goes on in a protected wildlife area, where everything is quiet, and where each stage of the process is apparent, not only visibly, but aurally and, I'll venture, tactilely (due to backdrafts and the near-misses of wayward pilots) as well. An absolutely brilliant and beautiful adventure that I'm fortunate to have witnessed. If you have the chance, don't think twice.

Unrelated points of grousing

A couple of observations that confirm my status as someone whose concerns have definitively been left behind by the rest of society:

* Yesterday, it was even more painful than usual to have CNN forced upon me by the giant televisions at the gym-- for behold, the caption summing up the story they were doing at the moment indicated two minutes' worth of devotion to the new pap smear recommendations coming on the "heals" of recently updated mammogram guidelines. I seriously doubt that anyone was trying to make ironic wordplay here, and that the botched orthography was, rather, due to outright incompetence and a lax attitude, encapsulated in the word "whatever," toward spelling and editing. As Flaubert (and others) are rumored to have said, "God is in the details." Think about that for a while, and then consider the shoddiness of so many cultural products of late.

* My students have been insisting that they're unable to call outside numbers on the front desk phone. Why? Because they automatically assume that one needs to use the area code when dialing local, and when they do so, nothing, of course, happens. I suppose this expectation is only natural, for kids who've never had to use (and probably rarely even seen up close) a land line-- but it's an issue that had never occurred to me before.

Standing up for indignation

Even though the following episode does feature, you guessed it, the boss, in the end, it's truly not about work, I swear.

Yesterday, going over the items available for a catered event, we noticed that bottled water was listed among the beverage options. At that point, I mentioned how said product made me irate; with ridiculously high numbers of people on this planet without access to clean drinking water, and in addition to an environment increasingly under siege by, among other things, our heaps of plastic waste, I remarked that I didn't think we should support such a venture-- that, hell, I'd just bring in my Brita filter and continually fill everyone's glass, if that was what we needed.

The wench responded by smiling in inane condescension while sort of wiping my arm (a terrifying cross between a caress and peremptory touchy-feeliness) and saying, "A lot of things make you mad, don't they?" In addition to repeating in my head the unvoiced demand not to touch me, I was also thrown into a different sort of fury, the one that emerges when people react to others' outrage at injustice by viewing it as something cute. My molester happens to be a fanatic of new-age spirituality focused on "blessing"-- which may be individually comforting. Anything, however, that causes a person's head to be so deeply lodged in one's ass that said person views anger as always, de facto bad and/or lamentable is, say I, deeply flawed.

It's not anger itself-- a native human emotion-- that's horrific, but rather, one's reaction to it that may be open to judgment. Without anger, I'm guessing that the impetus to improve our lot would be far less; in my case, that atrocious perturbation has been the goad not only to positive personal transformation, but to attempts to achieve some sort of societal progress as well. Yes, the expression of anger manifested in sophomoric actions such as town-hall-meeting shout-downs, acts of violence, or a general refusal to treat one's "opponent/s" with dignity: such behavior is grievous, to say the least. Don't, though, in your warm, fuzzy Disneyverse of cosmic cluelessness, condemn (especially not in that self-righteously gentle way) an emotion just because it might force you to face up to the reality that the world is not always a just or happy place.

Having made my statement, I retire.

Strategery

A co-worker and I have decided that B-rate acting is the best strategy for dealing with the confused bundle of neurons that is my boss. I'm working on the car salesman smile, as well as the ability to be two completely different people at the same time. This could be a recipe for madness, you say-- and I'll agree with you. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, however, has proven to have lasting literary merit, and who could forget the intrigue of Sybil, or even Fight Club? At any rate, I'm already well on my way into the pit of despair, and so I might as well make that road a challenging one. I haven't yet reached the point of spiking my morning tea with 100-proof moonshine, so I suppose I'm still within the bounds that one would consider "healthy." Oh, mental breakdown: what exciting things you plop down on my horizon!

Emergency drill, how I love thee

Fire drills: they should happen much more often-- even, I dare say, on a weekly basis. One can never be too safe; and if those ear-piercing alarms and dangerously bright flashers that assault you from all sides during such events are legitimate menaces, I'll take a few seconds' exposure to them if it means being able to hang out in the sunshine for fifteen minutes or more, gosh-darn unable to stare meaninglessly at a computer screen for the time being. Hell, why not really cover the insitutional butt, and throw in tornado, bomb, and crazed gunman drills as well? Or take a cue from DeLillo, and let us lie about in the streets for an hour our so, the better to protect us from toxic clouds and other random threats?

Unbelievably, sometimes, I'm quite willing to go with the flow. And in those occasional intervals of compliance, I'll even welcome the ridiculous levels of cacophony that come along with them. Get those fire alarms going, then; the twilight zones they engender mean that work is an infinitely more pleasant place.

Gearing up for losing battles

It's Tuesday: that means staff meeting. I'm eager to see what will ensue, coming so recently off of an action-packed brown bag at the end of last week, wherein a colleague and I finally pushed back against the forcefully cheery regime in which we've somehow landed. The topic? Positive psychology, and how helping others, for example, makes the giver happier. When my co-worker pointed out that viewing altruism in such a fashion was really just one more way of using others to increase one's own peace of mind, the rest of the room exploded in histrionic shock and horror-- a group undertaking of protesting too much, methinks.

In the meantime, I'm attempting to discover how I can get some sort of non-carcinogen-containing, flame-retardant substance able to be doused over my body at regular intervals. I feel it would be therapeutic, and convey so much more than words ever could, to light myself on fire during moments of extreme absurdity, and just walk up and down the halls in mute protest.

Reader hang-ups

This writing thing is hard. Hence, I find myself easily led astray, taking a procrastinatory moment out of what should be single-minded application to a piece I'd like to hand over to an upcoming contest. At any rate, the distraction, other than the early Billy Joel tunes in the background, is this: lingering frustration with the occasional, inane commentary left in the margins of the otherwise brilliant book I'm currently reading (W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants). Sebald does such a magnificent job of hiding extreme complexity and depth beneath a paradoxically rich sparseness of style-- giving us, in other words, a work of unassailable sophistication. And so, it's violently jarring to come across bubbly handwriting that expresses its owner's consternation, via phrases such as "WTF?" and, in a series of stories about Holocaust survivors, multiple, impatient demands about, for example, protagonists' otherwise unexplained fears involving boxcars.

I know I'm a snob-- and one who, even at that, is also glad that a reader apparently more used to absorbing something on the level of Dan Brown has taken up, and even finished, this dense series of character descriptions. But really-- if you're going to sell something back to the bookstore, consider erasing your commentary beforehand.