“Twitter is a sewer,” wrote New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens last week in one of the many skirmishes that have now coalesced into the phenomenon known as Bedbug-gate. The ongoing saga is quite beyond the remit of this blog (though we do a brisk trade in actual bedbugs). But I’ll take Stephens’ sewer observation. He meant it as an indictment of man’s inhumanity to man on the hell site, but by pure chance he may have stumbled upon a useful metaphor for personal data.
My fish died last week. I am not sure how long he lay on the bottom of his aquarium before I noticed. It wouldn’t have been more than a day, because I’d checked on him the previous afternoon. He wasn’t looking good, unmoving except for his gills, which seemed to be straining.
But then Percy (Percival L. Fishington) never looked that good. He liked to stay near the bottom, or hide in his hollow-log toy. He was probably the least engaged, most depressed-seeming betta fish I have ever had. He lived in our house for two and a half years.
Was he depressed? I have kept many fish in my life and the others have not seemed depressed, but I don’t know. It is unknowable. What is it like to be a fish?
I worry all my creatures are depressed. I worry about my houseplants. In the miniseries “Good Omens,” the character Crowley shouts at his plants to make them grow, and they live in fear of him. (I don’t remember whether this happens in the book.) It’s played for a laugh, and it is funny to watch David Tennant menace a quivering ficus, but it also made me genuinely sad. What if they are scared? What if the plants are sad? Is it my fault?
Earlier this summer, as I lay with my head on my boyfriend’s chest, I heard something odd. His heart — an efficient athlete’s organ that normally thumps fewer than 50 times per minute at rest— switched from its reassuring, steady bah-buhm, bah-buhm, bah-buhm to rapid staccato: bah-bah-bah-bah-bah-bah.
I lifted my head and asked if he’d noticed it. Pete said yes, it had happened before, and that sometimes his chest hurt and his arm tingled. I called my dad, a retired physician, and he said Pete should see a doctor as soon as possible. As Pete left for his appointment, I badgered him to not minimize his symptoms: “Make sure you say the words ‘pain,’ and ‘tingling,’” I said.
It took a while to get the workup scheduled. When she hooked Pete up to monitors on a treadmill to do a stress test, the nurse was incredulous. “You’re too young for this,” she said. Pete is 35 but looks much younger. In fact, he looks so young that I didn’t take him seriously when he first asked me out three years ago, at the start of a long, slow courtship. In May, when we attended graduation at the high school where Pete teaches science, someone mistook him for a student, congratulating him on his achievement.
The point is, Pete looks young and healthy. He is young and healthy. But his blood pressure has been abnormally high since his twenties— high enough that he needs meds — and the doctors don’t know why. Last month they gave Pete a heart monitor and instructed him to wear it for 30 days, to detect any abnormal rhythms. They also performed an echocardiogram, using soundwaves to image his pulsing heart. Two weeks ago, we sat at our kitchen table and opened a bland-looking envelope from the VA Medical Clinic which contained his echocardiogram results. Among the findings, it listed a congenital malformation of the heart called a bicuspid aortic valve.
I have a bit of a t-shirt problem. I love the graphics. I like how someone at the gym will say, “Hey, I was at that concert, too! Wasn’t it great?” I love wearing something that represents my neighborhood when I’m traveling far away. I love how, every time I take a t-shirt out of the drawer, I remember the event or place where I got it, and how that place made me feel.
T-shirts have their limits, as external memory devices. They wear out. And, no matter how many times I tell myself I have enough t-shirts, they pile up. A reasonable thing to do would be to give them away. And I do, sometimes. But what if I forgot the thing forever? Anyway, nobody wants my old t-shirts.
So I chose shirts that I loved, but didn’t want to wear anymore, and I cut a big square from each one. My mom probably helped; she’s made several quilts. With a sewing machine, I assembled the 49 blocks in rows and columns. Then the sandwich: the sewed-together t-shirts, a layer of fluffy batting, and a piece of backing material. I pulled the whole stack loosely together with long lines of big stitches.
At the beginning of summer, my feet often feel tender. There
is a particular stretch of asphalt between the university parking lot and the
beach that is especially pitted, and the sharp dark bits of broken ground make
me cringe even before I step onto the road.
I often choose a different route to the beach, down the steep steps that are soft wood, worn by salt air and waves. But one of my friends likes to walk the bumpy path. While I dodge back and forth, taking a few steps on a curb, another on a small island of sidewalk, she charges straight down the bumpy asphalt. “I’m working on my summer feet,” she told me once. How good would that be, I thought, to have soles so thick that I didn’t feel anything?
Yesterday was National Dog Day, so I thought it only appropriate to repost this story about my dog and her insatiable appetite. She’s five now, and still insatiable.
Perhaps there was a time when our dog, Bea, didn’t eat everything. If so, I don’t remember it. At first, we thought it might be a puppy thing. But this month she turned two, and it seems clear that her insatiable appetite is a permanent part of her personality. Dogs aren’t known for their discriminating taste, but most dogs will balk at . . . well . . . something. Not my garbage dog. She is happiest when her mouth is full.
Can plants behave? Can they weigh risk against reward? Do they have personalities? At least one study suggests they can and do—and that we’ve missed their complex behavior in part because they live life at such a different pace.
Mimosa pudica, or “sensitive plant” is a frilly plant in the pea family with a wonderful talent—when touched, its leaflets fold up, demurely and rather sedately (but fast as all-get-out by plant standards) as if to say “I’m too proud and reserved to be eaten.”
The plant, despite its rather refined air, has weedy proclivities and has naturalized across the tropics, so its party trick must be adaptive. But the “touch-me-not”, as it is also called, has to do a bit of cost benefit analysis when deploying its rapid-fire defensive mode. You see, although closing the leaves reduces the area available to munching herbivores like insects, it also reduces photosynthesis by about 40%. Much like an animal that cannot forage or hunt for food while it is hiding, the plant can’t eat while it is tucked away. So how does it decide how long to keep those lovely bipinnate leaves hidden?
