Today I am a Monkey Performing Personal Maintenance
The gorillas in the zoo move limb to limb along their artificial trees, and stay put to sleep, chew grass stalks, or observe eachother and their guests. I read their various faces: contemplative, conniving, content.
- - -
For the first time since living here, I let milk go bad, so I boiled the unfinished portion with vinegar to make cheese. Only a few tablespoons resulted, which I saved in a small bowl. I was covering this with plastic wrap when I felt a prick in my palm. Hardly a hint of a cut in evidence, but I had broken a glass nearby the other day, so I suspected an invisible splinter. In my bathroom cabinet I found the fine-tipped tweezer I'd thieved for just this kind of occasion—pocketed from the entomology lab where, for eight dollars an hour, I used the tweezer's precise points to sort larvae from lake slop underneath a dissecting microscope. This time they extracted a tiny glass shard from underneath my skin.
- - -
Today I mostly stayed home, worked out my taxes, ate, slept, called friends, spent little time studying, more time identifying this odd mood I'm in. The splinter adventure reminded me of opposable thumbs, the cleverness of our species, and our rituals for keeping healthy. O simple life! To stay in one place and chew grass. To while the day delousing one's self and one's companions.
- - -
For the first time since living here, I let milk go bad, so I boiled the unfinished portion with vinegar to make cheese. Only a few tablespoons resulted, which I saved in a small bowl. I was covering this with plastic wrap when I felt a prick in my palm. Hardly a hint of a cut in evidence, but I had broken a glass nearby the other day, so I suspected an invisible splinter. In my bathroom cabinet I found the fine-tipped tweezer I'd thieved for just this kind of occasion—pocketed from the entomology lab where, for eight dollars an hour, I used the tweezer's precise points to sort larvae from lake slop underneath a dissecting microscope. This time they extracted a tiny glass shard from underneath my skin.
- - -
Today I mostly stayed home, worked out my taxes, ate, slept, called friends, spent little time studying, more time identifying this odd mood I'm in. The splinter adventure reminded me of opposable thumbs, the cleverness of our species, and our rituals for keeping healthy. O simple life! To stay in one place and chew grass. To while the day delousing one's self and one's companions.
posted by fragments of angry candy at 12:16 AM
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