An outing to the science museum AGH! FUCK! A BUG!
We took our kids to the science museum. A friend joined us, brought his family along. It was fun and I learned a lot.
Just inside the museum a man and a woman in labcoats held snakes in front of them for children to pet. I showed great restraint and didn’t even consider making an off-color comment. I imagined the inverse of this image, two large snakes holding two humans for small snakes to crawl on. After snake handling we went into the children’s play area which was full of a school group. My wife looked around and reacted like they may as well have been snakes. Snakes would have been better, actually, because quieter. “We’re going upstairs,” she announced, “it’s crazy in here,” and walked off with the kids. Our kids, I mean, not the school group kids. That would be counter-productive, though it would have been a nice thing to do for me, so I could get a little peace and quiet.
I hung out with my friend and his family for a minute, making small talk about the latest tragedy on the news, then I went upstairs to check on my family. I found them looking at turtles and snakes in glass cages. A reptile-ful day, I suppose. That room was lovely for its relatively emptiness and quiet. I went back down to tell my friend, and they headed back up.
In the snake and turtle glass cages room there was a display of metal outlines of different kinds of leaves on a sort of plaque, and small slips of paper and pieces of crayon you could use to do rubbings of the leaves. It reminded me of when I was in Scotland in 1998 and Liz and I got directions to a bus station that didn’t exist and so ended up hitch-hiking the twenty or so miles to our destination, which turned out to be more like 70 miles (we got the distance estimate from the same guy that told us where the bus station was, i.e., where it really wasn’t) and we got picked up by a very nice couple who took us with them on a tour of some couple three thousand year old standing stones in the area, that they were doing rubbings of. That was back when I was sure I didn’t want kids. I did my rubbings of the leaves with blue crayon then turned the paper slightly and rubbed over it again with red crayon, trying to make like an old timey three-D sort of look. I did like six of them, because precision matters, you see.
They have this thing there that I want for my house. It’s like a magnifying glass or microscope thing that you can focus, attached to a big video screen. Wood grain under maximum magnification is beautiful. So are dragon fly wings. My thumbnail is hideous, looks sort of like a chunk of a huge and diseased slug that is breaking apart. My arm, also hideous. The hairs looked like spider legs, thick and wiry and gross. I stuck my whole head under the scope but it was too big to focus on. I learned from all of this that anyone is repulsive when you get sufficiently close to them and that I have a head that defies visualization, because so large. I mean, I know both of those things already but it was nice to have scientific confirmation.
We headed to another room in the museum where my friend and his son and my older kid and I played with dominos, setting them up into various configurations and then knocking them down. It’s a metaphor for life, I think.
My kid and I tried to build an arch out of large foam blocks but I fucked it up and it kept falling over. It was still fun though. Sometimes it’s fun to drop stuff wherever and make a big mess, preferably in a noisy way, so I liked when the blocks fell. This is probably what the school group had thought when they were in this room and playing with the lego blocks laid out for making cars and racing them down a ramp. The legos were scattered all over the floor with pieces as far as twenty feet away from exhibit. It made my house look clean by comparison.
They have a planetarium there too. You can select bits from a computer display, choosing what astronomical stuff you want to learn about, then you hit start or whatever and go into the planetarium and it tells you about what you selected. It’s nice and dark and quiet, I love to take naps in there, except my kids usually wake me up.
We went downstairs back to the children’s play area, much calmer now, and my youngest daughter got into an argument with another girl in the play kitchen area because they both wanted to be the mama of the house, they said. My kid put her hands on her hips and stomped her feet and shouted “no I am the mama of this house!” I said “you could both be mamas” and they looked at me like I was stupid. This is an important developmental milestone, when you reach the stage of being able to look at your parents as if they are stupid and in a way that makes them feel a bit stupid but you do so without actually calling anyone stupid, so you have plausible deniability if your parents get pissed, which means you then get the treat of saying self-righteously “I didn’t even SAY anything! GOD!” and sighing because you are so very put upon.
Afterward we went out for tacos. My friend has a spacephone and looked up a nearby place with vegetarian options. I have a flip phone and increasingly feel I am a walking anachronism for it. Getting a fancy phone out of peer pressure is really stupid, I know, but knowing doesn’t help. It rarely ever does. After tacos, ice cream, and we walked by another restaurant I’d never seen before and that I wanted to remember the name of to check out later, but I don’t. Probably wasn’t any good anyway, and too expensive, with a menu consisting entirely of sour grapes. I wish I had a taco right now, and some cake.
I typed the above and then got up, I had been laying on a mattress on the floor in a messy room in our too small house, and I jumped because out of the corner of my eye I saw an earwig crawl under the cushion on the floor right next to the mattress. I’m a bug-o-phobe. This jumping reaction is interesting because it happens basically at the instant of perception - the order of operations feels less like ‘look, see bug, realize it is bug, jump with fright’ and more like ‘look, jump with fright and realize mid-jump that I am frightened and jumping because bug.’ Being brave but also considerate, I heroically only consider for about a second that I might wake up my wife and ask her to catch this bug for me. I kid, of course. I considered it longer than a second and the reason I didn’t wake her up is greater fear, not bravery or consideration. I don’t want to be sexist, but I will say, what is the point of marriage if your wife is asleep when a bug needs catching? I am relatively sure this was in our marital vows. If it wasn’t then it was obviously an unintended oversight that should be read into the spirit of whatever it was we promised that day.
Abandoned in my desperate plight I had no choice but take matters into my own hands, though the thought of that big bug in my hands makes my insides jump yet another time. Resourcefully, I went to the kitchen and got a glass, and grabbed a piece of paper from the floor (it’s very handy keeping pieces of paper all over the floor, good for drawing, paper airplane making, and bug catching), folded the paper a few times to make sure it was thick enough to keep the bug and its bug cooties away from me, then went back into the bedroom. Then I went and picked up one of our cats, who have been known to eat bugs.
I looked and the bug was gone. Oh fuck. I was going to sleep in this room tonight because I’m up late and have to be up early in the morning and don’t want the alarm to wake anyone else up. But I’m sure as fuck not sleeping in a room crawling with a bug the size of the tip of my pinky finger. I looked closer and the bug was still there. I picked up the cushion and the bug ran really fast to the end of the mattress.
I remembered earlier tonight when I was at the Capital reading group. I said something about how an apparently positive development wasn’t actually positive, and said “so the glass is half full, of spiders” and someone then launched into a story of how his girlfriend had kept a box spring in her dad’s garage for a year while living elsewhere or traveling, then came home and took the box spring to her new apartment. There she discovered that there was a small hole in the fabric of the box spring, through which had crawled one or more spiders, who had laid many eggs, a whole spider civilization’s worth of eggs, and they infested her bed and then the whole apartment. “It was kind of like that movie arachnophopia,” he said, “when a thing like that happens it kind of fucks you up.” I felt kind of fucked up just hearing about it. One of the lessons here is never start a Capital reading group, because if you do then other people will talk.
I pointed out the bug to my cat, who walked away. I remembered when we were preparing to move and so living among many boxes, one night I was going to go visit my brother across town for a bit. We had been on a walk with the stroller and diaper bag. I walked out the door to leave, saw the diaper bag still in the stroller, picked up the diaper bag and carried it into our kitchen, and turned to leave. Just as I did so a mouse jumped out of the bag and scurried behind some boxes. I shrieked and my wife and kid came running into the room to find me trying to find the mouse and scoot it toward the door. Our cats found it repeatedly, and each time let it go. That struck me as very cruel, cruel to me I mean. Crueler still to not eat this bug tonight.
I put the cup down on the bug and it ran circles quickly inside. I slid the piece of paper under the lip of the cup, and the paper folded over and the bug crawled under it so that if I had picked the paper and cup the bug would have been on top of the paper makeshift lid instead of in the cup. I pulled the paper back out then repeated the process, this time scooting the cup instead of the lid, until the bug was trapped and pick-up-able. I carried it to the bathroom, dropped the bug in the toilet and flushed it. Later, bug. Then got a drink of water, pissed in the toilet, and flushed again. Fuck you, bug.
At the science museum in the turtle and snake glass cage and magnifying machine video screen room there is also a display of dead insects pinned to a board for perusal. In my current addled state (tired, long day plus dead lifts at the gym) I feel somehow convinced that this bug in the house means science is out to get me. That really bugs me. Ugh fuck I’m sorry.