It’s true, I haven’t been posting much.

Part of that is because I’m focused a lot on work and job stuff at the moment, and as we all know, I don’t blog about that. But here are the vagaries: I’m still teaching in the program where I’ve been teaching for the last few years, and that’s mostly good. I’ll also be teaching again at the same program where I taught last fall, and that should be fun. I picked up a little writing work for an ongoing media analysis project. I’m still trying to get the big honkin’ book published, and I have another article coming out later this year. In the meantime, I’m looking for a full-time gig with health insurance and stuff.

Looking for work is pretty much always a fairly soul-crushing experience if you give a rip what you end up doing, and it’s even more exhausting when you’re keeping up on other jobs while you’re doing it (which you have to if you’re addicted to things like food and electricity). Plus, I’m finding out that it’s a funny thing with advanced degrees: it’s still a numbers game, but instead of it being easier to get a better job with a fancy degree (which is what you’re told will happen), I’m finding it’s actually a lot harder. There are fewer near-perfect fits, employers are surprisingly inflexible about what they think you can do, and people want to put you through the ringer to see if it’s worthwhile to invest in you. The hopper has to be so much deeper and wider to yield the same result, and advanced degrees force you to specialize, not generalize. Plus, nobody will hire you for a job they think you’re overqualified for — which is a lot with a Ph.D. — because they think you’ll just leave in a month or two when you find something better. Can’t really blame ‘em for thinking that. So yeah, it’s draining. It does force one not to settle, though: the market won’t let me.

Dr. Meg will be on the air on Monday on KGNU Denver / Boulder / Nederland and at KGNU.org if you’re not in earshot. Syndication has been mentioned (and passive voice has been used). I’ll keep you posted, of course.

You have the bat and frog update below.

Lisa has been relatively close by this summer, which has been great. She’ll be around for another 5 weeks or so, and we have lots more fun to cram in before she goes home.

The thyroid deal is looking up. I found a delightful family practice in Boulder, brought my lab reports and stuff, had a brief but productive discussion with a sympathetic and fine, fine superfine physician, and walked out with a prescription for generic synthroid, which I got filled (wicked cheap!) on the way home. I already feel better, even after just a few days. I had the best dance class yesterday that I’ve had in months, in part because I didn’t feel sluggish at all. I haven’t been to the gym yet today, and I don’t even have unpleasant, depressive symptoms. I’ll probably get in a bike ride later this afternoon, which will be even better because I’ll know it’s actually going to have some sort of physiological result. Yee-haw!

Finally, the spambots seem to have declared open war on my moderation queue. I average a little over 100 pieces of spam an hour. In order to get akismet to work, I have to upgrade WordPress and install it, and I don’t have direct access to the server, so that’s taking some effort to resolve, and in the meantime, every time I log in, there are all those zillions of bits of spam (baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam), and quite frankly, after I’ve gotten through them all, I often don’t feel like posting anymore. I’ll try to be better about that, and get the spammage fixed shortly.

So that’s what’s up. Or most of it, anyway.

The bat and frog monitoring goes quite well, thanks!

I monitor frogs solo, and did so last week. My site is an intermittent stream, and I walk along it, as close to the water’s edge as I can, and poke around (up the bank, too) looking for leopard frogs. I didn’t find any the last time I went, but I did find a couple of turtles, several bullfrogs, and a mama duck with about 10 fuzzy little ducklings. The site is pretty challenging, between the terrain, steep banks in some spots, the fact that the stream splits into two or three streams at various points, and there is some getting through barbed wire fencing involved. Last week, there was also some mild cow confrontation as I irritated a herd while scrambling through a nearby fence and they all stood up and glared at me. Beef cattle ain’t dairy cows, that’s for sure.

The funny part is that the conservation folks are really annoyed with the bullfrogs. They’re an invasive species in Colorado, most likely having come along with the stocking of local trout ponds. They eat all kinds of stuff, from the insects and things that leopard frogs would like to eat, to mice and other small critters that wander too close to the water’s edge for a drink, to the leopard frogs themselves, regardless of their stages of development. It was hinted at that if I wanted to take a big ol’ spear along and have bullfrog legs for dinner every night for a week, they wouldn’t mind a bit.

It makes me ruminate on the nature of ecosystems and invasive species. At what point does an invasive species simply become part of the ecosystem? Since ecosystems change all the time, where do we draw the line saying a change has fully occurred?

The bat monitoring I do with a partner, who is a nice post-doc in biology and has also done some cool nonlinear dynamics work. We are stationed at a reservoir, which we monitor two consecutive nights at a time. We’ve done two stints so far. We hike in for about 20 minutes or so from where we park, set up by the reservoir a bit before dusk, and wait for the bats to come feed. For about the first hour or so, we’re both looking and listening. For the next hour, just listening. Because, yeah, it’s dark and stuff.

We are assisted in this listening with a piece of equipment that magnifies the sounds of bats’ wings flapping (Colorado bats can be heard around 35 - 40 kHz), and maybe a bit of their sonar. It’s a small box, about the size of the original Sony Walkman, with two knobs: kHz, and on-off/volume. What’s really cool is that it seems to me that each bat has a unique sound signature. When we hear multiple bats, they all sound different to me, and we often hear the same signatures again and again as a single bat will make multiple passes while feeding.

All in all, I’m really enjoying myself and learning a lot.

Dr. Meg will once again be a guest on tomorrow’s Ironfeather radio show from 12 - 3 p.m. MDT. If you’re not in the Denver / Boulder area, you can still hear the show on the KGNU website. Just click on “listen.” A copy of the show will be saved in the archives for a couple of weeks afterward. I know a bunch of you are reading and lurking, because the volume of my spam moderation queue is utterly excessive these days. Feel free to tune in for more (purposely) terrible lifecoaching advice–or even call in and get some for yourself!

As I think y’all know, I’m an only child. As such, I’ve been entertaining myself for decades now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. Here’s the latest thing giving me the giggles.

I was watching TV or something months ago, and someone referred to the Spider-Man movies. The funny thing was, she pronounced it a little bid oddly. Instead of the usual “Spider-Man,” with emphasis more or less equally on the “Spi” and the “Man,” she said, “Spiderman,” emphasizing only the “Spi,” and giving the “a” a sort of schwa sound, hence making it sound like a surname: Goldman, Mossman, Spiderman. As in: “I’m here for the Spiderman bar mitzvah.”

Okay, that in itself cracked me up. But you know I can’t leave well enough alone.

“We had Herb and Rachel Spiderman over for dinner the other night.”

“Oh yeah? I love the Spidermans! They’re so amazing.”

I just go on and on about the Spidermans until I’m laughing so hard I have to stop. Then I go down to Sam Spiderman’s deli and have a nice egg salad.

Perhaps my favorite Greek myth is that of Orpheus and Euridice. If you’re not familiar with it, let me fill you in.

Orpheus was a wonderful genius musician of the variety that woodland creatures would sing and dance along when he played, like a cross between DaVinci and a Disney movie. He fell passionately in love with the beautiful Euridice, who loved and appreciated him in every way. On their wedding day, though, she was bitten by a snake and died. Orpheus was devastated. He couldn’t make music, or really even function — he sort of did the ancient Greek equivalent of sitting around in his worst pair of underpants drooling, and not bathing or leaving the house or anything. The woodland critters, having nobody to play their furry hoedowns, were even concerned.

Finally, Orpheus got off his sad, soggy duff, and resolved to go after Euridice. He bathed and threw on a fresh toga, grabbed his lyre and went off to Hades, where the living cannot go, but he charmed his way in with his music. He lulled Cerberus to sleep, paid the ferryman, finally met with the god of the underworld himself, charmed him with music, and begged for Euridice’s release. Eventually, the god gave in, but with one condition: Orpheus had to walk out of Hades the way he had come, and not turn around to look back until he was back in the surface world. Euridice would walk out behind him, but if Orpheus turned around to look back, she would be taken back into Hades forever. No do-overs. Orpheus hastily agreed, and started the trek back up to the surface world. The whole time, he worried about whether Hades had been straight with him, and whether his true love really was back there. He had every right to be nervous, of course, because the Greek gods were like the cast of a soap opera.

Finally, Orpheus could see the “Exit” sign above the opening into the surface world. He was so close, and the feeling of having been duped by Hades was stronger than ever. A few moments before he would have reached the exit, he was overwhelmed by having to know for sure, and he turned quickly, just to steal a glance behind him. Euridice had been back there the whole time, all right, and as he turned, she emitted a terrible shriek and was sucked back down into the underworld forever. Orpheus never got past it. His music was still beautiful, but it was always really sad after that. He was never the same, probably because he knew he had had more chances than most for true love and happiness, and he really screwed the pooch.

I’m not sure why I like this story so much. Usually, I like movies with a lot of explosions and not tear-jerkers. You’d expect me to like The Odyssey (which I do), but not something like this. It might be because it’s about having faith in the people you love.

In any case, imagine how different the story would have come out if Orpheus and Euridice had had text messaging:

O: I C the Xit. U still back there? E: Yep O: Kewl. Almost there! E: Sweet! Can’t wait 2 kiss U O: Me neither. Got all the snakes out of my apartment 2 E: Thx! UR so sweet. Just don’t turn around, OK? O: No worries, we’re good. IM out! E: Kewl

…and they’d live happily ever after, facilitated and reassured by the joys of modern technology.

The KGNU Afternoon Sound Alternative (broadcast live on May 26th) hosted by Ironfeather and Hannah Banana, with guest Dr. Meg:

MP3:

http://kgnu. org/audio/AfternoonSoundAlternative_2008-05-26. mp3

Streaming audio:

http://kgnu. org/cgi-bin/play. m3u?show=AfternoonSoundAlternative&date=2008-05-26

When people thoughtfully ask me if I’m cold, or if I want an umbrella, or if I’m otherwise climatically uncomfortable, I can respond with an enthusiastic, “Heck, no!” to be followed by, “This is nothing. I’m from the worst climate in America!” By which I mean: New England.

People here in Colorado, with its semi-arid, sunny, mild, near-bugless climate don’t really grasp the degree to which a climate can suck. I can tell them, but they don’t really get it. I can give them examples of my experiences with the cold, such as how my lip gloss used to freeze while I waited for the bus to my high school, and we’d break off bits of each other’s wet hair to annoy each other (sometimes big 80’s hair was more of a necessity), but then they’ll say something like, “Well, for some people, though, a really hot climate like Florida is a lot worse.” Yeah, well, New England gets that, too. Hence: the worst climate in America. The summer is hot and humid and muggy and buggy and gritty, and if it gets over 85 degrees, old people start dying.

A good way to cool off from the obscenely hot unpleasantness was always to go for a swim. The local swimming hole was a seasonally dammed-up brook. The brook in question was actually snow runoff that, when in its liquid state, would travel downhill. Using what resembled two metal horizontally-mounted captain’s wheels, the dam would be cranked shut shortly before Memorial Day so the pond could fill, and then opened again by Columbus Day, so that local men could retrieve the testicles that had frozen off and sunk to the frigid bottom when they had unwittingly gone swimming during the summer months.

Of course, other things besides testicles would be left over on the pond bed. Indeed, some testicles wouldn’t be there at all, reportedly having become lodged in their owners’ necks like goiters. Minimal trash from upstream, sure, but lost toys would be there, too. One time I found a gray plastic squid nearly a foot long. That was pretty cool. It became a favorite tub toy of mine, in part because I already knew it would sink to the bottom and lie in wait for small plastic tugboats — plastic tugboats of course being the natural prey of the plastic squid.

I suppose the terrible climate did make me tough, though. Plus, it was largely responsible for my discovery of the plastic squid. I’ve never found a plastic squid in Colorado.

This is by no means a complete list, but…

1. The average rainfall in any geographical location anywhere.

2. Any of the names of any current world leaders I didn’t already know.

3. When the last verified sighting of a living thylocene was.

4. Who actually is afraid of Virginia Woolf.

5. What cat livers taste like.

6. Where the hell Bruce Jenner got that terrible, terrible haircut all those years ago, and whether he ever got it fixed.

7. The second fourteen digits of Pi.

8. Why Phillip eats cold ravioli out of a can.

9. Who won any World Series or any Oscars that I don’t specifically remember seeing.

10. Why anybody watches American Idol, ever.

So don’t tell me! This is going great.

I’m afraid I will not be visiting your website to learn more. I feel I have learned enough.

Are you trying to give me some information about the Roseate Spoonbill or what the Thai Bhat is doing? Well, I am not learning it! Lalalalalalalaaaaa!

I am not responding to your plea for me to continue my education in criminal justice, in part because it’s a euphemism for a B.A. in the execution of fascism, but mostly because I am finished learning forever.

Nope, no more learning for me. I’m not even going to remember new people’s names. I’m just going to call them “Hey you,” or something that reminds me of their general appearance, like, “Hey parrotnose.”

I will certainly not be staying up to watch your news broadcast to learn what four things lurking in my bathroom could kill my baby, because a., I don’t have a baby; b., anything in my bathroom that hasn’t killed me yet is clearly too wussy to do the job — I mean, the stench of Phillip’s feet has been known to kill at 60 yards (no, I do not want to know how!) and I’m still around — whatever candy-assed bacteria or eyelash curlers might be in there pose no real threat; and c., as previously noted: through with learning.

If there is anything about which I am not learning the most, it’s Amway. I don’t even want to hear if it’s still around.

Don’t you try to inform me which swimsuit suits my body type, lady, if that is your real name. You don’t know me. And since I am no longer learning things, you can basically just kiss my ass.

If I don’t know it by now, I never will. Because: no more learning! I might even try to get stupider from here on out.

Well, gentle reader, I got my test results back today, and I don’t really have a sucky metabolism so much as I have wicked hypothyroidism. Out of a normal range of 0.4 - 4.5, my TSH is… (wait for iiiiit…) 13.43! I’m really glad to know. Now I can go about getting this bizniss treated.