Publish Yourself

I've decided to start a new blog to refute my inability to remember things. Smells, sights, people, and events - even words, grammar, and books. My memory would make a great colander for linguine but it won't help me later on in my decrepit old age (trust me, I'm blogging from a senior center). I blog to protest my brain and a life sans memory.

A little late to be blogging Summer 09. It's July 15 and the summer is more than half over. As any good girl procrastinator knows, there's the immense decision of recounting everything that's happened in short, terse sentences OR let it fade into the days of yesterday. In my opinion, those quick paragraphs that summarize thrilling moments remind me of small children with sticky faces and stuck-out tongues who sing: "I had a good time - naaaah." Who wants to experience that? Maybe I'll drop a lollipop later on if nostalgia demands it.

Even blogging a day later is dangerous. Here I sit at my mom's work - a senior center about 20 miles from our house - and yesterday seems like ages away. Cait invited me - along with her youngest sister, her two friends, and mother - to the Philadelphia Zoo. The Zoo is like that relative who works in the mafia but gives you really great birthday presents. You have some dubious feelings about what they do but you choose to ignore them and play with super-awesome toys.

Animals in cages - all sorts of animals and all sorts of cages. The new fad in the zoo is to create cages that don't look like cages - they don't have bars. So they've built a new bird house with a simulated habitat that you can walk through and see the birds fly around, smell them, and occasionally feel their poop land on you - a real bonus experience. The simulated lion habitat idea didn't go over too well; bars are still a standard feature there.

No "exhibit" really stands out in my mind - except for a pair of mating lizards. The two were stacked on a high branch, twining tails, butting heads, and nibbling on each other. Seemed like foreplay but we couldn't be sure. Ah, now I recall a big black snake (possibly a rat snake? I was more interested in what it was doing to peak at it's nameplate). He was lifting a third of his...torso, mass? right off the ground and across a small pond in his glass enclosure. He then sniffed out a black, plastic something in the center of the water and used that to prop himself up and out of the water as he made his way across. It was only until his lower half and tail were traveling down that he slipped into the water. Epic failure but still impressive!

Big mammals, small mammals, and a moving "Amish Exhibit". A family of eight Amish were quietly making their way around the zoo. We first saw them in the primate house - after that they kept popping up everywhere. Very quiet in comparison to the mass of families and uncontrollable children running about. Parents yelling, kids screaming - come to think of it, going to the zoo for the Amish is a two-for-one deal. See exotic animals and see a slice of contemporary American culture. :P Which would be more strange/shocking, I wonder.

I wonder as well if, in the far distant future, once Earth is composed of one amalgamate culture - sort of similar to Firefly or Futurama - we'll be visiting Zoos that exhibit the cultures of the past. "And here we have the so-called American culture of the 21st century. Notice the obesity and open-mouthed, screaming children." Yeah, I want to be there for that.