oh go screw

thank you, carleton. thank you so much for this. there's an entire saturday morning gone. i'll never get that back.

i think this might be the only thought i have for today

at this point in her life - agewise, semesterwise - my mother was pregnant with me.

maybe i have just had too little sleep or too much coffee, but i feel like right now i understand something about how terrifying that must have been that i didn't understand before.

"i swear to PANTS that is what they are called"

brian is right. they ARE called megafauna. here are some more examples:


i forget what this is. a relative of the horse, or the hippo? both?


this is definitely an armadillo. an enormous, enormous armadillo.

nature is both terrifying and fascinating.

sorry some things are just more important

well, today was a great day and i was in an incredible mood for a decently large fraction of it. i walked my bike down to bicycle bill's - i would hyperlink it, but you would end up with this poorly designed new york cruiser's web page, which has a color scheme that would give a color blind man a headache. anyway, they were really nice to me. they complimented my grandmother's bike and let me watch bike race footage with them for a little bit, and then i read all their thank-you notes, many of which were from children. well, one. you know, the kind of card where a kid draws something on the front while you talk to them about why there is a card and who it will go to, and then you just write the appropriate sentiment on the inside. i love those cards. i have a stockpile of them.

anyway, one of the cards was from the "troll ladies" of brighton, allston or brookline, i can't remember which one. they are a couple of ladies who have an old station wagon with all these trolls glued to the roof. i've seen it. it's pretty memorable. as soon as i saw who the card was signed by, i knew what they were talking about. i tried looking it up on the internet, though, and all i found was this, which is also interesting. maybe i will hit that up as a detour to mexico, which is where i always go when i feel fed up, bummed out or like doing anything but my homework, which is occasionally.

in conclusion, it was a great trip to the bike shop. there were a bunch of the kind of moments where the sun is shining and maybe you meet a dog who is proud of the big stick he's carrying or there's a crocus or the sun is shining on the train tracks next to the freeway and the light is the way it is in the afternoon (perfect) and you are just right. also i took this picture.

it's what my aunt would call a "virgin on the half shell." (<-- shock quotes, that's what those are called)

last saturday was also pretty amazing. i:
walked to harvard square
went to a bookstore where i
- got a book on math in the rainforest for my mother
- purchased my fourth and hopefully last copy of "old possum's book of practical cats" [zeppelin's favorite poem is "growltiger's last stand" (i picked that website for what a great example it is of how the internet is insane)]
had tea at a tea shop(pe?)
went to the harvard museum of natural history which was so incredible i devote a paragraph to it later
ate pizza
bought one record
looked at comic books
walked home
went to a party in new hampshire, where i am pretty sure i was adequately charming and had a great time

now about the museum. first, the glass. the museum has a collection of handcrafted glass flowers - when i first heard that, i was expecting a handful of colorful handblown glass pieces in the entryway, something like:

which, i admit, is pretty incredible. instead, i found a room full of glass cases exhibiting THE most lifelike glass anything i've ever seen. it was incredible. so incredible i didn't take any pictures, which is a real shame because i can't think of a way to describe it. the blaschkas, the father and son team who made the flowers, did so at the request of a biology teacher who found drawings too two-dimensional and pressed live specimens too listless. the blaschkas also made a smaller series of undersea life - jellyfish, sea slugs, anemones - because biologists had a hard time with actual specimens losing their color and puddling at the bottoms of their jars. it was all pretty amazing. i did take this picture:

IT IS A SLOTH. maybe you can't tell how huge it is, but it's huge. the size of a small dinosaur. terrifying. the actual dinosaur skeletons were awesome, except for the aquatic one which made me never, ever want to go swimming again.

AUGH I JUST GOT A NEW RECORD PLAYER EVERYTHING IS ON HOLD