France, France Revolution

I understand that writing is supposed to be a better way to organize and collate your thoughts, or so that hobo told me. Of course, it is entirely possible he said this to dissaude me from eating his brain to gain his insight.

It has come to my attention that I have not posted in a signficant time, and that this may have a detrimental effect upon my somewhat limited readership, but perhaps as the aforementioned passage indicates, this will be an exercise for myself more than for anyone else.

Of particular interest have been my activities during the long summer months in which we all must endure this abomidable weather. Well, after a brief hiatus from college and a greater wealth of social activity I have returned to the campus to live (not at home) and work for money, which I am exchanging for goods and services. I have two part-time jobs, one is in the mornings, the other in the afternoons, a clever organizational ploy by myself.

The morning job is for the Lewis and Clark College biology department where I help them keep everything organized and running smoothly so the professors and student researchers can concentrate on, well, their research and not menial tasks left to the students of humanities. I do things like fill deionized water carboys, wash dishes, feed spiders, and in general do little "go-fer" tasks for my employer, whose task it is to bring order and harmony to the naturally chaotic environment of the four to five research programs that are all happening at the same time (in the case of this year, four). The majority of my time is spent happily washing dishes, which is more personally rewarding than it sounds. I have an entire lab station to myself, which is strategically placed in the center of the entire cluster of labs, where I am left to my own devices as I turn piles of slimey and odorous dishes into scientifically sterilized glassware ready for the mighty auto-clave (one of my favorite machines). For the most part I enjoy it because the lab is kept cool and I get to stand up and walk around.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I mention feeding spiders? That's right, spiders. Now, when I applied for this job, I actually wasn't required to fill out any paperwork, or go through an application process, I was immediately accepted for the job on my basis of being willing to do it. I am the third person to hold this position this summer, the previous two both quitting within a week of starting. Why? Spiders. The Binford lab has a two-year grant to do research on little known spider toxins, specifically those of the Brown Recluse, which has cousins within its geneis all over the planet. Well, how do we feed spiders? I walk down a long hall from the central lab complex to a small, smelly room full of chirping crickets completely unaware that their sole purpose in life is to become spider compost. There is a door set into the back wall of the last lab, at least four inches thick with a tiny double-layered window and a heavy locking mechanism. Beside the door is an array of gauges and swithes that carefully manage the delicate ecosystem inside. I am then locked inside this room, which is in dimension similar to a walk-in closet, which has only one working, flickering flourcent light and I am left inside for over three hours as I tend to some three hundred spiders that line the walls in small clear plastic cages that go above my head level. To feed these arachnid horrors, I must take a device known as a "puter" (I'm not sure I spelled that correctly) which consists of a plastic tube with some nylon inside it to create a thin physical barrier between both ends. I place it over one of the crickets in the broiling mass of insect apendages and I suck it into the tube. Yes, I suck a cricket up into a tube I am holding in my mouth. I have the sexual innuendos repeatedly mentioned to me, my only response is to remind everyone that it was a biology major, not I, who invented this method. I then open one of the spider cages and blow (yes, suck and blow) the cricket inside and quickly seal it before my poisonous prisoner desides I'm more palatable than the cricket and I watch nature take its course. Maybe I'm being overly verbose about this, that I'm making it worse than it actually it is, I dare you to come down and do this shit for three to four hours, locked in that tiny room with spiders that ALL will send you to the hospital if they bite you, well, assuming you don't die before you get there. So yeah, I had to conquer some fears of poisonous spiders that kill me during the course of the summer, good stuff.

On the other hand, in the afternoon's I work in the McAfee office, specifically in the Lewis and Clark Department of Public Affairs and Communications. My job titly is Student Media Analyst. That's fancy talk for "copy bitch." See, whenever anybody in any newspaper, magazine, TV, or Radio spot mentions "Lewis and Clark College" in any way, no matter how small, a copy gets sent to the college via these large organizations that do nothing but look for such things. The articles go to my boss's boss, who reviews them and picks out important articles about the president and such, and then sends me hundreds of clippings. I fit them into 8.5x11" or 11x17" copies to be distributed for review, then take the originals and enter them into an electronic database with about 16,000 articles about L&C and categorize them and sort them into the electronic archives. I then take the reviewed copies, copy them some more and distribute them to know less than five different people within the college bueracracy, sometimes by hand, sometimes by mail. I then personally make envelopes and mail the articles about faculty to each faculty member, and then I take my master copies, sort them by a number of categories and sort them in our massive physical archives, which take up a monolithic basement in the bowels of Lewis and Clark, where few students have roamed. It's more boring than it sounds, and it sounds pretty boring, but it's kind of neat to be the central conduit in which an unfathomable amount of information flows. Even my position in the office behind a cubicle wall, but in front of the central copying cluster makes me something of a wallfly to ALL THINGS that happen in the PubCom office. The knowledge, it fills me, it is neat.

Anyway, that's a lot of text, but it's good to sit down and just write, so enjoy the fruits of my labor. I know it's customary to read a blog, say "that's neat" and then go to the next page, but if you could leave a little comment, even unrelated, I would be greatly abliged to know if anyone reads my web page anymore.

Charles