bees in birds and bugs in brains

Seussian nightmares.

The other day I was walking up the street and looked down to see a dead bird in the gutter. This wasn't disturbing in itself, even with its guts splayed open to the morning sun, but there swarming about in the bird's chest was a handful of bees, not just flitting about with an idle buzz but actively digging into the avian. It was actually kind of beautiful, and if I hadn't been so shocked and on my way to school I would have gotten my camera to take a picture of it. In hindsight it seemed an odd thing for bees to be doing, last time I checked I didn't think bees ate flesh, and beyond colony-collapse disorder I wonder just how else the environment is effecting wildlife.

Perhaps more disturbing was a news report I stumbled on (via posthuman blues) about brain-eating amoebas that have killed 6 people in southern lakes this year, an unprecedented spike in the number of deaths by the brain-eating amoeba, which if you splash in a still, algae-covered lake and get water up your nose, will crawl up to your brain and eat till you die, in two deliriously painful weeks. That this is real disturbs me, that the amoeba's thrive in hot water and the scientist studying them thinks we'll only see more of this as global warming continues disturbs me. That the symptoms of having your brain eaten by an amoeba are a stiff neck and headaches disturbs me (because that's how I've been feeling for the past week, though I think I'm suffering more from spending too much time looking back and forth between my computer and books for this research paper). I think what disturbs me the most is trying not to imagine these creatures somehow getting into a city's water supply. Actually I am more frightened by the possibility of spiders crawling into my ears and laying eggs, which I'm not sure is really possible but I still don't know what happened to that big mother who was crawling around the corners of my room all last week.

I actually have more important things to say, but they are being quietly consumed by the massive amount of research I'm doing to interpret the Ṛigveda myth of Indra slaying Vṛta for class. Having not done a research paper in years I'm actually quite excited. It's like an enormous jigsaw puzzle using information as the pieces, and with no final picture but what you want to make it. Of course, I also love organizing information, a trait that seems to run in my family, and hopefully I'll actually get around to writing the paper before it's due in a week and a half.