Troglodyte

Troglodyte (n)- 1. a prehistoric cave dweller. 2. a person living alone.

I'm focusing on school and taking daily trips to the beach. Everyone else seems to be making great friendships, cavorting off to game parks, camping trips, Pride parades, or Garden Route towns but I'm here. My biochem teacher is making us memorize the structure and ionization constants of all the common amino acids; my zoo professor is making us memorize the cardiovascular plans of each order of vertebrates. It's not all that challenging but I simply don't see the point. All of this exists in tables in books where we could consult them if we needed to know the venous system of squamatans for some curious reason. Memorization isn't learning, isn't exposing the relationships that underlie the foundations of the natural world. I have to dissect a whole chicken, clean the bones, and then mount the skeleton for marking. When can I go see the elephants? I don't want to take apart any more animals. At least I feel confident that conservation biology and ecology is what I want to be doing.

I went into Central with Melina on Saturday. We went to the Donkin Reserve and walked up and down Govan Mbeki Avenue, sort of the main drag of downtown Port Elizabeth. I'm pretty sure you could find anything you wanted on that street, from beadwork to fresh fish to clothes to cell phones, all sold by hawkers. The shops are an amalgamation of convenience stores, family-run operations, and full-on fancy corporations like Woolworths or Adidas. People were yelling, cars were honking, babies were crying. We took the taxi to get there, a mini-van that runs up and down the street honking while a man leans out the window and yells "Town? Town? Town?" to solicit your patronage. This was the first time I truly felt I was in a foreign place, not in the diplomatic sense but in the mysterious, hitherto unknown excitement.

 

I bought a bottle of high thujone content absinthe since it's illegal in the States and I'm highly curious. It is a lovely color but the taste is a bit abrasive. I've been preparing it in the French method because I'm afraid of lighting it on fire in the Bohemian fashion.

I swear, I did nothing to the color of the drink in the photograph; I just selected the green tones. Isn't it pretty?

Everything is fine and well. I sort of wish I could come home already. It's challenging to look forward to what the future may hold when the present is so unexpectedly dull. I expected it would take time to adjust but I did not foresee this crushing solitude. At least, I didn't foresee solitude being a problem. See how my friends and family have spoilt me? 

Back to fish hearts and chicken guts. Did you know there are four names for the same part of the fish heart? It's driving me nuts. I think I'm going to start my Peace Corps application this week. 

Happy Birthday, Alice.