Double Flee A

the ice fish

In the southern ocean near Antarctica is a group of fish whose blood is totally clear. They have no red blood cells. Red blood cells have been characteristic of invertebrates for over 500 million years, but it wasn't working for the cold water fish because red blood cells made their blood more viscous and harder to pump in the sub-zero temperature. So how they get oxygen is, they pump a lot more blood around with a bigger heart at the same O2 saturation as the surrounding seawater. Problem solved.

Even though they have no need for it, their DNA contains an old, leftover remnant of a gene that produces hemoglobin. It isn't active, it just sits there the way genes do when they're not being used any more, an unused vestige.

It's a good word, vestigial. It describes things that are still uselessly hanging around. Most of the time they're a nuisance. That's how appendices are in humans, as I found out at the hospital this year with my wife.

There are also cultural vestiges. For example, in metropolitan areas at this time of year the highways thunder and scream with cars cutting each other off to get their occupants (as quickly as possible!) twenty miles out of town to relaxing hay rides, a sort of living fairy-tale postcard from a pastoral past most people weren't around for, but that we like to imagine was real anyway. Fake nostalgia informs much of our tradition in the United States. There is another cultural vestige I'm more interested in discussing, though.

It's the vestige of my expectations for the civilization of academe, at any institute of higher learning. It must be said that my expectations low as they are, are unreasonable: to associate the school I go to with academe is like shaving a reptile: why. When describing my school the word prestige comes to mind only as a sick joke. (I'm just in it for the watchmaking certification, for anyone just joining us and asking the obvious question.)

Expectations low, check. Thus is my happiness guaranteed. But what could I expect from standing outside a classroom and looking in -- not peering, mind you, not fogging up a window, not the over-close, loitering, hallway pollution equivalent of breathing heavily into the receiver. What could I expect.

Walking back to my classroom from the computer lab, passing a classroom, out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed words that I thought said "escapement principles" just above the instructor's gesturing hand, so I stopped to see what they said, which was "exponent principles". Much to my satisfaction my vision still extends that far after looking through magnifiers all day for a couple of years now. While I was at it, I decided to stay for a second and find out what "exponent principles" were. Two very plain women looked over at me the way cows look at fenceposts. This is nothing new to me since I once worked on a farm, so I ignored them and read on.

A to B means A times A, B times. So far so good.

I went on. A to the minus B. But I was not to learn this riddle of the ages. Things were about to get uninteresting. Because then the thinkable, the extremely predictable, the most boring thing that could happen, happened. It's like work even telling you about it.

Suddenly the entire portion of the class that was within the horizons of my visual field through the small window was looking at me. Next, the doorway no longer contained a nice door, but a disappointing-looking thirty year old pudgy asian guy, asking me a question, and in a tone that is strangely familiar... Why must the bitch-ass people even ask, when by so doing it is evident that that helping is clearly the last thing they would prefer to do? Why not just say "Hey fuck you, get outta here." At least it's honest.

"Can I help you?"

Normally it is a woman that asks me this question in this way, and I have a stock answer that never fails me. I smile like a guy who's about to get laid and and ask them loudly what they had in mind, making sure everybody can hear. This was a man, though, who I'm not taking any chances on. I have broadband and I know that Asian people do all kinds of bizarre sexual things to each other, so this response doesn't likely produce an outcome that holds any allure for me.

I said no, suggested that he could instead help them though, and pointed in his class, since I was just walking by and they were paying to be there. I blinked. The door closed as abruptly as it had opened, and I wondered many things.

How is it that this place can be accredited, employing staff of this low personal caliber? How much dumber will the lessons be in the future? In this very room in thirty years will someone be teaching the principles of integers? "Repeat after me, NUM-BER!!"

Does it surprise me that the accrediting body, the same body that is responsible for verifying the quality of the education avaiable in this meager institute, has also sealed with approval the system that produced these college-age bird-brains who have to be re-taught seventh-grade math? No! It doesn't surprise me one bit.

I looked in the window for another moment. The class sat there incomprehensibly incomprehending, the way they will for the rest of their lives. They don't need a teacher as much a feeding tube, and in a lucky accident, what they've got more closely resembles the latter.

I try to be nice to people. Really. They just make it so goddamn hard.

So the ice fish didn't turn out to have much to do with the story, but it's a blog and my expectations are low, so my happiness is more or less assured.

posted by dale @ 5:46 PM