After today’s hearty lunch, my friends and I planned to have a movie marathon in the waiting shed near my dorm (that is, in actual fact, not a dorm. Explaining the grounds on which I was allowed to stay there is getting really exhausting so let me call it “charity house”.) We ended up dividing into factions. There were five of us: one wanted to finish this thriller movie, Amusement; three huddled up in a corner to watch Friends with Benefits; and I, being the sore, emotionally widowed woman I quote myself to be, wound up writing this blog post.
We dropped by the charity house to retrieve my and my roommate’s laptops. What happened next was sort of life-changing in an optimistic sense . . . But immensely gross in another.
On one of the windows in the porch, we saw bee land on a heap of soil we presumed to be a pseudo-hive (a hive is a shelter for a swarm of social bees like honeybees; I’m pretty sure that bee wasn’t one of them) It was carrying a leaf. Yes, I know bees don’t eat leaves (or do they?) so I leaned in, with much precaution, to take a better look. Oh, good news. The bee didn’t mutate and turn into a leaf-eating wasp. The “leaf” was a caterpillar—a live, fat caterpillar that probably had a family waiting for it in some bush down the street. It was a caterpillar probably due to metamorphose sometime next week, coming out of that cocoon to be the poster animal for homosexuality and there it was, being stuffed into the pseudo-hive of an uncaring wasp that worried more about the balance of the ecosystem, not the preservation of life.
I guess the ecosystem matters more for everyone. Still, it’s barbaric to shove a helpless (juicy) caterpillar to a house of hungry baby bees.
That led me to think, what if I was born a caterpillar? Imagine how many days I’ll have to live. The average lifespan of a butterfly is a little more than two weeks. Plus, there are countless possibilities that may account for my death. I can be eaten by insects on a higher position in the food chain. I can be drowned in doses of environmental-friendly insecticide. Kids can come, pick me off my leaf, and impale my soft wriggling body on a barbecue stick.
Or worse: I can be eaten by aboriginals. (It’s not that I’m racist, but you know how bad death via frying pan is.)
It felt like watching a live feature of Animal Planet. It really did.
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Yeah, pretty shallow post. Inexcusable, at the very least. I was studying for tomorrow's Chemistry long exam, what can you expect?
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