The Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name

[shereads]

I want one, too, even though now that you've pointed them out the three fingered hands do kind of creep me out.

- Mindy, wondering what kind of credentials you need to work in the nursery at the zoo...

I spent hours talking with zoo volunteers when I was struggling to get up the courage to change careers. The problem was, they were volunteers.

You need free time and proximity to a zoo, for some tasks.

The best job of all is meerkat keeper at the Miami zoo. As soon as I heard they had acquired a litter of 13 teenaged meerkats a few years ago, I called in sick at work and went to visit.

I had always pictured meerkats as taller than they are. At the Miami zoo, you're separated from them by a pane of glass, so you can get down nose to nose with them. As teenagers, our little group stood about eight inches tall.

Their keeper is paid staff, but she told me she barely makes a living wage and in fact wouldn't be able to afford to live in Miami if not for the fact that she's married to a lawyer. She has a degree in zoology and makes little more than a typical fast food teenager.

But what a great day at the office: At noon, she enters the meerkat exhibit and tosses them a handful of live crickets.

Meerkats + crickets = entertainment.

The wierd part about her interaction with them is they didn't seem interested in anything except her shoes. She has to destroy their tunnels once a week by caving the system in with the handle of a shovel, otherwise they'd run out of stuff to do and they'd grow bored. (One is always on lookout - planes overhead get the same response as bird of prey - and the rest dig tunnels and play, dig and play.)

You'd think they would begin to resent this woman coming in and destroying the tunnels, but they reacted as if her visit were just another fascinating appearance by The Rubber Work Boots. They'd gather around her feet, in every direction except the one where she was whacking the ground with her shovel handle, and they'd just contemplate her feet.

I want someone rich to support me so I can be a zookeeper. Someone else can have the komodo dragons; I'll take the meerkats and Asian River Otters (one of those came over to where I was standing at the rail, stood on her hind legs and showed me how she could balance a small rock on her head.)



Martians:

 

[minsue]

I witnessed the exact moment when the segregation began with my 4-year-old nephew. He was holding hands with his best friend, another boy, and two adult males (his dad and grandfather) went into uncomfortable giggles and exchanged a string of manly comments like,

"Let's hope you two are over that before you turn fifteen."



So they went back to hitting each other, and all was well.

Question for men with sons: Are all heterosexual fathers secretly terrified that their sons will be gay?

My boss, a widower with two teenaged sons, was giddy with relief one day when he announced that he'd found out his 15-year-old was having sex with a neighbor's daughter. Yessir, that's my boy. Chip off the old block, etc.

Sher, I've often wondered about that myself. I'll never understand it.

In my fourth year Spanish class my teacher said, in all honesty, that he would throw his son out of the house if he ever came home and said he was gay. Then he spent the rest of the period teaching the class a multitude of homophobic epithets en espanol.

Of course, this was after the whole class had, once again, told me that I was going to hell. There were only three females in the class: myself, a girl who also didn't think someone's sexual preference mattered (she was painfully shy so they shut her up pretty quickly), and a third girl who said that it's ok to be gay as long as you're celibate since otherwise it's against god. Great group of kids, eh?

Parents aren't only that way about their sons, either. My mother seemed relieved when I finally brought a boyfriend after a 1 1/2 - 2 year period in my early 20s without one and my father complained to me about one of my female friends a couple of times, "I don't like the way she's always touching you."
---------------------------------
I just realized how much I'm rambling and I've gotten myself good & pissed off so I'll stop now.

- Mindy

ps to Perdita - They are like cartoon hands. Thank you for pointing that out. I'm back to wanting one again.

 

[minsue]

Someone else can have the komodo dragons

*waving hand in the air*

Ooh! Ooh! Me! Me! Sheeerrrr! Pick me!!

- Mindy

(OK, now Sher joins Colly on my list of people who's names just do not stretch out well when writing. )

 

[SlickTony]

Otters are so lovely; it's great fun watching them swim. They're so good at it. I remember they used to have them at the zoo in Baton Rouge, but they had a tendency to escape. They've figured out how to contain them better in Jacksonville.

 

[MathGirl]

Perdita, what about hippos? Are they predominantly heterosexual?

Dear SheR,
According to Terry Pratchett's books, the subject is undecided. E.g. Keith and Roderick of Ankh-Morpork.
Helpfully,
MG