The Life of Pi

There’s that one cliché first-date get-to-know-ya whatever question that’s like “if you were an animal, what animal would you be?” Yeah, it’s a stupid question. I mean, let’s be honest. Who cares. You can’t be an animal, unless you’re a Hindu, and even if I wanted the be a cow, the point is that you don’t get to choose. Unless there’s a Sanskrit “previous-life to next-life-form” equivalence chart, in which case I could try to tailor my actions in this life to ensure me birth as a platypus in the next. It’s got to be a delicate balance, though. I mean, wouldn’t it suck if you spent your whole life getting the precise karma coefficient required to come back as an eagle, and, with your dying breath, you killed an ant, and came back as the next animal down, which could be a rhinoceros, for all you know? I mean, that’d be rough. That’d be a pretty big risk. Maybe you’d have to find TWO animals next to each other, in case you accidentally did something good or bad at the last minute.

Maybe I should start an RSS feed for my karma score. I mean, knowing my credit score is interesting, but my karma score… that’d be valuable information! I might drive a little more carefully, for example, if I knew my reincarnation coefficient was at “sewer rat” or, worse still, “ogre”.

Tangent.

The point is that I now have a stupid answer to that stupid question. I mean, Oh, if I could have all those first dates back! Things could be so different!

…

But really, it’s quite obvious. I’d be a goldfish. Duh. I mean, I’m half-way there already, really. Think about it. My skin is scaly and gold… and I love water!

Er. No. Actually, what I was saying is that, mostly, I have the attention span of a goldfish. They have, what is it? A seven second short-term memory? I mean, my memory’s fine, it’s just remembering what I was doing seven seconds ago that gets a bit troubling. But really, I can’t believe she’d do that. That was so out of character for her.

Sorry. That was shameless.

Similarly, though, goldfish are exceptional fish (ah, yes! I’m an exceptional fish!) for their uncanny ability to grow to fill any space. In a small bowl, say, a goldfish might not grow (despite any amount of food) to be any more than 4 or 5cm. In a pond, however, a goldfish might grow to be 25 or 30cm! This is truly amazing!

A line that touches but does not cross a curve.

Similarly amazing is my ability to fill any amount of open space with (STUFF!!). I noted this similarity walking into the long room (not MY room, mind you) in the quad this morning, at some ungodly hour. At some point last night, apparently my own, appropriated, corner just wasn’t big enough for me, and I began to spread on to my third table. There are four tables in the room. I mean, we’re talking big tables, here. And, somehow, my stuff is just everywhere! Books, paper, more papers, pens, stationary, folders… it’s a mess. But it’s only because there’s so much space! With only a 2×2′ desk that I could call my own, my mess would be quite neat and tidy. I just … expand to fill any space.

Rather like a gold-fish.

Also, like a goldfish, I’m seriously reconsidering my grad-school thoughts. The limit of my interest in math, as “X” approaches a grad-school-satisfactory-amount, is … zero, to say nothing of my ABILITY (which, as the course numbers go toward infinity, also approaches zero).

Now, thinking, maybe I should just go buy a goldfish. Oh, the conversations we could have. And are the Dodgers still playing in Brooklyn? I mean, is it even baseball season?