Up close and personal

Visual hair report especially for the scientists out there: Laura buzzed mine, which was getting to the point where it looked post-chemo-scraggly in a way we don't really have an adjective for. Imagine my delight to snap a picture of what I could see through my little hobby microscope (every home should have one) by putting my puny camera right up against the lens. Dig this ca-razy shot of the different thicknesses of the hairs -- that really skinnyminny one is a hair as it first appeared after chemo. Told you it was soft! The thick stalks are where the dog hair clippers buzzed off the ends. Note that white hairs really are transparent.

I'm leaving the microscope around the house for a bit. Every now and then I go through a period of examining everything that buzzes or crawls by or can be squished between two glass slides.

I snagged this earwig, below left, off a blueberry bush and pressed him between two glass slides. Sorry, sorry, sorry! I kept saying as I pressed the glass together. Bleccch.

This year we have had a spate of earwigs on the blueberry bushes. How about this for the continuum of ick to yum? First, this morning's harvested yum, to the right.  Now, below left, accompanying ick -- a few of said earwig's limbs.

I realize that these little earwig legs might not look all that ick in this photo. You had to be there, with your eye pressed to the microscope. I jumped more than a few times while looking at his still twitching body, now seeming waaaaay larger than life. I let out a little scream once after the pinchers twitched long after separating from the rest of the body. "JEEZUS CRIMINY!" I squealed. This is going to cost me, bad, in terms of karma. I should have found a way to give it some ether, send it off to dream of its icky insect ancestors while I made my little point about ick and yum.

But here's the thing: how come you have to have ick to want to write about yum? I've been wondering this a lot lately. Earwigs on blueberry bushes aside, I am less compelled to write about delightful stuff when I am going through less difficult stuff. That sucks. I feel like a cliché, like the heavy-lidded poet who - phooooooooooo -- blows weary smoke while writing a sublime poem about beauty.

Or does it suck? Is it simply an exceeding kindness that the Universe helps us appreciate yum when we are stuck in ick? Is it that writing about ick helps me feel yum? Does thinking-that-it-sucks-to-have-bad-stuff-make-you-appreciate-the-good just existential whining? Phooooooooooooo.

NEWSFLASH, a few hours later. I just took a final peek at the gradually dessicating earwig before rinsing it off the microscope slide. OMG, It had ick of its own, the poor thing. Here is a shot of a, well, microscopic mite that, despite its dead host, seems as happy as a clam.

Except clams, of all people, apparently deal with a lot of crud in order to be so happy. I mean, jeez, they EAT crud.

Quod erat demonstratum.