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Elephants = awesome
Jan. 4th, 2007 02:35 pmI've been reading a lot about elephants today.
I'm back at work after a highly successful trip to my new favorite po' folks' clinic yesterday evening (If ever you find yourself sick and without insurance, or even with insurance but without a regular doctor, you should check out Callen-Lorde in Chelsea. My doctor, or rather PA, was a fabulous-in-all-connotations-of-the-word gay man who spoke in a drawl and called me "sweetheart"; though the total cost of visit and prescriptions came out almost identical to that of my somewhat disastrous trip to the other clinic to get my asthma diagnosis, I was in and out in an hour instead of six. Plus, their focus is on the LGBT community and they do free AIDS testing and annual gyno exams and all kinds of good stuff, and just about everyone who works there is part of that community, and though I myself am about 85% straight I think that's totally awesome. And they give out condoms like candy, so yay for that.)
Anyway. I'm here but my darling boss is out sick (my fault, I fear), and since I finished my project for her before lunch and she's not around to give me anything else to do, I've been sort of twiddling my thumbs for much of the day. Having exhausted the available material on my friends list and the one message board I frequent, I figured I'd check out what's accumulated in my much-neglected Bloglines RSS aggregator. Metafilter, it turns out, has been having some kind of elephant theme going on, so I've been reading a lot about elephants. That's how I discovered This wonderful NYTimes Magazine article about dysfunctional elephant populations and the eerie similarities between pachyderm culture and our own:
They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.
Also, I added Suffleupagus as a myspace friend. It's just been that kind of day.
I'm back at work after a highly successful trip to my new favorite po' folks' clinic yesterday evening (If ever you find yourself sick and without insurance, or even with insurance but without a regular doctor, you should check out Callen-Lorde in Chelsea. My doctor, or rather PA, was a fabulous-in-all-connotations-of-the-word gay man who spoke in a drawl and called me "sweetheart"; though the total cost of visit and prescriptions came out almost identical to that of my somewhat disastrous trip to the other clinic to get my asthma diagnosis, I was in and out in an hour instead of six. Plus, their focus is on the LGBT community and they do free AIDS testing and annual gyno exams and all kinds of good stuff, and just about everyone who works there is part of that community, and though I myself am about 85% straight I think that's totally awesome. And they give out condoms like candy, so yay for that.)
Anyway. I'm here but my darling boss is out sick (my fault, I fear), and since I finished my project for her before lunch and she's not around to give me anything else to do, I've been sort of twiddling my thumbs for much of the day. Having exhausted the available material on my friends list and the one message board I frequent, I figured I'd check out what's accumulated in my much-neglected Bloglines RSS aggregator. Metafilter, it turns out, has been having some kind of elephant theme going on, so I've been reading a lot about elephants. That's how I discovered This wonderful NYTimes Magazine article about dysfunctional elephant populations and the eerie similarities between pachyderm culture and our own:
They have no future without us. The question we are now forced to grapple with is whether we would mind a future without them, among the more mindful creatures on this earth and, in many ways, the most devoted. Indeed, the manner of the elephants’ continued keeping, their restoration and conservation, both in civil confines and what’s left of wild ones, is now drawing the attention of everyone from naturalists to neuroscientists. Too much about elephants, in the end — their desires and devotions, their vulnerability and tremendous resilience — reminds us of ourselves to dismiss out of hand this revolt they’re currently staging against their own dismissal. And while our concern may ultimately be rooted in that most human of impulses — the preservation of our own self-image — the great paradox about this particular moment in our history with elephants is that saving them will require finally getting past ourselves; it will demand the ultimate act of deep, interspecies empathy.
Also, I added Suffleupagus as a myspace friend. It's just been that kind of day.
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