Today echoes of high school biology in the same pungent kind of way that bad envelope glue stays on your tounge. Biology class provides various forms of entertainment: bits of formaldehyde pig skin which can be tossed at the kid sitting across your lab bench, the bladder out of the plastic human torso which can be stolen and planted in your friend's lunch bag, or the video "Birth: The Story of Human Gestation" which can be rewritten in whispered back-of-the-classroom tones. There prevails, however, one landmark of biology class which all students of the scientific journey will inevitably encounter: the Fruit Fly Lab.
Today is June 9th, 2011 and it is like the Fruit Fly Lab. If you remember, during these lab proceedings the masses of fruit flies are closely monitored while living inside of a behemoth contraption. Said contraption looks like an outdated form of refrigeration. However, instead of of chilling breezes, the behemoth emits tepid air which smells of London during the Bubonic Plague. Therein live the fruit flies, cramped by the hundreds into worn-out, damaged beakers. Several times during the lab hour, the wood grain facade door of this non-refrigerator is opened, so that the students may observe their specimens. The interior air of the chamber attacks in waves, each more ferocious than the last. One can see, with the naked eye, the mixing of these bombastically foul waves with the relatively untainted air supply of rest of the laboratory.
That is today: hot and unyielding. There is almost a moment of respite and then the next onslaught of waves comes, hotter and stickier than the former. I am a fruit fly, living a life of misery inside of a muggy inferno which reeks of rotting seaweed.
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