Chirky

When I was a senior in high school, Bio 2 was one of my favorite classes. I
think it had little to do with my teacher, who once told me that she was
allergic to nearly every food and only kept tomatoes and beer in her
refrigerator at home. What an odd thing to tell a student.

My favorite parts of the semester were dissections and classifications. We
dissected a variety of worms, a shark, various frogs, the normal. Toward the end
of the semester we each were given our own baby pig. I remember pulling back
individual layers of skin until I finally reached the interior cavity of the
pig's body. I examined the organs, and pig's blubber, and its eye balls, etc.
Even eight years later, that is my favorite memory of high school. I decided
then that I wanted to go to medical school, just so I could dissect a cadaver �
it was absolutely fascinating to me!

After graduating from college with ungodly amounts of student debt, I decided
against medical school.

Classifications was exciting to me just because I got to research and classify
different species of animals, etc. I remember Tomatoes and Beer handing each
student a baggie when we arrived in class, filled with about 25 pictures she had
clipped from an assortment of magazines. Our assignment was to review each
picture and classify the animal found in each image.

When I was about halfway finished flipping through the images in my baggie, a
picture jumped out at me, and I screamed. In class. Tomatoes and Beer looked at
me and said, "Jessica! Girl, what are you doing?" I tried to explain to her that
when I looked at the image, it scared me, and my first reaction was to scream.
She rolled her eyes at me, scoffed, and said, "Get on with it."

Pleading, in my typical dramatic style, I said, "Ms. Tomato and Beer,
puh-lllleeeaaaassssseeeee don't make me classify this snake. I absolutely CAN.
NOT. STAND. LOOKING. AT. IT." After listening to my whining for approximately
thirty seconds, she finally gave in and handed me a different picture.

When I was young, my brother and I would run around the field across from our
house in Washington (state, not District) with a five-gallon bucket, catching
grass snakes. They were about two feet long, green, and skinny like a pencil. I
think that the innocence and stupidity of my age allowed me the courage to do
this.

I am not sure at what point my mind turned. Perhaps when we moved to Texas and
the snakes were five feet long, three inches in diameter, and black. Yes, that
could have been it. That, and the memory of me calling my dad to come look at
it, and him unloading his shotgun into its long, slithering, disgusting body.

As if snakes aren't disgusting and scary enough, I recently learned that some
species can FLY.

Another view of the tree snake in flight. � Jake Socha

I'm going to need to have a LOONNNGGGG talk with God about this after I die.