mating habits of primates and the single muskrat

it's weird to spend half the night flipping over to check the clock.
why spend all this effort waiting for time? time will never wait for me.

i'm pretty nervous about today. i was putting today off for a while... and then the magical powers of responsibility flipped on and i started swimming toward today with heavy arms. it hardly seems fair that in 24 hours i'll just be waking up feeling nervous about tomorrow too, but is life ever fair? har har har.
peter called early this morning, and said things that were reassuring and caring on his way to (what sounded like) the purchase of a banana. it was a really sweet and energizing way to start my day.
i'm reading a very interesting book called african genesis, which explores the social and communicative habits of animals-- never failing to include humans as part of the biologically-driven animal kingdom. it's fascinating, and i can't wait to find more books like this that aren't quite as old. in the 30s, a publication came out called "the sexual habits of primates," which created quite a stir because 'primates' is what the hierarchies of the established church of england were called. so the title was changed to "the sexual habits of monkeys and apes," which is just the kind of thing that cracks me up when i'm at work.

i fell asleep last night to the chapter about territorial behavior, which i've never really read about before, and is exploding my brain all over the place. it's incredible to learn about the factors behind how large an animal's territory is -- in the winter a moose guards a space the size of a back yard; in the summer he considers himself the master of up to ten square miles. i liked this a lot:

nature, by instilling in the individual a demand for exclusive living space, insures two consequences: first, that a minimum number of individuals in any population will be enabled to breed in relative security and pass on in fair certainty the conformation of their kind. and second, that the surplus will be cast to the wolves; to the owls, to the foxes, to the plagues and famines and lonely, unfamiliar places, there to make the most of perilous conditions or to die.

well, i'll be damned. i would like to make a short film someday about a transient muskrat who is exiled from the territory of his muskrat brethren, to see if he could make the most of his perilous, unfamiliar place. it actually strikes me as something that could be heartbreakingly beautiful. how would the muskrat react to his exile? how fast or nervously would he tread around his new surroundings? what instincts would kick in first, and how would he secure a safe sanctuary alone? what would the muskrat's behavior look like over time, and if he out-smarted the foxes and wolves, what would the rest of his muskrat life look like?

maybe this is the credo of the siblingless-child, but i honestly don't know how i'd get through days like this or weeks of my life without a really, really good book.