Ceps Maniac

Yesterday was a sunny, fresh autumn day that had immediately followed a wet day. Those are the ideal conditions for a bit of mushrooming. You can tell when mushroom conditions are perfect: lots of waterlogged cow pats, preferably with a shiny little pool of water on top. This is not where mushrooms are found but watery cowpats are a good omen.

So, with such perfect conditions, the Sous Chef and I decided to go out and see what we could find for our  mushroom risotto. He was particularly keen to find some Penny Bun Boletes (Ceps or Porcini mushrooms) but other boletes would be fine, too. Boletes are not like the mushrooms with ridges or gills underneath their caps, a bolete’s underside looks like a sponge, with lots of pores. We tend to find beech and birch boletes, and slippery jack (another good ‘un), but it’s ceps that are the best.  When it comes to other mushrooms, the gilled sort, we have a few set favourites that we can recognise with confidence but we also took along two books on mushrooms to help with identification on some borderline cases. These gilled types are the ones that contain the deadly-poisonous varieties so while boletes are pretty safe, with the others you have to be sure. Really sure. (some make you feel unwell, others can kill you without warning. Kidney failure). So you have to be sure.

Through the first half of the walk we found lots of interesting but sadly inedible mushrooms and a few poisonous ones, too. We collected some unknown ones to check the sporeprint (place the cap on a sheet of paper, check an hour later what colour spores it drop. This can help narrow it down a bit) but that was just for scientific curiosity, not for eating. It was getting late and still no ceps. The Sous Chef was getting increasingly anxious to find some ceps (“you’re ceps mad, you are”)and eventually we were not disappointed. We found four remarkable specimens and felt extremely pleased with our find. Woodland wildlife likes a penny bun bolete as much as we do, so they often get pretty nibbled but we found some in good condition.

It was some time later we bumped into a group of 6 walkers who had a basket chock FULL of boletes. It put our meagre find into the shade. But hey – we had three large boletes and a small one, enough for our risotto and any more would just be greedy.

A train ride home and a hot bath followed by a creamy wild mushroom risotto, cooked with the day’s find. Delicious! I flippin’ love autumn.

Yesterday’s exam

I’ve spent the past two weeks talking nonsense, about interrogative themes, intersubjectivity and interpretative reportoires. Not to mention the paranoid-schizoid position, the pre-reflexive self and the quoting of opinions of existentialist philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Heidegger.

This revision has driven the Sous Chef potty, as he tries to seem interested. Later stages saw him test me on concepts, theories, studies but mostly, what I need more than anything to get a decent mark in this course, is the right-sounding waffle. Psychology generally, has been dominated by the scientific, statistically significant, replicable results type psychology but this course has been the voice for the qualitative, touchy-feel, airy-fairy, postmodernistic waffle side of psychology. It’s driven me batty but in the last three weeks it all started to make some sense.

The exam was yesterday morning. One chap was severely reprimanded for bringing his revision notes to the exam desk (admittedly, he was found reading them before the exam had actually started but even so. How desperate and/or stupid is that?)

The exam was three questions in three hours. Each part had a choice of two questions and you chose one from each section. As soon as I read the options, all the information fell out of my head. I went totally blank.

I ate some fruit pastilles to calm myself down and read the questions again. I kept re-reading them and realised I was getting nowhere so just started to scribble some notes for a plan on the first page.

I wrote out three essay plans/brain dumps in the first half hour (I like to get all the info out before I start any proper essay writing) spaced apart to allow essay space between for about three sides of essay and then set to it, 50 minutes for each essay.

The first essay was on unconscious and conscious processes in the formation of subjectivity and started on it. I’d got about half way and checked the time: it had been only 15 minutes! the time was going really slowly, I had plenty of time, so I relaxed and started to enjoy myself.  Yes, I was enjoying the exam!

The second essay was on attitudes  and the last on intra-group processes. I was doing swell until somewhere, midway through the final essay, just as I was starting to critical evaluate the theory of Groupthink (Janis, 1972) that I totally lost the plot. Mid-paragraph I had no idea what I was going to say next, no point to bring out and I was in a dead-end.  One packet of Rolos later and I decided just to change the subject to Phenomenology, drag in some stuff from a chapter on the Fundamental Attribution Error (something about not splitting the world into discrete objects but looking at individual/group identities as a whole rather than separate things) and at 5 minutes before the end, wrote “run out of time“, added some bullet points of good ideas and a quick conclusion that may or may not have had anything to do with the preceding essay.

Ok, so that last essay went rather badly, but I did manage two decentish essays before that. On the strength of my previous exams and assignment, I would need only 55% or better for a 2:1 (a First is sadly out of the question, as I didn’t get a high enough grade average in my assignments – a tutor who declared herself a ‘tough marker’ back in February made me doubt I’d manage a First anyway, so it’s not a big surprise). I won’t hear what my exam result until 18th December, but with a threshold as low as 55%, which I achieved for sure, there’s no need for nailbiting.

Just one more assignment (a biggish one, due 24th November) and my degree will be finished. Hurrah!

Revision and a Robert’s

That TMA I was trying to write, I got a respectable 82% in it. Go me! And now I knuckle down into revision for the exam later this month.

Revision is boring. But also interesting. But mostly it’s  boring. Each evening I get home, I get changed out of my cycling togs, have some food and then drag myself off somewhere quiet, to read up on what the Discursive Psychological perspective has to offer on our understandings of intergroup conflict or similar nonsense. I find myself dropping “interpretative repertoires’ and ‘intersubjectivity’ into conversation with the Sous Chef and so far, he hasn’t tried to quietly murder me for boring the pants off him (yet).

I’ve allocated 14 hours per chapter, with 9 chapters in all. The exam is Tuesday week. Mind you, it’s not been entirely wall-to-wall revision. As an end-of-course gift to me,  I took a day off work to go get myself measured up for a custom-made bicycle frame. It was a little undignified having my inside leg measured (33 inches) and locating the top of my thigh bone required some sharp prods into an extremely well-padded area (yes, my saddlebags are on me, not the bike) and then endless bicycle-speak to ensure I get exactly what I want:  Top tubes, bottom brackets, seat stays, crank lengths – the potential for making a complete tit of myself was pretty high, but I think I managed not to completely sound like an idiot, particularly with the Sous Chef being fluent in bicycle-ese and stepping in whenever my vocabulary failed me.

So, three or so months from now, I shall have my own custom-made bike. The only question now is: what colour should I go for? I’ve provisionally asked for black, but I’m quite taken with burgundy. I could go for a three-tone bike, or one with flashy designs, but I don’t want it looking too desirable (read: worth stealing).

On the train home, The Sous Chef said: “with you getting a Robert’s [frame] like mine, that’s rather like being married”.   – Erm, is it? I thought getting married involved a ring, some vows and a wedding-type event, but I might have that wrong.  If getting married involves buying a £900 bicycle frame and cycling around the world on it, then I guess that explains why fewer people are doing it these days.  I have no idea how his mind has constructed that little logic but it’s quite sweet.

As it is, I’m very excited about my Robert’s frame and hope it’s a new era in a very happy and loving relationship. There’ll be some bumps along the way and we won’t always have a tail wind but hopefully we can have a great ride anyway.

on having children

ok, I’m actually procrastinating, as I’ve an essay on trait theory to write and I’m supposed my first draft done by the end of today.

I’ve always known I would want to have children some day. I’ve never gone through that baby-fever some women speak of, where it becomes an obsession and they stare wistfully into the prams and pushchairs around them. That might be because I’m not actually a big fan of infants (they get interesting when they can start to speak and you learn how they’re making sense of the world) and yet I’ve known that some day I’d like to be a mother. It’s hard to put into words but it’s about that guardianship of someone, passing on the baton of life, raising them to deal with the world and hopefully equip them with the skills and resources needed to thrive. It’s a big task but it does comes with love to sweeten the deal. As a non-parent I realise I can imagine all sorts of wonders and imagine the blissful happiness of holding a swaddled infant, safe in ignorance of the difficulties, the stresses and the periods of intense boredom that are nearer the truth, but it’s not about babies. A parent is a mentor and wanting to be that is something I’ve felt for as long as I could remember. That is why it is with regret that I look at my life and think: where are my children? How come I haven’t got any yet?

The Sous Chef and I have had several conversations about children. Even before we were a couple, we would spend evenings talking about life, pasts, hopes, futures. He knew how I felt about children and I knew how he felt, too. That is why, the day after we first kissed and I realised the attraction went both ways  that he was ready to call the whole thing off. He told me “perhaps we should just stop this right now, before we get in too deep. We want different things”. He knew already that I wanted children someday and he was very sure he did not. He would have dreams in which I announced I was pregnant and he felt despair and wanted to run under a bus. Telling me this made his message plain: no children. Not with me.

Calling it all off might have been sensible but I had already fallen in love with him and knew I would not be able to walk away. Love is a terrible and beautiful affliction. Decisions that used to be easy become very hard. I spent a long time thinking about coming to terms with remaining childless. Would I become bitter when it all becomes too late? How would it affect our relationship in later years? What if I get that baby-fever? I do not have the right to insist he become a father for my sake. If I stay with him and never have a child, I must be sure I know that that was ultimately my decision. I cannot hold him responsible for my decision to stay.  And still it was hard.

Over the course of the relationship, we talked of children occasionally. Whenever we visited friends of his (who have four terrific children) and his brother (who has two wonderful daughters) I’d bring up the subject (it helps when you have positive exemplars of children to broach the subject) and each time he confessed he could see there were rewards to parenthood but having children would happen ‘with great reluctance’ on his part. He feared it, even though he could also tell that people with children have an extra dimension to their lives and this dimension continues. Having children isn’t just having a baby, it’s a person who will one day be fifteen, twenty, fifty years old. Infancy is just the first stage.

Over time he spoke more acceptingly about children. He seemed to have started applying that ‘what if…’ to his own life. He started to speak less in absolutes and seemed to have warmed to the idea, but I knew our current situation was not conducive to having children. I had a degree to finish We still wanted to travel. There were obstacles that just had to be moved out of the way before having children becomes a possible prospect.

Since his saying he is no longer completely opposed to the idea of having children, I’ve felt that I’ve had to handle this delicately. It’s fragile and I feel I need to keep him at this point until my degree is finished and we’ve traveled together for a year, as planned. Only after all that can we even begin to think about bringing a child into our world.I am afraid that when we get back from our travels, he’ll have changed his mind. Asking him to be a father is something I don’t take lightly and he is free to change his mind at any time.

A few evenings ago, we’d had a fair amount of wine, and the subject of children came up again. This time I heard him say he most certainly wanted children and he hopes I really am up for that sort of challenge when we get back from our big trip.

cripes!

of course I’m up for it. It looks like he’s thinking of being the primary carer with me out earning money for the family. I confess this will almost certainly make me very jealous and becoming the main breadwinner is a terrifying prospect but I think it’s worth giving it a go.

I love it when a plan comes together

The Sous Chef and I just got back from a cycling trip in Brittany (but sans cycle computer so we have no idea how many miles we did). The Sous Chef proved worthy of his name, as we cooked some excellent dishes on our new primus optima stove (including spaghetti carbonara, risotto, fried bananas) which is no mean feat with limited ingredient options and only one heat source. We’re planning to take the stove with us on our round the world cycle tour, as it burns on anything (even petrol if necessary).  Since we’re carting all our provisions around on bikes and up every hill it means packing very lightly and being smart when it comes to what foods to carry and when to buy. As it turned out, we cooked out every night except twice.

Although I’m a bit of a polyglot, French is not really in my repertoire. I realised that I can say more useful things in Russian than I can in French and I don’t consider myself a competent Russian-speaker by any means (about the level of the average person’s French or Spanish, I’d say). Still, we managed somehow and people never snubbed our pathetic attempts at pronunciation and were always extremely nice to us.

My linguistic skills did come in handy on our second restaurant meal on the last evening in St Malo, though. We found a Restaurant Javanaise. Within a minute I noticed that the staff all spoke Indonesian so rather than struggle with French we communicated in Indonesian. Easy! The food was excellent (if you go there, have the Rendang Padang Asli, it certainly tasted ‘asli’ (authentic) to me which is more than I can say for any other Rendang I’ve had since leaving Indonesia). It was great to be able to communicate freely for a change.

I got my essay back that was driving me crazy for its vague question and my inability to tie it all together into a coherent piece of writing. I expected a not so terrific mark (maybe 60%) but was amazed at the 78% I got. I’ve reread it and still don’t think it deserves that much, but then I’ve had essays I think are better than their received mark too so I guess it evens out somehow.

I’ ve also now got the materials for my next course which runs concurrently with this one for a while (so I’ll be revising for an exam AND doing an assignment for the other due on the same day as my exam. Eeeep!!) but once that course is done, I’ll have finished my degree.

And here’s the perfect timing. My final piece of work to submit for my degree will be sent on 24th November. After that, no more uni work to do. I’ll be free. Meanwhile, the Sous Chef is to be made redundant and we’ve been waiting for the official notification of timescales for when he’d be actually unemployed. There’ve been some changes and it seems he’ll be free as of December. This means I finish sooner than expected (I thought it’d be January) and he gets paid for longer than expected (we though it’d be October) and we both achieve the freedom we need to travel at about the same time. Whoop!!!

All we have to do now is figure out how to rent the house out, where to keep up our stuff, buy the equipment we need, plan our route around the world (hmm South America or New Zealand start…) plan the visas and organise the finances. Easy  (and all while revising. Oh God)

burglars

Has anyone here been burgled? What’s worse tha being burgled? Confronting a burglar has to be, I reckon. Better to be out of the way when it was happening.

Last night, The Sous Chef went out for a drink with his pal and since I had an essay to write (it’s making me miserable. Really) I stayed at home to carry on procrastinating.

At about 11pm I heard a noise downstairs. I left my youtube video tutorial on making buttercream roses (these things are vital to research in depth when an essay is due) and shut down the computer and went toward the bedroom (which has a view of the stairs. Anyone coming up them would have to turn around to see you).

I figured it must The Sous Chef back from the pub downstairs so started to get ready for bed (I was half-planning to put pin curls in for the night, started to brush my hair, getting the pins ready).

“He’s taking a long time” I thought. I stood in the doorway looked along the landing and even though I was sure I’d left the hallway light on (there is a switch upstairs and a dimmer switch downstairs) for the Sous Chef, it was now off. Strange. I hit the switch again and nothing happened. Someone must have put the dimmer down to zero downstairs. I could hear movement down there. At first I thought it must be the The Sous Chef, but why was he staying down there so long? I wondered whether I was mistaken about the light and Iwas actually hearing noises from next door.

I strained to listen but the sounds of someone moving about where definitely in the house and I really was sure about the light.  It was ages and The Sous Chef would have come upstairs by now or seen the light on and said something. He usually gets in and comes straight upstairs or might have a glass of water from the tap but there was just movement downstairs and no attempt at water or stair climbing.

My heart in my mouth I looked around the room for a suitable weapon in case whoever was downstairs would come upstairs. Nothing. I wondered whether to stay absolutely quiet so as not to disturb the burglar or to make noise hoping the burglar would prefer to get away with loot than have a confrontation. I know that generally burglars would rather get out then get violent. I was hoping this was true this time. I wondered whether I could climb out of the window if I had to.

From the doorway I stood silent and had a good view of the stairs. I assumed any burglar would not venture upstairs and from the bedroom doorway I could see the stairs and potentially the back of the head of anyone coming up them, except the light was off,with just a bit streaming across the landing from the bedroom.

Then, my knees trembled as I was sure I could see a pale shape coming up the stairs and the back of someone’s head. After a few seconds I recognised The Sous Chef’s shirt and then his head turned round, he saw me and laughed.

I wasn’t laughing. I was so relieved I burst into tears. He’d really frightened me. He was (drunkenly) doing his ’stealthy ninja moves’ up the stairs. I have no idea why he thought that was a good idea. The bedroom lights had been on and curtains wide open when he got home so he should have known I was up.  If he thought I was asleep there was no need to turn the dimmer switch to zero downstairs and why was he taking so damn long to start climbing the stairs?  I had thought it was him at first but when the movement stayed confined to downstairs for so long I figured it couldn’t be him. He was very apologetic and expressed a heartfelt relief that this is not America and we don’t have guns in the house (not that I’d buy one if we could).

With hindsight I should have hidden under the bed. A burglar wouldn’t look there for any valuables and if it turned out to be the Sous Chef I could have frightened him back. Next time, next time…

another hazard of cycling in Brighton

Had a bit of a close shave yesterday on my commute to work. This time it wasn’t through the  careless driving of a 12 ton bus, or a skip lorry or even a bazzed up car. Not even a careless pedestrian crossing the road with their back to traffic and not looking over their shoulder. This hazard was much smaller but no less deadly

I was cycling along a rather narrow bit of cycle lane (so narrow that large vehicles tend to be using it too, so I have to keep well to the left to avoid getting a clip round the earhole with a wing mirror or something). As I was cycling I heard above me a simultaneous thump and click. I couldn’t think what it was until a stunned/concussed herring gull fell out of the sky onto the kerb, very narrowly missing me (it made  me jump out of my skin!). I instinctively hit the brakes and veered to the right and nearly ended up underneath a van. The seagull must have flown into a roadsign, judging by the noise and subsequent inability to remain airborne. its plummet to earth looked rather inelegant.

I don’t know what became of the seagull. It wasn’t dead by the side of the road on my homeward journey so I assume it was just a bit stunned. It’s going to have quite a headache, though.

BA(stards)

The news on British Airways asking its workforce to work a month for free has popped up in the news again. I can’t help but feel that’s pretty unethical for them even to ask this of the lower paid sectors of the business.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re earning £200,000 a year or whether you’re on minimum wage, when it comes to your income, the first £1000 a month is your most important. That’s the bit that feeds, clothes and houses you. The second £1000 you earn is for fun or for better versions of the essentials but it’s beyond what you need. Any money beyond that is just to feed your self-worth and stop you leaving for another company.

The chief exec, Willie Walsh (who it turns out is NOT a character from the Beano, despite the name) is asking his staff to forego a month’s salary and he himself will do the same. Except he earns a further fifty nine of those cute little thousands every month. That means that in his first month of the financial year he has already covered his basics the next 6 years. The money received during the next 11 months of the year are nothing but fun and extras.  I’d say someone like him can easily afford to forego a month’s salary.  He has covered his life essentials in less than a week’s pay. Someone who is earning less than £14,000 on the other hand has not. In fact, after tax they don’t even clear that first grand a month, so BA is asking far more of them than of him. So that’s unethical for a start and it stinks. (I don’t work for BA by the way, but this riles me anyway).

Add to that, when the company is hit by hard times, it asks the people who work for it to take a hit, but when BA is having a surge of profit, do the lower paid sectors of the business get to enjoy bonuses?  Not really. Bonus schemes are typical among higher paid positions and atypical in the lower.  When times are good, the top benefit from the boom while the bottom do not. Also, during boom times, the salaries at the top get bigger but this does not always trickle down to lower sectors of a company. It’s a one-way street where this money is concerned.

I just think that Willie Walsh dropping a month’s salary compared to someone doing the same on only £14,000 a year is laughable. It’s so Marie Antoinette of him!

It’s like someone fasting of all food and water for 24 hours for a cause compared to someone giving up cake for a day. The two are not the same.

I can’t decide whether the news of the Sous Chef’s redundancy is bad news or good.

On the one hand, he wasn’t happy at his job and actually wants to go and do something completely different. He wants out of I.T.  I can’t say I blame him. If I were to wave a magic wand and give him his ideal job I’d probably make him an abseiling instructor or something. That’s how I see him and he has a great manner with kids of various ages.  Unfortunately there is a long queue of experienced scout leaders and youth workers who would be ahead of him. He has also never abseiled, as far as I know – but I still reckon he’d love that sort of job and be really good at it.

We can live on a smaller income than we’ve been on these past few years. It’s not as if we’ve been living at our  means. We’ve lived below them for a while and as neither of us is into status symbols and don’t have kids to worry about it, we can live on a smaller income that many of his colleagues could. He earns quite well but we  can live on less without it hurting too much.

But I’m afraid of this large, unknown future. When we go on our round-the-world bicycle trip we will be entirely unfettered and free which is great but also terrifying.  Normally you go away but you have a home to go back to. When you’re done cycling about, you come home and carry on life as normal. This time around there is no job, potentially no house and what do you do then?  We could go away, come back and – nothing.  It feels like taking all the playing pieces off the board and having to start again.

That scares me.  I don’t know why it should. I’ve done relocating to a new country clutching only one suitcase and cabin luggage several times before . I’ve started from almost zero a few times and somehow that can be very liberating and exciting, but I’ve always had a little bit of a safety net.  There has always been a starting square,  a roof over my head, someone to meet me at the airport. I’ve never looked a year into the future and seen me as just a bit of drift wood.

But here is our plan: The sous chef works until the end of August and I will continue with my job as normal. I finish my degree in January 2010 so we could actually begin our RTW (round the world) trip in February. I’ll quit my job (or beg for a sabbatical) and we cycle RTW for a year. We come back February 2011 maybe back to his house (if we haven’t sold it or are renting it out) and we both start looking for work. I’m supposed to do a career change into psychology around then and TSC has no idea what he’ll be doing. The idea is, I become the one with the greater earning potential. God knows how I’ll find work in this new field, but I am sure I could rely on my admin experience to get temp jobs or something for the first few months back in UK while I scout around for something in my new field.

It all just seems so unclear. Career change/address change/life change. I’m actually terrified.

the meaning of life

In our office we have two mothers, there is also me (not a mother but would like to be in a year’s time or so) and one anti-mother. This is the person who, when I spoke to one colleague about wanting to start a family with the Sous Chef said, “oh, so you’ve joined the breeders, then”.

There are multiple reasons not to want to have children. People might feel they would not make a good enough parent (how ironic that to have had this thought in the first place means you’d probably be good enough – it’s the ones who never even considered this important who really are the bad parents). Another reason might be that they worry it would affect their quality of life adversely (again, a considered and honest reason. They are also probably right that it will, initially. If you don’t think you want to do it, don’t). Old anti-mother however used to old chestnut: I think the world is already overpopulated. I’m not going to add to the problem.

Oh, the altruism. What a saint this person is. I am sure her efforts really will save the planet.

The planet is very heavily populated with people. A plague, practically. We should all feel guilty for being here. We’re destroying the place. We are a bad bad bad species. So I ask: are we?

When a patch of lichen grows on a tombstone, it gets bigger and bigger and starts to cover it and destroys the stone underneath. Should that lichen really feel guilty for its existence? It’s just being lichen. It is being and doing only what a being does. As human beings, we are just being human and living as humans, doing as humans do and continuing on in a way to ensure humans will continue to be. We are living beings and that is what living beings (from bacteria to elephants) do. Life, in all its forms, be it single celled or complex, is something which will always find a way. It is ridiculous that one (or a group or a species) of organisms imbued with this thing called life, should feel  guilty or wrong for existing with it. We do not have life. Life has us.

This takes me to: What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? My answer to those two questions is very similar: the meaning of life is to continue life and we are here in order to continue life. We are here to fulfill the meaning of life.  Procreation is part of that, but you do not have to procreate in order to fulfill the meaning of life. Just living has done that. Just being born did that. Just affecting the procreating living beings (and not just of your species) did that. A bigger contribution would be to continue life more directly. I was born human, so I can only produce another human. I can support a puppy but I can only make a human.

When a volcano erupts, its lava flowing down the sides, destroying all living things: plant life, animal life, everything is destroyed.  We can see the scars left behind when the magma cools and only dead rock remains. We lament the destruction of life. Oh what a disaster this was to all the living inhabitants of that mountainside. But go back 20 years later and you see life returns. Plants, small animals, little things, eking out a living somehow. Life, wonderful life, the miracle that is life fights and finds a way. When we see life returning to the destroyed volcano, we’re glad. There is something about life that seems to, given even a quarter of a chance, rebuild itself and carry on. Changed in its forms, of course, but life nonetheless. And that is the point.

So why do we claim for ourselves the arrogant idea that we should or shouldn’t be here in our numbers? Who are we to decide that? We are not all that different to a patch of lichen and are harbouring ideas far above our station if we think we have control over it or can judge it through a moral lense.

All living things, by the ebb and flow of evolution, are driven to carry on this thing called life. We pass the baton, from one generation to the next. When the times are good and conditions are right, a species will flourish. When the numbers cannot be maintained, competition grows and numbers reduce. Evolution is driven by the boom and bust. The easy days (or years, or millenia) of a  boom allow a wide variety of exemplars to be born and a genetic variation here, a mutation there is not much of a burden or disadvantage. Genetic variety is high. So what if you have bumps on your back? You might have big bumps, or small bumps. You might have movable bumps or bumps that stick out quite far, or both.  Nearly everyone gets to live and breed and bumps don’t stand in anyone’s way. Then comes the bust, competition is high, large sections of living things cannot make it.  But there is enormous variety now. Some of the varieties, for a myriad of reasons, survive. Some varieties, even if similar, do not. The one with two big movable bumps survives. The one with a no bumps at all survives. For some reason, the middle sized bumps don’t make it.  Repeat this and you might someday have something akin to wings, as long as those bumps were a bit useful somehow during the harsh times.

All this change only happens because of the boom. Life must always make hay while the sun shines. If it didn’t, it would be too weak to survive the disasters. Even if we humans are overpopulating the planet, even if  we are heading for some sort of massive correction in the numbers of our species, which will undoubtedly cause suffering for large numbers of our kind in the future, it is unpreventable. It is lunacy to try to consciously stop something which life does, has always done and always will do. Our best bet is to add our drop in the ocean.  Do what we, as a living being, are destined to do. We do not have life. Life has us. You place your bet on the roulette wheel, give it a spin, and die. That’s your part and them’s the rules.