So this weekend my friend Erin invited me to this special blogger event at the Houston Museum of Natural Science to celebrate a new dinosaur exhibit and to meet brilliant scientists but I didn’t have a babysitter so I brought my 4 year old because it’s illegal to leave her in a closet even if the cats are in there with her. Then Erin ushered Hailey and me into the private lab and then a live chicken attacked me. It didn’t really attack me so much as it just walked up to me, but when you aren’t expecting a live chicken to confront you it kind of feels like an assault. Then the chicken perched itself on my shoulder for the next hour where it tried occassionally to peck out my earring. Her name was “Schmaltzie Nugget” and Erin said she was there to show us that chickens are just like dinosaurs, which I guess means dinosaurs taste delicious.
The lab had a weird mix of dirt, chickens, live piranhas and very eccentric scientists who were extremely entertaining and didn’t bat an eye when I mentioned that I’d grown up in a house with a bathtub of raccoons and a professional taxidermist for a father. Then one of them told me his wife found a dead dog and was boiling the flesh off it to put the bones together to find out what kind it was and that’s when it kind of felt like I was home.
Then this guy wandered in and he looked like my dad if my dad had been living in his car for two weeks and he looked at this sign on the freezer that said “Do not open” and he read it out loud and then shrugged and totally opened it and I didn’t ask what was in there because then he started talking about how some exec at the museum had the heart of a 10 year old boy and that’s probably where he stored it and I wondered why they let the janitor open freezers that clearly said not to open them and then Erin introduced the janitor as Dr. Bakker, who is a totally famous and brilliant paleontologist and not a janitor at all. Also, according to his wikipedia page, an actor actually played him in Jurassic Park 2 and was eaten by a T-Rex, and if I was him that would totally be how I’d introduce myself to everyone: “Hi, you may know me from being eaten by dinosaurs in Jurassic Park 2. Also, I have a PhD from Harvard. Sorry I look homeless.”
Hailey attached herself to him immediately because, like her mother, she likes weird guys and they made molds of dinosaur parts.
Then my friend Erica O’Grady walked in and she asked why I’d brought a chicken with me which was kind of insulting but also kind of fair since the last time she’d seen me I was somewhat inappropriately naked on national TV. And it was also sort of indicative of my status as a blogger because I’m standing next to a blogger who just returned from a red carpter, star-studded Emmy party in LA and I’m wearing a chicken like some kinda fucked-up pirate.
Then the famous paleontologist dude started this really deep conversation about whether acceptance of evolution leads to increased ethical behavior and the other people in the room were all super smart and were quoting people I’d never heard of and some other scientist solemnly said that “knowledge could be a curse” and I was all “Yeah! Like with the cyclopses!” and then it got silent and I explained that Cyclops know the day that they are going to die and it makes them clinically depressed and I was a little surprised that they didn’t learn that in college and then after that I just tried to stay quiet. Then we made some fossil molds of giant T-rex teeth and Hailey tried to put them in her mouth, which was very funny and also probably toxic and she was yelling, “My toofs grew!” and I was very glad she was there because she was the only person there who made me look intelligent in comparison.
Then I remembered that the last time I was at the museum I went to the butterfly exhibit and some stranger offered me a bug to eat and I totally ate it and it tasted like a cheeto, if cheetos were made of bugs. Also I had to explain to Hailey that taking candy from a stranger was totally forbidden but turning down the chance to eat a bug was just stupid and I’m pretty sure she got it she probably didn’t get it at all that I’m the worst mother ever. So then this time I went back to the butterfly exhibit and found the Insect-O-Matic vending machine that the stranger got the bugs from and bought a whole package of BBQ larvae for you, gentle reader. It’s kind of a pathetic apology gift because I might be MIA for a little bit because I have to write a book so I may be taking a small break to refocus because I have a book inside me and I’m going to get it out even if I have to forcibly squeeze it out of my vagina. Because that’s what the world needs. A book squeezed out of my vagina.
Anyway, leave a comment to enter the “Oh-I-won-some-bugs-to-eat-apparently” contest and I’ll randomly choose a lucky winner next week.
PS. Dude. I just looked at the package of BBQ Larvets and there’s only 9 calories in the whole fucking box. Larvets are totally the new rice cake.
Comment of the day: I had a pet chicken. His name was midnight. He did tricks, and was trained. He came when you called him, and he’d sing, and he’d dance. Then my dog bit his head off one night because I forgot to close the door to his coop. ~ Maria
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We have a “winner”. I asked Hailey to pick a number to see who gets to eat the BBQ larvae and she chose “1,000” which is flattering but useless, so I told her to try again and pick a number under 225 and she chose 21 which belongs to Steph, who didn’t want to win the bugs at all but is now pretty much required to eat them. Such is life. The people who don’t want to eat bugs have them mailed to them with threatening letters about children starving in Africa, and the people who desperately want to eat bugs never get the medical attention they need.