Slimy creatures

Wherever you go this Spring you have got a real good chance to hit a snail or a slug. There are tons of them slowly crawling on paths and sidewalks  and as much of them splashed out because you cannot always avoid stepping on or riding over them, unfortunately. Especially the stepping on bit is a rather disgusting experience, I can assure you. The snails with the coiled shell give a nasty crack but the slugs who crawl shamelessly naked pass out in an even worse manner: like a huge piece of old and used bubble gum, however not as sticky as that. It does not matter knowing that they are very destructive for the plants in my garden, such a lethal step will leave me feeling guilty anyway. However you can buy poison for snails in garden centers, I would rather not do that. Because I am a softy. I cannot easily kill any other animal than a mosquito purposefully. Whenever there is a spider or a bee or wasp in my house I catch them carefully to carry them out and release them. Although, to carry out a frog I would need the help of a more braver person. Thankfully that has happened only once since I live here.  You would have laughed your heart out seeing me and my girls standing screaming on the sofa when a lost frog wandered in the living room. However, they do make me jump sometimes too when I am weeding the garden, jumping unexpectedly out of the plants where I had my hand just a minute before. The frogs of course, not my girls. The girls do like to jump too but only on the trampoline in the backyard. The region underneath that trampoline turned unintentionally into an incubator for frogs. When we built that thing in we lowered it half the size of its legs. The groundwater resulted in a pool most time of the year which makes it a perfect frog environment. And frogs, contrary to snails, are protected animals, so you cannot even expel them unpunished. That is, unless you let some other animal do the nasty job, a cat for example. I do not like a cat as a pet, although I think they can be really cute, but they like to reward you with their prey. Not my favorite reward a half-killed mouse or frog on the doormat. So I think I just have to live with the presence of the frog population in the backyard, hoping that they will like it enough to stay under the trampoline, invisible to me. And as for the snails and slugs, well I will keep on carrying them, if possible, carefully onto my hand scoop to the compost container where they can live happily for another two weeks before the container will be collected again. That is a much better perspective for them than being splashed, I guess.

Although there are people, other than biologists, who genuinely like the creatures I described above, as far as I know that means served on a plate.  The French and Belgian cuisine are rather famous for their respectively served snails, better known as ‘esgargots’, and froglegs, which seem to resemble chicken meat a lot. Not for me though, I am a much too picky eater. I would not even want to try it. The same for oysters, although they seem to have huge aphrodisiac effects. Only thinking of sipping the slimy parts out of their shell is enough to make me lose my appetite completely. For food and for sex.

That is exactly what happened with the course I am studying now. Sexology. I needed the study points when I enrolled for this course but I was not particularly interested in the subject since I had seen some lecture slides beforehand. The photos of severely disrupted penises made my stomach flip. So I enrolled but I did not go to the lectures, which were on the ungodly hour of 9 a.m.  I had enough on my plate with the bachelor project so I put the subject away in the far corners of my mind until the exam date became really close. Coming Tuesday. On the ungodly hour of 9 a.m.

I started studying the subject last Thursday night, after having taken my exam on Emotion and Cognition. Way too late to do it properly, I admit. However, not uncommon for students in general. Surprisingly the book does read well, it is not only very nice written but it does teach me quite a few things I did not know before. Like for example that the sexual revolution from the 70’s was not the first in history. The Victorian age was preceded by the Romantic. That is visible in art of course but it really hit home to me reading that because it means that progression is not so much linear but more parabolic.

Also interesting is the establishing of sexology as a science. Is it hard to study psychology scientifically,  sexology is even harder. There are of course many cultural differences, but also many economical and political issues that influence it. Common sense is full of myths about topics like differences in sexual behavior between men and women but even in more serious issues like birth control and sexual transmitted diseases. It was only in the 70’s that homosexuality was no longer considered to be an illness in the DSM. I am not even half way, and even shocking material like two boys twins where circumcise for one of them turned out badly, and the doctors decided to make him a girl, that is about gender identity for your information, cannot stop my determination to try to read as much of the book as I can. It will help me to get a much broader perspective on a subject which undeniably affects us all, although passing the exam is my main goal for now.