Dreams of A Bio Dork

I dreamt that I was taking another of Arri's classes, and had been saddled with the worst group assignment ever. I'd been put in a group of five people to design our own experiment and present it to the class. Somehow we got stuck with ants as our model organism. We couldn't decide on anything, because everyone in the group wanted to do something different. And the deadline for presenting our findings to the class got nearer and nearer. Moreover, we couldn't just order some experimental ants from a lab supply source. We had to go catch them ourselves.

I suggested we go and collect some ants so that we'd be able to perform our experiment once we actually agreed on one. My groupmates begrudgingly agreed, and so we went out to the sidewalk in front of Pseudo-Dream-Turman-Dorm, which was a lot like the real Turman, except with balconies on the side facing the train tracks, which also featured a huge cliff. I convinced my group that we could catch our ants by spilling small amounts of Minute Maid lemonade on the sidewalk, and then coaxing them up blades of grass so that we could drop them in little plastic containers we'd brought along. This worked out okay, although some of the guys kept spilling out half the can of lemonade and drowning perfectly good test subjects. Also, the ants were about three times the size of normal, and almost beetle-like, with nasty looking mandibles. We wished we could find some normal ones, but we were running out of time.

After we'd gotten about thirty or so, we put all the ants in one big tupperware container and watched them running around frantically, clacking their mandibles menacingly. No one really liked the idea of opening the container again, even if we did have a project to be doing. So we though we could start our poster first, and then just fill in the blanks later once we got some actual data. We'd acquired some posterboard and Crayola markers, and went to town on the sidewalk. It started to rain, though, so we had to run inside. The markers were washable, but our posterboard came out mostly unscathed.

The entire class was living on the same hall. My suite had separate entryways for each of the rooms within, so that I could actually avoid seeing anyone if I felt like it, assuming we weren't in the hallway at the same time. The only problem was that immediately opposite my door, an entrepreneurial burrito and omelette maker had opened up a small shop, and everyone would come to eat there. My suitemates kept bringing out pans of eggs, tortilla chips and tomatoes and asking the Burrito/Omelette Man if they could use his griddle. I hated going out in the hallway, but the food really was pretty good.

At last, the day of the presentation arrived. The class was in a very small seminar room, and Arri had brought his six year old son, Gabe. Inexplicably, the seminar room also had a shower in one corner. My group huddled in conference right next to the shower, coming up with a game plan, since we'd been too afraid to let the mutant ants out of the container, and had never done an experiment. We decided to fill the blanks in on our poster as though we'd done a behavioral study. We called it, "Social Interactions In a Novel Ant Variant, Formica Horribus." We had the ants there with us, as well as a copy of E.O. Wilson's 1990 tome The Ants, so we figured we could improvise okay.

Just then, the shower came on, spraying the seminar room and our now-finished poster. "Not the washable marker!" we wailed. The primary and secondary colors began to run, ruining my careful diagram of the horribus ant. Class was moved to a normal classroom, with an old chalkboard. Arri felt bad for us, but told us we could just write our poster on the board, instead. We began to do so as the class reconvened, along with the guests who'd been brought in to watch the presentations.

One of the guests was my middle school Spanish teacher. She came up to talk to me while I was trying to correct the grammar of my groupmates, and we got into a long conversation. I told her about my taking Japanese now. She was very impressed that I could still speak without hesitation after almost a year of not taking any Spanish. When I woke up and remembered the entire conversation in Spanish, I was impressed, too.