[Short Prologue: This blog is always a shadow in the back of my mind, but after nearly eight hours of writing Monday to Friday (my current full-time job), blogging--unfortunately--usually ends up being the very last thing on my 'To Do' list (cast away with a few other unfulfilled tasks under the invisible subtitle: 'Things That I Won't Have Time For Today, But Wouldn't It Be Nice If I Did?'). Luckily, I've found a different, less time-consuming outlet for my curious roving mind, which is posting photomicrographs pretty much daily on my Instagram account, 'itsy_snap'--a kind of microblog). This post provides a bit of an explanation of how I feel when doing so.]
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There's something to be said about being privy to characters and
settings unknown to most; storylines that can never be recounted by anyone else but the [conscientious] voyeur.
I had my first epiphanous moment one day in the summer of 2011, sitting in the FLAMES Lab at the Dorset Environmental Science Centre in Dorset, Ontario, Canada. I'd been racking my brain trying to find out what wasn't clicking within my experimental design, so I decided to devote my beautiful summery Saturday to getting the most detailed possible glimpse into the relatively short lives of my zooplankton protagonists. I plopped a single spiny water flea (an invasive invertebrate zooplanktivore) onto a glass slide and let the show go on.
A few hours in, my younger sister called, and I picked up. We talked for a while, but I never took my eyes off the 'scope. Then, suddenly, I interrupted her. "Oh my God! It's pooping! I've got to go. Call you back later." She burst into peals of laughter, but my heart was racing with excitement. Mind you, the excretion process ended up taking an excruciatingly loooong time (which is probably not normally the case, seeing as the poor critter was suspended in a drop of water, rather than swimming about freely), so my enthusiasm eventually died down. But I never forgot the exhilarating rush of that biochemical high, of registering something new--which I hadn't read about anywhere in my stacks of reprints--via my very own eyeballs.
Fast forward to the present. Not much has changed for me these days. The microscope is an amazing contraption, and I realize it more every day. My geographical coordinates have changed tremendously since my lab days (I'm in a different time zone, smothered in a blanket of smog and surrounded by drab concrete, genetically related yet decidedly different people, and the occasional courageous rat...rather than the trees, lakes, and wildlife I'd grown up with), but the microscope stage has become my proverbial 'cave' (think Fight Club). It's safe, and familiar, yet not quite the latter.
So, I feel like a voyeur (minus any weird kinds of social and/or legal perversion), bottom line, when I'm glued to my microscope. These are completely everyday, accessible (with the right tools) subjects, too small to be noticed, or too insignificant to warrant more than a few seconds of human-powered thought. I enjoy being a bystander, a witness, and all I have left of each novel experience is a digital image.
Which I'm happy with. :)
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