The things we carried

Turns out it's a good thing that I'm on my new kick of not leaving the house without a bullet-proof layer of SPF Avogadro's Number, because mosquito-repellent toxicity can maybe get me instead.

I spent six weeks during the summer before senior year working at an archaeology field school in Alaska's squashy bush country. Taiga, or huge flat stretches of land where the permafrost level is about 6 inches below the surface, is mosquito-breeding heaven: With almost no hills to speak of, drainage is minimal, and water that doesn't make it to one of the slow-moving rivers ends up pooling in large shallow ponds on top of the frozen zone, broken up somewhat by muskeg, a squodgy mass of vegetation that has been described as feeling like wet mattresses. Mosquitos breed there in astronomical numbers, providing a bountiful food source for the local avifauna and attacking anything warmblooded without mercy. 

Most of Alaska's wildlife is at least somewhat protected by thick bushy fur, so given the choice between trying to find a landing place on a bear's snout and diving for unprotected human flesh, the average Anopheles alaskabastardicus will invite three million of her fellows to join the Homo sapiens buffet. Oh, and due to circumstances beyond our control, we spent a night and most of two days without a netted outhouse. Our bare bums must've seemed like Christmas to the skeeters, and we all swiftly lost our senses of humor about bites in private places. We spent the six weeks in a permanent haze of Deep Woods Off, pure deet smeared on our clothes, and incense-like smoke from mosquito coils, which contain some sort of insect neurotoxin that probably doesn't do much good for humans. From where we sat, slapping incessantly at the bugs, going without some sort of chemical protection would've been the road to madness. Even our two vegans weren't above cheering the deaths of our hungry tormentors.

Obviously deet isn't really good for you, though it was the lesser of two evils. As we packed up, one of the other students grimaced, "I have a new baby niece to meet when we get home. Better hit the sauna for a few days first; if I touch her now, I think she'll shrivel up like plastic in the microwave." We did end up spending quality time in the McGrath firejumpers' sauna, trying to sweat out all the toxins in the haze of menthol-oiled steam (and the story about how that evening involved meeting various locals whilst mutually nekkid was funnier after the fact). Maybe it worked: Sarah's niece survived her first encounter with her aunt.

I'm still going with sunblock. Should the fates call me back to the bush in high summer, too, I'm still bringing the Off.

Fortuitous accidents

The joys of geekly conversation include being able to mention a possible head injury to one friend and end up with the links to a couple of free iUniversity lectures by a fascinating scientist studying the relationship between chronic stress and disease. I've had mixed luck with iUniversity before: It's easy to fantasize that I'll spend the endless Metro delays learning about Russian novels or basic anatomy, but in too many cases the lectures don't live up to my hopes. Boring speakers, poor sound quality, material that's out of my league...for one reason or another, a lot of the lectures fall short. Robert Sapolsky's "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" and "Stress and Coping: What Baboons Can Teach Us," however, are completely fascinating, like classes with that one professor who made you consider switching majors halfway through college. He's good at boiling down reams of data into clear descriptions of physiological reactions and consequences, then giving advice on how to be one of the "good" responders. Of course, there's a risk that you'll come away with a neurotic desire to check your various hormone levels multiple times each day to make sure that you're not so stressed that you're prone to disease, and that will both increase your baseline stress and probably cut down on your number of friends, further diminishing your coping mechanisms aiee. Caveat lector. Also, the nonendocrinologically educated among us will get the major wiggins about the Peter Pan story he tells, so if it's important to you to keep a sense of childlike sparkling wonder about the book, (a) you're beyond my help and (b) for pity's sake don't learn anything about J. M. Barrie's early life.

Because Ibiza is so so done

The Pacific Ocean turns to foam and eats part of the Australian coastline; locals treat it as a giant house party with no thumping beat. "Scientists explain that the foam is created by impurities in the ocean, such as salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed." More disgusting than club foam? Discuss. I do love that the Ozzies just kind of shrugged and went about their business, rather than losing their shit and screaming about how this is all the fault of the immoral [fill-in-the-blank]s and oh Lord take me now it's a sign of the end times.

In completely unrelated news, there are free podcasts of British celebrities telling fairy tales. These are not the classic versions of the stories, exactly, so they're probably good for kids who've passed the age of demanding that the tale be told precisely the same way every single time until Mummy and Daddy, driven out of their heads by the calls for textual accuracy, start to wonder whether they could make it to the treeline. I mean, does any other version of Sinbad the Sailor include the term "anorak"? And how can we go about introducing that word into broader American use, because there's clearly a gaping need.