Mendel

Gregor Mendel was a champion for whirled peas. (bada boom)(crash!). No really. He liked peas. >:) He noted each day in a journal , what cross resulted in a desired trait, and what cross did not. He loved his plants dearly and did everything he could to keep them healthy. Its normal enough. I have a thing for the push pin pig I made out of an eraser, here on my desk. It represents me. (thank you, Matt Groening!)

One of the neatest things about Mendel is that most of his work you can remember and sort of keep in your head. Sometimes I think this happens because we sublimate our desire to further the species into something abstract. He was entirely alone. He called his peas his "children". There were a form of human escape for him. A way he could be a real person. It wasn't an obsession, because those can be blind. It was a simple love. That he kept his entire life.

When we share stories amongst ea. other about kids, or we see pictures of kids, an interesting reaction is that in many of us, you can watch the eye dilate. Try it sometime, when there is a cute little one in the room. Watch carefully (if you can) the eyes of your friends as they see your little one. The eye will widen ever so slightly.

This also happens to be the same response, when we pass the plate at the table. The human eye will widen ever so slightly as the food lands right near them. And they will subconsciously track dinner as it makes its way to the table. This is called the "food stare".

The idea that food can be your kid is a little bit of a stretch. But I think anyone who has ever been in a garden, seeing all of creation - god just willing these beautiful things into being - you have to at least appreciate the beauty of it all. Its not such a stretch to want to take care of things. To think of a sweet pea as a little one that you need to take care of, you'll have to sort of look at it colorlessly. It would be a fairly abstract thing, you would probably need to be in love with the idea that the little peas were your kids. As much as you would be the little sweet peas themselves. It would probably be pretty hard to tell someone you cared about, also that, you really love sweet peas. You would be sort of unable to talk about it sometime. They would likely just brush you off as some kind of strange person. But if you thought sweet peas, were your little ones, I bet you might not be able to make the thought of them go away easily. I bet that when the idea sleeps, it sort of rages through your mind. Mendel probably could never shake the image of peas out of his head.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. I get to swim in the gene pool. yay