Quirkee.com

I want to find someone

who will still love me

after I've shared

all of my secrets.

Anonymous - A Lifetime of Secrets

As taxi driver, I quickly became well versed in people's almost inherent need to unburden themselves from the weight of truth. Every night revealed yet another stranger's secret. There were times when I just sat stupidly silent in the wake of these admissions, unable to offer an opinion, advice or even a half-hearted consolation. There were other times when the cab ride confessional would become so dark and real, I would have to clutch the steering wheel, white-knuckled, to keep myself from wheeling around and telling the person to just shut up and keep it to themselves for once. The anger would well up within me, not because they were revealing themselves with unwarranted abandon, but because they were bringing my own secrets to the fore as well, forcing me to face things that I was not ready to cope with.

The No Asshole Rule

Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't

by Robert I. Sutton, PhD

Business books in general are a mixed bag. Some are well-written tomes filled with self-help strategies, real world anecdotes, and thought provoking truisms that span most professions and industries. Others are trite, get-rich-quick (for the author that is) morality tales that can literally be summed up in one paragraph; a very short one or two sentence paragraph at that. This book tends toward the first bag, but as is, it's in limbo. If Dr. Sutton had addressed these few items, there would not be a question as to where it belongs. Call them my bones to pick, reader considerations, or simply my wish for a pièce de résistance that I could take away from the book as a big "A-HA!"

Overuse: Dr. Sutton uses the word "asshole" or "assholes" 837 times in this 186 page book. (No, asshole, I didn't count them all.) While the book is about assholes and how assholes can wreak havoc to an individual and organization, this is excessive. It also seems that the author is trying to capitalize on the "cool" factor of using a swear word much like professorial author Harry G. Frankfurt did in On Bullshit.

Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures

How many times do you read the same horror/sci-fi garbage? You know what I mean: Aliens take normal humans and turn them into castrated zombies, serving their masters as long as their undernourished bodies will allow. Or highly specialized blind killers navigate vast networks over great distances, and wreak biological havoc on mission-critical centers of commerce or culture. Perverse? Yes. Highly entertaining? Has to be!

As a sucker for trashy horror/ sci-fi, I am immediately drawn to Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer's tale of a fantastical world of creatures that prey on the good people of Earth and go through varying life cycles from eggs to larvae to adults, each stage of life in a different form, causing a different illness, attacking a different host.

The catch is that every bit of Zimmer's "tale" is nonfiction.

Zimmer takes the topic of parasite evolutionary biology and gives it an Alien - Invasion of the Body Snatchers - X-files rendering... sans the Sigourney Weaver underwear scene. Well, there is underwear, but it has fluke egg-infested poop in it. And some snails eat the poop. Then the snails throw up big balls of egg-infested snot. An unsuspecting ant wanders by and shares the snotty prize with his friends, who partake and get infected after the eggs hatch. At this point, some of the flukes take control of the ant's tiny brains and make them climb blades of grass and hold on tight. Soon, a cow finds the yummy ant grass. At last, the adult flukes have reached their final destination - the cow's intestine. After a candlelight dinner the flukes make more eggs that travel down and out the back of the cow. More poop. More snails eating poop. Rinse. Repeat.

Sweet redemption.

If you can handle it, this book amazingly dispels the myth of the parasite as a lowly, unsophisticated organism, raking the muck at the bottom of the evolutionary food chain. From this standpoint, Zimmer demonstrates how these life forms have evolved to a level of precise specialization, attacking the host's immune systems, and manipulating the host for the parasite's benefit. I hear Frenchie from Grease (not often, just this once): "Men are rats. Listen to me, they're fleas on rats. Worse than that, they're amoebas on fleas on rats." Just take a few steps further and you get the picture.

Fascinating read!

More on Carl Zimmer

Davy Rothbart, most famous for his bestseller "Found," compiles eight short stories in "The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas" that blend coming-of-age adventures with a ready sexuality that is both honest and refreshing. As all are told from the first person, readers find themselves in a forced intimacy with the Narrator throughout the book. Not that we mind, mind you. We take each journey with the Narrator and it is difficult not to engage and enjoy each moment.

The title story revolves around the Narrator and his girlfriend Sally, making out in a car. They are eventually interrupted by a nearby boy, "surfing" on a piece of wood, who falls and breaks his arm. Seems innocuous enough. But for all the voyeuristic satisfaction the Narrator experiences watching the surfer in the lead up to the injury, we readers experience "the same tingle of shame and perverse excitement race up [our] spine." Rothbart seems to make us willing conspirators in the Narrator's emotional transgressions, or at least guilty of enjoying every unclasped moment of it.

Every once in a blue moon, I come across a novel idea. I may stand alone in this, but I'll say it anyway: I think Frank Warren's book PostSecret is absolutely brilliant. Warren passed out three thousand postcards and invited people to anonymously send them to him with their secrets written on them. As word of Warren's little project got around, and after the three thousand postcards were spoken for, people sent homemade cards to Warren's mailbox in Germantown, MD.

I'm still in love with her. I hope she reads this, and

recognizes my handwriting.

this is also my last try.