The Spartan Sweetheart

I like to think I’m intelligent.

I was on the Honor Roll in high school, I came to MSU with 22 Advanced Placement credits. In college, I’ve managed to maintain a decent GPA while juggling a job, an internship and a social life. (Except for that whole debacle where I failed Constitutional Law, but that’s another story.) Everyone I know is insanely smart, talented and successful. My entire house is a testament to the future teachers, techies and politicians of the world.

But there’s one area where I have to admit ignorance.

And sometimes…it’s really embarrassing.

I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about animals.

I don’t know where I was when all this animal knowledge was passed along. I assume I was off doing something Star Wars-related, or reading, since that’s what 90 percent of my childhood and early adolescence was about. Maybe I should have watched more cartoons starring animals as characters, but I wasn’t into anything that wasn’t about princesses or women in general. If it had boys, machines or animals…I didn’t care. Maybe that explains my love for trashy semi-historical fiction, movies and television.

Perhaps, this knowledge was passed along the same day as the class on vampires that I also apparently missed. (In my “Gender and Pop Culture” class, my prof. asked how you kill a vampire. And I was prepared to answer! Good thing I got that vamp education after all.)

I wasn’t aware of my animal ignorance until ninth grade, when my best friend Emily and I were passing notes and reading science fiction behind our textbooks in “Career Preparation and Exploration” class. This particular part of the Saline High School curriculum involved a health/sex ed segment where we had to go around having “cup sex,” which involved everyone having to pour special color-changing liquid from their cup into other people’s cups to show how easily you can get AIDS/have sex/get pregnant and die. (Luckily I was still mature about sex and determined to take this educational lesson very seriously, or I would’ve actually enjoyed asking people to mix their fluids with mine. Instead, it was just profoundly awkward in the way that 14-year-olds are profoundly awkward and resulted in a lot of homosexual cup sex since we were all way too afraid to ask men if they would do some hot n’ heavy pouring.)

Anyway, this particular health class, we were passing notes back and forth and insulting one another for the hell of it. When the note came back to me, I remembered a wonderful piece of trivia our marching band instructor passed on that morning: an ostrich’s eye is as big as its brain. So I wrote, “Your brain is the size of an ostrich’s.” Then I proceeded to draw a picture of an ostrich, looking something like this:

It wasn’t long before I got the following note back:

“OSTRICHES DO NOT HAVE FOUR LEGS, YOU MORON!”

So that’s how I learned that lesson.

Another time, my mother and sister and I were playing Pictionary with our family friends. My mom’s best friend Lynne is an art teacher, my mother is a former art teacher, my sister is an artist and she’s been drawing with Lynne’s daughter Mina since they were five. (Seriously, one of them draws a line and the other immediately knows what it’s going to be. It’s super creepy.) I drew what was supposed to be a jaguar and heard all the artists in the room ask if it was a dog, lizard or some bizarre dinosaur-Chester Cheetah hybrid.

When I failed to make my team guess the correct animal, my mom and sister looked at the card, busted up laughing, and said, in unison, “JAGUARS DON’T HAVE SHORT LEGS AND NECKS LIKE HORSES, YOU MORON.”

This summer, during my last night on Mackinac Island for my summer internship, my friends and I were out drinking and decided to get special expensive ice cream drinks. The drinks consisted of lots of booze, lots of ice cream and various toppings. They were named after different places on the Island, and my friend Alex decided to get one called “The Great Turtle.”

“Why do you think it’s called ‘The Great Turtle’?” I asked. (I was barely tipsy at this point.)

“Because turtles have nuts in them,” Alex responded confidently.

I sat there dumbfounded before the questions started pouring out of me.

“Wait…how does THAT work?”

“Exactly where is the nut? Is it inside their shells?”

“Is it all green and wrinkly and smelly, because that’s what I’m picturing.”

My friends just looked at me like I was insane.

Finally, Alex said, “TURTLES LIKE THE CANDY, YOU MORON!”

“Oh.”

Alright, so I clearly wouldn’t pass biology class, but animals are just weird. How is everyone aware of the fact that dogs don’t sweat? Or that foxes are carnivores? Did everyone but me get those Zoobooks magazines and start acquiring biological knowledge while I was out pretending to be Catherine Zeta-Jones in “The Mask of Zorro?”

The only thing I learned about animals in school was during our unit on spiders in first grade. I made a big picture for our class book that said, “The female Black Widow spider devours its mate.”