Please Don't Throw Sand at Me.

By Evan

"No, no, no! You need to stand over here when receiving a serve, Bonnie!" I shouted. "Moo!" "Don't you moo at me!!!! We're not going to stop until you stand in the proper position and actually manage to volley for a bit!" Bonnie the cow gradually shifted to the correct side of the court, whereupon I tossed the birdie to Irene on the other side of the court, who hit it towards Bessie. It had taken me years to breed and train cows capable of playing badminton, and I was just beginning to make progress. The major difficulties revolved around the lack of suitable appendages, and the general stupidity of the cows. The only solution I found was to teach the cows to hold the rackets in their tails and mount a complex series of mirrors in front of their eyes to allow them to see the net. Many would think it's a pointless pursuit to teach such a thing to cows but that was my job, pure research for the sake of knowledge alone. If anything I did proved useful, I'd be at least as surprised as anyone else. Utility was never the point to anything I did, I simply had to prove that anything could be done, no matter how ridiculous. "Don't be so hard on the cows Steve, they can't help it that they're stupid," Kyle said. "They're not that stupid anymore, I've been teaching them, see they're actually managing to volley back and forth a bit." Indeed they were doing a fairly good job of hitting the birdie over the net. They weren't very good badminton players but they were at least evenly matched.

"Forget that for now, I've got some news." Kyle was a lot more practical than I was, and as such he was responsible for procuring funding for both our experiments. Any news he had was not likely to be good news, as our funding tended to get cut off whenever the various universities or eccentric millionaires providing them with money felt like it. On numerous occasions they had had to work as hotdog vendors in order to afford to feed themselves and their animals.

"I'll go get the push cart."

"We're not going to have to sell hotdogs this time Steve. We did get our funding cut again on the basis that everything you do is completely useless but I finally managed to find a way to use that to our advantage."

"You mean use my uselessness?" "Well yes, we're going to be letting tour groups from colleges visit and take a look at our experiments. We're going to be tour guides to fund our experiments," Kyle said enthusiastically.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I screamed in horror.

"What's the matter? Are you really that upset about giving people a tour of the facility? It'd be a great opportunity for you to show off your knowledge. You probably know more about the genetic structure of animals than most of the other geneticists in the country. I'm sure the tour groups will be impressed or at least interested by the badminton playing cows, or the weasel window washers. Even if those fail who wouldn't find the hamsters trained to give enemas funny. Well okay the ASPCA might not find that too funny but it always strikes me as hilarious."

What Kyle didn't know, although I didn't know how he couldn't, seeing as how we'd worked together for three years, was that I was a complete nincompoop when it came to socialization with other people. Either he was just very unobservant about my interactions with other people on the rare occasions that I had even attempted conversations with anyone, or perhaps my discomfort was not as profound when talking to him since he was my colleague. At any rate, the dingbat didn't seem to realize what the problem was, even after my scream of horror. I wasn't sure I should tell him about my problems with dealing with people, that even selling hotdogs had been a bit hard on me and then all I had to say was that'll be two dollars and fifty cents. If I told him he might try to fix my problem, which was after all the entire reason he had decided to be a geneticist, to solve problems. The biggest problem then would be that I knew the general cures for phobias involve flooding a person with the thing they fear and I did not naturally want to be flooded with social interaction. I got along just fine talking to the cows. They were my life.

"Are you afraid of people? If so then this is precisely what you need to get over it, you're twenty-eight years old for goodness's sake. If you're not afraid of people then there should be no problem with doing it."

"Darn your logic! I don't suppose there is any way I can get out of this? Maybe we could just sell hotdogs again?"

"No you will be giving a tour of your experiments. You have to or you're going to be left on your own with no funding, the first tour group is arriving tomorrow and they're coming all the way from Virginia. You're not going to make them waste a long bus ride all the way to Louisiana are you?"

"Bbbbbbut I get nervous speaking to people, I'll screw it up for sure, and they'll all laugh at me, and throw sand at me, just like in elementary school," I pleaded with Kyle.

"Come off it Steve, if they make you nervous, just imagine how they look in their underwear, then you won't be as embarrassed if you screw up."

I immediately decided to try it; I imagined the way Kyle looked in his underwear. He looked pretty pathetic because for some reason I decided that he wore underwear with gigantic yellow smiley faces on them. It did make me feel slightly better about myself, so I decided to try and put my fears to the side for a moment and hoped that I could manage the tour successfully since I didn't have any choice in the matter.

Many preparations were needed before the assorted experiments could be shown to anybody else and so I was kept so busy that I couldn't have thought about my social fear if I'd been inclined too. I had to bathe all the animals so that they smelled good (or at least, less bad than they usually did), set up the badminton net and court for a full scale match between the cows, make sure the weasels were ready to squeegee the windows and also fluff the enema hamster for his demonstration. These and a thousand other odds and ends of tidying I accomplished, and went home, where my mom had dinner waiting for me.

"So how was your day?" My mom asked, perfunctorily as we sat at the table eating spaghetti.

"Well Kyle just sprung it upon me that I'm going to have to give tours of the lab, starting tomorrow. I'm very worried about it. What will happen if I embarrass myself in front of all those people? I won't be able to life with the shame of it all."

"That's nice dear."

"That's all you ever say, can't you ever listen to me, mom? You never seem to really care about what is going on in my life. You're my mother, don't you love me?"

"Please pass the salt, pumpkin."

"Arggh I give up, you'll never listen."

As soon as I finished my dinner I went to my room and fumed about how my life was getting so stressful beyond the happy simple days of simply selectively breeding animals to create the types of critters for my experiments, and occasionally using a retrovirus or two to tweak the genetic structure to my liking. All of this was simple and fun but now I am stuck with the most difficult situation of my life, public speaking, and my mother didn't seem to care at all. I later found out that my mom was having a hearing problem but didn't want to admit that she was growing old and losing her hearing. Then, however, I still thought she was simply ignoring me and was bitter about it.

After an hour or two of reading, I told my mom good night and went to bed. My dreams were filled with the constant laughter of young children as they threw sand at me and made fun of my lisp. I would cry, which would only add to the jeers of the other kids at my school. I then decided as I had in real life, that people were mean and cruel and nasty, and that I would have as little to do with them as possible. Cows and other animals were much more fun, sure they would poop wherever they felt like it, but at least they weren't mean to me unless I was mean to them which didn't happen. Well it did happen when they wouldn't listen to me and stood on the wrong side of the court while playing badminton.

After awaking from my autobiographical dreams, I got up and got ready to go to work. I began to try to think rationally about my fear. The people I would be dealing with would be adults, most likely those getting degrees in biology or genetics, six months of speech therapy had cured me of the tongue thrust that caused my lisp, and the outdoor areas for the animals had no sand for them to throw at me and therefore I had no need to worry. Plus I could always fall back on the visualization of underwear thing.

When I got to the laboratory, I made sure to get all the animals from their quarters to their observation rooms or badminton courts. Kyle arrived shortly thereafter and dropped a bombshell on me. He had neglected to mention that the people coming from Virginia were coming from the Randolph-Macon women's college.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I screamed in horror once again.

"What, how does the fact that they're all going to be girls affect anything?"

"Well first of all, I can't exactly picture them in their underwear in order to relieve my social stress can I! Secondly, they're girls, all girls!"

"Aren't your cows females?"

"Well yeah, but that's different."

"How is it different?"

"Well, as you know, I'm very stressed out in social situations, and the reaction of my penis to women just adds additional complications to the mix."

"Surely you must have dated some in high school or college right? Even if you couldn't ask a girl out, you're a reasonably good looking and intelligent guy, so a girl must have tried to ask you out at some point right?"

"Well it did happen on occasion, I felt the urge to say yes but my fear always kicked in and said, 'Did you know that a cow has four stomachs.'"

"Have you ever thought about seeing a therapist for all your social problems? You seem to be pretty messed up socially."

"Well what would you know, you didn't even notice it until yesterday."

"Yes and I apologize for that, we were both too immersed in our work for me to notice your problems until you're about to be thrown into a situation that you've never had to deal with before. You have no choice in the matter, if you don't do this, we will be flat broke and all our animals will go to cosmetics labs." "What sort of cosmetics would they test on a cow?"

"I don't know, its not my field, but we can't afford to feed the animals if we don't do this, at least until some madman or university decides to fund our kooky, well your kooky experiments, mine are reasonable, cows that produce more milk, chickens with extra legs, things that could have actual commercial impact."

"Big deal, commercial impact, why does everything have to have a purpose? Sometimes you just have to follow your dreams," I explained irritably.

"And sometimes you have to increase the scope of your dreams to fit the world around you. Here comes a grand opportunity for you to expand your horizons and actually socialize with girls if only as a teacher."

Their chartered bus pulled into what passed for a parking lot in our little out of the way neck of the woods, a large patch of dirt in between the barn and the observation building.

"Quickly, get to the badminton court and wait."

So I ran to the badminton court and got the cows ready, and began to think that maybe Kyle did actually care about my fear after all, he was giving me the easiest part of the tour, I only had to explain how the cows learned to play badminton, an easy task that I could probably do in my sleep. I had the cows begin to play and waited.

Eventually the tour group reached me and my mandible nearly fell to my tarsals (my jaw fell to my toes for those of you less familiar with the human skeletal structure). Amongst the girls chattering away most of them fairly disinterested in the spectacles they were being forced to see or at least disgusted by the enema hamsters, but this one girl eagerly soaked up all the knowledge sent to her. And oh boy was she beautiful; Mr. Happy down in the basement suddenly needed a bigger apartment. If she had been a chicken, her drumsticks would have been juicy enough to make a grown man cry. I calculated that the volume of her mammary glands was roughly equal to the volume of her head, an unbelievably well proportioned body by my reckoning. What really caught my attention, and caused the dropping of one part and the rising of another, were her eyes. It somehow seemed as if the whole universe dissolved and converged into her eyes. The eyes were probably green, although I at least, lost all awareness of color when our eyes met.

After a minute of my jaw hanging limply beyond control, my social fears and my newfound desire to learn more about this unbelievable creature arose in conflict to one another. As I struggled to gain control of my emotions, and was mustering the strength to say something to her, Irene hit the shuttlecock too hard and it smacked right into my nose. After this embarrassment and the uncharitable laughter of the girls (although not the creature whose unfathomable depths I sought to explore) I began my description of the process of breeding the cows, selecting the cows for intelligence and strength of their tails. Then I explained the tedious process of teaching the cows to hold the racket and understand how to hit the birdie by using their eye mirrors. None of the girls, well perhaps I should have considered them women, they were in graduate school so they couldn't be more than five or so year younger than me, seemed overly interested in my lecture. Except of course for her, she inhaled my information like an aardvark does ants.

Eventually I finished my talk and asked if there were any questions. She of course had an extremely good question, probably the only one close enough to my heart for me to answer despite my fears.

"Hi my name is Mindy and I want to ask you, what motivates you in all your experiments? In other words what makes it worthwhile for you to teach cows to play badminton?"

"The answer is simple, for the sake of the knowledge that I acquire. I dabble in that which interests me and the knowledge I amass is its own reward."

She gave a broad smile that made me feel as warm and fuzzy inside as a blow-dried squirrel. I got the impression from the way she beamed at me that she had liked my answer a lot. Unless of course I was feeling so infatuated with her that I was seeing only that which I wished to see. At any rate, I started to blush from the unaccustomed praise, which made me feel embarrassed, but it was a very different kind of embarrassed than what I was accustomed to. I didn't feel disturbed or distressed about it and people did not seem too inclined to make fun of me or throw sand at me. Maybe all this socialization stuff wouldn't be so bad after all, except that I probably wouldn't see Mindy again. That realization obliterated my fear of social contact. I felt she was a kindred spirit, a fellow seeker of knowledge for knowledge. Now that the tour was over, everyone was just milling about for a bit until they

"Hello," I said tentatively.

"Hi, I really enjoyed your talk. I found all the things you've done for the sake of learning to be simply amazing."

"Why thank you, so how long is your class going to be in town?" I asked, blushing once again. I'd never felt so good and so embarrassed at the same time.

"Yes, this was only the beginning of a larger visit to the various agricultural and zoological attractions in Louisiana. We're going to visit the Audubon zoo and LSU's Agricultural College in addition to your little eugenics lab."

"Well then?" I struggled to say, trying to override the last remnants of my fear of social interaction in order to ask her out to dinner.

"Would you like to learn about the fascinating world of the cow's digestive tract?" I said as Kyle smacked me upside the head.

Kyle then took Mindy off to the side for a moment and started talking to her quietly enough that I couldn't hear them. Judging by what happened next Kyle apparently explained about my poor social skills and must have said some pretty nice things about me.

"How about we discuss the cattle digestion over dinner? I'm staying at Holiday Inn," Mindy said.

That statement nearly made me pass out from disbelief. At any rate, I picked her up from the Holiday Inn and we had a wonderful dinner, which was eclipsed by the wonderful conversation. We continued correspondence with each other after she moved back to Virginia, and she now works with me in my lab. My social phobia had ended, all I had needed was someone to like me and now that I have an increased self-confidence, I'm ready to propose marriage to Mindy. I am very thankful to Kyle for broadening my horizons to conclude society to a degree, even if I am still pretty nervous around people who don't understand my quest for knowledge, especially if there is sand around.

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