Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Planning for my trip next week has almost exclusively involved watching the videos about the World's Largest Dinosaurs exhibit over and over again, debating about whether or not to spend two days at the museum, and organizing drinks in rooftop bars with very funny people. It's been a while since the last time New York and I were in love, and right now I am bored and restless in my bones. In the summer my angry robot always demands a change of scenery.

Last week I was watching a documentary about migration--two of my favorite things are butterflies and the zugunruhe--and they talked about how it takes three generations of monarchs to get from Mexico to Canada, but only one to get back home. They say that the information that tells the butterflies if they are aligned with the Earth's magnetic field is kept in their antennae, a chemical compass right on top of their little heads.

In my head is the story of a butterfly who just can't keep itself straight with the rest of the group, and it's only later that it finds out that its own antennae are aligned with a magnetic field somewhere else. Jupiter, probably, or even the lost field of Mars. Someplace further than it can get to but that it never quite stops trying to reach.

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