Sir David, my fearless octogenarian knight

It's a breathtaking day outside, the kind of day fabric softener companies use to pitch their "Spring Breeze" scents, and I'll spend most of it in a windowless office listening to moronic cell phone conversations taking place right outside my door. By the time all the white-gold brilliance has faded out of the air and everything's draped in exhaust-colored shadows and the world begins to cool again, I'll emerge to drive Pants' comic book rally car back home, where two hungry animals will immediately begin howling at me for dinner.

Pants is in another state, flouting the laws of physics. Someone once explained naval technology to him as "a series of incredibly bad ideas that turned out well," and I think this is accurate. His current training exercise goes against thousands of years of evolutionary survival instinct-- technically anyone willing to do what he's supposed to be doing should have been weeded out of the gene pool eons ago.

In the meantime, I've been keeping myself occupied by watching someone else comically endanger himself. David Attenborough's BBC nature series, The Life of Mammals is hands down some of the most interesting TV I've ever seen. Not only have I discovered interesting facts about whale penises (the Wright whale has a 12-foot prehensile dong!), I've also gotten to see an 81-year-old man roped to the back of a swimming elephant, hoisted into the Amazonian treetops with pulleys, and buffeted on the freezing seas in an insulated wetsuit as he chased sea otters. Steve Irwin, rest his soul, had nothing on this guy. Attenborough is able to retain his eloquent British aplomb even when farted upon by a Florida manatee.

Lonely evenings with microwaved spaghetti aren't that bad when I turn them into dinner dates with Sir David. The conversations I have with him as the DVD plays aren't that much different from how they'd go if he were really in the room-- mostly "Holy crap!", "awesome!", and "no fucking way..." from me, and then long periods of silence while I stuff my face and listen to him.

Incidentally, he's also got a fabulous series on bugs called Life in the Undergrowth-- bat-eating centipedes! do you need another reason to watch?-- as well as The Life of Birds and Blue Planet, which is all about ocean life. I should mention that the only reason I've gotten to develop this one-sided relationship with my 81-year-old boyfriend is that my friends Stephanie and Will, whose incredible nature adventures deserve posts of their own, have been lending me their DVDs. Thank you!

Interesting side note: Pants refused to watch Life in the Undergrowth with me. All the other Attenborough series garnered accolades from him, but Pants is terrified, on the brain stem level, of bugs. Funny that someone can routinely and literally endanger his own life for a job, and then leap shrieking from the room when a spider peeks out at him.

To be perfectly clear, I'm not mocking his fear, not entirely anyway, because I have an equally incapacitating fear of needles. It's rooted so deeply that I can sit there and deliver an out loud, over-intellectualized pep-talk to myself while getting blood drawn-- "I must breathe deeply. This is no big deal. I acknowledge and accept my fear, but I will not let it control me. Blah, blah, blah..."-- and I'll still end up face down and twitching on the floor in a dead faint.

Will, lender of DVDs mentioned above, postulated this weekend that perhaps both mine and Pants' fears are rooted in a perception of invaded boundaries, and our lack of control over maintaining those boundaries. "Bugs are little," he mused, "and they can crawl up your pants leg or in your butthole." Same with needles-- they break the sacred boundary of the skin, the boundary that, for me at least, should clearly define where the world ends and I begin. I think his theory has merit.

I just found it especially disappointing not to be able to have Pants share in my marveling at the incredible camera angles in Life in the Undergrowth. The cinematography (is that what you call it? with nature shows?) was extraordinary. Where all the National Geographic shows from my youth showed insects looking hyper-focused, over-lit, and vaguely greasy, the BBC crew, with their new teeny tiny fiber optic cameras, were able to make a snail shell look like the sloped and smoothed-over scenery of Mojave desert rock formations, and the segments of a millipede look like the precision-tooled, battle-ready machinery they are. Seriously, I don't normally wax poetic about slugs and insects, but this camera work inspires me.

If only Sir David could make a beautiful, artfully arranged documentary on phlebotomy.