Courting Chaos

This afternoon I went to the Kits library and searched for books by Diana Beredford-Kroeger. They were supposed to have two that were in but when I went to look for them they were gone. Ditto for a book by E. O. Wilson. It was present in the system but not on the shelf. So I decided to bug the librarian and she was happy to go take a look for me. She'd heard the interview with the botanist/biochemist as well. She was also a fan of E.O. Wilson who by coincidence has written the intro to Bereford-Kroeger's upcoming book. I'm onto something good here. I tell the librarian I have the feeling someone else heard the interview and has the books on a table somewhere in the library. I keep staring at a pile of books by a man reading magazines. After a while he starts to feel my eyes on him. The librarian goes to the trouble of ordering me all the books I'm wanting, then figures I actually made a mistake transcribing the code for the Wilson book. I take another look and it is there. Meanwhile the librarian told me she was harassed for two hours on Sunday after booking an online air ticket that seemed to have disappeared. "It's the same thing," she says. "The computer said it was there but it was not really there." As I was about to leave I looked at the pile of books I was obsessing over. Both the books I wanted were right there just where my spider senses had been tingling. I have them now and I am happy.

Before making dinner I listened to the podcast three times as I cleaned the house with a natural cleanser containing citrus oils which makes me feel bright and happy. "Is it toxic?" my son asks. "No, completely natural," I say. "Toxic," he says. My mom says I've never been a great housekeeper. Well, she said it behind my back to my partner actually, so I am really making an effort to clean the house.

I am also very excited to be courting chaos with A for a performance in the fall. Ideas are percolating.

The other coincidence is that I turned to a page in the E. O. Wilson book written with Bert Hölldobler called The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance and Strangeness of Insect Societies that talks about the patterns honey bees use to choose which cells they are going to lay eggs in, which they will put pollen and which honey. He describes a formula that helps create order out of a seemingly random and chaotic process. More on this later, but this is one of the burning questions in my beekeeping mind these days.