We Amuse Myself

It's raining today, but I had the Wanderlust anyway. So I started taking my usual route and what do you know, there's a bunch of suicidal earthworms out there just waiting to be stepped on. Such things make me sad so as usual I felt compelled to pick them up and put them back in the dirt (the less wet patches of dirt, so they drown less easily...)

When I found the first one and set to work scrapping away the mulch in the nearest garden bed, I began to wonder if I was actually rescuing them. In a community service class I took two years ago, we once read an article about people who pick up starfish along the beach and throw them back into the water. Except that they're actually doing the ecosystem a disservice because the starfish, whether they like it or not, are supposed to get eaten by seagulls on the beach instead of eating other things back in the ocean. My class took that to mean we shouldn't be doing any community service because it will inheriently off set the ecosystem of the community and threaten some aspect we can't quite see. Yeah. (i.e. They didn't want to do the community service portion of the class, lazy bums). See The IT Crowd episode "The Red Door" for a lovely interpretive dance that goes along with this hands-off approach to preserving the ecosystem.

But sometimes I have to wonder, do the earthworms crawling along the roads and sidewalks during storms actually serve a purpose and am I disrupting that purpose when I attempt to "save" them? Am I even saving them or do they just end up dieing (...dying?) in the rain-soaked dirt? I am preventing them from continuing on an important journey from dirt patch to dirt patch, like some weird earthworm mating ritual that can only be completed when the rain is falling just right?

This are the things I think about when it rains.

Anyway, after "saving" maybe five earthworms (and feeling bad for not rescuing another two or three), I came back to my apartment, washed my hands (because earthworms, although important for the soil, have cooties), listened to Tokio Hotel's "Bereichte", which cheered me up nicely, and sat down to write this blog entry.

One day, I'll go out into the rain with my little yellow umbrella and just spend the day watching the earthworms and see what happens. And then feel bad if it turns out I was helping and my non-interfering-scientist/observer-self lets them die.

Adorable Hypothetical Picture of my Future Rainy Day Adventure

Courtesy of Pink Sherbert

PS: I think Mythbusters already answered this question.