This Monkey Business
I've spent most of the day doing pretty much the only thing I've been doing with my free time for a while now. I could have gone to visit my mom at work. I could've practiced my form for my upcoming belt testing in taekwondo. I could've gone for a jog and spent some time in the fresh air. No. Instead, I spent the day trying to figure out how to weasel my way (hehe... I guess?) into the monkey business. My first concern is getting into Rutgers. There's not a whole lot I can do about my GPA at this point (its a not-horrible but not-too-impressive 2.79) so I figured it'd be best to fatten up my extracirriculars and volunteer work- which is MIA since about 2000 when I got my first job and found out- hey, I can get paid for this crap! So I went to the Somerset Co. Library in Bridgewater and adopted myself a bookshelf there that I'm supposed to keep in order. I can see it now: I'm gonna put up some retinal- scan-that-sends-sonar-pulses-into-your-brain-and-sees-what-kind-of-hulligan-tendencies-you-have-lurking-about-in-you device that will not allow you to touch the shelf unless you have a pure soul. Oh yeah. I can do that. I used to be in charge of security at the Warren Co. Library. We took these matters seriously.
ha!
I've also been perusing the wildlife volunteer opprotunities out there and found a couple that look kinda sweet. Theres Woodland Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Clinton that I really hope gets back to me. They have bears! Woot! It would be such a great place to get my foot in the door with the whole catch, nurse and release bit. *sigh* All my dreams... There's also the bigger organizations- World Wildlife Federation and Wildlife Conservation Society. Really all you can do with those though is give them money and call yourself a member. I might join one like that... whichever one puts my money towards adopting a gibbon I think :) Or an orangutan. The orangutans could use the money more, but then it becomes an exercise in futility, really. I don't want the orangutans to disappear off the face of the earth by any stretch of the imagination (I'm a big fan)... its just that... well look at it this way:
The only surviving wild orangutans live in Borneo and Sumatra. I don't remember the exact number, but theres estimated to only be a coupole hundred some odd of them left. Orangutans are solitary apes- each has there own territory they stick to (though the male's will sometimes overlap with the females.. bow-chica-wow-wow), but two males will not overlap and two females will not overlap. They eat fuit- and have very specific fruit needs. That being said, in order to sustain themselves, an orangutans territory needs to be many kilometers in size. And no overlapping. Given that in the amount of total space the species is working with is already tough. If you were to start plugging more of them into the equation, it would get awfully cramped and food would run critically low. This actually was a problem with some of the rehabilitation centers when they released a bunch of the apes back into the wild. So if the population is to flourish, a lot will die of starvation. On the other hand, an orangutan only produces on average 1 offspring every 8 years. At this rate, too much population won't be an issue- the species will just dwindle down to nothing. Either way its a catch-22 really.
I guess it goes to the gibbons.
Huh, anyway. I'm also looking for many a once-in-a-while charity group to join... Habitat for Humanity maybe. That could be fun :)