Sometimes I worry about my own curiosity. Most of the time I think of it as a sort of hyperactive aspect of my personality that occasionally leads me to say or do odd things. Things like sticking an avocado pit into one of my mom's flower pots to see if it would grow (which I am happy to report it is and I am thrilled about the prospect of homegrown avocados, in a few years of course.) Kind of quirky, but I can live with that. But sometimes, such as following my latest experiment, I worry for my health and or safety and freedom.
This June has been rather more wet and rainy than in recent years, which everybody seems to have an opinion about. I don't really care one way or the other, though I am hoping to get a few good swimming days in sometime this summer. At any rate, the rain has led to some prolific plant growth in the backyard and this has lead to some curiosity (or stupidity) on my part. One plant species especially caught my interest, though not for its bright pink petals.
We have some poppies in the backyard that have been there forever without me taking too much notice of them, other than steering clear of their dark black polleny centers that stain your fingers and clothes. (And when it comes to staining clothes, I am enough of a slob/klutz on my own that I don't need any outside help, thank you.) However, this year these giant pink poppies caught my eye because they reminded me of a film we watched in my "Drugs and Human Behavior" class fall semester.
The film was about the opium trade in Afghanistan and (you tell me if this is a good or bad thing to show in a classroom setting) they actually demonstrate the way that opium is harvested. Now, because I know that most of you probably have a better handle on your curiosity than I do, I will tell you that you basically take the center of the poppy inside the petals and make a few horizontal slices to it, at which point it starts oozing plant gunk. After a few days the gunk dries andthe Afghans scrape it off and collect it into little balls of sap. Then, when they need some pain relief/a fix they just pinch off a tiny bit and eat it. All of this was shown in the film, which makes me think that the class might more appropriately have been titled "Drugs: A How-To Guide for Human Addiction Behavior." (Incidently, in this same class we also learned that various drug education programs, such as DARE, have a pretty lousy track record of preventing drug use and may actually increase students' curiousity about drugs. Now there's irony for you.)
So when I saw the poppies this year I got a little curious. First I just wondered if they were the same kind of poppies they have in Afghanistan and if they would bleed opium sap. I wasn't so much concerned with the actual opium as with the harvest process. So I thought I would test it out. And sure enough the stupid black pollen stained my hands and clothes. Oh and also the poppies did bleed some sort of sap and I though that was pretty interesting, because it makes you wonder why we don't hear about the police raiding poppy farms in the US.
So up to this point, my curiosity is pretty much at its normal level and I was just weirdly slicing a few poppies in the backyard. No big deal. It's not like I am going to harvest it and sell it or anything. And since I am not a drug addict and have no plans to be one I wasn't going to eat it either. So I pretty much left it at that. I checked it a few days later and saw that it had indeed hardened into a tacky sap, as was demonstrated in the video. With the experiment over I went inside and made a sandwich and being the klutz that I am I promptly sliced my finger. And being the overly curious person that I am I decided that, although completely unintentional, this kitchen mishap provided a perfect opportunity to test the poppy juice. This is where most people would rationally say to themselves, "Hmm, I have an open wound that could be subject to infection. Should I rub backyard plant sap into it or try the neosporin instead? I think I will go with the neosporin." Wise choice, but unfortunately not the one that I made. Oh no, not at all the one that I made.
It is only now as I look back that I realize how stupid this was. Not only was I going to put plant guts all over an open wound, the plant guts could contain opium, a controlled substance in the United States, if I remeber correctly from my "How to Be A Drug Dealer" class. This means that theoretically I could be charged for possessing it. As I said, I worry that my curiosity is a danger to me sometimes. It's as if it takes over the rational part of my brain that says, "Lindsey, you are not a drug addict. Keep it that way." So I merrily rubbed the plant gunk into my fresh wound.
The good news about my curiosity problem is that I generally learn from my mistakes pretty quickly. It only took me one time of exploding an egg in the microwave to learn not to put raw uncracked eggs in the microwave. And it only took about ten seconds of burning, stinging pain to go wash the poppy juice out of my wound and put some neosporin on it.
The bad news is that sometimes you don't get a chance to learn from your mistakes. I realized this as I was contemplating the field of mushrooms that has also popped up in the backyard as of late. I started wondering if they were edible and if I could use the internet to identify them. I was nearly to the point of formulating recipes before the rational me stepped in and said, "Are you crazy? People die from eating poisonous wild mushrooms and even the experts can have a hard time telling which ones are edible. Plus, the dog uses the backyard as his own personal bathroom. Do you really want to be eating the fungus that pops up back there? Go finish your sandwich and stick to the avocado experiments."
I am thinking that maybe it would be good for my health if the rain started clearing up soon, before the beanstalk gets climb-able.
