Time Lapse Observations

Remember those nature videos with the flower blooming in fast forward or the five-second version of a spider building its web? Well, tonight I created my own time lapse nature video, sans the video, which you will thank me for after a few more lines of this post.

For the past week or so, I have been working eight or ten hours, then a trip home, a quick dinner, a meeting and an hour workout by 11PM. Arrive home, pour a bubble bath (jasmine of course), light a few candles and enjoy a romantic moment, with myself (and an episode of Burn Notice). The routine has been greatly rewarding, after which I put myself in a robe, climb into bed, tweak on the internet, and then fall asleep. Tonight, a change in plans. With the holiday approaching and the roommate out of town, I opted out of the robe and enjoyed the evening "in the buff" as we like to call it around here.

Given my late lunch today, I waited to eat dinner until after the bath, and chose a simple meal of pot stickers, and well, pot stickers. While I am supposed to avoid excess sugar (I did cut out the peanut butter cups and the pint of Hagen Daaz each week), I enjoy a root beer in the late evening, my reward for a good day's work. As an aside, frozen pot stickers, encrusted in little ice crystals, tend to snap, crackle and pop in a pan of hot walnut oil. Normally, this doesn't bother me much. I have a habit of scorching my hands and arms on a semi-regular basis when cooking with hot oil (or just heat in general), and my personal safety is typically an afterthought when it comes to a good meal. Food tastes that much better when it requires a personal sacrifice. Tonight, not so much. Le buffe and scorching hot oil, not a pleasant experience. This is why the ex likely never cooked me a meal in nothing more than a see-through apron nor I for her. Fortunately, I managed to minimize my exposure, and that is why I am writing this little anecdote.

You see, when I retrieved my cold treat from the fridge tonight, I had just exited a very steamy bath environment. Typically, when one is hot, it is pleasurable to cool down, whether with a cool rag, a cool breeze or in my case, a cool beverage. Not only was I hot, I was nekid (say it out loud, it will make sense). If you are male (which I am) you understand that our body has several self-defense features we have no control over, but which we are grateful for. Our biological mission is to reproduce, and our contribution to that process is located in the testes, often two (though sometimes one) oval-shaped marbles encased in a stretchy piece of soft, hairy (preferably shaven) skin, located in between the legs, directly below the Chosen One (or King James if you're an English bloke).

One of those self-defense mechanisms is to regulate the temperature of the gonads, which is accomplished by either expanding or contracting our soft kangaroo-pouch to warm up or to cool off the "boys." Temperature change is often a gradual process, and given that we use additional protective layers to shield "lefty" and "Pancho," we rarely, if ever witness this climatologically-influenced change. Instead we are subject to its results, as when we exit a warm bath or wake up in a snow bank with no clothes because we drank too much and our friends thought it would be amusing, even if hypothermia was surely inevitable. As you might imagine, the ball sack (technical wording, not my terminology) will expand when exposed to heat, causing the testes to descend away from the body such that you can stretch it (the ball sack that is) over a softball (or for the truly ambidextrous, a basketball). Cold then has an opposite effect, resulting in a tight, firm ball sack, even though the amount of skin remains the same, it contracts, resulting not only in a smaller "package" but a thicker protective covering over the testes. If you are ever lacking an outdoor thermometer, buy yourself a bull (or otherwise sufficiently large mammal with exposed junk) and you can judge the temp by the distance between the ground and his nuts. Crude, yes, but effective.

We now return to my predicament: A hot bath, a nekid body and a cold bottle of root beer. It is here that my experimentation began, and not to spoil the surprise, but I assure you, it was a success. Simply place the 40º beverage sideways, underneath the outstretched ball bag, and in a matter of seconds, the volume of the sack rapidly decreases, revealing the aforementioned biological protective process known as shrinkage. I know of no human being (I don't really know that many honestly) who is unaware of this concept, and I am sure that many of us have witnessed its aftermath, but few of us, including myself until tonight, have ever seen it in real time. If you are so willing (or for your girls out there, if you have a GGG partner) you might want to give it a try. I will be honest with you, watching a time lapse of blooming orchids or the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly is a touching experience with nature, but neither compares to the sheer joy derived from this little moment I had with myself tonight. Now if only I had a video camera...