Betty the Anthropologist
The dolphins with whom I resided those many long years found much of our human behavior to be utterly incomprehensible. Being creatures of instinct and strict habit, they saw our gnawing aspirations and yearnings to be other than we naturally are as mere foolishness and morbidly contrary to the immutable laws of Nature. Many hours I would argue this trait's merit, but one would find greater success attempting to convince a mullet to swim on its back than to sway my cetacean friends from their time-honored beliefs and creed. In later years, however, I would come to the conclusion that my dolphin friends were not only correct in their evaluation of this dangerous foible, but uncannily prescient in their revelation of its weighty and awesome truth to me.
   The veracity of this wisdom was thrust upon my scorpion several years ago, in the golden bayside city of San Francisco. I had been lecturing at that great bastion of learning and gelasticity, Berkeley, on the Law of Solubility, and found the students most apt and attentive to this profound dictum. I found the female scholars to be most  receptive, especially while discussing the merits of this crucial philosophy in the steamy confines of a water-filled cedar tub, a learning environment I found highly stimulating to the kaskas as well as the vidni, which by now had become profound, though wrinkled.
   At the end of this watery session, one of the lovely young coeds, Betty, invited me to accompany her for some much needed refreshment to a nearby bistro. As we sipped glass after glass of wine at the gay sidewalk cafe, she revealed that she was suffering under the weight of a crushing quandary. Though diligently studying for her degree in anthropology, she longed for other, more spiritual realms.
   "Master Akiryon!" she cried, looking at me through tear-filled eyes, "I don't want to study this dumb old anthropology! It's sooo boring! And all we study are these gross tribes that eat bugs and stuff. It's too icky! I know I have been put here on this earth for something else. You know, like a higher purpose or something. I have this, like, gift, you know? I want to be a psychic, like the ones on TV."
   I sat in silence for some moments, weighing and sifting her words. Her very future, nay, her very life might well depend on my answer.
   "Sounds good to me," I said, draining my wine in a final gulp and signaling to the waiter to bring another bottle of similar vintage without delay.
   Later that week I encountered my young friend once more on the crowded thoroughfare outside the campus. Running up to me and embracing me with that typical American familiarity, she cried, radiant with elation, "Oh Master Akiryon! I took your advice. I dropped out of school yesterday to live my dream! That ol' Miss Cleo better watch her fat ass!"
   "What is this?" I asked in some surprise.
   "You know, silly, what we were talking about the other night!"
   "Oh, yes, of course! Absolutely. Well, good fortune to you, my dear."
   As the days passed, I heard no more more from my young friend and hoped all was well with her. Then late one night, the telephone in my hotel room rang. The voice on the other end was hysterical and it was some time before I understood that it was to young Betty that I was speaking.
   "Now calm yourself and repeat that again, my child. Where are you?"
   As fate would write it, Betty was in the hospital. It seems that she had run into some difficulties in her new profession. I left immediately to comfort her.
   On reaching her room, I was saddened to see the condition this fine young woman had been reduced to. Her body was in a cast from head to toe, her legs suspended from the ceiling by cables and pulleys. Her once cherubic face was bruised and battered and her long blond hair singed to the roots. "My dear child," I cried, with something approaching sympathy, "whatever has happened?"
   "Well, I started my new business and had just began running the commercials. It was great. Thousands of people were calling. Then the other night some Jamaican guy attacked me as I was coming out of my office. As he was beating me up he said I better shut down my business or else. I got away but as I was running across the street, I got hit by a cab. I managed to crawl back to my office and lock the door just as the whole place exploded. I fell out the back window just before it burned to the ground."
   "My goodness! But this is terrible!" I cried.
   "Yes and it's all your fault! I never should have listened to you!"
   "What? What do mean?"
   "Well you're the one that told me to do it! How did I know it was so competitive. I should have stayed in anthropology. I'm just not cut out to be a psychic on TV."
   "A psychic! Is that what you said?" I roared in utter disbelief.
   "Of course it is. What did you think?"
   "I thought you wanted to be a sidekick on TV, like the entertaining and noble Tonto."
   Of course there was nothing more I could do. I did hear years later, however, that my young friend had graduated with honors and was living with the Tsaday tribe in Mindano, where she had finally become accustomed to eating bugs.

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