hu cares | moo(by) deng

on being chaotic, round, moisturized, blurry, feral, unbothered

Hippos can’t swim. Maybe everyone else on the planet already knew this, but when I pictured a hippo — its velveteen head bobbing in some body of water, the soft blorple of its body beneath the surface — I assumed it was swimming. But really, those hippos are bounding, like an moonwalking astronaut, across the water’s bottom. They are too dense to truly swim but can momentarily float along if they can push off the ground.

I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand, bamboozled. On the other hand, relieved; you don’t have to know how to swim to live in water. If you’ve figured out a way to make it work, no one else questions it; they just assume you know what you’re doing. I mean, hippos do know what they are doing. They live in and move through water, just not the way I thought they did. I assumed and that’s on me.

When life is swimming along, I don’t think anything of it. I just assume I’ll keep moving forward: riding my bike to the happy hour, walking to the coworking space, bussing to the ceramics studio. It is one of the great privileges of my life to have the health, time, and wealth to move through the world with relative ease. And there is no time I feel more grateful for it than when I lose it.

Recently, I gashed my leg open and suddenly no more swimming. Literally, no swimming — the official care instruction for my stitches dictate I cannot submerge the wound, which is sad because I’m dying to take a bath — but also figuratively, no swimming. For the next bit, my life was on pause: none of the usual fun and movement. Instead, a lot of sitting. 

If I can’t swim, I can bounce along with a little help. And boy, has this been exposure therapy in asking for help, a thing I have always meant to get better at but never really wanted to do. I have jokingly taken to calling N garcon; garcon, can you refill my water? Garcon, bring me bonbons. Garcon, will you untie my shoe? Take out the recycling? I’m asking people for rides. I’m leaning on friends for emotional support, leaving rambling voice memos about how everything and everyone is so annoying. (“Could being in low grade pain for days have anything to do with this?”

Kate Horowitz

gently asked.) 

As a result, my screen time is up 498913759187%. And somehow, this has led me back to hippos.

Coincidentally, I’d already been reading about hippos — their inability to swim, the American hippo bill, Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos — when a pygmy hippo named Moo Deng took the internet by storm. Here’s what we know about her: she lives in Thailand, she is very round, and she is blurry in almost every photo. She has no teeth, but nonetheless tries to bite zookeepers. Moo Deng’s skin is dewy and she appears unbothered. Moo Deng is brat. 

It soothes me that everyone loves Moo Deng. No one cares that she cannot swim! People love that she is chaotic and loud, slippery and feral. 

Our girl, via Wikimedia Commons.

Then I learned that Moo Deng has an older sister, Moo Wan. When you google Moo Wan, you get links to the pork dish she is named for. No hippo images. She is every bit as cute as Moo Deng but the hordes have not chosen her for their fan art, their make-up tutorials, their brand memes. In fact, Moo Deng has multiple older siblings, none of whom were internet sensations. This feels very unfair to me, but then again, Moo Deng never asked to be a celebrity, and she is a hippo. She has no idea any of this is happening, and I find that even more soothing.

A land seal, from r/StaffordBullTerriers.

If pitbulls are land seals, then Staffordshire terriers are land pygmy hippos. Tell me a grey staffy sunbathing doesn’t look like a little Moo Deng. Maeby, our sweet pup who passed last year, was a staffy mix, and one of her nicknames was Mooby; if she were still alive, I’m sure we’d be calling her Mooby Deng. She made all sorts of small animal noises, and in the way humans and dogs pick up on one another’s languages, we learned the specific chuff-chuff that meant she was in pain. One night, as I crept into bed gingerly to avoid jostling the stitches, N pointed out I was making the same chuff-chuff. 

As the days went on, I felt myself transforming into Mooby Deng. My routine featured the same basic elements on repeat: sleep, eat, bathe, nap (sidenote: it’s been wild how much additional sleep my body has needed to heal this wound!), eat, chuff-chuff, etc. Not to spoil Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, but the upshot feels relevant: working mother’s anger transforms her into a werewolf. Becoming a land hippo, though, is significantly less glamorous. For instance: I have fleas. Yes, fleas! I’m not quite sure how it’s possible, given that we don’t have a dog in the house any more. None of the fleas are biting N, only me. The only way this makes sense to me is that my transformation into Mooby Deng is complete.

Between the leg injury and the fleas, I have been a very sour land hippo. I hate that I’m missing perfect cycling weather and my team’s weekend riding retreat, but that’s not going to make me heal faster. I’m annoyed that I have to vacuum my house top to bottom everyday to control the flea population, and I’m paranoid every time I see any black speck on me. I feel guilty that I’m this crabby over the circumstances of my life when others have it much worse. Most of all, I’m trying to make sense of why this is all happening, what lessons I can learn to avoid this happening again, but all I’m coming up with is: don’t be so unlucky. (Did I mention the leg gash happened on Friday the 13th?) In my desperation for an explanation, I googled “cosmic shift September” and, I swear I’m not making this up, the top result was “URANUS IN RETROGRADE.” The only explanation here is that the universe is laughing at my nonsensical question.

I’m usually all about appreciating the present, but what happens when the present kind of sucks? In the urgent care waiting room, I told N how impatient I was feeling, how I wanted to fast forward to the part where they’d put the stitches in my leg. I wanted to get it over with. N looked over at me and just said: “We are waiting robots.” Yes, I decided. He’s right. Beep beep boop boop; no thoughts, just wait. 

And that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps the only way to survive being a land hippo is to be a land hippo. Regret, annoyance, paranoia, meaning-making — these are all very human reactions, yes, but perhaps I need to just be the soft animal. I lay in the sun when I want to lay in the sun. My toothless bites won’t hurt anyone, my feral yawps admired. I am moisturized, dewy. I let go of any attempt to make sense of this, and lean into being a chaotic blur, bouncing off rock bottom to keep my head above water. It’s not swimming but it will get me there, wherever there is. 

Lately / next

• Tim Keck created two of my favorite things in this world — The Onion and The Stranger — so I was excited to chat with him about psychedelics for his new podcast, Mush Love.

• I’ll be reading at Nonfiction For No Reason on October 11 alongside some very cool and talented people, and you can get tickets here! (For more on NFNR, The Stranger just wrote about it.)

  

Unsolicited recommendations

• Barbara’s Original Cheese Puffs. A friend brought them on a backpacking trip, claiming they were “healthy Cheetos.” I have not fact checked this but it doesn’t matter because I am now obsessed with them.

• If you’re going to pay a few hundred dollars to go to urgent care, leave with as much as you can. After the doctor put my stitches in, she offered me the scissors she used to cut the suture material. They are now the most expensive pair of scissors I own.

• Point Break. I rewatched it recently and can attest that it remains a cinematic masterpiece.

• When writing about Indigenous communities and issues, there are concepts and values that are difficult to convey when operating in the framework of Western journalism. Toastie Oaster explores this tension in an illuminating and important piece reflecting on their experience working on an investigation for High Country News and ProPublica.

• If you’re in the Seattle area: go climb at the brand new Edgeworks location, Bel-Red Boulders! I have it on good authority that the staff has been working hard to put it together, and the guy who runs it is pretty cool IMO.

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