In an effort to quell the needs of my tyrannical overlords, who insist that I pay my mortgage and bills every month, I work about four different jobs.
One of those jobs is writing tests for the UK university system. What this means is that if you’re trying to attend a university in the UK and your first language isn’t English, there’s a chance you’ll have to take one of my tests. If you see me in public one day and punch me in the face as a result, I completely understand.
This means I spend a lot of my extra time working. When other people get to relax, put their feet up, or enjoy the weekend, I pore over texts and write questions about things that slowly drive me out of my mind.
This weekend, for example, I spent a great deal of time reading about elephant sanctuaries and a woman who’s on a lifelong quest to educate the public about bats.
Now, of course, I’m obsessed with bats. And I’m obsessed with elephants. That’s how this tends to work out. I spend six hours writing comprehension questions about something, and suddenly it’s my entire personality.
Naturally, I began wondering whether we could somehow team these two animals up. Could we build a sanctuary for both elephants and bats?
I don’t know exactly what this would look like, but I think it would be a fun place to visit. There would be enormous elephants lumbering around during the day and thousands of bats flying overhead at night. Perhaps a gift shop. Maybe a café.
I suppose the first question we’d have to ask is: how do bats and elephants get along?
I have absolutely no idea.
They do seem to feature in a lot of Bugs Bunny cartoons, sometimes at the same time, so perhaps that’s a promising starting point. I don’t know if Warner Bros. cartoons are considered a reliable source of zoological information, but at this stage I’m willing to consider anything.
Other animals that hopped into my writing sphere this weekend included rats, dolphins, and apes.
All of this was in pursuit of one question: Do animals have a sense of humor?
Dolphins, it seems, laugh at things. Or at least they make sounds that researchers believe might be laughter. The problem is that we don’t know whether they’re actually finding anything funny.
Or perhaps, as Douglas Adams suggested in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, dolphins are simply much smarter than we are.
Maybe they’re not laughing at the same things we’re laughing at. Maybe they’re laughing at us for being stupid enough to laugh at those things in the first place.
Perhaps we’re living in some sort of simulation, and the dolphins are running the whole operation. Maybe they’re observing us from behind the glass, trying to determine whether humans are intelligent enough to understand humor.
“Look, Nigel, he’s laughing at a man slipping on a banana peel again.”
“Extraordinary. Give him another fish.”
You gotta be kidding me.
And then there are the rats.
Researchers, it seems, have been tickling rats. And I mean that literally. Scientists have spent their working days physically tickling rats to see whether the animals enjoy it.
Apparently, they do. Some of the rats even came back wanting more.
Now, we don’t know whether rats are sadists, masochists, or whether they simply enjoy being tickled like the rest of us. But apparently, tickling is something they’re into.
I find this fascinating, partly because it suggests rats may have a sense of humor, but mostly because somewhere in the world there are professional scientists who get paid to tickle rats.
And here I am, writing questions about them.
So while I spend my weekends creating dozens of gap-fill activities, vocabulary tests, comprehension questions, inference questions, and high-concept comprehension questions, I’m also left wondering:
Are rats smarter than us? Are rats sadists? Are dolphins smarter than us? Could bats and elephants peacefully coexist in a sanctuary with a decent gift shop? And how exactly does someone get a job tickling rats?
I don’t know.
But that’s what my weekends are like.
I hope yours was nice.
