This drawing was done in park in the Lower East Side, in a little notebook, soon after I quit school and came back to New York City.

One day, back in the late 1990's, I was goofing off at the French National Library, having decided not to pursue my doctorate but determined to nevertheless enjoy the privileges of the reading room till the end of the semester. Waiting for a book to be delivered to my desk, I started leisurely clicking my laptop, opening mysterious files that had somehow ended up in the garbage. (Remember when Mac files would end up in the garbage after a crash? In a file called "Recovered Files," saved by the computer fairy?) I opened one and it was titled: "The phenomenology of slime." It was just a few sentences that I barely remembered typing, all alone, in the middle of the night in my garret, with the BBC World Service on the radio, as usual. It said:

"There’s a scientist on the radio right now who’s saying, “When you think of the immensity of the universe, you realize that we humans are just a bit of slime on the surface of a planet!”

You know what I have to say to that? Speak for yourself, slimeball!"

Carolita