We are clearly not cut out to be buddhists.

It's not an actual soccer ball, happily, or they'd have broken my head by now.

This is why you need a Malian name if you live there--it's hard to get stuff done without it.

It's weird now when I go back to America and no one looks at me, actually.

I seem to have a lot of strong opinions about animals.

More realistically, the differences between Mali's skirt-bat and the more graceful bats in Nepal probably just have to do with them being different species. Different kinds of bat brains specialize in different kinds of flying depending on what their environment is like (I wrote a paper on brain sizes once, which is how I now know this extremely useful factoid. And to think people sneered at my anthropology degree.). Unless skirt-bat was just having a really bad night.