Yes, I am a Nerd

Because I am who I am, and those of you who know who I am know that I am who I am, I MUST do this post.  I pre-apologize.

Parasite Spotlight:  Ascaris lumbricoides (my personal favorite; we'll call him Al)

Al is a Nematode, or an unsegmented roundworm (blah blah blah, I know, but keep reading...).  Al begins his life as a little egg.  When you ingest Al through your mouth, he gently drifts down past your esophagus into your inviting digestive tract where he hatches and becomes little larval Al.  Little adventurous larval Al burrows a teeny-tiny hole through your upper intestine to enter the fast an exciting current of your blood.  Like a fluid roller coaster, your blood wisps him past the darkest depths of your liver and inter the furthest chambers of your heart.  Adorable Al is pumped by your loving heart into your moist, delicate lung tissue.  In the nutrient rich lungs, little Al feasts and grows and molts, and feasts and grows and molts.

After three weeks of feasting and growing and molting, curious adolescent Al begins to wriggle from your lungs through the bronchioles, up your trachea, to the back of your throat.  As he reaches the summit of your epiglottis, you begin to cough him up, but in an act of selflessness, you swallow him back down into the comforts of your warm bowel.  

Al settles down in your upper intestine again, but now he grows to maturity, reaching tubular lengths up to 35 cm long.  That is longer than a foot.  It is here and now that Al begins to notice Allie, the cylindrical diva who hatched, burrowed, molted, and was choked down by his side.  Al and Allie get their unsegmented groove on, and soon Allie is producing up to 200,000 potential offspring a day, every day, for a year.  If you had a dollar for every fertilized egg Allie made in the span of one year within you, you would be seventy-three million dollars richer!  Lucky!

Al and Allie lovingly deposit their cute little baby eggs into your soft intestinal chyme, and their brave little troopers are gently shipped out of your body via BM.  To bid Al's progeny a proper farewell, and to share the parasitic love with others, you deposit them into a garden, or field, not just to fertilize your crops, but also to allow the life cycle of this marvelous creature to continue for generations to come.

I post-apologize.

But now that you have a glimpse of what goes on in my brain, let me give you an idea of what goes on in my life.  Take this next video, and change the blonde girl into a hot Asian chick, and this sums up my life...pre-children.