Crickets!!!

I'm in a crappy "computer lab" here in Korea. I'm being rushed out because there's people waiting and "everyone gets a turn". Take a long walk of a short pier, I say.

Anyway, this has been bugging me for the last two days and I didn't get a chance to write about it for a while. There's a cricket in my bathroom. He's been there for two days now. Chirping. Today I thought he was dead or moved on because he was quiet this morning; but this evening he's back at it again.

Originally, he annoyed me. I just wanted to brush my teeth and use the crapper in piece. Instead I'm assaulted by this chirp-chirping. I toyed around with trying to hunt him down and shmoosh him, but I was rushed in the AM and he got a reprieve. Then yesterday I was taking a shower and I stopped to listen to his chirp.

Chirp-chirp.

Chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp.

Chirp-chirp-chirp.

There seemed to be a rhythm or pattern emerging. I didn't hang out long enough to empirically capture the pattern of the chirps, but there seemed to be a couple of consistancies. First, the chirps came in bursts, followed by a pause. Second, they came in groups as short as two, but no longer than six. Third, the three chirp burst seemed to be the most frequent.

This had me thinking: is this really some short of cricket language? Is it preposterous to place a label like "language" on what could very well be a series of random cricket sounds that have no underlying meaning? Maybe I'm not qualified enough to make that assessment. But it does beg the question that if this is a cricket language, then what is the cricket trying to say?

Is he scared? Unfamiliar with his surroundings and in a strange world, is he pleading to other crickets out to help lead him back to a more hospitable place? Maybe he's trying to call other crickets to him. Maybe finding my bathroom is the best thing that can happen to a cricket. It's damp, there's plenty of food lying about in the trash, there's no birds flying about trying to snatch you up in their beaks. Could be worse, I suppose.

However, the pragmatist in me thinks that the chirps probably don't amount to anything sophisticated enough to call a language. They may have meaning, but not in the same way that we understand language. I guess that sucks some of the fun out of the idea of the cricket language, but I think it's still a novel idea.

So there.