A most amazing day or, How to Catch a Frog-- A lesson for Growing Scientists

This was written four years ago. Only slightly edited. This was when I was in 10(?)-11th grade.

This one day, out of random, I wanted to actually be useful to the society for a change. So I went to my most attractive girl friend, and offered help for her school-day experiment. There's always been this awkward love-hate sexual-platonic tension between princesses and frogs, and it manifested in her experiment -- she was doing an experiment involving frogs, and needed few. I knew what I had to do-- I took the water trough and frog-jar from her and went to the school’s new 'pond-ecosystem' to catch frogs.

On the way, I asked people I knew if they wanted to help me catch frogs. Some refused outright, others were interested but busy then and promised to help later. Few thought it was some kind of sick joke and pretended they didn't know me. I found a found a group of junior girls that had nothing better to do than walk around, and they were excited by the thought of getting to know the frogs. They couldn't control their excited giggling to the pond-- those selfless helpful little women. They realized that they could mention the experience in moral science as 'selfless' help to others.

The only thing you will ever need to know about frogs is that they don't like noise. If you live next to them and play loud music, even on weekends and in early afternoon, they will call the cops on you, and if that doesn't work because duude, wtf are you even talking about, noone does that in Nepal, they will try to overload you electrical system and blow the fuse. So to avoid such situation, we tried keeping quiet at the pond.

When a frog feels it's safe and noone's going to annoy it by talking loudly on the phone or blasting LimpBizkit over the sound system, it comes to the surface, and you have to slowly scoop the water below it using the water trough. You have to be very fast at this stage: if the frogs figure out there's something fishy going around, they dive right back in and stay in there for a long time, resurfacing only when they think it's safe again.

The frogs that came to the surface dived right back in because of the excited squeals of my helpers, which frankly I can't blame the frogs for, because that kind of act is really annoying-- you're trying to do something productive finally and they undo several minutes of your patience by getting excited at the sight of a frog. Get a life! Go to Sauraha and squeal at the Tigers, ok?

The deal with working with young women and getting their help is, if you're working 'with' them, you're already screwed, because you enlisted their help since no one else wanted to do anything with you. You can't let them go, because heyy, at least you're not a lonely weirdo looking for frogs on your own, and letting them stay is such a pain because they just wont stop squealing like a frikkin' Dolphin in the heat. It was fortunately lunch time, and I dug into my hidden stash of expensive candies, gave them more than their 'pay' for the time, and got them on their way. Getting them out of the way made me look crazy, but my catch significantly improved without their squeals that were pretty much emergency sirens for the frogs.

My math teacher, who was passing by, was interested by the commotion, and was offered help. He literally got dirty-- he folded up his sleeves, and got into the game. He then started with his backintheday, and told this story about how he and his friends used to catch frogs backintheday backinthevillage, back when everyone was 10, the panchayat was on, and the King was the villain and the netas were the heroes. Strange times they were, he told us, and we had no reason to suspect his tales--  in the few minutes he helped, he doubled the standing catch from two to four.

He covered the frogs with the trough, and carefully created and opening in the trough and caught the frog that tried to escape lightly with his hands. We then put the frogs the jar. As s rule, when a frog escapes, the trick is to not get nervous, run around in circles and unknowingly crush it but be cool and try to recapture it. If it gets too far away-- it's not worth it. There are other frogs in the pond ecosystem.

By then, a small crowd of onlookers had formed around the us. Since it looked like we were having fun, everyone wanted to help now. They all wanted to walk into the pond, pants folded, and catch the frogs barehanded; someone offered to bring his fishing net so we'd catch all the frogs in the pond in a go. A classmate who was doing an electrical experiment for the school-day offered to bring the portable power pack and run current through the pond to stun the frogs. All the ideas were stupid so I refused them, specially the offers for help from those older than fourteen. The frogs somehow knew instinctively that fourteen-yearolds were the easiest way to escape back to freedom, and would jump to one of them when they could. The crowd was getting bigger, and I shouted many times at everyone to keep their frikkin' mouthholes shut. There were already several people fishing for frogs now, including the school guards who were in  regular rounds around the campus and friends who had laughed when I'd asked for help.

After collecting seven frogs, which is enough for any experiment( frog zombification anyone?), we got the trough and the jar together and called the crowd to get a life now, since the drama was over. I took the frogs to the experiment, to the delight of my attractive and intelligent female experimenter friend. She was rather surprised; she had not  been expecting so many frogs, and stuttered while trying to thank. (Everything after this is a lie, but it looked good on paper when I first wrote) I explained to her that I rather doing it, and thanked her instead. Took a quick bath—the pond water looked toxic! After the experiment was over, I returned the frogs, and we went to the movies with her. Learnt to catch frogs. The most amusing day of my life.