Owen O’Connor ’07’s hobbies include laughing and being happy. In his spare time, he works toward his dual career goals of being a zoologist and starving artist. He has also been selected as a Wesleyan Student Poet for the second year in a row.
MB: There’s a high volume of Owens on this campus. Five, to be exact.
OO: Yeah. Word.
MB: Did you know other Owens before you got here?
OO: I had one acquaintance and one professional acquaintance named Owen.
MB: You’ve been a Wesleyan Student Poet twice in two years. WOW.
OO: Yeah. It was fun. I had a bunch of people help me out this time doing some singing and humming and such. We’ll be performing at the Buttonwood Tree at 3 p.m. on Sunday.
MB: Why did you decide to have a lot of readers?
OO: The poetry was very visual. It had pictures and music notation and things in it. I thought that, without the extra spice, that would be somewhat lame.
MB: And last year, you had an interpretive dancer?
OO: Yes, that’s right. Josh Ring ’07. He’s quite talented.
MB: I got there late last year, but I remember a lot of short poems about a cat.
OO: The poems were all called The Cat, but they were about themselves. About the poems.
MB: You’re also a proud member of She Calls Me Daddy. Tell me about that.
OO: She Calls Me Daddy is the campus’ only all-male, gender-blind, experimental music a capella group.
MB: When was the last time you performed?
OO: For Parents’ Weekend. We were looking online at the schedule of events, because we were thinking of playing at Taste of Middletown, where the different restaurants sell lunch for the parents. And then we saw that the secret Skull and Serpents super-secret society was having a meeting at 11 a.m. and was advertising it on the Internet. So we showed up with masks and robes and paper bags over our heads and chanted, waiting for them to come. Only two showed up.
MB: Were they impressed?
OO: They warmed up to us.
MB: Do they take any measures whatsoever to not let you know who they are? Like, shouldn’t they have been the ones with bags over their faces?
OO: No. And yes.
MB: Is She Calls Me Daddy improvised singing?
OO: She Calls Me Daddy is a lot of things. One or more of them may or may not be improvised singing.
MB: Ah, that’s wonderfully vague. Tell me about Food Politics Week.
OO: It’s a week of food politics related events, sort of inspired by Vandana Shiva coming and speaking on campus [Thursday night]. She’s an ecologist and agriculture and women’s issues activist. There are a lot of important issues that are being discussed right now on the politics front, but food, shelter, and water aren’t really any of those issues being discussed. But they’re crucial problems for all of humanity, and Americans also have a big impact on the health of the environment. And it’s sort of sad how environmental and poverty issues get pretty much ignored during the presidential campaign.
MB: So this is about the interrelation of those issues?
OO: Food, agriculture, economics, the environment are all intertwined. I think there are big problems with the way we get our food, and the way food distribution is structured.
MB: What are the other events going on?
OO: Well, I’ll give some highlights. There’s a bread baking workshop Friday at 3 p.m. at Earth House, there’s an edible plants walk meeting at 3 p.m. on Monday at the entrance of SciLi, and there’s a dumpster diving tour of Middletown meeting at 10:30 p.m. at Earth House on Tuesday.
MB: Have you ever dumpster dived?
OO: I’ve done some dumpster poking.
MB: You looked inside dumpsters and poked at their contents?
OO: That’s right.
MB: So the idea is to reuse things that would normally be thrown out?
OO: The idea is to look for free delicious food.
MB: What did you do over summer, Owen?
OO: I did Bio research with Professor Mike Singer. I pretty much walked around state parks all day and looked for caterpillars. It was awesome.
MB: Did you find any?
OO: Yeah. We collected about a thousand.
MB: What did you do with them once you found them?
OO: We fed them until they pupated or died, and then we took measurements on the survivors.
MB: Remind me what a pupa is. Is that where they become butterflies?
OO: It’s right before then, but most of the caterpillars we had were moth caterpillars.
MB: So what were you trying to discover?
OO: The research had to do with the connection between parasitism of the caterpillars by wasps and flies, and the caterpillars’ feeding behaviors. It was the first year of a five-year project, so what we found out was pretty much how to better structure further research.
MB: Did you bond with any of your subjects?
OO: We had some favorites. Some of the butterfly caterpillars looked like snake heads.
MB: Did you give them names?
OO: Just names like Sticky.
MB: Oh. What do you want to do after college?
OO: I used to want to be a zoologist, but for the past couple years I’ve been telling people I want to be a starving artist.
MB: Do you see any future in combining zoology with being a starving artist?
OO: Paintings of malnourished animals?
MB: Yeah, I guess that would do it.