This week we present two stories from scientists searching for that special someone.

Part 1: Zoology student Devon Kodzis's strategy of attracting boys with fun animal facts proves difficult.

Devon Kodzis has a degree in biological sciences and professional experience in teaching, animal training, and education outreach, and science program design. She is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Biological Sciences. Her passions include reading about food, and shouting at the Antiques Roadshow with her cat.

Part 2: Away from her boyfriend for grad school, Meisa Salaita starts to fall for a chemistry classmate who's her complete opposite.

Meisa Salaita is enamored with the beauty of science. Through her work founding and directing the Atlanta Science Festival and as a producer for the Story Collider, she spends her days trying to convince everyone else to fall in love with science as well. To that end, Meisa also writes, has produced radio stories, and hosted tv shows - all in the name of science. Meisa has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has birthed two humans, and has a bizarre level of enthusiasm for shoehorns. If she had the stamina and talent, she’d be dancing hip-hop 24/7.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Devon Kodzis

My first day of kindergarten, I wore my absolute best shorts. They were pink and they looked like slices of watermelon and they had little black seed sown on them. Ah, yes. I see someone else is excited about these shorts. And I also wore my favorite National Geographic t-shirt. I came in that first day with a plan and so when Miss Sands announced it was time for recess, I put it into action.

I jumped up on top of the blue circle table and I said, “Come on, girls. Let's go get us some boys.”

And I ran out to that dusty expanse of a playground because, you see, I had stayed up late the night before watching a documentary on the topi antelope. For those of you unfamiliar with this incredible creature, the female topi antelope is unique because she pursues the males. And I had found my prey.

James Samuelson, his little black flap of hair, kind of blue in the back of his neck in the wind and I saw him running and I said, “That one is mine.”

So I took off sprinting after him. And this kid looks back and sees this chunky, little kid in pink shorts sprinting towards him, just very sweaty, and he has no idea why I'm chasing him but he is very scared. He starts running faster but it's too late. I had already gained the ground and I got on top of him and I went to put my mouth on his mouth.

And just as I got close, he punched me in the stomach and said, “Why are you so weird?”

I'd really like to say that my relationship with the male members of our specie improved between kindergarten and when I was a sophomore Zoology major at Florida State. I certainly had more to work with. I grew some up top. I grew some behind. I got these guys all straightened out so I was looking really good.

By the time I was in college with my 4.0 GPA in Zoology, I was great at getting male members of the species into corners with me at parties. I could attract them. And as soon as they would get in, and I would say something normal like, “How's the weather out there?” They would get close and, like clockwork, it would happen.

Devon Kodzis shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Wild Detectives in Dallas, TX in April 2019. Photo by Fallon Stovall.

Maybe they have a butterfly on their shirt that I've studied or putting their arm up there is a snake tattoo crawling towards their wrists. And, as they would get closer, it would come up like hot lava and I couldn't stop it. I would say, “Did you know that the snake on your arm is a lot like a tree snake that can be found in the Amazon? And the coolest thing about that snake is that it can open its jaws really wide, swallow an egg whole, use a reverse vertebrae to crack open the shell, suck out the yolk and spit out the shell whole.”

And they would fade into the distance. I would go home to my six herpetology books, my 4.0 GPA, and I would look up my favorite animal to research when I was feeling solitary, the Pacific giant octopus. If you have never Googled, I highly recommend.

They're incredible, these large, brilliant, intellectually brilliant creatures with eight flowing tentacles. I was just enraptured with these creatures. I had notebooks full of printouts about them, pictures up on my wall like a rock band. I could not get enough and I thought one day, one day I will not come home to this octopus. One day, I will come home to a human man.

That day did not occur before the summer of my sophomore year in college, so by the summer of my sophomore year I had gone home. I was invited to a toga party which is, I suppose, what normal college kids go to, and I said, “Okay, you're going to do it.”

I wrap myself in what can only be justified as a tea towel. I've left my hair really big and I looked in the mirror and I said, “Devon, you're going to go to this party. You're going to say normal things to men. You are not going to say any fun animal facts tonight, young lady. And you are going to put your mouth on one of their mouths.”

And so I went to the party. It was a friend of a friend's house and everything is bumping and jumping. Everyone is sweaty and wrapped in sheets and so I kind of slid along the back wall kind of staying away from all the bodies until I had some liquid courage in me. I made it to the kitchen, took a few shots, and I was feeling pretty good.

I was making eye contact with a guy in Power Ranger sheets in the corner. I figured, yeah, that's probably about as good as it's going to get tonight so we'll do it. And then, just as I am getting ready and I am looking over, I hear someone shout, “Make way for Zeus,” and he rises out of the crowd. Brown, rippling, milky blue eyes, a tongue lolling outside of his mouth. It was the most incredible chocolate lab I'd ever seen.

And he was being carried by a very drunk, young, blonde man through the crowd, teetering drunkenly with the dog above his head, and I knew I had to pet that dog. I watch as the boy carried the dog out to the lawn amidst all the partiers and released him like a drunken Merman onto the grass. And then he reached into his toga and pulled out ear drops and put ear drops in the dog and rubbed his ears and said, “Good boy, Zeus. You're such a good boy. I love you so much.”

And we had a change of plans, ladies and gentlemen. I was going to put my mouth on his mouth, the man, not the dog.

So I grabbed bottle from behind and I go teetering out to the lawn. I sit down next to the blonde boy and I say things like, “The weather is nice,” and, “Do you think that young woman vomiting in the bushes is going to make it through the night?”

And we're chatting, and we start talking about movies and books and the Salvador Dali tattoo on his arm, and it’s going great. He's getting closer and closer and closer to me. And he puts his arm behind me and I'm thinking, “You're going to do it. It’s going to happen. You're going to put your mouth on his mouth and then your parts on his parts and it's going to be amazing.”

And then he says, “Oh, you brought the Kraken Rum out. I love Kraken Rum.” And he pulls the bottle in front of my face that I had brought out and, lo and behold, on it, emblazoned on the paper wrapper is a Kraken. For those of you unfamiliar with Kraken Rum, on it is an eight-legged creature attacking a ship. Some might say it looks just like a great Pacific octopus.

I say nothing. I take whatever is inside of me and I squish it as small as I can and I am just looking in the dark at his face. And he says, “I love octopuses. I would love to go to the Atlanta Aquarium. Did you know, Devon, that the Atlanta aquarium hosts singles night sleepovers and I really want to go and my plan was always to go and camp out near the octopus tank because I knew whatever woman I met there would probably be really cool.”

And I said, “Oh.” And I can feel the fire coming up and I'm pushing it down. And he says to me, “Did you know that the Giant Pacific Octopus, when it has a head the size of a softball, can fit through…”

And folks, it's done. The fire is up in my throat. Now, there is no controlling what is about to happen. I grab him and I shout, “They fit through a hole the size of a nickel.”

Floodgates open, team. And then I'm like, “Did you know that the male member of the octopus species has a specialized arm that can be used to transfer sperm packets to the female partner called a hectocotylus?”

And he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

And then he reaches and hands the bottle in front of me and he says, “Here, I'll make sure that gets into recycling for you.”

It's been what? Nine years now, baby? That's right. I brought a surprise husband into the audience. We actually just celebrated our four-year wedding anniversary this week. Baby, I think you're more popular than the story. I'll have to keep that in mind.

So the thing is, honey, you have followed me everywhere. You have picked me up and shipped me across the country to train animals, to pursue a degree in journalism, to live my life as I needed to and you have never asked me to be anything other than exactly who I am. You have even allowed me to wake you up at 2:00 in the morning because I found that really great article about sperm whale song and you had to know that it's the poetry of the animal kingdom.

So I guess if there was something I wanted to say to you tonight, in front of everybody here, it's that when the southern chorus frog goes to spawn in the spring, they go down to a pond nearby and they go and they scream for their mates at night, top of their little frog lungs. But the thing is, everybody else, every other frog species in the area also goes to the same pond and they scream and scream and scream and, so from the outside, what you're hearing is the spring peepers and the wood frogs and the southern chorus frogs all screaming for each other and it just sounds like pennies in a can, like a horrible cacophony of noise.

And you think, “How could anybody find their partner in all that sound?”

But the thing is, baby, frog ears are special. They’ve got these little tympana, these freaky little trampolines and they are tuned only to the sound of their own kind so everything else is drowned out. I was screaming for so long before I met you. I'm just really glad your freaky little ears were tuned into my song. Thank you.

Part 2: Meisa Salaita

I’m in my first quarter of grad school and every Monday, Wednesday, Friday starts off the exact same way: 8:00 a.m. Structural Inorganic Chemistry. Now, this is supposed to be my favorite class, because I love this shit, but it ends up being my professor just droning monotonously for an hour with 20-year-old slides that he puts up on this ancient overhead projector. It's not fun and it's not fun to have it at 8:00 a.m. But I am a rule follower and if I am taking a class, I show up every day.

It's maybe a couple of weeks in that one of my classmates, his name is Khalid, he strolls up to me and he's like, “Hey, can I borrow your notes?” And I am a very nice person and I was an exceptionally good note-taker and I was eager to show this off.

So I'm like, “Yes,” and I whip open my three-ring binder and I find the right divider tab and find these perfectly colored-coded notes and I hand them over to him. I guess he really likes them because, a couple of days later, he asked to borrow them again.

I'm still nice and so I hand them over again, maybe a little bit less eagerly. But this time, when I look at him, I notice that he looks remarkably well slept. It's very clear to me that he is not waking up for this 8:00 a.m. class.

A couple more days pass and he asks again. This time I just looked at him and I was like, “Dude, why don't you just try waking up?” And Khalid laughs like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard.

But, me, I don't think it's funny at all. I mean, this whole grad school thing is not going how I imagined it. I thought I'd fit in better. I thought I'd make friends faster. I just really miss my college life. I really miss my boyfriend Mac.

Meisa Salaita shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Highland Inn and Ballroom in Atlanta, GA in March 2019. Photo by Rob Felt.

Mac and I have been together since freshman year and Mac's not at all like Khalid. He's like nothing I've met. No one I've met at Northwestern, really. Mac is… well, he's exactly how you'd imagine a Mac to be. If everyone could close their eyes for a second and picture a Mac, I feel pretty sure that about 75% of us in this room are imagining the same person.

He's big, 6’2”, 6’4” maybe, but not tall in like he's got heft. And he drives a big, red pickup truck. He likes to fish and he listens to country music.

Now, I never thought of myself as somebody who would date a Mac. I like to spend my weekends in museums, not watching NASCAR. That's for sure. You can't trace my American lineage back to the Civil War and beyond. I am first-generation American and I speak Persian at home with my family. And I most definitely do not listen to country music.

But somehow, we work. And when we graduated and we decided to go to separate schools for graduate school, him to West Virginia for law school and me to Chicago for chemistry graduate school, it felt heartbreaking. It still feels heartbreaking, but it's okay. There's some things about my new life that I really do love.

I've really fallen in love with Chicago. It feels like there is always something to do here and that anything is possible in this city. As for Mac, he ends up in about as opposite a place as you can imagine. When I go visit him and we walk around, there is no hustle and bustle. Strike that. We never walk. We drive, and often for miles and miles without seeing much of anything. It's about as opposite as you could get from the life that I'm living and it's hard to understand how we've drifted physically into such different spaces.

But it's okay. We're going strong. We talk every night. We have visits planned every couple of months and it's all right. We're going strong. It's great.

As time passes, it feels a little bit better. We get adjusted to our new lives and the distance starts to feel a little bit less hard. I start to make friends and, weirdly, I've even become friends with Khalid. I mean, he's still an annoying moocher and he's maybe the most disorganized person I've ever met in my life.

You know Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comic strip and that cloud of dust that follows him, it's like Khalid except a cloud of chaos instead of dust.

Now, I'm calling him Khalid but really his name is Khaalid. He's Jordanian. He's not at all tall. He doesn't fish and he'd have no clue where to find his local honky-tonk, if he even knew what that was. And I have to admit that despite my distaste in his disorganization, I do think he's quite cute. But that does not matter. I am meant to marry Mac and Khalid is meant to take his tornado of chaos somewhere far away from me.

But we do this thing in our second year of grad school called a qualifying exam and, as we're preparing for it, we start spending a lot of time together. And I find myself getting completely sucked up by his tornado instead of in the storm shelter where I'm supposed to be hiding and pining for Mac.

I don't know how this happens to me because I am not a big drinker, but the night we pass our qualifying exam, I find myself at a bar, drunk and snuggled up in his lap. From what my friends say the next morning, he didn't seem to mind it at all.

But I am horrified. I mean, I have a boyfriend. He has a girlfriend. I was drinking. Who am I? Not this person, I know.

Then it happens again. And then I find myself looking for any and every reason to go to shitty bars with my friends just so I can get chummy with this guy who, oh, my God, is so cute but really, entirely wrong for me. But is he… I mean, just because he's a ball of chaos and I'm scheduled to a tee, I mean he makes me laugh all the time and that's great.

We found a million commonalities between our Arab and Persian cultures. We both like science and we can actually talk to each other about what we're doing. In fact, it kind of feels like we can talk to each other about anything.

My 24th birthday rolls around and I decide the best way to celebrate is at a downtown Chicago dueling piano bar. I told you anything was possible in this city. And in the midst of the many margaritas I had in me or, let's be real, it’s probably two. I'm a lightweight. I decide that I'm not just going to snuggle with this guy. I am going to kiss him.

But despite being drunk, I'm still smart. And I recognize that the optics of this are not good. I mean, I still have a boyfriend, he maybe has a girlfriend, and I need to come up with a plan. So I hatched one. I decide that I'm going to kiss as many people as possible so that when I kiss him he's just one of many and no one will know.

So I get myself fired up. I dance my ass off to one of the piano duelers playing Madonna's Like a Prayer and then I enact the plan. First, I kiss my roommate Andrea, then I kiss some random old dude named Tony, and then I laser in on my target and I am just about to do the deed when Andrea Yanks me out of the bar. You see, I had a good plan. Some of you might say brilliant. But I neglected to remember that Andrea is very smart. She has an extremely strong moral compass and she was going to see right through me.

So she yanks me out of the bar and she says, “Meisa, what are you doing? I can't stand by and watch you do this to Mac. It's not fair.”

And she was right. Flirtation, friendship, all of it, it had to stop. I was not being fair to this man that I loved.

So the next morning when I wake up and Andrea's words are echoing in my brain, I resolve no more Khalid. And I have the perfect opportunity to make things right again because a week after plan Kiss-Everyone-At-The-Bar falls apart, I am set to go to my alma mater and meet Mac for a weekend birthday celebration.

So I go and I feel determined that I am going to make things right again and it feels super weird and very, very hard but I'm trying. I'm pushing those feelings down. And we're walking around campus and it's lovely. And then I realized that he is leading me to the bridge.

See, there's this really picturesque bridge on campus and, legend has it, if you walk over it with somebody, you're going to marry them. And I freak. And I beg, “Please, let's not go there. Oh, look. What's over there? Let's walk that way,” and I pull on his arm and he insists and, before I know it, he is down on one knee.

I immediately start bawling and Mac takes my tears as ones of joy and a positive answer to his request and I let him think that.

So I fly back to Chicago with a ring on my finger. And when Khalid sees me, it's like all the air has gotten sucked out of him. See, by this point he's fallen pretty hard for me as well and he's just kind of waiting for me to get to the same place, but I'm not there. I mean, I've been with Mac for five years. We are supposed to be together.

And even if we're not, I mean, how can I break his heart? I can't do that. Taking that ring meant I made my choice and I was sticking to it.

So the next few months pass and Khalid and I kind of dance around each other. I try, I really try but it feels like we can't find a way to stay apart. He's become my best friend at school, the one I always want to be around, and I feel stuck in this place where every choice I make is the wrong one and is unfair to somebody. I spend a lot of time crying. I suppose I should thank Mac for introducing me to country music. It makes the perfect soundtrack to my life.

After a while, it gets to be too much. I realize that I don't want to be in West Virginia. I don't want to spend my weekends tailgating at football games I care nothing about. I don't want to think about why the fish aren't biting that day. But what I really don't want is Mac.

And coming to grips with the realization of this is simultaneously the most horrifying and freeing feeling. And I know what I have to do. I fly home. My dad drives me to West Virginia in a snowstorm and he drops me at Mac's apartment. It's horribly sad but also weirdly transactional. I give him the ring. He gives me a Tupperware my mom sent food in, and I go home.

When I get back to Chicago, Khalid is not there. He's back in Jordan visiting his family and so I get a couple days to be alone with my thoughts. I'm heartbroken but also I feel so free and just so excited that I get the chance to be with somebody who makes me laugh all the time, who understands me, who likes the same things I like and still pushes me beyond the world that I know. And maybe it won't last but maybe it will.

A couple of days later, Khalid flies back from Jordan and I go pick him up from O'Hare and he sees my ring-less finger. He runs to give me a kiss. It's one we've waited a long time to have and it feels so right, not just because I wasn't drunk. I made my choice and this time it was the right one. Thank you.