"That's a really horny oak tree."

"What is it, 150 years old?" asks my partner.

I had just returned from visiting family. He was explaining why my car and driveway were covered in brown, stringy flowers: they had fallen from the massive oak tree near our house.

Our weather has been more plant-friendly than usual this spring, and I've noticed many plants being especially lush. It looks like this oak tree decided to join in the fun. When the acorns start falling, we might need umbrellas to leave our house.

Is it weird that I think that would be really cool?

Getting further in life

My grandmother told me recently that you get farther in life by being nice. That didn't quite sound right to me. What immediately came to mind was a college friend who worked in a one-hour film development booth. She would develop in just a few minutes the film of people who were mean to her. To do this, she imposed on the good nature of her pleasant customers, sometimes making them wait past the one hour limit of company policy.

Also in college, I vividly remember writing maintenance request after maintenance request about the dryers not working. I'm sure at least a few of the couple hundred other women in that hall did the same. Finally, after several months, I put in a rather nasty phone call to the management. Within a week, I got a personal response, polite almost to the point of sucking up. They had asked the service company to come out: turned out the dryer vents were completely clogged with lent.

At my work, too, our polite customers have their work put on the bottom of our to-do list. The assumption driving these situations is that if a person is mean, what they are talking about must be important to them; if a person is nice, they must not really care about receiving whatever service they requested. My grandmother's sentiment seems like it should be true, but I just could not bring to mind a place where being nice got you ahead in life.

Then I got online and visited Wikipedia. Where long-term rudeness often results in an editor being banned. While good-faith negotiation may get controversial text accepted in an article, failure to be polite is the best way to have one's edits removed. I've seen several apparently successful owners of online publications attempt to bully their way into adding to or changing an article. Apparently surprised at the failure of this approach, they fall back to the publication they own in order to write about how awful a place Wikipedia is. My grandmother was right after all.

Of the situations discussed here, I think Wikipedia is different because the editors have no monetary transactions with each other. Giving nice people the short end of the stick seems to be driven by an environment of paid services. Unfortunately, that is how most of my days are spent: either at work, being paid for what I do, or outside of work paying others as I purchase food or clothing or pay bills. Although I'm hardly the first person to make this observation, I find it interesting that money leads to deterioration of social mores. If only we could figure out a way to get away from it.

Bronze monkey

For a semester in college, I assisted one of my department's professors for an hour a week. He specialized in powdered metals, and one week he demonstrated for me how a part is made from powders. Bronze powder and a monkey mold were what was laying around the lab, so we filled up the mold. Before it went into the compression machine, the filled mold needed to be sealed to protect it from liquid. Looking extremely embarrassed, the professor pulled a condom from a drawer, opened the package, and wrapped up the mold.

Demonstrating isostatic compression does not seem like something a person should be embarrassed about. But our society's attitude toward sex seems to be that it's "bad", and that "good" people avoid anything even associated with sex. I think it's actually a negative attitude about intimate relations, not simply a matter of keeping private matters separate from public ones: bowel movements are private issues, but toilet paper doesn't have the stigma associated with it that condoms do.

I encountered this attitude again recently: I'm working on the "condom" article on Wikipedia, and requested a history book through interlibrary loan. When the book came in, a librarian called and left a message on my answering machine. She was very careful to not mention the name of the book.

I have wondered if this idea that all things related to sex are "bad" has come about because of some unconscious realization that much of the intimacy in our society really is unhealthy. Unable to articulate the negative effects of certain behaviors, everything related to them gets caught up in the sense that these things wouldn't happen in a healthy society.

The broad brush does seem to be getting more specific, though. More than one of the stories in The Girls Who Went Away (a book I read recently) recounted how "pregnant" was a dirty word. One woman said her parents' avoidance of the word was so extreme she never even knew her mother was pregnant until her baby brother was brought home from the hospital. I believe it's good that the stigma associated with pregnancy has faded; perhaps someday using a condom to help make a bronze monkey won't seem so dirty, either.

Being tired all the time

I surprise myself with how reluctant I am to get a sufficient amount of sleep. I know how much better I feel and how much more productive I am when well-rested. But when I'm tired, especially several days in a row, I want to attribute it to some nutritional deficiency or undiagnosed disease: it's difficult to admit to myself that I just stay up too late. It's especially ironic when I stay up late because I want to do things I'm too tired to do.

I have some jealousy of others who don't seem to need as much sleep. To feel good, I need to be in bed for over eight hours a day; this is normal, from everything I've read. But somehow it doesn't feel normal. I keep thinking, and acting on the though, that I should be able to stay up and suffer no ill effects. Just an extra half hour, that's all I want. Or so I tell myself.

Writing this, and reading over it, brings to mind a post from a blog I read by Jen, about attachment to sin. Hm. More food for thought.

Laminar flow

Since I first saw the advertisements in college, I have been enchanted by (and covetous of) laminar bathroom fixtures. The water that comes out of them doesn't splash: not even when it falls from the ceiling!


I may never have those fixtures in my bathroom. But, thanks to my local grocery store having a major expansion, I now get the next best thing. The filtered water station has a laminar faucet! Every jug I fill, I'm fascinated by the silent and completely splash-free movement of the liquid. And all I have to do is go grocery shopping. I am a lucky woman.

Affirmation of self

I recently finished a knitting project. I wore it to a knitting group I attend, and it was much oohed and aahed over. I'm particularly happy with how my work turned out (it's rather difficult to tell if something will actually fit while it's still on the needles), but I don't credit all the positive attention to any particular skill. This group admires everyone's work, and all finished objects (FOs) are displayed proudly on their blog page. Having something one invested significant thought and time into be so flatteringly admired is very affirming of the decision to spend time on knitting. Receiving this affirmation is, I think, an important motivator for being a member in such a group. And offering such affirmation to other group members is an unspoken expectation of the group's membership.

I see the same dynamic on the long hair message boards I read. When anyone starts a thread with pictures of their hair, a flood of comments appears with all the same theme: "How beautiful!", "So lovely!", "Gorgeous hair!" Negative comments never appear. Not even constructive criticism (unless it is specifically asked for). Again, I'm sure affirmation of the decision to have a less-common hair length is an important motivator for being a member of those boards.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with seeking groups where this kind of affirmation is given and received. But demanding affirmation of lifestyle decisions from the government seems a little over the top. And I believe that's what is behind the movement to force legal recognition of gay marriage: the recent ruling in California was not based any legal obstacles faced by legally registered domestic partners in that state, but on the lack of "dignity and respect" caused by the State's refusal to call their relationship a "marriage". I'm not convinced the court has found the best solution to the question presented to them. Instead of marriage licenses for same-sex couples, I'd like to advocate that our government get out of the marriage business.

Can you talk?

In middle school, I started taking books with me to school: in any free time, I would read my book. I participated in my classes and was in band, which required communicating with fellow band members, but in general I did not pursue social interactions. There were several occasions where children I did not know came up to me (while I was reading) and asked, "Can you talk?" I always thought it was a very odd question.

In high school I started making a conscious effort to be more outgoing. Whether it was my efforts or the different school format, the rumors about me being mute apparently died down. Moving over a thousand miles away to college, and now employment, surely separated them from me for good.

Last year, at my current job, another employee was using the photocopier. I watched what he was doing for a minute, then tried to be helpful by explaining how he could photocopy his papers more quickly. He looked at me in surprise, then said, "You can talk?" Geez. I guess some things you just can't get away from.