Storytelling

One of my unofficial resolutions for 2017 was to get better at storytelling. I've written several stories through the years with varying levels of success, but good oral storytelling was a talent I recognized in many people that I admire.

Fortunately for me, I acquired a lot of stories this year to practice with. The two I've probably told most are my bear encounter tale and the First Nations fable of how the raven got blue eyes, both stories courtesy of my time in the Yukon. There's also the time I got a wasp under my shirt, but I don't like to think about that.

A big thing that helped me in this resolution was the group dinner structure at the research camp I worked at. Each evening, we had the chance to talk together about the events of the day, and there was a specific tradition of sharing 'Yays' (good things) or 'Nays' (bad things) that had happened. This was a great forum for practicing stories and getting reactions from a relatively large group of people (the wasp story, for example, went over well).

Have I actually learned anything about storytelling this year? Hard to say. The biggest lesson for me has been pacing-- describing things is important for setting the scene, but also for making sure the story beats come in at the right time. I personally like repeating a key phrase to mark the rhythm, but maybe that's just a crutch.

Of course, there's still a lot more to it and I doubt anyone ever got good at telling stories just by being analytical about it. However, I'm hopeful that with more practice I will continue to learn. With any luck, the three stories I mentioned will appear on this blog in the coming year, severed from their oral glory but hopefully still interesting. Should be a good year.

Job Expectations

I've had real jobs before in that I've worked for money, sometimes even enough money to pay all my bills. However, I feel that my new job in pest control is my first really real job in that it includes all the stereotypes I expected from adult life.

First of all, I work regular weekday hours, and outside of those hours I don't do company work. Waking up early is part of the bargain, but I've read somewhere that adults don't need as much sleep, so I should be good.

Secondly, I am now in a system of payroll deductions, taxes, and benefits that is surprisingly enjoyable to navigate (mostly because I am not in crisis at the moment). I'm sure I'll have even more fun in the upcoming tax season.

The last element I am waiting for is a conversation with co-workers by the water-cooler. I know this is possible because we have a water-cooler, and since I've already had conversations in the same room as said cooler, it's only a matter of time before I enter a conversation directly adjacent to the device.

Sick Tips

When I'm sick with a standard cold or flu, there are a few things that I do to make recovery faster and more comfortable. Do they actually work? Maybe; I'll probably never know.

1. Ginger tea-- good for an upset stomach or just in general to reduce the feeling of sickness.
2. Damp sock over the eyes-- great for falling asleep while feverish.
3. Coughing while blowing the nose-- best way to clear it out. I just need to be careful not to close a nostril while doing this because that makes the adjacent ear block up.

None of these, of course, are original to me, though I did learn #3 through experience rather than teaching.

Drive Time

Over the years, long drives have bothered me less and less. A 3-hour trip that used to be an ordeal now goes by relatively quickly. An overnight busride doesn't seem like a big deal, even if I don't get much sleep.

I can probably attribute most of this to practice. From an early age, my brother and I had training for sitting quietly. The next level developed during my part-time job as a museum guard; standing silently in a room for 3-5 hours at a time puts sitting noisily in a car in perspective. My job in the Yukon also helped, because in addition to long drives from camp to resupply, I spent many mornings sitting against a tree watching a squirrel's territory, observing everything that happened in a two-hour window.

Of course, it's one thing to endure long periods of driving or similar boredom, and it's another to enjoy the time spent in inactivity. Worrying is a not-so-fun way of wiling away the hours, but there are happier types of thinking that can fill the time. For example, some of my least constructive hours have been spent planning strategies for Civilization games. More recently, I've enjoyed thinking about different ways to pay off college loans.

In a classic twist of fate, as I find my patience for long drives increasing, I find my physical discomfort from driving for a long time is also rising-- there's no way to sit in perfect comfort. I suppose that's the way of things.

Sleeping Bags

I have been sleeping in a sleeping bag for most of the past year. At the start of my senior year of college, I moved into a new apartment and never got around to buying a blanket, so I was in my sleeping bag for the whole academic year. I got a new sleeping bag when I was headed to the Yukon and used it during my months there (for the cold nights, which was most of them, I slept in one bag inside another bag). Now I am back in a new apartment and am using my unzipped sleeping bag as a blanket.

I suppose a sleeping bag is basically an upgraded blanket that can be zipped up into a cozy pocket. Perhaps this customization capability is why I have enjoyed using sleeping bags so much. Are there downsides to using a sleeping bag rather than a blanket? The zipper can be uncomfortable, maybe, but given its placement at the edge, you have to work pretty hard to be inconvenienced by it. Also, depending on the material of your bag, you may or may not feel like you are sleeping under a large pair of snow pants. With all that in mind, I'm surprised there's not a larger market for indoor sleeping bags. A soft, breathable sleeping bag not constrained by the need to be used outdoors could be the next Snuggie-- it's the blanket that never comes untucked!

Grocery Limerick

There once was a neighborhood grocery
That was luckily located close to me
For foodstuffs I yode
Crost a crosswalk-chalked road
Protected from risks locomotery

Augustine and Anger

The City of God is a great work by St. Augustine. Written in the 5th century AD, it is a response to critics who blame Christianity for the fall of Rome, and it builds from this start into an elegant, well-structured comparison between the City of God and the City of the World, examining the origin, thought, and state of all who attach themselves to God on one hand and anything else on the other.

Augustine's systematic approach to theology is applied to great and small alike, as can be seen in the following passage from Book 14, Chapter 15:

"Pleasure is preceded by a certain appetite which is felt in the flesh like a craving, as hunger and thirst and that generative appetite which is most commonly identified with the name 'lust,' though this is the generic word for all desires. For anger itself was defined by the ancients as nothing else than the lust of revenge; although sometimes a man is angry even at inanimate objects which cannot feel his vengeance, as when one breaks a pen, or crushes a quill that writes badly. Yet even this, though less reasonable, is in its way a lust of revenge, and is, so to speak, a mysterious kind of shadow of retribution, that they who do evil should suffer evil."

I would like to think that Augustine's pen malfunctioned just as he was discussing the ancients, leading him to include in his great theological work a brief discourse on anger at inanimate objects.

Infinite Graphing Software

Let's say you have a bunch of data in Excel and you want to visualize it in a graph. There are, of course, lots of options for graph-making in Excel, and they're pretty good, but if you want to do a lot with error bars and fancy axes. If you are a genius or simply have a lot of data and a lot of time, you might be using R for all your analysis and graphing, but for the easiest and quickest graphing you've ever seen, GraphPad Prism is the program to choose.

The first time I used Prism, I was astounded with how user-friendly it was. The columns of numbers I copy-pasted from Excel became elegant and accurate graphs, and a huge number of well-explained options were available to tweak graphs and impose formats en masse.

Such good software, of course, comes at a price, and unfortunately for me said price is out of my current wheelhouse. When I was in college, I could use Prism on school computers, and when I was finalizing my thesis, I downloaded the 30-day free trial of Prism and used it happily while it lasted.

And thus Prism left my life for a while, until the day came last week when I once more needed to make graphs. I opened the Prism program I had downloaded so many months ago, but the free trial had expired and to do anything but view a Prism file, I would have to make a purchase. It looked like all hope was lost, but then I remembered my second laptop, an old stuttering machine that I no longer used but had never gotten rid of.

I had previously installed the free trial of Prism on the old laptop as well, and the 30 days were definitely long gone, but a ray of hope remained. I booted up the laptop and was greeted, to my joy, with a still-opened Prism program. The free trial expiration works by only opening Prism in view mode once the thirty days are up, but if you never close the trial program, you can still make graphs as if it was day one. Through my time in the Yukon and months of travel, my old laptop had sat in storage, not dead but sleeping. Prism had been running the whole time.

It was with great happiness, then, that I made my graphs and enjoyed once again the great software that is GraphPad Prism. With any luck, I'll be able to buy it one day.

Pest Control Witcher

In the past few weeks, I have started a job in pest control and completed playing The Witcher 3, a universally-acclaimed RPG in which the player is a witcher, a superhuman mutant who wanders the world killing monsters for money. It wasn't long before I saw the parallels between the game and my job. It's possible that pest control is the closest real-life occupation to being a witcher. In both jobs:

1. You kill or otherwise deal with a variety of creatures in exchange for money
2. You travel to do jobs for a large number of clients
3. Clients pay a good deal of money but in most cases don't admire you
4. To do your job, you need to first do detective work on location to figure out what is going on
     a. Sometimes you talk to people to figure out what the problem is and use that information to make a plan
     b. Sometimes you have to figure things out just from the clues you can find (in the witcher, because all witnesses are missing, in pest control because clients are not at home)
5. You consult books that tell you how to deal with certain creatures
6. You mix concoctions to aid in your job (potions for a witcher, chemicals for pest control)
7. You undergo mutations that grant you superhuman speed and strength

Actually, the last one just applies to witchers. In any case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new job has so many similarities with the subject of one of my favorite computer games.

Food Buzzwords

There are a lot of words and phrases for enterprising shoppers to pay attention to in the modern world. Some are more common than others, but in any grocery store in the US, you might come across a product that is:
Organic
Low-fat
Sugar-free
GMO-free
Vegan
Gluten-free

It's a rare item that checks all these boxes, but some combination of these qualities is generally seen as a good thing. I was interested, then, to see a product that was advertised as pro-GMO. Unsurprisingly, this product was Soylent, a liquid meal replacement that is basically the opposite of slow food, the movement that champions the qualities listed above.

I wrote and then deleted a few paragraphs here about slow food vs pesticide-ridden, genetically-modified crops produced on an industrial scale. To make a long story short, I think it is worth approaching this issue with the future of a very large and mostly poor population of humans in mind. I can safely add this topic to the list of things I can spend a lot of time talking about, somewhere between insect farming and Lord of the Rings.

Tree Climbing

One part of my job in the Yukon that I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would was climbing trees. In the area we were in, there were only two types of trees: aspen (which are deciduous) and spruce (which are coniferous). We needed to climb the trees to find squirrel pups, and squirrel nests are almost always in spruce trees.

If you're lucky, climbing a spruce tree is almost like climbing a ladder: there are plenty of decently thick branches and maybe even enough space and material to sit down on once you get to the level of the squirrel nest. Of course, squirrels don't always take ease of human climbing into account when choosing nest locations. In a lot of cases, there would be thin branches or no branches in between you and the nest, and in those situations you might have to pull yourself up the trunk (not something I am good at) or climb a nearby tree and lean over to get at the nest (spruce trees are pretty flexible).

The most thrilling moment I had while climbing a tree happened when I was about twenty-five feet up in a relatively lonely tree. I reached the target squirrel nest and was happy to find pups in it. I was putting them in a bag to weigh (this is all safe for the pups) and had just gotten them all set when a strong breeze began to blow. I had a helmet on, but didn't really want to see if it worked, so I held the bag of squirrel pups in my mouth and wrapped my arms and legs around the tree as tightly as I could-- the trunk was about eight inches wide at this height. With characteristic flexibility, the tree started to sway back and forth in the breeze, enough to feel like the kind of amusement park ride I don't usually go on. Thankfully, my time with the squirrels gave me a heightened ability to cling to trees and I survived to climb again.

Nighttime Odyssey

I'm currently listening to an audio recording of the Odyssey as I fall asleep each night. Most of the time I'm sleepy enough to just hear five minutes or so before drifting off into dreamland, but having something to listen to is the method I use (for better or worse) to keep me from thinking about today and tomorrow instead of sleeping.

Some books, of course, are better in audio than others. Homer's works, I think, are on the end of the spectrum most improved by being heard. I suppose this isn't too surprising considering that the Iliad and Odyssey come from an oral tradition. For the version I am listening to, the translator (W.H.D. Rouse) and narrator (Anthony Heald) also deserve credit for the strong cadence and lyrical dialogue.

Frequent repetition of the many phrases gives a rhythm to scenes, and embellishment of the simplest interactions allows the hearer to enjoy simply listening to the language rather than having to make an effort to follow along (though I am sure it helps to know the general story of the Odyssey). In each speech, characters cite the examples of other heroes and mythic figures, suggesting to the hearer an old and magnificent world. Last but not least, I enjoy the way characters are addressed not only by their names but their father's names with some modulation. For example, Achilles, son of Peleus, can be called Pelides. Some of my favorites to hear are Laertides, Tydides, and Cronion Zeus.

It's a bit of a contradiction, I suppose, to write about what is good about an audio rendering, but the above is my best attempt at explaining why I enjoy so much the five minutes before I fall asleep.

Nose Musing

It's funny how a runny nose
Reverses functioning
More sniffy snuffs my probiscose
But I can't smell a thing

Mindful Fun

Getting home from work at 5:30 and going to bed at 11:30 gives me a good six hours to relax every weekday, but somehow it never seems to be that much time. One possible cause of the time flying by is how I spend it. I spent a good deal of this evening playing Civilization VI, which was fun, but it eats up hours in a way games like Team Fortress 2 don't. As far as video games are concerned, I might want to stick to multiplayer games during the week because they drive up my blood pressure enough that I only play for short bits of time.

Reading is another sort of relaxation that makes time pass slowly for me. It feels constructive while still being refreshing. Putting together furniture also fits into this category, but my time doing that is just about finished now that my apartment is almost entirely set up. At the moment, I think there's space for one new hobby in my life, or perhaps a revived one. I just need to find the right balance of engaging and relaxing. If all else fails, I can keep getting more furniture to put together.

Fashionably Late

A large part of my college education was social rather than academic. When I first arrived, I may not have been entirely adjusted to American culture, but the larger issue might have been a lack of practice in a variety of social situations. Perhaps the most concrete example is the timing with which one should show up to an event. Going to class? It doesn't hurt to be on time or early. Going to a party? If you show up 'on time' and don't know the host really well, you will by the time the party actually starts.

There is a certain level of lateness that is extravagant and carefree, and it seems hardwired into some people. What I did not previously know, however, is that there is another level of party-arrival lateness (in general) that is just normal. I discovered this both from arriving 'early' to some events and accidentally being late to others and finding that it worked out much better. With practice, then, I could plan my schedule to be exactly as late as I wanted.

To sum up, some are born late, some achieve lateness, and some have lateness thrust upon them.

What To Do With Cardboard

About half of the furniture and other items for my new apartment have arrived on my doorstep in boxes, and I have not yet been able to suppress my instinct to hoard cardboard boxes because they might be useful. The stack of flattened cardboard in my living room is currently finishing a final stage of growth as the last few items arrive, and then I need to make a decision.

I could make some sort of furniture, or perhaps something decorative, but I can't quite think of something that I would actually want to have around the apartment. My younger self, I'm sure, would be very unhappy to hear of this current lack of creativity; I remember a book of crafts my family had that described a bunch of things to do with big boxes that I could never try for lack of material. Perhaps I need to take an afternoon to make a cardboard fort and then be done with it.

Mattress Saga

When I moved into my new apartment, I knew there were two things that I wanted to order online: a mattress and a desk chair. Other furniture would come from a variety of sources, but I wanted to use two-day shipping from Amazon to get a mattress and a desk chair as soon as possible so that I could be comfortable while sitting down and lying down.

At first, things were looking good; I placed my order and followed tracking information online as the mattress and chair traveled from an Amazon facility to my door. On the day the packages were to be delivered, however, I came home to see an empty front porch.

Life is full of difficult questions, and I suppose we will never know the answers to some of them. What happened to those packages that day is one of those mysteries. Data entry error? Possibly. Theft? Perhaps. I waited the 36 hours recommended by Amazon when packages are marked as delivered but are missing, then contacted customer service. Fortunately, I was offered a refund for the chair and a replacement for the mattress (why the different products got different responses is another of life's mysteries). And thus began my mattress's second odyssey.

Package tracking began again at distribution, but for an unknown reason, USPS did not bring the mattress on the expected day. Next thing I knew, the package's information was updated to become UPS and it was revealed that the mattress had spent the weekend in Texas and had only just begun its voyage east. At this point, I would normally have contacted customer service, not because of my natural inclinations, but because this first time that two-day shipping had let me down meant that I needed to sleep on the floor for a week longer than I had hoped to. However, since the mattress I was being sent was a readily-offered replacement, I decided not to push my luck.

I arrived home today to see a battered package on my doorstep. I cannot tell the adventures this package has been through, but the mattress it contained was fresh and new, and I look forward to sleeping on it tonight. It is by this series of events, then, that the first item with which I hoped to furnish my apartment arrived last. I'm sure there's a moral in there somewhere.

Hot Pocket Limerick

There once was a microwaved sandwich
That was stuffed full of cheezies and hamwich
The outside was hot
As a stove-heated pot
But the inside was wow even hotter I burned my tongue

Magic Tricks

There is a constant discussion among watchers and performers of magic tricks about what the effect is of knowing how a trick is done. On one hand, of course, is the idea that knowing the mechanism ruins the magic. On the other hand, however, so many books and videos are dedicated to revealing magic secrets that you have to admit that many non-performers get enjoyment out of knowing how tricks are carried out.

The third point of view in this discussion is that the best sort of magic has no trick and is thus equally amazing no matter what the audience and performers know about it. My personal favorite trick to perform is in this vein: you take three cards from a deck of cards (you can even have someone choose the cards for you if you like) and shuffle them around. Display the three cards to your audience so that you cannot see them and have them pick one (you can have them touch it or just think about it if you want to go with a mentalist angle). Shuffle the three cards again and select one at random (performer embellishment goes here). Present the card with a flourish and ask the audience if it is their card. If it is, great! Everyone is amazed. If you got the wrong card, change the subject of conversation.

Experimental Design

One thing I enjoyed about my summer in the Yukon was the sort of conversation that can be found in a remote camp of a dozen or so young biologists. While the squirrels being studied at camp were certainly a dominant topic, we would also spend time talking about other research projects we had heard about or been involved in. On a particularly wild night, we watched an episode of BBC's Planet Earth 2 on an old laptop and I have never seen such an excited and vocal audience for a documentary.

If anyone at camp suggested an untested theory or hypothesis, the next question was 'how would you design an experiment to find that out?" For example, if someone proposed that squirrels bark when they hear other squirrels barking, a simple experiment might be to play recordings of squirrel barks in the forest and see if real barking increases in frequency.

There were many good experiment designs discussed, but perhaps the most brilliant was a story we found written in a textbook written by some of the scientists who had started doing ecology research in Kluane (the part of the Yukon we were in) over 30 years ago.

The question to be answered was 'is the population of snowshoe hares limited by food availability?' A standard experiment to answer this question is a 'food add'-- if you put more food in the hares' environment, and the hare population then increases relative to an environment with no added food, there is evidence that hare population is limited (at least in part) by food availability.

There was, however, a problem. Snowshoe hares in Kluane share an environment with bears, and the containers of food pellets put out for the hares were being eaten by said bears. To prevent this, a series of clever containers were made to allow hares access to the food while keeping bears from eating everything and ruining the experiment: metal bars at the mouth of a container, for example, could create a barrier for bears that hares could slip right through. Unfortunately, the bears were able to break everything that the researchers could (cost-effectively) come up with.

The key design question, then, for this food add experiment is how to provide food for hares without providing food for bears. How might it be done?





It's not the easiest question, considering the variety of things that bears will eat.





The brilliant solution that was eventually arrived at was to scatter the food pellets over the forest floor instead of depositing them in containers as is typical in many food adds. This works because of Optimal Foraging Theory, which says that since animals need to spend time and energy to acquire food, they will only make an effort if the reward for foraging is worth their investment. When the food pellets were all together in containers, it was worth a bear's time to break into said container, but if eating all those pellets required picking them up one by one off the ground, it was no longer sustainable foraging for a bear. For a hare, however, finding and eating pellets one by one was a great deal, and thus the experiment was successfully conducted. The design was simple, elegant, and made use of a broad ecological theory for fine-tuning; that sort of experiment is something to aspire to.

Then, Now, and In Between

It's been a year and a bit since my last post, and I'm looking to get back in blogness. I don't think I've changed hugely in that time-- looking again at the blog description that I wrote three or four years ago, I can confirm that I still like plants, games, King Arthur, and thinking about eye contact on public transportation.

There have been, of course, a few life changes. I graduated college in May, worked on a research project in the Yukon for four months, wandered through three months of self-esteem-decreasing underemployment, and have most recently moved to Charleston, South Carolina to start a new job in pest control. There are stories here that I can tell at a later date, but to reflect the general life transition of the past year, I have changed my blog's visual theme.

I fell off the wagon of blog-writing for a few reasons, the biggest being that I felt like I was running out of things I found interesting to write about. As I start blogging again now, I am hopeful that the thoughts and events of a year will be sufficient fuel to get me back in the habit. Additionally, the blank page that is my first real job and solo apartment should produce some new situations and thoughts for this blog's benefit.

With any luck, this will be a second wind for Variant Minds. If not, third time's the charm.