Maybe Natural Selection Had Its Uses

Today I was at the airport and decided to get a latte because I needed lunch and have already eaten 17 chicken nuggets this week.  Here is an accurate depiction of the area surrounding the Starbucks I patronized:

While I was waiting for my drink, I noticed a woman standing at the top of the stairs that are helpfully included in the above map.  The woman had a stroller with her.  The kind of stroller that has three-levels, off-roading wheels, and cup holders.  The kind that TriBeCa moms are always shoving into my knees and then glaring at me like it's my fault they are late to free yoga at Lululemon.

It wasn't the stroller that caught my attention though.  This woman was clutching the stroller bars and staring intently at the stair/escalator arrangement like she had never seen such things before, and certainly not together or at an airport.

For a moment I thought maybe she shared my fear of getting sucked under the escalator and was gathering her courage.  More plausibly she was lost.

I watched her for a second longer and suddenly it clicked what her issue was: she wanted to get from the second floor to the first floor, and didn't know how to do so with her stroller juggernaut.

Tricky.

I realize that, as a good person, I should have offered my assistance in creating a solution.  Instead I hesitated and kept watching.  In all honesty, I was kind of curious what she was going to do and also she deserved it.

What she came up with was something I would not have guessed if you challenged me to write down every remotely plausible hypothetical solution, even if one of those was "sew parachute out of Starbucks napkins using own hair".  What I saw has shaken my faith in evolution, because whatever we are evolving towards isn't going to be smart enough to open peanut butter jars.

This is what she did:

Rolling a stroller down a moving escalator seems ambitious already but, as my helpful arrow shows, SHE ATTEMPTED TO ROLL THE STROLLER DOWN THE ESCALATOR THAT WAS MOVING UP.  It wasn't even that she got confused and momentarily mistook the "up" escalator for the "down" escalator.  There were people riding the escalator up that she physically moved aside so she could execute her plan.

...

It didn't work.

This produced more handwringing.

Her second solution was in the same vein.  She took the stroller and determinedly pointed it down the "down" escalator.  If the end goal was getting the stroller to the first level, this could work, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to end well for her baby.  Although who knows, maybe those strollers have airbags.

Another woman standing next to the railing noticed what she was doing and had a far more reasonable reaction than I did:

She was right, there was.

I'm worried about that kid's future.  Even if his mother manages to safely avoid escalators in the future and guide him to adulthood, he will still have his own genetics to contend with.

So there it is.  I went looking for lattes and ended up with questions about where humanity is going.

This also happened.

Fortunately this plane only sat twenty people and we hit an assload of turbulence.

Munchkin Fashion Review

For most of my childhood, I looked like I was raised in a den of wolves interested in skateboard culture.

I blame it on growing up in the 90s and having too many younger siblings.

I hadn’t always been this way.  When I was a tinier munchkin, my outfits were very important to me.  Actually me and my three sisters all had definite ideas about what we wanted to wear.  Our parents were either super progressive or too tired to argue.

Allow me to share a few looks with you.

Look 1: Construction Management Toddler

About every weekend of my childhood, I went to Home Depot (my parents are contractors, but even then it seems excessive).

Based on careful observation of the crowd at Home Depot, I came up with the following uniform: 

Dad found it mortifying.  He was always trying to force me into overalls and flannel, which would be perfect 20 years later when I moved to San Francisco.

Look 2: Baby Hugh Hefner

The second look was a favorite of Sister Number Two.  It optimized for comfort and the frequent inclement weather we faced in…Southern California.

Look 3: Thor Meets Miami Dancer

Third, and my personal favorite, was Sister Number Three’s go-to ensemble for landscaping and trips to Baskin Robbins.

Note: That truly is a plastic Viking helmet with horns pointing different directions.  I don’t know why we owned it, but she wore it as frequently as she wore underwear.

Look 4: All Natural Woman

Our final look suggests that by the time my parents were faced with a fourth monkey wreaking havoc, they gave up.

At some point I remember my parents banning her from answering the door.

Just a note, my parents did occasionally enforce a dress code.  Every Christmas I was physically forced into some chunky, scratchy holiday sweater with nausea-inducing sequins and tinsel.  

This is why we don’t have any holiday photos where I’m not crying until I turned 12 and was allowed to pick out my own Christmas outfits.

The Magic Sandbox

My mother and I are pretty different people.

Once she discovered she had a pony-obsessed, dog-whispering weirdo on her hands, she could have tried to bring me around.  Instead, out of either love or a sick desire to make sure I would never relate well to my peers, she fed into my eccentricities.

The best anecdote I can think of to illustrate this observation started with a sandbox.

The sandbox itself was shaped like a giant green turtle.  I think my dad was tired of me digging up the backyard.  With whatever flawed reasoning you retain after having children, he bought the plastic turtle and filled it with sand.  

He didn’t realize that he had also fulfilled every one of my two cats’ fantasies.

I spent many hours in the sandbox with my Little PetShops carefully avoiding the crusty patches. 

The sandbox had been in my life for awhile - I have no idea how long because linear time is meaningless when you’re four - when my mom got a very crafty idea.

One day I was out there managing my imaginary pony farm, when I made an amazing discovery.

My sandbox was a magical gold-producing sandbox.

I started digging like I was in a frenzy.  Among the chunks of hardened cat poop I found nugget after nugget of pure, shiny gold.

If I were a well-balanced child, I would have gone running to my mother to tell her about our new fortune.  But something in my little brain clicked.

It was mine.  All mine.  I had discovered a gold mine and no one could ever know about it or else I might have to do the unthinkable: share.

I dug up the rest of the box and gathered every piece of gold I had found.  I stuffed it all in my pockets and snuck to my room.

I hid the nuggets in my super-secure lockbox (a pink and purple pencil case), counting them out as I went.  I was obscenely, disgustingly rich.

That night, after a few hours of playing quietly in my room - which was already suspicious behavior - I wandered into the kitchen.

With that I quietly went back to eating my dinner.  The questions went on.  She even asked me pointedly how my sandbox was that day (sandy?).  Still I made no mention of my discovery and the hoard in my room.  

As you might have figured out, the “gold” in my sandbox had been planted by my (very creative) mother.  Trying to bring joy into my world, my mom had made two important discoveries:

For whatever reason, my mom kept re-stocking my sandbox with gems.  Maybe she was afraid to break the illusion and damage my seemingly-fragile grip on reality.  Maybe she was so distraught over discovering that I was a tiny Midas that this was her way of giving me more choices to come clean about my presumed wealth.

Either way I amassed an unbelievably large collection of what turned out to be pyrite (a disappointing although healthy discovery I made when I got into geology) and learned a lesson that hasn’t served me well in life:

When life hands you massive amounts of good fortune…

Adulthood: Expectations vs Reality

When I was a very little monkey, adulthood to me meant that no one could control your cookie consumption.

I fantasized about the day I would become an adult.

As I got older I developed other ideas about being an adult would be like.  I even knew what I wanted to be - a rancher.  Specifically, inspired by books I had misinterpreted about animal conservation, of golden retrievers and orca whales.

But eventually, reality intervened and that dream fell by the wayside.  I got busy with school and then work.  I had a fancy real job and it went like this:

I think I might be in the middle of a mid-twenties crisis.  

It crept up gradually.  First, I started wondering about the amount of time I spend at work.

Then, I started wondering about the way I spend my time outside work.

And there it was, a full-blown "Adulthood: Expectations vs Reality" meltdown.

The thing is, I know my life is great.  I have a job, nice friends, a place to live.  But this is about being self-focused and in your twenties, so clearly something was missing.

Trying to figure it out, my brain started to wander. Hey, I thought, just for comparison, what would my childhood self, with all her expectations about adulthood, think of my life now? Disclaimer: this was one of the worst ideas I've ever had.  

For context, this was my childhood:

Let's explore this psychological shitstorm.

To start, my childhood self had a lot of questions for me.

Some of those weren't too anxiety-inducing.  I can open 80% of jam jars.  I can probably do long division, I just haven't in awhile.  And it definitely doesn't take 8 nurses to restrain me for shots (I'm down to a nurse per limb plus one to administer the shot).

But the rest...

It got lots worse.

I shut that door pretty quickly.

I think it all settled into my subconscious though, because one day I woke up and said "Why don't I read anymore?".  Other than daydreaming or climbing avocado trees with my golden retriever/best friend, reading was my favorite childhood pastime.  This was true into high school too. At some point in college I think I just started taking myself too seriously to do the kind of rampant reading I'd done earlier in life (or I made non-canine friends, who knows).

So I started rediscovering all of my favorite books, from serious Randian essays to the equally serious and involved "Deathgate Cycle".  Read it if you like dragons and magic.

But because I have an obsessive personality it didn't end there.  I started going to library book sales, collecting books, databasing my growing library (if you can't tell, I'm very cool).

The great thing about reading is that it sort of snowballs you into thinking about lots of other things. 
All those other things I'd left behind when I became an Adult, I started remembering.

'Misty of Chincoteague' reminded me of my pent up passion for all things pony.  So I planned my birthday around a horseback riding trip and did the financial math on pony ownership (conclusion: still only possible in my wildest dreams).

'My First Summer in the Sierra' reminded me that spending time outside made me less of a curmudgeon-cave-dweller.  So I started communing with trees and got back into rock climbing.

Reading to rediscover your identity is pretty wonderful.

But there is a cautionary tale here, as this is the story of an ongoing mid twenties crisis.

Here's the thing: I took it too far.  I should have re-read stuff I loved and embraced the whole book collecting thing.

Instead I thought, I can't be the only person struggling with questions about who I am and what I want! What do the great thinkers of history say about identity and purpose?

So I read a lot of philosophy.  Mostly modern interpretations of classical philosophy, which is how I found myself accidentally spouting Hegelian and Marxist ideas without really realizing it. 

Because you make really great choices at 25, I decided to stop spouting nonsense and make some REAL LIFE CHANGES.

Here was my list of action items:

I did the first two, plus item number four.  The fifth guy is unappealing and would massively interfere with the time I spend sitting around in my underwear feeling sorry for myself.  I am starting to realize the irony of item number three.  

The first two items (quit job -> Montana) were surprisingly easy, and surprisingly problematic. You see, the problem with experimenting with living your fantasy life is that you might really like it.  I sure did.

But, as my dwindling savings account reminded me, this was a summer fantasy. Being that happy is a little terrifying, especially when you can't feed yourself.

So I'm back at square one. I've laid off the philosophy and convinced myself I need a real job but still, somewhere in my twenties-addled brain, a sick fantasy lives on: