Writing here is twelve times more fun than writing essays.

I mentioned much earlier that I tried the no shampoo challenge.* Unlike everyone else who tried it, I discovered that I, a person with long fine light colored hair, was pretty much the original market for shampoo.

*Part of the "I'm miserable and isolated, so I may as well abandon societal conventions" phase. Fun times.

This last month, one of the hippy beauty blogs I follow introduced a "no soap" challenge. I was repulsed. I read about it- out of morbid curiousity- and found that I am in year 16 of the no soap challenge. They allow soap for pits and bits, and to remove chemicals and grime, they encourage washing hands... what else do people soap? I know that every summer my skin goes to hell because of daily Technu baths and poison oak and sunburn and sunscreen-caused acne- I do terrible things to it, but I don't needlessly scrub it down with miscablizers every day. You've gotta make peace with your skin bacteria.

Mingleminglemingle

I believe that everyone should have a fantasy career. It doesn't have to pay well, it may not be half as emotionally fulfilling as one's real career, it may be truly soul sapping and unpleasant. But everyone has three or four things that they really dislike about their job- it's healthy to fantasize about a world where these peeves are absent.

For instance, I hate poison oak, sleet down my neck, lots of driving, and unreliable implacable scheduling. When I am cursing my fate, I say "I should have been a dental hygenist." I would never have to skip Pilates matwork because my knees are solid bruises. I could go to farmer's markets on my lunch break. I could scrape gunk off of peoples teeth, natter on about plants, and they wouldn't be able to talk back. Or escape.

C daydreams about the carefree life of property management. My coworker imagines her life as a flight attendent- pouring endless ginger ales in a clean blouse and pantyhose, every single day. We dream small, beset with the irritations of our everyday lives.

Last week, I got an e-vite to a career related meet-and-greet/social. I've gone to these in the past. Botanists are new to career building- remembering someone's name and having a business card is considered impressive go-getter evidence. Thus, everyone there is thinking the word "mingle" over and over again, hoping that networking conversations will magically happen. It's dreary. I really should go and practice my groupthink skills.

The Google ad for this e-mail is "Become a Dental Hygienist. Dental Hygiene programs near "

Well played, Google. Well played.

Notes on Gifts

Oh my, a giant bread maker that needs to be plugged into a dryer outlet. How useful!

In other news: special marital sheets are because newlyweds have clearly never cohabitated before and they need nice sheets. I am disappointed and relieved.

I hate your face, ISTP: No, I apparently just hate you.

Goodness, I have some strong feelings about this personality. Really. I mean, if I have any readers who are ISTPs, I'm sure we've had a discussion- say, about how much junior high sucked, or how we both like kitties- and I've ended up icily dissecting each comment you make before I storm away.

It's embarrassing.

So let's just go with some backhanded compliments. If everyone were an ISTP, communism would work. They work very hard, and work for the joy of work. It would also work because they'd be OK with letting some people starve every now and then.

You may have read this study- about how being unclear in communication leads to misunderstanding. (Really ladies, why don't you just talk like men?) This is never a problem for ISTPs. They'll just ignore things they don't want to hear.

I mentioned that the ISFP was very good at focusing, and I was envious. ISTPs are good at focusing too. On the surface, it seems like they're exactly the same as me, except they've exchanged sort of a fuzzy big picture thing for not being too lazy to get out of bed. They never take a deep breath and look at things from someone else's point of view, they never put a project down for a minute and daydream about duckies, they never check their work using another method... They are juggernauts- runaway freight trains. They won't know they're wrong until next year.

Competent, logical, focused, and with selective deafness- this is not a personality type big on the social safety net. Don't bother asking them for favors, regardless of importance. The upside is that they're stolid, self reliant, and brave in the face of adversity.

No wait, they're whiny little bitches. I swear, 60% of Internet drama can be traced back to an ISTP. Whether it's hiding under desks after a breakup, quitting Facebook (again) because someone snapped at you, or sending out a passive-aggressive e-mail to every botanist in the state when your underling finds another job, an ISTP will rise to the challenge of completely overreacting.

The one thing that makes ISTPs slightly less intolerable is hard work. Give them a craft, and watch them go. Then give them another craft. The thing that makes them more intolerable is permitting them to major in philosophy. They think parroting Sartre makes them a existentialist guru.

More Rewards for Behaving Unwisely.

Today I had a meeting with my work leader, the botany specialist, and the head of the alive things that are not underwater department. We were hammering out plans for the summer. We discussed a scheduling conflict where my work leader needs to go work on another project for a while, and she expressed confidence that I could work alone for a couple of weeks.

Somehow that led to me complaining about my previous job to everyone at the meeting. It was in a light joking matter- I swear it was- but still a faux pas, no?

Right. It informed the botany specialist of my experience with certain geologic formations. This led to me looking up a couple of free internet tools for him. These allowed him to cut several hours off of a proposed project, which enabled the company to submit a lower bid.

So... gossip and malingering led bonding with my superiors and possibly getting my company a job. I...

I think I might start doing the reverse of whatever job advice I get.

My poor brother...

He's writing for the school paper- for some reason, he's basically writing about rural issues over and over again- and he often asks me to edit.

I have a rule that none of his descriptions of small towns can remind me of a 19th century novel's description of genitalia. It's tough going. "Nestled" is out. So is "deep" and "bosom". "Hidden gem" "Unknown treasure" "Headwaters" "Backcountry" are removed as a matter of course.

I don't know what I have against "discovered", but it's out too.

moss and gender

So if you're like me, you've often thought "Why am I not more like moss?" The possibilities of being hydrostatic aside, why are our gametes so pathetic? Why don't they live independent lives?

Note to self. Write science fiction with characters who can be completely dehydrated and revived. Also, with gametes that pull their own weight.

The cheery answer is that sometimes human gametes do. Recall high school sex education, where they explained that sperm contain a chemical that causes girls to fall in love? That is a lie and I did not know that until just now! I swear I have other examples!

Right. When the sperm and the egg fuse, some proteins from the gametes are still present. These proteins have startling effects on placental and embryo development. Sperm proteins determine the degree of implantation of the placenta- its ability to obtain nutrients from the bloodstream. (This is one of the major problems with egg fusion. No egg is going to encourage aggressive nutrient use on the part of the embryo. ) Egg proteins determine head size.

Oh, but that's not really gamete function at all- we want to anthropomorphize our gametes whilst they are still alive. Fine, fine, here. It's an article on how men will someday become extinct!

Except they won't. At least, not until everyone else does.

You'll have to excuse my terrible lack of citations here- all my science books are in storage. While Google is great, it cannot search for "that thing about 3/4 of the way through the book, next to the mostly green illustration". As a quick refresher- all eggs have an X chromosome. The chromosome present in the sperm (X or Y) will determine the gender of the embryo (female or male). Thus, most males have XY, most females have XX, and intersex persons have a dizzying array of possible chromosomal and hormonal variations. When fertilization occurs, there's a swap meet among the chromosomes- known as crossing over. This has less impact on the person who will get these genes than previously thought- you use all your DNA- but it makes a big difference to that person's offspring, because they get only the one copy. Oh genes, always thinking ahead.

The article above states that as Y chromosomes cannot recombine, single detrimental alleles are not exposed to selective pressure and eliminated. As such, most of the Y is nasty junk DNA, with only a cheery SRY (order: make testicles!) gene cluster maintaining some level of professionalism. (But there's evidence that they can recombine with themselves. Cool.) Since the DNA on Y chromosomes is crap, they are steadily shrinking. Soon they will vanish!

Well, okay. They'll vanish as soon as the SRY gene cluster moves to another chromosome. And all of the Y chromosome data becomes useless. Then males as we know them will vanish, as the genes that make them male will be on a different chromosome. (Italics for sarcasm.)

But we've strayed from our discussion about gamete adventures.

All living DNA is mutating at a steady rate. Since there are three times as many X chromosomes as there are Y chromosomes, X chromosomes have more time to experiment. (This is one of my favorite evolution facts. Larger populations mean a higher chance of an interesting mutation. Higher survival rates mean a smaller likelihood that the awesome will be lost due to random chance. This is why I am a liberal: because social supports might foster cool mutations.) Every so often, an X chromosome will decide that it can't trust a chromosome it can't recombine with- so all eggs containing this X chromosome will reject all sperm with Y chromosomes. Think of those amazon eggs, rejecting the possibility of becoming male! The excitement!

That's my gamete adventures Hail Mary pass. Sometimes eggs reject sperm with Y chromosomes. One of these shows up about once every... million years.

But let's think about the implications! The mutation can arise in a male, but after the first male passes it along to his daughters, there will be no males with that gene. (Well, until the magical circumstances that I'll talk about later.) Without males passing along this X chromosome, there can't be females who are homozygous for the trait. Thus, even if the gene gives you superhuman speed and the ability to eat rocks, it can't be present in more than 50% of all eggs. You'd end up with a male to female ratio of about 1:3. And what an advantage to the X chromosome! A 50% increase in available carriers! After a few generations as a zero sum gene, becoming 50% of all the mammals in a population!

But maybe a plucky sperm (with a Y) gets hit by a magic bolt of cosmic radiation. It's enough to knock off the DNA that marks it as a possessor of a Y chromosome, so it manages to fertilize an amazon egg. The resulting dude is a biological jackpot. Since his sons can carry the amazon gene, their daughters can be homozygous for that trait. Their sons will have the magic Y chromosome by default. Sperm from any other source is quietly selected against, because an ever growing portion of the population will be unable to bear sons with the old Y. Soon, everyone is a descendant of this dude. He wasn't even that awesome. (Everyone is also a descendant of the first person with the amazon X)

Man, that's another great science fiction short story. Oh, and platypus gender is freaky.

So this process has happened several times in our past. Every time, we've shaved a little bit more off the Y chromosome. Right now it is tiny. It's basically the SRY gene complex (testicles!) the SRY gene complex upside down, in case recombining is gonna happen, and about 50 million base pairs of mad ramblings. (The X has 150 million base pairs that code for things like blood clotting and color vision.) In the future, there will probably be further shaving of those mad ramblings. If the next amazon X recognizes the SRY complex as the marker of Y-ness, then we'll end up with that old 3:1 gender ratio. There can be no magic supersperm to remedy that, because the resulting person will have no sperm.

Unless the SRY complex is swapped to a different gene. See above sarcasm.

My, this is a long post.

What advantage do the other chromosomes gain by letting the X chromosome be picky about what sperm to accept? Well, at one time there were lots of human like things wandering around so it paid to be choosy about which sperm to accept. Mammalian hybrids don't survive very well- another way that moss is cooler than us- and since female mammals bear almost the entire cost of producing babies, X chromosomes in eggs were under significant pressure to reject dicey sperm.

One last thing. Over the last five million years, we've shaved 100 base pairs off the Y chromosome. The thousands of genes that once separated males and females have been reduced to less than ten. Human males are basically ladies with testicles.

C and I debate about this all the time. That's why I make him look at orangutans when we are at the zoo.

At least I got it out of the bookstore...

Fifteen posts in January, two in February. That's the sort of trend we want to see.

So I went to San Diego last week to see... people without nicknames. What should I call y'all? It was lots of fun- C got to hang out with a former roommate and play video games and bicker in loud voices, I found someone else who follows my feminazi blogs; there was a dog with exceptionally soft ears and good food and slow lorrises and a tortoise fight. Also I bought some books. (Shocker)

One of these books is Madame Bovary's Ovaries- it's about how classic literature reflects things we've found about evolutionary psychology. It sounds like a worthy premise, but the book is terrible. There are no end notes, for starters.

Shouldn't such a book have a decent understanding of the literature discussed? I've read five Dickens novels- not one has a secret relative aiding the main character. The author states that this is the unifying theme in Dickens- like matrimony in Austen. Speaking of Austen- there are many ways to interpret Mr. Darcy arranging Lydia and Wickham's marriage, but I don't think his protective instincts towards children even enter the picture. There's an early 20th century theme where women discover that they are more than objects- please do not summarize that as ladies being happier when banging rockin' dudes. Let's just assume I yelled about sexism for about five minutes there.

I'm not even going to get into what he said about Lolita and menstruation.

The science is really formulaic. Did you know that adolescent males often disagree with their fathers? Did you know that males freak out about paternity? Did you know that stepparents and children often do not get along? Did you know that science has a reason for this? I was hoping for new concepts.

For instance, why not illustrate the grandmother principle using the Little House series? When the Ingalls live near their extended family little favors- like maple sugar, rennet, and help with the harvest- are constantly being passed around. During this period, all the children survive, no one becomes blinded or consumptive, and they eat things besides wild game and cracked wheat. Oh, and Proust survives with his genteel poor parents because his grandparents take them in. Grandmothers are similarly important to child survival in Toni Morrison and I, Claudius. (They survive. What more do you want?)

If you're going to talk about Austen, why blather about hypergamy? When you are poor, it is a good idea to marry a rich person. Duh. Why not talk about resource concentration due to primogeniture? It's one of the hidden themes of early European literature- generations of people willing to abandon most of their children so that a few can continue to be rich.

Why not talk about different theories for the survival of homosexual traits? Of forming complex social networks as safety lines, instead of just marrying the right dude? Of the advantages a female reaps due to cuckolding her mate, rather than just the disadvantages to the mate? Of limiting the number of offspring one has, delaying the date where one starts bearing offspring, and allowing bachelors and spinsters? Of generous uncles who neglect their own children?

My biggest pet peeve is in the mate selection chapter. He refers to what sounds like a fascinating study- comparisons of desired traits in mates across several cultures. I'd love to read more: please see no damn end notes. The author goes on and on about how males in most cultures seek young, attractive females, and females seek wealthy, high status males. He cheerfully explains that because of this dichotomy the war between the sexes will never be resolved and it is foolish to try. Then he states another finding from the survey to prove a point about the bitter rules society forces us to live by. Apparently every single culture has two traits that both sexes place in the top three traits one seeks in a mate: intelligence and kindness. Damn society for punishing us for stealing and cheating and driving drunk! The man is keeping us down!

Hold that little factoid in your hearts, chickens. Throughout the world, a majority prefers mates who know not to poke sleeping rhinos with sticks and are pleasant enough to let others know this is a bad idea. I have a friend (not, I think, a reader of this blog) who constantly bitches about how he can't get a girlfriend because he's short and doesn't have a shiny car. Dude. Dude. You lost your last girlfriend because you mocked her religion all the time, told stories about getting high at her work parties, and drove you both deep into debt buying coffee and computer games. You lost your last girlfriend because you weren't smart enough to think these were asshole things to do.

Keep in mind that nearly a hundred years of evolutionary psych was written by men- only now are we seeing papers on the terrible physical costs of motherhood to mammals, the other side of harem infanticide, and the benefits of mating with low status males.

Oooo, I think I'm supposed to talk about wedding dress shopping next week

Actively selected against.

Cuervito once told me it was a miracle any botanists managed to reach an age where they could reproduce. We were discussing cold remedies, and they all involved placing significant stress on infecting organisms and minor stress on ourselves. I scoffed that hot showers, wasabi, scarves in the summer, and hot rags on the face could prove to be so harmful to humans that it reduced reproductive success.

I burned myself last week, doing that stupid thing I like to do with fire and cardboard. (It has resulted in minor disaster on about 44% of attempts. ) It's a tiny burn so no one looks twice. However, I did burn the skin to ash (again) there is a divot in the flesh of my finger (I never learn) and it did get infected.

Here's where my disparate topics can be woven together. I am currently in the Conquistador household where they are so perfect as to never have minor injuries that urgently require disinfection. I considered washing out my bitty burn with contact solution, creme hair bleach, antifungal ointment, CLR, 409, and hot water and soap.

You'll all be pleased to know I decided on hot water and soap.

Unless you read this for the schadenfreude.

I make good on the promises of my first post.

Say a djinn appeared and allowed me to make one bit of feminist theory reality. Would I choose the end of rape culture? Equal pay for equal work? Government subsidized child care for all? Rejection of unrealistic body images?

Nope, In the heat of the moment I'd probably blurt out "End bikini area grooming requirements".

On a quasi-related note: Amy and I were discussing our responses to inappropriate questions during interviews. Both of us had been asked if we were married, she was asked if she was planning to procreate in the immediate future. Interview experts suggest turning the subject to how you won't have any problems doing the work- that your child care issues are resolved, that your husband doesn't mind you being gone for months at a time.

Amy's response: "Shyeah, that's none of your business."

My response: "You know that question is illegal, right?"

We both got the job.

The lady Conquistador- C's mother- is something of a determinator. She was born in rural Chile during the 40's- the eldest daughter of 6 children- and managed to go to college, get an engineering degree, get an advanced engineering degree, move to the US, and find a job that took thirty minutes of explanation before I understood the cocktail party gist. At the same time, she kept herself fit, perfectly groomed, and very well dressed; mastered every domestic art; sustained a marriage to a schockingly difficult man; maintained a mild and friendly mein; and raised my favorite person in the entire universe. She did all this in a new country, using a langauge she didn't start learning until she was in her mid 20s. I am extremely intimidated by her.

However, I'm begining to realize that the drive to do such things might make you a wee bit insensitive. The day before we moved, she drove up and took us out for lunch. (FOR THREE HOURS.) There was a twenty minute enthusiastic screed on the son of one of her friends- he'd found his path in life, and it was installing solar panels in Gautemalan villiages. She leaned forward, and pointed out that we should not be so selfish in our chosen life paths- that we should try to find careers that would help the environment.

Also, she'll drive to the gym- which is six blocks away- in fine weather.

I wonder what she thinks I do for a living?