The common good

What ever happened to the common good?

Exhibit A. My department is moving into a new building this fall, along with another department. This is not just some ordinary academic building, it is a showpiece, a phenomenon, a fantastic place to work. It will be the nicest place that any of us have ever worked or will ever work. Yet I find out from a friend in the office that the administrators are having a squabble over who gets what office. Now ordinarily this might make sense, but in this building, every office is a nice office. Everyone will have a nice office and be happy. Why can't a few people just be generous and say "Hey it doesn't matter to me what office I get, they are all nice." Then the squabble would be over and everyone would be one iota happier.

Exhibit B. I work in a lab and we have a dishwasher who prepares our media and sterile stocks. Sometimes he falls a bit behind. Would you think in those times that people would step up and fill in for him? They don't. Of the nine people in the lab, only myself and one other person ever do these tasks when it is needed. This is not particular to this lab, it characterizes every lab I have worked in. People just think they are too important to do menial tasks, even though doing these menial tasks is essential to keeping everyone's work going. One guy even admitted to me that he thought it was beneath him. Well guess what, I have much more seniority in the lab and I do it. Grrrr.

And it spills on to everyday life, people running red lights are really saying "I don't care if it is dangerous, my needs are more important than yours." No one wants to pay taxes anymore for public services. It seems that little by little our ability to be generous is fading away. It makes me just want to stay home and not interact with anyone, since I just feel the need to prepare myself for their rudeness. Is that rude of me?

Pay it forward

I know, a hokey movie with Haley Joel Osment, Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt (right? I didn't see it).

Last weekend I gave a short ride to a total stranger who had some heavy bags and a ways to walk. She gave me $5 which I unsuccessfully tried to give back to her. $5 for a short ride is totally overkill, and now I am living with the guilt of having profited from something I should have done for free. I don't know why I didn't try harder to give her the money back, I mean, we did have the usual "You take it" "No, YOU take it" exchange, but I ended up with the money.

She told me where she works and I have thought about calling the place up and asking for her, but now I can't remember her name so it might sound suspicious to call up a work place and ask nosy questions about the employees.

So, I have to pay it forward. Monday I gave a small box of chocolates anonymously to a coworker that I had planned to have for myself. She had just come back from being sick for a week, so I figured she needed it more than me.

But I still feel the need to be nice to people to make up for the $5. I wonder how long the feeling will last and how long I will suppress the inner bitch in me to be nice in a totally unselfish way.

Faces

My mom and I went to the Paine Museum in Oshkosh to see some Gee's Bend quilts. No photos were allowed inside the museum, but they had some nice outdoor sculpture.

This is Roman Head.


According to the web page, this is Winnebago Lady, but I thought it was called something else.


It reminds me of the outdoor sculpture at Allerton Park in Illinois, although these are more tasteful. Allerton Park is not particularly tasteful, although it has left me with a lifelong desire to have blue chinese fu dogs as sculpture in my garden.

I am pro-accordion and I vote

I love that bumpersticker.

Spring is here

Well someone at the Daily Page Forum that I go to objected to the word sprinter. Whatever, I like it. Spring, summer, autumn and winter aren't enough to describe the more than four seasons we have here.

Anyway, it is now spring anyway. I have some proof.



This is a pretty shelf fungus that just sprouted up, and below are some interesting growths.


Yes I know they are rabbit pellet, AND THEY ARE EVERYWHERE IN OUR YARD.

I have to do something about the rabbits. I learned to wrap the shrubs in chicken wire, and in the past they have not stayed in the yard too long. Now it seems like they have excavated a little home underneath the shed and are really pooping up a storm.

My thoughts are to take a hose and run water into the home under the shed. Or to take chicken grit and pour that in. Don't I sound mean? I don't mind when they eat the plants but I do mind when the entire yard is their bathroom.

Then we would have to put chicken wire around the perimeter of the entire yard to keep them from getting back in. The yard already have a fence but they can squeeze through really tiny spaces. Sigh. Rabbit killer is not something I wanted to be when I grew up.

Sprinter

Today I was reading the local newspaper and there was an article about sprinter. The time between winter and spring, or maybe those late winter days that feel like spring. I guess I didn't really read the article, but sprinter means a lot to me.

Today I saw about 25 turkey vultures, circling slowly above the trees. A sure sign of sprinter. As was the robin I saw yesterday and the shoots of bulbs I see in peoples' yards. The shoots are only about three inches tall, but they are there.

This is why I like living in a place with distinct seasons, watching them change is one of the best things about it. Sprinter, of course, is particularly exciting, the new plant growth, the return of the animals, the melting of the snow.

Sometimes in the height of spring things just seem a little gaudy, after sprinter's restraint. The flowers are so day glow bright, the lawn seems dyed green, everything is almost obscenely fecund and bursting.

Sprinter, on the other hand, has a beautiful spareness about it. The garden is the cleanest it will be all year, the plants are whispering their arrival.

I think it is one of my favorite times of the year.

The photo above was taken on April 6, 2006. Right at the end of sprinter.

Ginormous

I just love words and language. Mostly etymologies, slang, and idioms. How great is "snug as a bug in a rug"?

Anyway, my new favorite word is ginormous. At first I thought it was a recent word, but if you Google it you find that it has been around since mid-century, and is even in the OED. They record the first use as in 1948.

It is interesting how new words are made. Who would have thought that gigantic and enormous (not to mention huge, colossal, humongous, immense, massive, jumbo, and mammoth) were not enough to describe all the variations of super large, and that we needed ginormous to fill a gap in the language.

I think ginormous has the implication of humorously large, while enormous means out of the ordinary large, and gigantic means giant like. so, there are nuances in the meanings.

I did once see the word written as gynormous. I think it was just a misspelling, but it is fun to think of what gynormous could mean...... a very large woman, or something bursting with womanlyness, like a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Or even a womanly norm, as in gyn-normous.