Praealtus

Luxury problems

I wish I lived in a world where all that mattered was the colour of my iPod

The Monkey Puzzled beside the volcano you can't see

My attention span is getting longer, but what was that splash anyway?

I obviously have a thing about insect sex, although that also tends to be a time when they sit still long enough to get a good photo. I don't know if these are bees, flies or wasps, nor which one is the male. They're over an inch long and I'm told they eat spiders.

A spider for goths (can anyone identify this creature? It's body is about 8mm across, it was found in a Chilean orchard in an arid area.)

Update: I found a book in Santiago that declares this to be an "opilionid spider". It moves slowly and defends itself with a nasty stink. I didn´t notice any particular smell from this thing. Some similar beasts show up on the internet, but they´re not the same as this one.

The term "opilionid" also seems to be used as the latin name for the daddy long legs, but this is obviously not one of those.

There were two, behind the couch. She said she'd never seen such creatures before. She said they weren't poisonous. I did not ask her to reconcile these two statements.

Courtesy is our goal (a mean little tale)

Yesterday, in BestSave, while waiting to pay for my bag of chips and four chocolate bars, I stood in line behind one other shopper who appeared to have finished with her shopping and was about to leave the cashier to me. She had packed up all of her purchases in the requisite plastic bag and was standing at the end of the checkout, chatting vaguely with the fat-looking woman at the till. Then she came back to the till and at this point pulled out her purse and credit card - something she could have done, even should have done, before starting to pack her goods. Then, of course, the cashier had to swipe the card, wait for it to be accepted, print the receipt to be signed by the shopper and complete the sale before she got to my four chocolate bars and bag of chips.

I needed to be getting back to work. I tried not to show my impatience, although I must have let a little slip because the cashier tried, rather challengingly and with a subtle threat of hostility, to engage me in some inane conversation -

“You didn’t have to swim here then?” She asked. I looked at her for the first time - an overweight, poorly-nourished, gray-looking white woman, head pulled back on her shoulders, in the usual synthetic-fiber nondescript cashier’s tunic.

“Uh, no?” I replied, wondering what she could possibly mean before realizing she was referring to the weather and then uneasily aware that this was a first foray into conversation with someone I didn’t know, on a subject I cared little about, perhaps designed to put me at my ease after being kept waiting, but more likely to raise my tension as I grabbed desperately for matching banalities to throw back.

“Oh, it’s not raining now.” She added, looking out of the window, and illuminating the meaning of her previous comment. “I hear it’s raining in Montrose.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.” I say, perhaps a little meanly, but in an effort to bring the subject to a close, pay for my food and get out of there. None of what she said was said with a smile, and she was wearing one of those horrible little badges which says something like “Courtesy is our goal”. If this is supposed to be a reminder to her, it won’t work, being pinned to her chest where she can’t read it. The only other target might be myself, the customer, or her coworkers, in which case, it seems to be some sort of challenge or merely intended to broadcast her “goal”. Perhaps we are supposed to assume she has achieved it and be automatically courteous back. She took the hint, and my 5 dollars.

It’s not that I dislike small talk, I just see little point in yammering inanely when there’s so clearly nothing to be said. It costs nothing to be polite, they say. Well OK, but part of good manners is knowing when to allow someone their silence and not to force them into a smile and a word that takes more effort than they can easily provide.

The best cashiers are those who will smile and banter with you if you are smiling and talking, and who will just ignore you and do their job if you just want to get through the line. They also won’t spend any longer than necessary chatting with a customer if there are others in line. This kind of cashier seems to be more common in Max's than BestSave. More fool me for shopping in BestSave.

Sometimes I miss pub grub.

100 pointless facts about me

Here's an interesting exercise: can you come up with 100 pointless facts about yourself? I'll have to try it myself sometime, but #99 of the case in point is one of the most wonderfully bizarre things I have heard anyone say about themselves: "I cannot stand to have my little toes touched". I also love the fact that it's item number 99.

Presentation

How much of the value of a work of art is in its presentation?

Ugly bugly eata da pretty flower.

Regret

Many years ago, I made a promise to myself never, when all is said and done, regret anything. Even bad decisions can be treated as beneficial, er, learning experiences¹. But the older I get, the harder it gets to keep this state of mind.

Embarrassment is much harder to deal with. I remember doing things as a child and later realising they were inappropriate, or offensive to someone else. Even now, in my forties, I can think of things from age ten or less that make me cringe.

¹: It doesn't matter how hard you try, you can't avoid cliches.