Never forget

..that it will be spring before you know it.

Also this year!

Elephant seals got it going on

I am currently locked away inside my container, writing a thesis going out of control.. a total of 10 pages are now devoted to beat around the bush, contextualizing my main topic (concealed human ovulation).

To avoid going completely bonkers I present you an excerpt from one of my (many) digressions:


"Describing humans as “mildly polygynous” correlates positively with the different sizes of men and women. Should a male monopolize several females, male-male competition will be fierce and the advantage of being big is clear, as we see within the large harems of the southern elephant seal where the 2.7 ton male dwarfs his 317 kg wives, of which he monopolizes, in average, 48 females (Diamond, 1991). While the human sex-based size differences are not that extreme, men are about 8% taller and 20% heavier than women, fitting the fact that most hunter-gatherer men are only able to support one single family, while a few resource-rich men have several wives, though that amount does not come close to the elephant seal (Diamond, 1991). On the other end of the scale, the previously mentioned males and females of the monogamous gibbons show little difference in body size, and will from a distance look identical (Scuiling, 2003, Diamond, 1991)."




.....FOURTY EIGHT!

Elephant seals must get up very early in the morning

Katharsis

I found this mspaint-like program for Mac users and so it is about time to revert to my former hobby (http://www.mspaint.net), if not for more than therapy.

Childhood irrational fears still haunting me, random order

* Getting my feet/hair/other parts stuck at the top of the escalators, where it disappears.
* Getting stuck in a revolving door, with half my body on each side
* Getting stuck in the closing doors of an elevator while the elevator is still moving (thank you Six Feet Under)
* Getting sucked into a "propella" thing on an airplane and cut into a million pieces (thanks to one episode of Lost)
* Spiders hiding in the toilet crawling up and laying eggs in my unmentionables
* Spiders hiding in the toilet crawling up to bite me
* Clowns (they're evil)
* Not being able to get the rings of my fingers
* Losing whole nails of my fingers or toes

Fears acquired more recently:

* Waking up graduated at age 27 without a single "real job" to put on my CV
* Turning 40 with wrinkles, fatty-liver, permanent bags under my eyes, 20 kilo heavier in my rented studio apartment and the chance of reproducing forever gone
* Turning 40 with wrinkles, fatty-liver, permanent bags under my eyes, 20 kilo heavier in my suburban mortgage house with 5 kids running around me
* Turning 40 and realizing that most of my life is behind me

* Presenting my thesis

the sel-fish and other fishes

Two things made the Tuesday night break in exceptionally ballsy in my eyes.

1. The poor robbed container is right next to the caretaker and janitors office. They work on typical caretaker/janitor hours (i.e. no one knows when they're around) and would have seen everything if they were there.

2. The container is situated directly underneath mine, bringing me closer to a potential crime victim than I've ever been.

All right, the latter is a very typical selfish observation and may be a response to me not knowing my neighbours well enough. I blame this on the missing "Hi, my name is" notes that could have been on our doors.

Ok, this post is getting ridiculous. To my defense: It's 1:53 and the police are communicating per megaphone right outside my window.

And I still think Amsterdam is safe enough.

An example of globalization -A study of free assosiations

K. wanted to tell them about a coffee shop at Harlemmerstraat, the Greenhouse. With fish in a large aquarium under your feet. This led to G's ichthyophobia. This made P. mention swimming preferences, lakes or salt water, the dead see, where there are no fish. P. and D. tried to think of the name of the sea which is not the Baltic sea but next to it. (It is the Baltic sea, btw, I checked). This led to pollution and Greenpeace. Finally we talked about toxic waste in North Scandinavia.

It takes approximately 5 minutes from weed to (nuclear) waste.

Keep your head!

*click* new friend! *click* in a (complicated) relationship. *click* attending event. *click* tagged in 7 photos.

Facebook is down at the moment and I'm walking on the walls. How do I know that I still have friends when I can't see what they are doing every moment of the day? How do I know what I look like when I don't have my Facebook pictures to define me? Am I falling of the face of the earth?

Seriously, will it ever stop? I know it will be back up soon, the technicians are probably working overtime, but this can't go on forever. Is real communication dead now as we're constantly in contact with each other on the internet?

And it doesn't stop here, the flow of information provides everyone with fast-food knowledge on every thinkable and unthinkable topic. Meta-internet concepts is the new humor and you better run with it. The race is on. There's a new red queen in town. Memes are competing for our attention. We are the replicating machines, the catalysts they need to survive. Are we really using them more than they are using us?


Perhaps summer went by because we were confined behind the screens? The weather was probably the same as always.