Tuesday, November 24, 2009

My wife, the amenity thief

(Are these items found in a hotel in Hong Kong or in my bathroom in Danby, NY?  Answer: both.)

Step into any hotel room with my wife and you will immediately notice that there is no soap, no shampoo, no body lotion, and no bath cap in the bathroom.  Nada, zilch, zero.  Because you only just checked into the room, there is no way that you already took a shower, forgot that you did so, and used up all those products.  No, the answer to the disappearing amenities in the room is that they are already in my wife's bag.  I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that my wife is an amenity slut. 

As I flip through my bathroom at home, I see shampoos from Sheraton and Radisson hotels, body lotion from the Hilton Garden Inn, and sundry products from hotels or pensions in France and Costa Rica that we visited years ago.  We almost never have to buy shampoo for our home.  In fact, my wife could open a small boutique with nice smelling lotions from around the country and the world.  Bed, Bath and Beyond watch out!  There is a major competitor coming to a town near you and her name is Robin.  Mind you, my wife is not a true thief.  She does not steal towels, or bath robes, or pillows, or the tv remote from hotel rooms.  She takes only those items that they place there for your use; it is just that in her case, she "uses" them all within minutes of hitting the room.  Nothing illegal or immoral about this, but it is damn irritating to her roomie----me.

How am I supposed to take a shower or dabble moisturizing lotions over my dried up skin if she has them stowed away?  I have learned that on the second day of our stay, I watch for the housekeeping lady.  I slip out of the room, and I tell her I will gladly carry the amenities into our bathroom to save her the trip.  But I surreptitiously slide a shampoo or two into my pant's pockets for later use.  Later in the day, I have to calm my wife when she begins complaining about housekeeping and how they skimp on bringing ample amenities to the room.  When she is about to call the front desk, I quickly draw her attention to the mattress on which we just slept: "I feel a bit itchy this morning honey.  I'm going to check the underside of this mattress for bed bugs", I say, acting as uncomfortable as I can.  I took entomology in college, so she trusts my observational skills when it comes to insects.  I spend a good 6-8 minutes examining the surface and finally conclude there is nothing there.  "I must just have dry skin", which is true for sure since I HAVEN'T SEEN BODY LOTION SINCE 1976.  My ruse works.  By the time I finish looking for the fictitious bed bugs, she has forgotten there was no daily replenishment of her sought-after booty, and we move on to the lobby to look for free newspapers or magazines.

I like traveling with my wife most of the time.  And she is generous to a fault.  We have friends who run a lodge in the Adirondacks in New York.  When they visited us last time, my wife gave them a supply of loot from her hotel visits that they will use to furnish the bathrooms in six cabins.  Not sure what those guests will think when they read "Holiday Inn" on the soap in their room.  But if cleanliness is next to godliness, does it matter from whence the cleanser came?

Sunday, November 22, 2009

The dispersal of human offspring

(Human offspring disperse for the same reasons as these dandelion seeds, but the effects of dispersal are quite different.)

It is normal in birds and mammals for young to disperse from their birth area.  There are a variety of biological explanations as to why this is adaptive.  A common reason given is that dispersal reduces the chances of offspring mating with their parents (or competing with them for resources like food), which would result in a higher degree of inbreeding and a higher probability of recessive, deleterious genes manifesting themselves in the offspring of such a mating between close relatives.  In birds, females tend to disperse farther than males from their natal area, and in mammals, males tend to disperse farther than females.  Again, if male and female siblings disperse different distances from where they were born, they are less likely to encounter each other when they reach reproductive age and, therefore, siblings are less likely to mate with each other.  So, while birds and mammals have different sex-specific dispersal patterns, the effect is the same.

We are all familiar with the bad jokes told about human inbreeding (=incest) in communities where everyone stays near home, and there is little movement of new humans into this isolated community.  This is probably an extreme case for humans.  I have to figure that for most of human history (3-4 million years), young males probably dispersed to nearby villages, probably no more than miles or tens of miles away.  After all, they had to walk.  Once they got there and were accepted, they found young females to mate, settled down in their new digs, and had babies.  Young female humans probably stayed near home more often, although the details of all this varied with cultures around the world.  In some cultures, females are simply kidnapped from nearby villages and brought to the male's home.  Important as well is that in this ancestral system everyone knew everyone else within the home community, and they probably knew almost everyone in all the neighboring communities. 

But in recent times, meaning decades or a few centuries, this pattern of relatively short dispersal distance and everyone knowing everyone else changed dramatically.  Many young people still remain in close proximity to their parents and to where they were born; they retain close friendships with many of their peers from high school.  But many others disperse hundreds or thousands of miles from their family, their birthplace, their homeland.  This can be a somewhat painful experience for those of us who enjoy being with our adult children on a regular basis.

This diaspora-like phenomenon has consequences for society as well, I believe.  Human behavior seems to be influenced and tempered mostly by peer pressure.  We tend to be on our best behavior when we are being watched by people who know us and who know our family.  Our family, in turn, puts pressure on us to behave in a socially-acceptable manner.  When humans move to a community where literally no one knows them, human behavior has a tendency to change.  I am not familiar with studies that document this, but I am betting they exist.  In other words, when you are not directly accountable to a social system in which your status is known and familiar to others, I predict that, on average, humans will be somewhat more likely to engage in immoral or illegal behavior.  For this pattern to emerge in the data, we would need to examine a sample of thousands of individuals who dispersed and compare their behavior to thousands of similar individuals who did not disperse.  If entire extended families dispersed together, I think my prediction would be weaker.

Thus, there are good biological reasons why human offspring might disperse from their natal area, but this dispersal may also have effects, or unintended consequences, in societies where it is common.  I love playing these mind games with myself to see where it leads me.  Having just helped one of my sons disperse even further away from home than he already was has caused me to focus on this topic again.  (In the case of my son's recent move, I am more concerned about what his new community will do to him than what he will do to it.  This must be a common parental reaction.)  I was always fascinated with dispersal in the mammals and birds I studied, but there is nothing quite like thinking about human behavior to get the juices flowing.  Of course, human dispersal is another one of those book-length issues, but maybe this little essay will start you thinking about the movement of people in a new and creative way.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

"Don't date a stripper from Vegas!"

(Punk's Place in Candor, NY will not have the same appeal after my son works in this Las Vegas nightclub.)

"Don't carry your wallet in your back pocket", is a useful piece of advice when walking around the streets of Las Vegas.  I have known that one for a long time, although I am a bit black and blue having my wallet bouncing around in my underwear.  Besides, I went to use the bathroom in the Venetian casino last night and the darn thing flipped into the urinal.  Thank goodness I wasn't at a Sahara urinal.  There must be a better place to store my money and credit cards.

My son and I have been in Vegas for five days and we have been given tons of advice on how to gamble here, where to find an apartment, what parts of the city not to live in, where to eat, and which shows to see.  It seems that everyone is an expert and we are novices here, so we are all ears.  Yesterday, a real estate broker told my son that whatever you do, don't date a Vegas stripper.  This advice was amended last night when a friend of my son's added cocktail waitress to the forbidden list.  (I actually dated a majorette from the marching band back in the day, but that is just between us.) The fact that we even have to have this conversation will put my wife on edge as we observe our "baby" sidle into Vegas life.  I guess that is why she sent me to help with this transition and she stayed at home.  So, I interviewed six strippers and three cocktail waitresses last night and I agreed with his real estate broker that Ryan should not date women who work in those categories.  I want to be thorough.

On the other hand, there may be some hidden (I use this term very loosely) advantages to taking up with women of this sort.  I would guess that they are somewhat used to being chilly, given their normal working attire.  Therefore, you could probably turn down the heat in the winter and save on the fuel bill.  I doubt they are ever pick-pocketed on the street, cause they have so many interesting places to hide paper money.  No thief would ever think to look there.  Financially speaking, it might not be so bad.  A good stripper or cocktail waitress at one of the high-end places in Vegas makes more money per year than a university professor.  Maybe my son wouldn't have to work at all. 

Thinking creatively, maybe I should stay out here and become a male stripper so I could return home with some loot.  Is there a market for a 63-year old, white-haired male stripper wearing only binoculars?  There are certainly plenty of elderly women wearing blue jogging suits who might want a break from those slot machines of an evening.  I'll check the classifieds today. 

P.S.  Don't worry Robin.  Either I will be home soon, broke as usual, or I will arrive home a few weeks late, with money hiding in places where thieves never go.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

In Denver, and I’m homesick

(I'm confused.  I flew to Vegas, but I might be in Paris.)

For the past week, I have been in Denver, Colorado visiting our sons. Denver is large and growing rapidly, as is the entire Front Range of Colorado from north to south. Driving on the highways is reminiscent of driving in southern California. The area is full of young people who immigrated here from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and other places where life has ceased to be exciting enough. They come here for skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, and camping in the Rocky Mountains nearby, and when in Denver there is plenty to do. The city boasts professional teams in baseball, basketball, football, and ice hockey, plenty of parks, bike and jogging paths, restaurants and bars of every stripe, interesting museums of art and history, and a good zoo. But I’m bored stiff. What the heck is my problem?

I’m bored because my primary activity in life, aside from blogging and trading stocks, is learning about, and living in, the woodland around my house. In short, I miss my forest in upstate New York and the “backyard ecology” that I practice there. Normally, an ecologist loves to travel to new places, because there are new habitats to explore, new birds to observe, new trees to appreciate. But in the city of Denver, that is not very satisfying. Oh, there are trees everywhere, but almost none of them should be here. Denver was built on the short-grass prairie of central Colorado—the native vegetation was only a few inches tall. Trees would have been limited to the banks of streams and rivers, and they would be cottonwoods and willows. The trees in the city now are mostly native to some other region of the U.S. or to another country: ash, Russian olive, Chinese elm, and Tree of Heaven, that native of China that I absolutely detest outside of its homeland. An irony is that we drove around a neighborhood yesterday with street names like Ash, Birch, and Cherry. Rub it in my face!

My issue here is that there is vegetation everywhere, but it does not constitute a “habitat”. Most homes have attractive green lawns, scattered trees planted in the yard and along the sides of the house, and a variety of flowering plants in gardens. All of this takes nearly daily watering, of course. But that is another complaint I have, for another blog. Nothing I criticize about Denver is any different than what I would say about almost any city in the world. We reconstruct a poor facsimile of the natural world that we took away when we built the city in the first place. For most, this is apparently just fine. In my case, I can’t wait until I go to the airport. But first, I have to spend time in Las Vegas, the Mecca of Facsimiles---Vegas even has the Eiffel Tower, which I always thought was in Paris.