lean, bronzed, serious, beardless

field notes from an ecology conference. i am not an ecologist. this is more a state of the american scientific community* for summer 2006, memphis TN

* i’ve made some calls about having ecology downgraded to a pseudoscience or maybe even all the way down to like a hobby group like model trains. no movement, thus far.

:: arthropod community response to catastrophic event in an irrigated perennial group
:: aggressive intermediate-level English speakers (uncollated South Americnas who are very wrong about how much English they speak)
:: the zero eye-contact man (maybe same as confused/lonely grad student)
:: women with short hair talking to men with long hair
:: unmanaged beards, tiny heads
:: weird stride length (related to being so nerdy you walk with a limp; duckwalker)
:: wrongtalking (similar to snakemouth or grumpyface)
:: the guy who tries to wear a suit
:: 74% attractive people
:: denim jodphur cutoffs
:: incongruous tattoo, boards of canada t-shirt
:: the dental phenomenon “superbite”
:: Flombaum
:: weirdshaped bigger protruding skull morphology. can involve volume, alignment or both in unfortunate cases.
:: weird colorations, “two-tone” beards
:: pants are clearly from 1987
:: all different kinds of shorts and sandals
:: manisfesting your social anxiety only through crazy head movements during an otherwise normal conversation
:: a pair of people who would be normal if you switched their head/torso/pants/neurologies. can only produce a total of one normal person. i call this the slot machine. a double or “natural” set would produce two normal people out of zero, but this is undocumented and likely not possible. heuristics needed.
:: hands-in-pocket squinty bearded mumbling guy (usually is complaining about getting jobbed somehow)
:: the oldest man in the world (parts are falling off of him as he tries to explain something). is named mike, or jerry.
:: the person who lost their internal monologue in a car accident
:: mouth-grabber (uses mouth as a pincer)
:: over-sighing
:: woman made out of grass clippings
:: hyper-foreign
:: obstrusive hot dutch girl
:: cargo cargo cargo shorts (a pocket on top of a pocket on top of a pocket on your shorts)
:: “wrongface”
:: limping, drooling lady who seems sure that everything is designed to belittle her.
:: people who hold things incorrectly

ain’t no love

i am wrestling with the 21st century here in Memphis, ancient egypt’s answer to the west side of chicago. depending on your viewpoint, southern hospitality might be construed as a euphemism for either “mentally injured” or “not at all concerned about what other people are doing or saying, but more polite about expressing that lack of concern.” both definitions seem to be proving true for the staff of this hotel. i spent my lunch break yesterday in the hotel bar watching oprah with the bartender and talking about anorexia. the verdict: anorexia is weird. i should probably drop a copy of The Craft of Research with the bartender. also, lifestyle choice threat #0343: i am goign to spend the next several months just reading rhetoric books and re-emerge with my darts sharpened as a kind of cyborg-abe lincoln type.

remind me later to expand on how air conditioning has made me a giant baby (although to be fair to myself, it is 99 degrees here). i am going back to the 18th floor to gaze at the FedEx Forum and mississippi river.