Today a 27-year-old man I was taking care of in the hospital asked if I could help him get boosted up in his hospital bed because, and I quote, “You look strong. Like, you look like you could take a motherfucker out.”
That is the most flattering thing that a patient has ever said to me, and I’m counting the little old lady who told me my eyebrows were beautiful, and the very deaf old German man who yelled at me that I was “WONDERFUL!!! MADE BY GOD TO BE A NURSE!!!!!”
Man human imprinting is crazy. My friend’s roomba zoomed by me and I got this intense urge to reach down and pat it. Like it’s just a machine? But it’s a good boy? It spends all day cleaning and sleeping and exploring the house and never complains and it’s just so good little robot? Pet robot?? Pet the robot????? Why am I like this???
When I bought my roomba the lady at the store told me that if it breaks within warranty and I send it back to the manufacturer, I can request that they fix and send back the same roomba instead of just sending back a new one. I gave her a confused look and she explained that people get attached to Their Roomba and don’t want them to just be replaced because they’re like part of the family. Humans are pretty great.
Aristotle’s definition of animal life was basically “anything that can move on its own,” so the idea of independent motion (or self-motion) as an indicator of consciousness is pretty deeply ingrained in the human psyche and regarding your autonomous vacuum cleaner as a domestic pet really isn’t that strange
My husband named ours and follows it around the room while it’s doing its thang, speaking softly to it.
please read this in a voice of pure pained agony: that’s a good fact very good
Seriously, it kills me when I see people hold scientists up as pinnacles of logic and reason.
Because one time the professor I was interning for got punched in the face by another professor, because mine got the funding, and told the other professor his theory was stupid.
This same professor told me to throw rocks to scare the “stupid fucking crabs” into moving so we could count them properly.
SCIENCE
thank you
this is one of the best comments this post has recieved
I have witnessed:
Two professors hiding around a corner and snickering, “Shhh, here she comes!” While a female professor approached and, when she finally found them, she proceeded to scream while pointing from one to the other, “You! I called your office but you weren’t there! So I tried to call YOUR office to figure out where HE was but YOU weren’t there!”
Two grad students standing outside a closed and locked door yelling, “Come out of the damn office. You haven’t left for days. If you didn’t have a couch in there I’d be concerned as to where you were sleeping!”
A religious studies professor apologizing for being late to class because, “security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit”
Watched a professor snort the results of my experiment to determine if I had the right final compound.
Two archeology professors toss priceless fossilized teeth back and forth in an attempt to figure out who is smarter by “guessing the type of tooth and species of animal before it lands”
Multiple fully degreed individuals throw dry ice at one another in an attempt to be first to use the lab/get that piece of equipment/or change the iPod song.
A genetics professor build furniture out of stacks of paper and planks of wood because she is that far behind in grading papers/responding. One of the impromptu furniture pieces housed a fish tank.
I could go on but I think that covers the larger portion of the insanity…
Every time it comes around on my dash, it gets better.
– I have had a professor buy a huge fuckoff bottle of rum during fieldwork in Costa Rica and let the undergrads get wasted because “you’re not underage in Costa Rica and we’ll be up all night with the bats anyway!”
– Same professor hung a bat from her headlamp and wore it as a decoration for an entire night.
– A whole swarm of older women – and these are women with PhDs and world-renown bat experts, the bigwigs – all, to a woman, go to the formal charity dinner at an international research symposium in Toronto in late October dressed in skimpy Batgirl costumes. Because Halloween was that weekend, you see.
– At a different conference, a professor get blackout drunk and pass out on the side of the road.
– “Yeah, we have to say we did it properly for the grant but to be really honest, Miracle-gro works better.”
– Teaching lab: we had liquid nitrogen for a demo, and after class the professor, the other TA, and I spent a good two hours freezing and breaking things in it.
a chemistry class begins with 30 students nine months later just six of us left sitting on tables dipping paper into contaminated chemicals to see what happens when we burn it teacher making idle suggestions while he marks our work
“go to the fume hood thing, yeah now put some potassium in chlorine” can i burn the results sir? “fuck it sure whatever its tainted anyway”
The prof I’m working for just asked me if I knew how to pick a lock, and when I responded “yes” she replied, “see, this is why I hire the former delinquents instead of the suck-ups. You’re actually useful.”
I then let her into her office.
“Security stopped me because I’m dressed like a hobbit.” I would bet anything this has happened to Dr. Medievalist.
Semi-related non-academic anecdote: The concert hall security guys tried to throw out our violone player in between performances this spring because they thought he was a homeless guy. Despite the fact that he was wearing concert black… and carrying a violone. There is no more obvious instrument.
One of my English Professors admitted that sometimes “you just have to do a soliloquy” and would phone up the main office of the department on the internal phoneline to recite a Shakespearean monologue at them. No greeting, no warning, just “To be or not to be”.
every time i read this stuff i think about how upset vulcans would be to meet earth’s greatest scientific minds
At one of the leading conferences for a certain branch of mathematics, there is an annual tradition of “walrus wrestling,” where the participants kneel on the floor with their hands behind their back and try to knock each other the fuck over. This takes place at the formal dinner.
no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
Plato’s allegory never accounted for what would happen when people who’d spent their entire life outside the cave suddenly traveled into it
Alrighty, I’ve told this story before, but it’s been about a year.
Now, understand that I am a camping and scouting veteran, a camp counselor, and an avid hiker; I know damn well what poison ivy looks like, along with every possible rhyme to remind a person.
Leaves of three let it be, red tint, it’s not difficult. I could spot the stuff from a mile away.
But this was a special occasion.
I was a brand new wildlife student, two years ago, facing for some reason my toughest challenge yet–Dendrology lab. We learned about 10-20 new trees every week in the field, and every week we were also tested on what we learned last class (along with their scientific names).
Memorizing Latin wasn’t an issue, but I was having notable trouble keeping up with identification (and we weren’t even into autumn yet, when the leaves are gone).
Now, when you’ve been doing something for years and years, it’s easy to sometimes overlook something odd, because you tend to fall into a habit of glancing and moving on, confident in your assessment, as long as the stakes aren’t enormous.
So this is a field quiz, no big deal. My professor is relaxed. He’s an impressive dude with a lot of knowledge, and he could probably about identify a tree blindfolded using some sort of echolocation known only to foresters.
So when he glanced at a small but particularly interesting poison ivy plant, he didn’t notice something crucial, which was its uncharacteristic leaf.
See, we were just a few classes into the semester, so we only knew about two trees with a very specific type of leaf called a “mitten lobe,” and those were Sassafras and Box elder.
Sassafras can actually produce three different leaves, the middle one in the photo being the mitten lobe (x):
So this poison ivy plant was not only growing out of the ground like a sapling, instead of as a vine or small shrub like we were used to, but it also had a mitten lobe as one of its few leaves.
I’m not sure if it was a mutated plant, or what exactly was going on, but this is not a normal thing.
Our professor missed it, but we were all hyper-analyzing this tree, because we were new to identification. So of course we all saw the mitten lobe and thought, well it’s either sassafras or box elder! We didn’t pay attention to ANYTHING else. It felt like some sort of trick question. The Mitten Lobe was the object of our entire, collective focus.
So, there are a few ways to tell sassafras and box elder apart. One method–in retrospect, the recommended method–being the branch alignment. This is THE most basic and first step to breaking down trees into possible identities. It’s where most people start.
And the other being the distinctive smell and taste of sassafras (if you crush a leaf, it smells a lot like fruit loops).
And how are a bunch of new, gung-ho students halfway through a test and eyeball-deep in stress going to decide on the difference?
We’re going to stick the leaf in our mouths.
So we all grabbed a leaf and tore it apart to share with our classmates and stuck the pieces in our mouths. Understand when I say not a single student knew the mistake we were making, because they absolutely would have interrupted the test.
Our professor was distracted, and we were all chewing slowly, as if at a wine tasting, mulling over the taste of the leaf and our options. It didn’t taste like sassafras, or like anything, really.
Which I said. Which is when our professor turned to me in horror and said “Molly Anne, did you just eat that leaf?”
I told him yes, and he was SO Plainly Horrified that I’m not kidding when I say half of the class–the half that hadn’t partaken in our cursed salad–immediately realized what we had done and put their pencils to their test to write in “poison ivy.”
Anyway, once it dawned on us our terrible mistake, a few things happened:
My professor asked us how we managed this, and we basically kept repeating “THE MITTEN LOBE” over and over again.
I called my mom, and she immediately said “you’re not doing well in Dendrology, are you?”
She went to Poison control for advice, and I had to break the news to my classmates that we were likely to break out orally and anally.
After the quiz, I went home for the day, and my professor called me twice to make sure I was alright.
I had never gotten poison ivy before, so I held out hope my apparent immunity would hold up for me in my darkest hour.
Although I wasn’t the only leaf-eater, I was the loudest and most dramatic in the aftermath (I found it hilarious), so I became known as the Only Fallen Dendrology Student in the incident.
When it came up in a lecture later that week, one of my professors laughed, “that was you?”
I am pleased to report that I did not break out. However, a few of my classmates weren’t so lucky and said they got it badly in their throat.
A week later, once of my classes toured an herb farm, and I asked to taste every single plant we saw, even when told “sure….you can…but it’s disgusting.”
Someone in my class couldn’t believe my dedication and said, “didn’t you just eat poison ivy like a day ago?”
Yes, I did.
EDIT:
I’m seeing people tag this like “don’t try this if you’re not experienced!”
?? ? ? ? Don’t?? Try this AT ALL?? At WHAT point in this story was there a takeaway of “hey go out and eat poison ivy to see what happens, but ONLY if you are in this field!!”
I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about that post that was like “that eight year old is crying over something you think is silly because they haven’t lived very long and haven’t experienced everything you have and that thing is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to them in their life yet”
and how honestly we should be applying that compassion to everyone, even if they’re grown adults.
This goes the other way, too. Sometimes something you take for granted, something as simple as “sleeping in a bed,” can feel like the best thing that’s happened to someone in a decade.
Just. Let people be overwhelmed. Let people feel their feelings. You’re not doing any good in the world by belittling or devaluing that experience.
do you ever look back at a childhood memory and think that it should have by all rights become a significant theme in your life and you wonder why the fuck those things/people haven’t come back around yet and then remember that your life isn’t a perfectly plotted out novel?
Aww shucks. It’s almost like I asked for this opportunity. (I did. Thank you for indulging me, @laughingthelaughiest) General warnings for the description of things involved with terrible car accidents – aka screeching metal and lots of blood. Happy ending though, I promise! Nobody died.
I am six years old. My father plows snow in the winter months, which means that bolted onto the front of his work truck is a very heavy snow plow that – when not in use – rests primly about a foot above the ground like a lady lifting up her skirts as she steps over a puddle.
“Hey kiddo, do you want to come to work with me?” my dad asks one day during a relatively minor* snowstorm.
(* minor my ass)
Because there was nothing more exciting to me at this time in my life than sitting in a warm truck and watching what is essentially a large metal trough push tons of snow from one end of a parking lot to the other, I practically yell, “WHY YES DAD, THAT SOUNDS GREAT!!!” and we get in the truck.
Only instead of arriving at our intended destination, we encounter a car coming from the opposite direction that spins out on a patch of black ice and manages to hurtle broadside at full speed into the plow.
I am pretty much just flung forwards, and terrible things happen to my face when my body continues on its general trajectory towards the windshield. Thanks, momentum!
Luckily (and novel-like), there was a nurse a couple of cars behind us who stopped to see if everyone was okay. She opened my door to find that I was very clearly not okay, and while my father did his best to staunch the blood that was streaming down my face, she tasked herself with keeping me conscious until the paramedics arrived.
Being six and probably concussed, she didn’t talk to me about anything complicated. I did not know who the president was. I sure as heck couldn’t have told you the date. But my favorite subject in school? I know that! Reading! My favorite color? Yellow! My favorite animal? GIRAFFES.
It’s important at this stage to mention that this car accident occurred on a street where people lived, and there had been a group of boys playing in the snow two houses up from where the truck stopped. Boys + crushed cars + blood = apparently just riveting, because a couple of them were staring at me/the vehicles from a couple yards away.
At my presumably slurred but very enthusiastic response of “GIRAFFES!” one of these boys split off from the rest and hoofed it through the snow towards his house. I was too focused on wanting to sleep and the nurse not letting me to notice this, but it for sure happened. As you will see.
Several sirens later, I am loaded into the ambulance wearing a neck brace and what feels like all of the gauze on planet Earth. My dad climbs in next to me, and the paramedic is just about to shut the doors when there’s a very small voice from outside.
We are all as so:
My father: probably still terrified that I’m going to die, literally could not care less what this other tiny child who is not his has to say, wants to get to the hospital, still has to call and tell my mom that I’m injured
The paramedic: good at his job, knows I’m stable, has a moment to spare, leans back out of the ambulance.
Myself: still in shock, staring up at the rows of medical supplies and disgustingly bright lighting, more concerned that my dad will crush my fingers than anything else going on in, say, the bleeding face area. (Severe head injury? Who’s she? DAD I KNOW YOU LOVE ME BUT PLEASE LET GO OF MY HAND THAT HURTS.)
The boy who had hoofed it home and then evidently hoofed it right back: “Would you please give this to the little girl who got hurt?”
Me now in the year 2018: wanting to cry because I still can’t believe this is a real thing that happened to me in real life and it wasn’t a dream it was real
So the paramedic says “Yes, of course. She’ll love it!” or something equally as efficient because I am still technically quite injured and they really do need to get to the hospital at some point. The boy leaves, the door is shut, the paramedic sets something on the stretcher next to me.
[pause for dramatic effect]
We tried to find the kid who gave him to me, but nothing ever came of it. In the back of my fully healed head I’m still waiting for the novel that must be my life to shoehorn that boy back into the plot. Where are you, giraffe man? I have to thank you for the best gift I’ve ever been given.
i'll apple your turnover 