A Manic Friday

It wasn't a Monday, It was my husband's fault. It was a chain of events. No time to eat. It was a manic Friday.

I should know the signs by now. It starts with a simple, inocuous task, It mushrooms; the day is chaotic.

Last week, my husband went on a short business trip for a meeting - held in a casino hotel. That was the start of it all. He won $2000 while waiting to go to the airport to come home.

Sometimes the distinction between need and want generates a frenzy. We needed a new stove because the coils on the old one would not sit level, no matter what we did. And when any burner was on high, the whole top of the stove became so hot that getting burned was a real possibility.

On the other hand, the fridge works just fine, no matter that the plastic in one place on the outside is cracked (and the damn thing was expensive to boot) and that we could use more space. But it keeps the food at exactly the right temperature, and really everything fits if we organize it. A new fridge is a want, not a need.

That distinction led to some new handbags, a scarf, and some awesome dress pants, a cleaning, sorting, re-arranging frenzy, and a cull of all the receipts and instruction manuals for everything purchased since about 1995. Oh, and some work on the arrangement of pots and pans and a couple of drawers of seldom-used cooking utensils. As I said, a manic Friday.

I'm not sure if it's my nature to start a task in the spare room and end up several hours later re-decorating the family room and re-stacking the firewood, or if all events in a house are only small threads that we pull, engendering the entire alteration of all storage and living arrangements in said house. It's not procrastination either; no starting something to avoid another something. No, it means finishing it all, often in one day.

So how did I get from saying yes to a stove, no to a fridge, yes to some new apparel and accessories and several hours of work?

The stove was almost a given; win $2000, buy that stove - delivery on Friday; be sorely tempted in appliance store to add a new fridge to the order; talk self out of new fridge.

Feel deprived; shop next day for a new scarf; buy three handbags, a scarf, and some trousers; feel elated. Go home to find that three new handbags will not fit into current space for handbags.

There's the thread. In order to make space for new handbags, I began to sort through a chest of drawers and a closet, which of course grew immediately to a huge undertaking.

Unfortunately, this was on the same day as the delivery of the new stove, which involved some re-arranging in the kitchen, culling some pots that would not work with the ceramic top of the stove, which led to more re-arranging in the kitchen - the 25-year-old espresso maker lived in the pot cupboard and simply had to be removed, which led to a hunt for all the accessories to go with it, which led to cleaning out a drawer with all the old and seldom-used utensils.  Cleaning the floor under the old stove led to some work on the cleaning supplies under the sink and sorting through cleaning rags, of which there were altogether too many.

The bedroom closet/drawer efforts were on hold.

I simply should not have put away the receipt for the new stove in the drawer where I keep all the receipts. I always open that drawer and throw in a new receipt and close the drawer. But not today. Today was the day when one more receipt broke the camel's back, and I spent 30 minutes going through them all, throwing out the 95% which had warranties expired, plus all the instruction manuals for stuff we no longer own!

Somewhere along the way, I managed to shop for a few groceries, go to the bank, try a cooking experiment, cook dinner, and spend 40 minutes on the treadmill. Oh, and pick up and deliver my husband to the car dealership to have his snow tires put on.

The handbags got put on hold, and I am pooped. I don't usually have these manic kinds of days - probably, I'm more often procrastinating, which leads to chaos when one card gets pulled from the house of cards that is life in most households.

Tomorrow, I am going to sleep in.  I will probably ignore the handbags, or risk starting the whole organizing frenzy again. Phew!!!

Two Thrift Store Allegories

It has become commonplace, the idea that only men were hunters and only women were gatherers millions of years ago. Most importantly, the "fact" of unambiguous gender roles for those millions of years explains, by way of evolutionary psychology, all gendered behaviour today. (I have written about this before, from a different perspective.)

And I say "Horsepuckie." I also say that I love a good metaphor; it can achieve greatness in explaining even seeming opposites, especially when it is developed to full allegorical glory.

So first, we have the allegory of the thrift store gatherer. She (she has to be female according to the evolutionary psychology people)  is driven by evolutionary imperatives to shop, to browse and select the best goods for the best price. She wanders through the store, looking for the best deals, much as she has been window-shopping for the best shops. She gathers her soon-to-be purchases, just as a female in Paleolithic times gathered nuts and berries, with a discerning eye for value.

Doesn't that sound nice? The good female shopper gathering goods according to her gendered, evolutionary role.

So now let's try the allegory of the hunter in the thrift store. She (stepping outside her usual prescriptive role) is hunting for treasure, that genuine Prada bag for $5, the one hanging in the midst of the other less desirable bags. Before every sortie to the store, she plans her attack, her route, and her strategy. She knows that other hunters are looking for the same prey, so she uses special tactics to camouflage her approach. She cuts off access to several bags, including her intended prey, which gives her time to assess the situation. Assured that the prey is genuine, she isolates it from the rest and finalizes the purchase.

Sounds nice, as well. The hunter searching for prey, isolating it, and going in for the kill.

That's the trouble with so many of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology. We mostly don't really know the difference between an evolutionary imperative and a damn good story that simply illustrates the status quo, especially in matters of gender.

Hardwiring 101 for Shoppers

I am not a violent person, but do wish from time to time that Charles Darwin would rise from his grave and give some of the "scientists" who pervert his ideas a resounding whack on the head. "YOU ARE WRONG!" Darwin would shout.

I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry when I read Richard Alleyne's article "Shopping styles of men and women all down to evolution, claim scientists" in the Telegraph.co.uk. The "scientist" whose work Alleyne writes about is Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan: 

"Prof Kruger decided to conduct the study after a winter holiday trip with friends across Europe.

"After exploring sleepy little villages and reaching Prague, the first thing the women wanted to do was shop, Prof Kruger said, and the men could not understand why."

(I swear, I'm not making it up!)

Simply, women like to shop, know about sales and selecting the best quality goods because they were the gatherers in hunter-gatherer societies. When selecting nuts and berries, women had to be discerning and picky and know when the good stuff was available. So today, when shopping for scarves and sweaters, women are driven by the same imperatives. (No, really, I'm not making it up!)

Men, on the other hand, had to be analytical (the laughing/crying response is bubbling up again) and precise. Plan the hunt, which prey. Out and back quickly, no window shopping (maybe it's nausea I'm experiencing).

I am all for academic freedom and Professor Kruger's right to study whatever he wishes to, but I am amazed and angered by the ignorance he displays about Darwin, anthropology, and some obvious objections to his claims. (And I must be fair here. I have read only Alleyne's article about Kruger's work; however, from Kruger's quotes, I find enough material to object to.)

The most obvious is Kruger's use of Darwin. I don't claim to be an expert on Darwin and evolution, but I have read  The Origin of Species and have an interest as a lay person. The whole Galapagos trip made Darwin realize that in isolation, in a particular environment with particular features, species will develop because individuals with certain traits more successful for that environment will be more successful in reproducing. And eventually, the traits are ongoing prominent features which define (in the sense of a biological class definition) a new species.

Kruger makes a sweeping generalization about humans, assuming that in all environments in the very long hunter-gatherer stage of human existence there were no variations in a gendered division of labour regarding subsistence foraging and hunting. In effect, he is saying that all societies, in every geographical environment on the planet were static and homogenous. Sloppy evolutionist thinking here (and very common, too).

Anthropologists know differently. They know that the male hunter/female gatherer divide is not universal. There were many cases in which the roles were often reversed and/or shared, and places in which either hunting or gathering was non-existant because of the geography. The division of food-procuring labour was quite fluid, not the rigid one that Kruger's argument assumes. The variations preclude the universal existence of  hardwired shopping behaviour in women.

At the level of obvious objections, it's hard to know where to start, but a quote from Kruger works well:

Men on the other hand, decided in advance what animal they wanted to kill and then went looking for it. Once it was found - and killed - they returned home.

Does Kruger know that hunter-gatherer societies spanned more than two millions years? His claim is meaningless without details of time and method - like persistence hunting and hunting with weapons - details that are important for evolution. I also dispute the ease Kruger imagines in selecting and finding prey- it is called hunting, after all.

Also, obviously, with tired bodies and carrying a carcass which could spoil or be stolen by other humans or predators, who would stop and pick berries - or browse to look at the attractive yam foliage? Really, do we need evolutionary explanations when simple physical ones will do? Wouldn't similar kinds of limitations exist for gatherers when they had their hands full and were tired?

And, just as with the claims about women and maternal instinct that I discussed earlier this week, Kruger's claims leave out all the people who don't follow his pattern - men who like to shop, browse, and don't know in advance what they want; women who don't like to shop, who want to dash in and get that one specific item; couples who like to shop together; and all the millions of people in the world who neither can, nor want to shop at all. Even shopping isn't universal in the way Kruger understands it.

This steroetyping is insulting to everyone.

Kruger's research begs the question and is unscientific and illogical. I really do wonder whether Kruger has read Darwin. Nonsense like Kruger's is damaging, sometimes funny, but still damaging. More and more I am deeply suspicious of the agenda of some evolutionary psychologists.

And now I'm off to go Christmas shopping; I've planned all the purchases, have a list and just want to dash in, get the stuff and go home! Hmmm.


(man shopping photo credit)