marginnotes

Many people fear arachnids like spiders and scorpions. Some spider venom is powerful enough for their bites to kill people, but deaths from spider bites are apparently extremely rare, less likely even than dying in a terrorist attack, much less likely than being struck by lightning. If you hang around in the right deserts, dying from a scorpion sting is much more likely than dying of a spider bite.

Spiders with their soft bodies have only been found in the fossil record over the last couple of hundred million years. Scorpions have been found in fossils over four hundred million years old.

Uttu, Arachne, and Anansi are linked to spiders, Serket to scorpions. Anansi is a sort of trickster god of storytelling.

Spiders live in my house. Both animals show up in my imagination.

Both

• Biters
• Transmit their "illness"
• Quickly recover from in injury
• Covens, or packs, they stick together

Vampires

• Elegant, debonair, suave
• Drink the victim's blood
• Hardly change shape (only teeth and maybe eyes?)
• Get them by letting the light shine in

Werewolves

• Animals
• Tear their victims apart
• Change shape painfully
• Get them with silver

Either way, they're exaggerated for effect. The high class vampire lines up with today's rich person, sucking the blood of their victims to stay alive, and occasionally creating another by not quite killing the victim. They need the blood to continue living. The low class werewolves don't actually seem to eat their victims, but create more werewolves through their violence.

When my son was on the way, I decided to stop studying and get a job. There are at least two debatable choices inherent in that.

First, should we have children? Though I didn't think about it this way at the time, there are about 8 billion of us. Without fertilizers, such as those we get from Haber process ammonia and natural gas, we'd never have made it to 8 billion. One estimate (graph on Wikipedia) suggests half of us wouldn't be here. Though maybe we'd not have grown too much beyond the 1.5 billion around before WWI.

Second, should I have jumped into paid work? My wife was working and wanted to stop. I was not ready to stay at home and raise a family. We figured we needed the money, We didn't figure too carefully. In fact, I do not remember much thinking involved in the decision. My enthusiasm lasted about 5 years. We're supposed to work about 40. 5/40 is not so much different from 1.5/8.

A friend said, "I work as little as possible, just enough to get by. So I can do what I love." The friend has an almost single-minded love of music.

I do love music, but I'm not as true as my friend. I also really like reading, learning, sometimes other things. Sometimes nothing.

Anchored deep in things I must have internalized a long time ago is the sense that if things are not right, I must do something about it. Sometimes, action is called for. But not always. When you're down a deepening hole, though, you might need to stop digging.

There's another deeply anchored misunderstanding about the impact I'm supposed to have. In my imagination, I'm supposed to do Great Things, or else I have failed. That's not natural, though. Nature does have things I'm supposed to do, like breathe, drink, and eat. They're not Great Things. At least, they're not exceptional. 8 billion other people are doing them, too.

It would be a good start to make better compromises, and probably just to do less.