9: The color pink

So I could write an entire manifesto against the pink aisle in the toy store. There are major problems with this. One of them is seizures. I'm just gonna go ahead and assume you are all with me on the absurdity that girls only get this one color. At least in my day, we were allowed to like purple as well. But that's not what I am here to talk about today.
You see, it's not true that girls only get one color. The fact is that they get 1/2 a color! Pink is not even a color. It is a tint of a color. It is one value of red. Your mind is not blown. I know this. Let me go on. When someone (let's say, for the sake of argument, it is your 83 year old grandfather) tells you their favorite color is pink, you are like "cool, ok, that's a color." If your favorite color is red, you think that this is not something you have in common. If you see a toddler dressed all in pink and his mother is dressed all in red you do not think they are trying to match. Visually they do not register as matching, in fact red and pink clash badly. This would be jarring.
No so of all other colors! Imagine asking deal ol' gramps his favorite color and he says "light blue." You think Wow, can't you be specific?! Haha, crazy old man! And if your favorite is blue (even if you really only like a dark blue) you say "Cool, my favorite color is blue too! This whole grandpa quizzing scenario gets even crazier if he tells you "light yellow" or "light orange." Who can even tell the difference between light and dark yellow?!
This who thing really bothers the part of my brain that craves fairness, balance, equality. I want red to be treated the same way other colors are.
Here's the next problem: Red doesn't always lighten to pink. Try to make pink with watercolors. If you take pure red and water it down you really do get a sort of "light red" color. You actually need a cool red hue to tint it to pink. This makes the color pink extremely specific. But we let it have equal footing with other colors. Think of the red-free colors people could give as their favorite color:

• blue: Blue ranges from teal to indigo. It is defined to be a pure, primary hue, but encompasses a very wide variety.
  
• yellow: Just listen to the song from Sweeney Todd about all the yellow hair colors. We've got some options here, but at its basis. This is another primary color.
• green: 50% yellow, 50% blue. Green has a nice clear definition and also encompasses all other blends of these primaries. Also, green is a little primary if you are a computer type human. I never "got" this, but I accept that this quasi-primary status is why toys always include green along with the three primaries. (Food coloring manufacturers are not forgiven, however. You can mix green very easily with the blue and yellow given, but you CANNOT make a really sharp purple.
  
  This infuriates me.)
• black: Everything/nothing, depending on whether you use paints or pixels. Either way, pretty clear and easy to define. White also includes anything with very little pigment in it UNLESS you put in only red.
• white: Nothing/everything, depending on whether you use paints or pixels. Again, pretty clear and easy to define. Includes grey from charcoal on up.
• grey: I think the only person whose favorite color is grey is that guy from the Counting Crows. Anyway, easily defined, wide range of possibilities.

Then we get into red and the colors having anything to do with red and all hell breaks loose!

• red: Red is a pure primary color. We include in its definition tints and shades of that exact color, blends of pure red with trace amounts of yellow and tints and shades of this blend. Near invisible addition of blue is allowed and this blend may be used in shades but not tints.
• purple: Blends of red and blue, shades of this blend, tints of blends wherein the proportion of blue is reasonably high.
• orange: The new black.
• orange: Just kidding. Orange is a mix of red and yellow in which the proportion of yellow is reasonably high. Mild shading is allowed. Tints of these hues are still orange as long as the proportion of yellows is above some threshold defined in terms of the amount of tinting.
• brown: deep shades of orange, warm reds and warm purples. 
• pink: tints of red after being mixed with trace amounts of blue, extreme tints of red or red mixed with grey or yellow.

When you look at this, it looks like everything was fine and balanced in color world until pink came along and carved out a chunk of space.
This is when things got crazy and brown moved in to take what is left. Of course no one loves brown, so we don't worry about it as much, but really it's just as bad as pink. Red just doesn't get the freedom and space of other colors.
It's just not fair.

8: That dizzy feeling when you think existentially

So I'm sitting here thinking about math and I start thinking that it really doesn't mean anything, that maybe the whole species could have evolved without thinking in numbers at all. Like rats, or maybe unlike rats, maybe in some extremely sophisticated way that we cannot conceive of. Maybe we could have developed as creatures who intuit quantity and never have a reason to look any deeper. Maybe we could have obsessed over language and found the most truth in how we express words, or in the science of motion, but I feel like built into our academia is the idea that mathematics is absolute truth. Ok, so there are idiots who don't get it, sometimes even professors in other fields, who say "but what if we found out 2+2=5, wouldn't that be crazy?" as though 2+2=4 is just a theory and we are only pretty sure it is true, as though 4 is not explicitly defined to be the sum of 2 and 2. It makes me want to kick them, shred their diplomas and move to a part of the country where academics don't smoke so much pot. Does such a place exist?
I am getting off topic. What I was trying to get at is that, we have discovered absolute truth through mathematics, when really the study of logic is bordering on philosophy, it is conceivable to me that maybe we could have come at it from a different direction.
But this is also off topic, what I was trying to demonstrate is that sometimes when I start to think about math, or anything, too hard my mind wanders to the reality of the world. We are just floating on this huge hunk of rock through endless space, through endless time. We evolved from nothing and the fact that we are aware of ourselves and aware of our extreme surroundings in unprecedented and unexplained.
I start to feel as though time is meaningless. There is so much of it that my life is over already. How can I live in the moment when there is no moment. This instant is 0% of my life, but at the same time, my life is 0% of all time.
I start to feel dizzy. I feel how my corporeal form is barely here. How my mind almost feels like it is floating somewhere. My body feels clumsy and light. I imagine this is what dying feels like. I imagine that I am so close to the truth of the universe, enlightenment, the way beyond everything which seems so trivial. When I think that I worried about how much we spent on groceries this week! What does it matter? If we spend all of our money on cheerios, if we starve to death, if we steal the groceries, it doesn't matter! Then I become afraid of myself, I think that I am evolving into something that does not live by human morals and I come back. I try and breath. I take a walk. I blog.

7: Silent letters in Egyptian names

So I don't think I have to start here, but I will.
The ancient Egyptian alphabet was different than ours. Here is a cute site that talks about how Egyptian names work. Here are some ancient Egyptian names:

• Tutankhamun, pronounced "toot in common." You know, the way Tutankamun would be pronounced. I am not going to debate the use of "u" instead of "oo" or anything, because some linguist knows what they are doing, but I don't think they are doing anything with that "h." Go ahead. Try to pronounce the "h."
• Horus-Netjerikhet. Again. Go ahead. Try and pronounce all of those letters. This guy's name can also be spelled Dsr, or Djoser, or pretty much any other way you feel like. Look it up. The list goes on and on.
• Serekh and Sekhemkhet, again with the "h," but now you must concede any hope that it affects the way the "a" is pronounced.
• Ptah, pronounced "Pitah" Ok, so I can see why they wouldn't want to carve an extra letter into stone, but these days we are talking about hitting one more key on a key board when typing this guys name. If we are willing to type out the 17 key monstrosity up there, why does this guy not rate the time to type an "i."
• Nakhtnebtepnefer. I'll stop there.

Thing is, there is no reason we need to have such crazy spellings for these names. The modern spelling of these names is, well, modern. Someone read the hieroglyphics less than 200 years ago and then wrote down his best approximation of the name in his own alphabet. This alphabet is not perfect, but it has an only slightly stupid list of rules. None of these rules say "and every 3rd letter you must have an 'h'." or "consonant Tourettes for all!"
Ok, maybe they have trouble writing a sound that ancient Egyptians used but we have long since forgotten, but I cannot believe that this is the case when they write "khtn" up there. Something is being pronounced that is not written or something is written that is not pronounced. For that guys sake, I hope the latter.

6: dehydrated skim milk

Milk, I learned in science class is just small beads of oil suspended in water. I was fine with this at the time, but at some point it began to really bug me because in my mom's basement is a box of dehydrated skim milk.
Well I'm no mathematician, but I think if you take water + oil and then you subtract the water and subtract the fat you should be left with nothing.
Actually, I lied. I am a mathematician and I know this to be true: x+y-x-y=0. Unless milk lives in some noncommutative universe of cooking ingredients! Maybe that's it and I am just using the wrong operation. If you think about how they blend it really seems more like multiplication anyhow. We just need to account for the fact that volume is additive in this situation and... and...
We still live in the real world.
It should have been a box of air.

5: Sentiments that sound absurd coming from a woman

1. Its his fault, coming in here with those arms practically bursting from his t-shirt.

When I interact with a sexy man, the conversation feels awkward. I feel guilty for not being able to keep my mind on Calculus or groceries or whatever I am supposed to be doing. When I day dream about sex, I internally apologize to the man in my dream for using his body like that without his even knowing!
When I interact with a man who finds me attractive and the conversation is awkward, I feel guilty for wearing something that shows some cleavage (because what doesn't when you are this big) or for being too flirtatious and not keeping the conversation on Calculus or groceries.

Ok. Nothing ever comes of any of this, so I should not be feeling guilt for either situation, but since men insist on blaming women for their own sexiness* I think I should at least be able to return the favor and complain when an attractive man wears jeans that cup his backside just so... It's not my fault. He was asking for it. Did you see what he was wearing?!

*If you disagree with the idea that men still blame women for their sexiness, then tell me why we need separate dress codes for different genders? Why is low cut only inappropriate if there is something to show off? Why do we have to cover up our bra straps? Why can children dress indecently and be cute and right around 13 it becomes wrong to dress that way? Why is it indecent to breast feed in public. Even if you are a man who does not think these things, you must know a man who does.

4: Awkward silence pressures

I wish I could have a little voice in my head that would stop me before I spoke. It would say "Shut up. Awkward silence is better than whatever you are going to say next." But without this voice, I ramble. I say whatever comes into my head. I tell someone about a movie that they really wouldn't like, that I didn't even like. I tell them about a moral debate that I am having with myself and then if I do manage to get them discussing this topic, I inevitably control the conversation because I have the home court advantage. The debate is in my head.
My adviser is extremely friendly and does not know what to do about someone else being socially awkward. I don't know how he has managed to live in the math world this long without screaming at anyone. Given a few seconds of silence as we walk somewhere, I have bored him by telling him about my new shoes (complete with details about my foot problems, always exiting to hear) my random health problems, my cleaning schedule, my little cousins, etc. I'm sure I was interrupting something that was already going on in his head. It may not have been interesting, but at least it was holding his attention.
Where do other people learn to make conversation. I know I need to learn to ask questions instead of talking about myself, but what can I ask? I open with "How is your week going?" and then I am stumped. My mind is constantly moving from thing to thing, so I just start talking about getting new glasses. I'm afraid if I tried to ask questions I would end up saying something like "Do you have any foot problems?" out of the blue, because of my stupid flow of consciousness.
Lets say I notice something about someone during a silence. They added highlights to their hair, for example. Now, it would have been polite to notice this earlier, but I did not. Do I point it out now? Is "I like what you did to your hair" good enough? What if they don't like how it came out? What if they actually did it 2 weeks ago? What if highlights are something they think is subtle and pointing it out defeats the purpose (sort of like "I like how you covered up the grey!" or "Good job masking that blemish!") What if they say "thanks" and we are left with another silence. This time, a silence that follows the introduction of a new topic. Is it rude to open with another non sequitur? Or must I continue on the vein of hair? What more can I ask? Did you have it professionally done? That is dangerous.
Today's annoying thing is really me. Me in normal situations.

3: Things it is improper to complain about in public

I had colitis a couple of years ago. I had to be hospitalized for a week. When I returned to classes, my lovely students were both concerned and keen on delaying the start of class and so they asked me "why were you out?" I responded without thought that I had colitis.
Everyone got quiet and a student asked "what is that?" to which another student hissed "-itis means an infection and so colitis is..."
They trailed off, student number one "got it" and no more talk of my colon distracted my class.
It occurred to me afterward that I had committed a social faux pas in this conversation. I guess I should have said "It was personal" or something. My poo should not be a topic of conversation in class.
But why not? I am not saying that I particularly want to discuss this with my class, but I was in pain! I had a hellish week and I wanted them to know that I was really sick and that they should cut me some slack. Should I have lied?
This is not the only pain which has to be hidden. In my relatively charmed life, I have often had to say "nothing" when someone asked me what was wrong, when in fact I was in pain. This pains in question range from a miscarriage to a UTI to a really bad itch in a certain place.
How come I have to miss a meeting with a man, giving the lame excuse of "Not feeling well" or the correct excuse of "feminine problems" (which, let's face it translates to "I didn't feel like it" due to overuse) when what is really going on is that I am suffering from hormonal attacks and anemia due to the fact that my uterus lining is shedding off and my stomach feels exactly the way you would expect internal bleeding to feel.
It is not fair that a stomach ache due to food poisoning gets sympathy, but constipation is a secret pain that you must suffer alone. Why is the line drawn at our underwear. Anything in that area is off limits. Mastitis was covered by my bra, so I was not supposed to tell anyone why I was feverish and loopy. An eye infection can be shouted from the roof tops. Singers cancel tours with public declarations of throat infections. If the line is grossness, then I think throats win out over breasts.
The line is definitely underwear.
Topic for a poll: Foot problems are as debatable as the question of whether socks are underwear. Do you think socks count as underwear? Would you be offended to hear that someone was suffering from an ingrown toe nail?