This is what you think it is, but it might not be where you thought it might be. It is the International Airport of Vienna, the Flughafen Wien-Schwechat. When I saw it, I laughed out loud. I was the only person in the men’s restroom at the time.
Since you are seeing this as a photograph, not in person, as I saw 
it, I should tell you that this is not a spider. It is a decal representing a spider. The decal does everything you want it to do. It affects people who know they are being affected by it and people who don’t know. And everyone it affects is affected in the same way. Their marksmanship improves whether they are attending to it or not.
There are lots of reasons why the people who run a public facility where there are wall-mounted urinals in the men’s rooms would want pee-ers to be careful [1] and there are lots of ways of approaching that goal. I have seen cutesy little signs like” “We aim to please. You aim too, please.”
With appeals to “courtesy” multiplying as they are, I expect any day to see a sign that says “Please direct the flow of your urine as a courtesy to the patron using the next urinal.”
That’s really the whole event as a memory of that time. But it turns out that I have been thinking about it off and on for all the years since and I think those thoughts are part of what makes the memory so cherished.
Why not a target?
I have thought in the years since that maybe a target would be a good 
device. People like to aim at targets. But targets have two disadvantages that spiders do not have. First, you know they were put there in an attempt to manipulate you. Not everyone likes that. Second, if there is a place you are supposed to hit, there is the chance that you could miss it. You could, in other words, fail. Not everyone likes that either. And besides, what good does it do anyone for you to hit a target.
I won’t try to persuade you that I thought about all these things while I was standing there in Vienna and snickering in appreciation at what they had done. Some of these effects have just now occurred to me and some I thought of on the flight home. Still, there is an abiding sense that there should not be spiders in the urinals; therefore, there is an extra do-gooder credit that accrues to anyone who even tries to remove it.
Furthermore, because this is a good thing you are doing, you don’t have to succeed at it to reap the reward. And you don’t have the sense—not immediately, at least—that this was put there by someone so that you will act in a certain way. You have more clearly the sense that this is something you have decided to do yourself.
Peeing on a spider (decal) is something you wanted to do yourself. Indeed, it is something that is hard not to want to do. Peeing at—notice the different conjunction—a target is something someone else wanted you to do. Whoever put the target there.
And since a target represents an assessment—that is why some of the circles are small and central and others large and peripheral—it is something you need to do well in order to feel good about having tried. Aiming at a target and missing is really not a good thing. Aiming at a spider is a good thing (a good deed) whether you hit it or not.
So the whole thing has a feel-good aura about it. And maybe that’s why I have felt so good about it ever since.
[1] And if there is a journal assessing the quality of different devices for improving the marksmanship of men, I am sure it is a pee-er reviewed journal.
nevertheless, have views on how children should be raised, have a dilemma. I learned what the right goals of childrearing are from my parents and got a refresher course by being a parent and a step-parent. I know what is right and why it is right. I have never asked what would be the right kind of childrearing if the goal were, as in the case of the working class, to ensure that no one sinks to “hard living.” So in confronting this question, I am facing a question I have never faced before. I need to ask, of the child rearing practices of the working class, “Will they meet the goals of the parents?”
But there are some differences as well. Lubrano’s father raised him to be a really good bricklayer, but Lubrano became a journalist instead. A father in our society in preparing the sons to do the same kind of work he does, is closing off a lot of other economic choices that the sons might prefer. That’s not true of the hunter.
the same problem I have. We need to be able to challenge these childrearing practices on either instrumental or on normative grounds. Those are the two I introduced above. We need, in other words, to say, “I understand your adopting those practices as a way to prepare your children for working class life, but actually, they won’t have that effect.” First, I’m not really sure that is true. Besides that, I am sure I am not in a position to say it even if it were true. So the instrumental case against those childrearing practices falls apart.
Starbucks grappling with the recent spate of sexual abuse accusations made against public figures. A small party came in to sit at the table next to us: a young couple, a small child and an infant. The mother had scarcely settled in her chair when she came over and asked us to watch our language, there being a small child within earshot.
It’s hard to say that her fears were unreasonable, given that the topic—which, I remind you, was allegations of sexual abuse made about public figures—was potentially offensive. I good way to approach this would be to ask how likely it is that offensive things will be said, how harmful it would be if offensive things were said. Since she didn’t have any way to judge either question, she set the bar for her own action very low. These six old people might say something I would not want my child to hear and it might damage him or her. [2] I am trying to imagine the six of us having the kind of impact on this mother that this picture is intended to have.
After the woman had gone back to her table and her infant and her preschooler and her husband, some members of our group recovered a little from the shock and engaged in a brisk game of Shoudasaid. We shouldasaid, “Everyone here is a parent and a grandparent. We don’t need your guidance about what kind of language to use.” We shouldasaid, “We will be careful not to say anything we wouldn’t want our own grandchildren to hear.” We shouldasaid, “Thanks for sharing your feelings, but we are going to have the conversation we had begun and if you don’t like it, there are other tables you might occupy.” We shouldsaid, “You want us to what? Really?”
the meadow. The first 33 were headed to the woods to cut firewood and bring it back home by the armload. The second 33 were all a man named Per [1] who was sneaking off to meet Par [2], a beautiful Persian girl whom Per’s parents would like him to avoid. The third set of 33 trips were taken by a physicist deep in thought. She found the predictable walk to the woods and back…oh…restful. It cleared her mind to work on the space-time continuum.
and there are only two teams the left and the right. The people who have been calling themselves umpires, are actually members of the left—they have been “irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy.”
woman could have been raped and her account of what happened to her could be true—UNTIL IT WAS REPORTED IN THE PRESS. Then it isn’t true anymore. When it is reported, it is an act of political aggression and the truth claim is buried in politics.
missed most of the early discussions, but as I came to understand it, Sartre argues that life has no intrinsic meaning at all and that the task of existentialists, those who are courageous enough, is to live a life of authenticity. Authenticity as a value has the great virtue of being centered in the self and if there really is nothing else, that is a great virtue indeed.
I have great respect for the effect that poem had on President Mandela. I have been affected in that way from time to time. It is a marvelous experience—not always one that feels good—and I am always grateful to have it. So I am a fan of standing up when all you really want to do is lie down.”
It is not clear to me just why Julie will never walk alone. Will her husband Billy Bigelow, who killed himself, be walking with her? Will Julie’s cousin, Nettie Fowler, who sings this song to her, be with her? It says to have hope in your heart, which seems like a good thing, but what is one to hope for? Is an unspecified hope, a hope with no home, enough to keep you from being alone? It doesn’t seem like it, but this was the mid 1940s and maybe “hope itself”—hope with no clear referent at all—was thought to be enough.
fair. Abraham Maslow, whose stages of development are widely cited, says that we need to be a part of a group. But after that, we need to go on to become who we are ourselves, without reference to the group. My grad school mentor, Jim Davies, used to identify these stages by saying that we need to be a part—then we need to be apart.
iconically funny moments. Mother had seen a doctor for her regular checkup that day. On her way home, she stopped to get some groceries, including some milk. When she got home, she put the shopping bag on the table, put the milk in the refrigerator [3], went into the living room, turned on the TV, lay down on the sofa, crossed her ankles, and died. Just like that. But first, she put the milk in the…um…icebox.
That presupposition is put even further out of conscious reach in the second stage in which you get injured or sick and then recover. You look at the picture of disability as an episode in an otherwise whole and healthy life. You might feel grateful, for a little while, to regain the full use of an injured leg, but you life goes back to normal and you count on the leg to function “normally.”
round of satisfactions and successes. I can go back to teaching if I teach two courses instead of three. I can get back on the trail because I can still run on soft surfaces, but running on the hard surfaces of my neighborhood are a thing of the past. I can rejoin the book group with the understanding that the “discussions” are now going to include detours of personal reminiscence and repeated stories. It’s “back” you see; it just isn’t all the way back.
likely to do in the next season.
respect us. I am concerned entirely with the effects of one kind of assignment of responsibility or another and the first thing I notice about this one is that it is external. It would be entirely possible for this group to say that they are not worthy of respect and that is why they aren’t getting any. It isn’t very likely, of course, but that would be an internal attribution (it’s “us”) rather than an external one (it’s them).
occasion for the expression of their unhappiness, but the current occasion is not the reason for their unhappiness, just a chance to express it. What kind of formulation of their unhappiness will loosen the borders of the category so that nearly everything “fits” into it? Conversely, what kind of formulation will keep each reason for unhappiness separate and therefore easier to act on?
Internal: There is no reason, for instance, that the problem described above could not have been formulated as an internal problem. [4] “They” don’t respect us (although they should) is an external problem. There is no reason, absent some context, that the difficulty represented in this picture should be formulated as the bridge being too low or the water being too high. Which way to define it depends entirely on what tools you have at your disposal.
