Thursday, November 27, 2014

LoBotany? BoNotomy?

Hey, whaddya get when you put twelve botanists in a room and make them decide how to group line items in a budget?

You think I'm going to give a punchline now but I'm not, 'cause it's not funny. It's an actual thing that actually happened. To me. And what you get is the very definition of hell, plus the slow and creeping fear that you must not be a very good botanist because you don't really give a shit about whether the phone bill gets slotted under Administration or Communication, yet all these other botanists seem to care. A lot.

Deep breaths. You're a good botanist. You're a good botanist. You're just a shitty accountant is all. Yeah, that's what. Just go home and read about sedges and you'll be totally legit again.

So I read about some sedges for a while, then got bored and decided to do some baking (still good! sedges are just boring to read!) and realized in looking at my recipe collection that I actually taxonomize the bejeebus out of everything in life so I must be okay after all. I have rigorous and complex systems for recipe organization, Halloween candy sorting, sock drawer arrangement - you name it, I identify it, label it, and stuff it in a category. I just *occasionally* see the need to back on up a level and call a few relatively similar things all "cookies" in effort to stem the madness.  

I even taxonomize my relationships. I have, for instance, Close Friends, Old Friends, Neighbour Friends, Work Friends, Facebook Friends, LinkedIn Friends, Other Classroom Parent Friends, Frenemies, People I Don't Actually Know But I See Often Enough To Awkwardly Acknowledge and Talk To Friends, Favourite Relatives, Less Favourite Relatives, Plain Weird Relatives, Relatives I Don't Actually Know At All But You Somehow Do So I Will Awkwardly Explain How I Don't Know Them, Work Nemeses, Work Sisters, a Work Dad (a new one, since my old one retired), and even a Work Husband or three. Occasionally, I see perfectly good reason to back on up a level and not let people know precisely which branch of the "Relatives" tree they're on. (Suddenly starts to sound like wise management instead of poor accounting, doesn't it?)

I've asked a few of my Work Husbands whether they categorize people in similar ways (e.g., Work Wives) and the answer is, invariably, no. This could be a personality thing, a botany thing, a gender thing - I don't know for sure, but it does suggest the individual inhabiting the monotypic genus "DH" is likely to take issue with my Work Husband category. Don't worry, dear - the Work Husband category is a benign one, characterized by an abundance of bickering and a lack of sex. Just like being married! It's those darn work boyfriends you have to worry about.

Of course, I don't have any of those...

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