Transcender

Among the many things Honeybuns has given me, is a set of new friends and acquaintances that are nothing like the ones I have from before. To begin with, none of them has an engineering degree.

At a recent party I found myself the only heterosexual male in the room. Or, at least that’s what I assumed, but I couldn’t be entirely sure—some of the people in the room, quite consciously, defied my attempts to sort them into definite male/female categories and I was annoyed with myself for even attempting, yet some deep-rooted reflex demanded certain knowledge.

I was reminded of once when I was visiting my parents. The OBCM was taking an advanced course in numerical analysis at the time and had brought along some homework. My father asked what she was doing and got an explanation of how she was computing the (parabolic) velocity profile of the water flow in a pipe. My father was intensely provoked by this. “Clearly the water comes with full force!” he decreed. If I hadn’t been so annoyed at the time it would have been an interesting example of how something that goes against one’s preconceptions can be rejected out of hand, even when a tiny bit of physical reasoning would let one work out one’s misconception.

I’ve often seen the same rejecting-out-of-hand non-reasoning with regards to transgender/intersex people, so my lack of equanimity disturbed me, but then again, as I’ve mentioned before, living correctly with respect to others requires constant awareness.

Taking the B train

Nynäshamns järnvägsmuseum and Stockholms ånglokssällskap arrange various steam train excursions from time to time. This Easter Sunday they offered a tour of Lake Mälaren, with a stopover in Eskilstuna, it not only being a nice little town, but having several industry museums presumably of interest to people interested in steam engines.

Honeybuns and I managed to get tickets before they were sold out and so joined a huge throng of people at Stockholm Central all admiring the B class locomotive puffing steam and smoke in the bright morning sunshine. A woman with a big camera was taking detail pictures of rods and pistons. Lots of children had been brought along by their parents to get the experience of a real train ride such as we all imagine it to be, with a chugging choo choo and small cars with wooden benches. Some child was heard to comment that the locomotive was smelly and not very nice. Presumably she would ask “Are we there yet?” within minutes of getting on the train.

We got on board and found seats and soon the station pulled away from us to be replaced by a springy Mälar valley. In spite of the warm weather there were still thin ice sheets in many inlets and in places clumps of ice still clung to the walls of rock cuts. Trainspotters, who'd realised you wouldn't get any good pictures from inside the train, dotted the landscape, with their cameras at the ready.

A short break in Västerås to lubricate the locomotive and then the lake continued past us, Eskilstuna soon arriving. The trainfull of people created a considerable crowd on the streets of the Sunday-lazy little town, presumably boosting the local economy some infinitesimal amount as they spread out for their various goals.

Honeybuns and I skipped the museums this time and instead opted for an Asian buffet and a stroll around the old town, peeking into backyards, navigating narrow alleys, passing by all the many cafés, their patrons basking in the sun.



Eventually we were back at the station, where people already waited for the depot to return the train, which had been serviced and polished in our absence. Unmoving pillars of smoke rose from the depot for the longest time, but finally the platform pulled up to the train and we got on. Sun-heated and well-fed, we dozed while I eavesdropped on two gentlemen who'd run into each other for the first time after their studies at Lund University in the late 1960s. I picked up some interesting information on telephony standards development that filled out my more contemporary experiences.

Eventually Södertälje Hamn, the old Södertälje Södra station, hove into view and I noted with delight that it still had not been modified from its original design with wooden shelters and narrow stairs. (Otherwise most commuter train stations were remade in the 1980s into a standard mold of tiles, glass and metal; while in most cases a necessary improvement, still somewhat reminiscent of public lavatories in the general design.)

Finally Stockholm C arrived and we had closed the loop.

Conservation efforts

Jean Piaget developed a model for children's intellectual development. One of the milestones is the understanding that a liquid doesn't change its volume when it's poured from one container to another of different shape. This is known as conservation. However, sometimes it's painfully obvious that this is an understanding on a more superficial and intellectual level, as when a friend poured the contents of a can into a glass with seemingly larger diameter yet the water level ending up much higher in the glass. We could figure out that the thickness of the walls of the glass was larger than those of the can, yet the effect was eerie.

Falling asleep

Earlier this week as I went to bed, it broke beneath me. In the morning I examined the bed a bit closer and was surprised at the common-sense-defying design. The mattress, a Sultan Sturefors has a series of boards underneath, supporting the springs. These boards are simply attached with two large staples at each end. The staples have nothing in the way of barbs, grooves, or anything, they are just smooth strips of metal, parallel with the forces when someone lies in the bed. Clearly it is just a question of time before they work themselves out of the wood, and the time was now.

I requisitioned transport and brought the mattress back to IKEA, where a person in the complaints department stared at it incredulously and really didn't seem to take to heart my proposition that this was an accident just waiting to happen. There was however no question that I wouldn't get credited the price, so I went back in to retrieve instead a Sultan Storfors, which has a more sensible construction with the boards resting on a frame and thus unlikely to just drop out the bottom.

I will now proceed to test the new mattress.