Out on the OP - LP, 14 July 12

Again we fail to make amends
And wend our way between intents
And looking back, not moving on
Oh but something's always wrong
--Something's Always Wrong,
Toad the Wet Sprocket

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Time for the Second Edition of "Out on the OP - LP", what we hope will be a regular feature here at RangerAgainstWar.

We are tweaking things, trying to find out how to make it something in which you will enjoy participating. To that end, we will try a leading question, to see what thoughts it might dredge up. You are not, however, constrained by the topic. As always, R.A.W. is a free-fire zone.

Topic: Accommodation


I mused this week upon the uneasy accommodation I have with the tree frog who has made an abode out of my mailbox. As I am not a little boy, meeting wet frogs has always been a fraught issue for me. Yet I know I will have to meet the frog daily as he leaps out when I remove the mail, or just sits on an envelop until I flick him off.

I wonder: Is it not terrifying to him when the postman drops a particularly large bunch of mail in the box., thoughtlessly, without heed to the fact that he is disrupting someone's lair? How does the frog sleep, never knowing when something will be dropped into the post box? What is it about the black metal box that keeps him there, braving bodily damage?

Then I thought about myself -- it seems we all make poor choices at times in order to accommodate. Friend and professor emeritus of sociology at FAMU, Charles U. Smith, once mused about the forms accommodation takes, from the simple idea of acquired changes in the behavior of individuals to help them to adjust to their environment to Lundberg's more dire idea of people's simple desire to relieve the fatigue and tension of competition and conflict -- accommodation not as a way to reach a higher state, like harmony, but as a technique simply to be able to exist.

He mentioned how he had accommodated to being raised in poverty by being penurious, and how difficult it was for him even today to splurge on a filet mignon over a flank steak, when he could well afford the former.

What accommodations do you make, and why? Is it always better to determine one's desires outright versus accommodating to another? Are there certain issues upon which one should never accommodate? Anything else on the topic?