A Meditation on the Diaphanous Nature of Transit and Transition, in Five Parts

I.

When I was younger, maybe six or seven, any car trip over four hours in duration was preceded, on my part, by roughly the same amount of preparation as goes into waging a small-scale war. The back seat of the family station wagon became a veritable bomb shelter, stocked with several lunch’s worth of food, a pillow in case I needed to sleep, several Nancy Drew books, and enough candy to send an entire kindergarten class into an insulin coma. All that was missing were canned goods and a gas mask — though, given my then-ten-year-old brother’s predilection for loudly announcing his flatulence, perhaps the gas mask would have been a good idea. Now, a seasoned traveler, I put decidedly less effort into getting ready for one of my routine treks between Ithaca and New York City: I make a sandwich and get on the bus, where I proceed to sit and stare out the window for the next five to six hours, all my worldly possessions in a knapsack clutched between my knees.
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We all play out many different roles in many different arenas; I am a student, a writer, a HumEccie, a friend and daughter. But according to sexual strategies theory (SST), the only role of mine that matters is that of a fertile vessel for sperm.

Not that many people have heard of SST, but most are familiar with what it theorizes. Coined in 1993 by Davids Buss and Schmitt, the term describes the popular behavioral-ecology-based idea that the supposedly distinct mating strategies of males and females are based on maximizing reproductive potential while accounting for differential investment. Women have a gestation period of nine months followed by a year or more of breastfeeding; men need only donate several minutes of their time to the conception of a child. SST states that, because of this, men compete with other males to mate with as many youthful, fertile females as possible, while women look for men with resources and status, aiming to rope in “good providers” who will take care of them and their children. It’s simply part of our biology, proponents of the theory say; billions of years of evolution have made us this way.
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