This essay will sort of ramble a bit, but the day has been like that. We had some very nice weather today. The sort of fluffy cloud, dry mildly warm days that we beg for and get maybe a total of one month, while the rest of the time it is either too hot, too cold, too humid, or just plain raining.

In any case it was one of those beautiful days, and it also happened to be the day we had our company picnic. I drove to the picnic with a guy I'll call Barney because he looks like Barney - not Barney the Dinosaur, but Barney Rubble from the Flintstones. Barney is an older attorney and is a member of the Mormon church. He also was at one point the part owner of a topless lounge. Last year he declared bankruptcy, but somehow this year he has managed to buy a 2006 Chevy convertible. So he's a Mormon, and an active member of his church (that evening he was supposed to head up some youth activity), but he's a bit outside of the typical stereotype Mormon.

So three things happened on the trip, and I'll talk about two of them because the third one is stupid. So anyway we are driving along, and I start noticing the wildflowers along the road. There were some really pretty purple ones, and they looked a lot like some of the ones I had seen in Washington a month ago. So this urge to pick some and figure out what they were just came into my head and started nagging at me. After a few minutes, I had to ask Barney to pull over. He thought I needed a bush to pee behind or something, but instead I needed a purple flower. So back in the car, I flipped through my field guide that happened to be in my backpack that I brought with me to keep a change of clothes in until I found what I thought was the right flower. Then I was happy. I tossed the flower out and we kept driving. Only, I went back and looked at the picture I thought was the right flower and realized that my flower's leaves were smooth, while the flower I thought was right was had serrated leaves. Nothing else in the field guide looked anywhere near as close though. Then I read more closely, and it gave a distinguishing characteristic of the flower in terms of the width of the lowest facing petal. Unfortunately, I had tossed the damned flower out. So this picnic we went on was about 100 miles away from where I live in a lower, flatter territory, and there aren't any of these flowers nearby. So I'm almost tempted to drive out that way again just to find another sample of the flower.

This nagging urge to learn stuff, like this annoying tic that I can't get rid of sometimes - I wonder - do lots of other people feel this? Is it something common, or just a quirk held by a select few nut bags? I'm not talking about wildflowers, but anything. Maybe hearing a tune and needing to figure out what notes are played at a certain point as a sort of throbbing irresistable urge. I can think of other examples, and the more I think about it the more obvious it becomes that all of us feel this way about different things. It's the impulse that made us visit other lands to satisfy that nagging urge to "find out what's over there" or to develop new ways of forging iron or whatever. It's the conquest impulse. The desire to master.