Giving directions

So the other day I was out on my usual lunchtime jog, when an older couple in a minivan pulled up next to me and asked how to get to (a nearby hotel that shall remain nameless). The road they were on, a small, residential dead-end, just happened to share a name with the larger, commercial road where the area's high end hotels are all situated, so I knew right away what had happened (darn GPSes! They're always getting people into trouble around here!). I gave them directions as best as I could, bid them good luck, and continued on my way.

About 5 minutes later, it occurred to me that I give directions differently than most guys I know, and I started to wonder if this was another "gender thing." That day I focused mainly on landmarks (e.g. "you'll pass a park on your left"), rather than on concrete map directions ("go north on Poplar about 2 miles until you get to Hollyhock"), which made me think of something I'd read a while back on the subject:

Studies over the past decade have shown that women are likelier to rely on landmarks and visual cues, and men on maps, cardinal directions (such as north and south) and gauges of distance.

There's a Men's Route And a Women's Route, washingtonpost.com

Sounds like what I experienced! But in Googling the subject tonight, I found a least one scientific study which seems to indicate that these differences are probably anecdotal at best:

[the researcher] gathered data from a more natural context, by driving alongside a customer in a petrol station, winding down her window and asking the person for directions. She did this 60 times, asking 30 men and 30 women. Ewald found no differences in the directions that she received, with the single exception that men tended to estimate how far away the destination was more often than women did. However the men’s estimates were more likely to be wrong than the women’s!

Linguistics Research Digest

Still, there may be some truth to this. Not that it makes any difference, any more than if my ring fingers are the same length as my index fingers, or if my arms turn outward when I face my palms forward. But still, it made me chuckle.

Back!

Peek a boo...?

Just a quick note to say I'm still here and still have a lot I want to get around to blogging about. Shortly after my last post, two things happened that have affected my ability to blog here:

1. I got busy with work and my side business.
2. I wrecked my bike, earning me a stiff neck & shoulder, long and uncomfortable nights of restless sleep, and a nasty face scar that sends my dysphoria into overdrive if I stare at it in the mirror for too long, because of how it makes me feel about myself (there's probably a blog post in there somewhere).

So, yeah. You'll probably see me pop up in the comment threads for my friends' blogs, and I occasionally jump in to a conversation on the two LDS email groups I joined (TGI Mormons and NorthStar), but I have three or four posts in draft that I'll be posting soon, the biggest of which is the story of how I came out to my wife, and the effects that it's having on our relationship.

That one's heavy stuff, and I don't want to be misconstrued, so it doesn't exactly write itself. I'm hoping I can carve out some time to finish it later this week.