BLOG REBOOT! PCHEW PCHEW PCHEW!

This blog isn't about being in graduate school anymore because, as of December 11, 2011, I have a Ph.D. But don't worry your pretty little head; my imposter syndrome is still going strong! It turns out that no one knows you have a Ph.D. unless you announce it, which I did not realize until I had one. Boo. More forms should have a "salutation" field. Validation, people.

I'm still at the university where I did my Ph.D. work, now a "Research Associate IV". THAT'S A FOUR. And it's not like golf; higher numbers are better. I'm an associate to research, technically, but not literally. I'm not in a lab anymore. I'm not designing experiments. I'm not reading papers AT ALL. And I love it. I am still trying to figure out what my projects are, maintain my own schedule, finish papers from grad school and successfully avoid panic attacks, and other things I didn't really like about grad school. However, I realize that many people in 9-to-5 grind jobs wish they could have more autonomy so I should quit being such a whiner.

The struggle to be ambitious and impressive in the face of my self-doubt and laziness continues. I want to DO things, GREAT things that amaze everyone and show initiative and make a name for myself. Things that will get talked about to colleagues and get me handed up the ladder until I have an awesome business card title, like "Executive Innovator" or "President of Creativity". Instead, I sit at my desk, making lists of ideas with reasons why I shouldn't bother. Someone else is probably doing this. I don't want to annoy so-and-so with questions. My friend is already doing it better. No one will notice. Someone will notice and think it's stupid. Everyone will notice, and I'll realize it was stupid.

So I plug away at the few projects I've accrued in the last two and a half months, always feeling like I should be doing more, thinking more, trying more. But deep down, I know - I'm waiting for a life-altering, mythological event that inspires me, when I know that I've BEEN inspired and I've argued it away.

It's a boy.

We found out yesterday.


I'm just going to write as if you already know that I'm almost half-way done gestating my second child and that I'm trying to defend in October so that I can give birth in November so that I can graduate in December so that I can start my next life in January...

He just kicked me. Well! 


When I got the internship with SEA (see previous post), I was still editing for AJE and TA-ing and researching and writing and, you know, trying to be part of a family, so blogging got kicked off the priority list. And eventually editing had to go, too. Now my internship is over, and I'm still not editing in lieu of trying to get my dissertation chapters published. But I still didn't return to my blog because all I could think of was BABIES! And... BABIES! And who wants to hear about another pregnant woman? It's all gas and crying at commercials and back pain, right?


Until I realized that that's a huge part of why I started writing here! I wanted to write about the grad student/mom combo, and what better time to catalog my adventures than when I'm doubling my mom load and trying to finish? So I'm about to get all BABY up in here. Like BABIES are going out of style, which, of course, they aren't, they're quite stylish these days, so here we go.


It's a boy. I was sitting here trying to grade exams when I considered that I'm already trying to figure out how to raise a woman; now I have to figure out a man, too? I'm supposed to have distilled out the qualities of both sexes that are most important and figured out how to instill them upon new people, lest I add two more cretins to the world? I mean, thank God for my husband, seeing as how I don't even understand how that whole "shaking off" thing works, but I'm pretty sure we're not going to come up with an infallible Perfect Man List in the next 5 months, one that we can confidently proceed with as a template for our son.


I truly thought that by the time I had kids, I'd have it all figured out. It would be just like The Cosby Show. I'd always know the right answer - scratch that, I'd always know exactly how I felt about the issue at hand. And I would explain it in exactly the right amount of words, with just the right amount of humor injected so that they took me seriously but didn't resent me. Newsflash! Your parents, and all parents, we're making it up as we go. I just assume that I'm going to screw up my kids; I'm just trying to minimize the damage.


In addition to the terror of trying to raise wonderful human beings, this baby is already crazy active. The ultrasound tech was quick on the draw with the anatomical measurements, thankfully, as he looked like he had Restless Fetus Syndrome, so she had to chase him all over my uterus. Considering that our current child will sometimes walk into a room reading a book, forget that she's walking, and just stand there reading for a good ten minutes, I'd say we're in for a shock. As a baby, she hit all of the gross motor milestones quite late; even after she was mobile, she never got into much. My husband as a baby, on the other hand, was walking at some ridiculous age, like six months or something, and jumping off the neighbor's roof shortly thereafter. Imagine the possibilities. God help us.

Bits and Bobs, p.s. I've missed you

I decided a few months ago that, because I had two manuscripts to complete as quickly as possible, if I was writing, it better be one of those manuscripts. And my blog plummeted on the priority list. However, dear ones, I failed to appreciate the outlet this blog is for me, both creative and constructive. So here I am again, without schedule or intent, just here because it feels good to be here. (And the manuscripts are almost done, so I don't feel too guilty.)

I'm finishing up an application to the Scientists and Engineers for America virtual internship in policy. It's due tomorrow, and I have no answer for the question that reads thusly:


4. This internship requires an ability to speak eloquently and impartially about controversial science, engineering and health issues during weekly conference calls. Please describe a previous situation where you accomplished this (subjects can be diverse, or non-science policy). 

Why can I not think of an example? I'm sure I have a good example, right? I'm totally eloquent! I've got eloquence coming out of my bottom! Anyway, I'm stuck. And I'm pretty sure I've not interpreted at least one of the other questions on the application correctly... and all of the biographies of previous interns talk about high political aspirations, of which I have none. I just want to talk to lots of scientists about all their crazy data, turn it into normal human language, and convey it to the political-type people so they can push for change from a more educated place than they were before. Yep. So if you need one of those... I'm just saying, I'm right here.

My F1 was home with an earache yesterday so I spent a little time editing, a little time playing blanket fort, and a little time reading whatever I wanted online, which has become a guilty pleasure of mine. Whatever I want? FOR 20 MINUTES? Why yes, gofugyourself.com, don't mind if I do. Anyway, I was reading about Neil Gaiman (really, I read whatever I want, it's great) and started reading his blog. And then I decided that I wanted to become a writer and marry him. When he writes about writing, it makes me want to write. It makes me think I have scintillating metaphors and whimsical prose somewhere in my heart, if only I would sit down and let it out. Well. You're reading my blog. My metaphors are readable, at best, and my prose is as whimsical as an extension cord. But he makes me BELIEVE. He makes me do SOMETHING, even if I don't do it well. And I appreciate that. Thanks, Neil Gaiman. Let's hang out together.

Woh.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx_C2OPQm-VEXzCnPlAg5TM3fBeeQmER3aeJoIiuIam75-H3JMjGW2fggSnMiinEtMs0J2QchJcN-v4HhcgNQkZtxhJnEyL51iPN-ojgtqwYBOuqXJQ_hCg0dri9FVJN1yeQH5-gM9m5Gn/s1600/DataWorm.jpg


Merry Christmas.

(It's not my secret, FWIW)

Science Policy

In case I wasn't already considering enough career options, I have decided to throw another one in the pile... science policy!

I was recently informed (by someone in science policy) that it is SO not what I thought it was. When I heard the phrase "science policy," I had always imagined people with science degrees that were pushing to have particular laws changed and having strong partisan affiliations  and possibly screaming SAVE THE WHALES. But in a professional way. It turns out that "science policy" is acting as a liaison between the scientists with their data and their public unfriendly p-values, and the politicians that don't understand the data and the p-values. You become a science translator for government officials. That sounds... kind of awesome. (Assuming that I've understood correctly... it's possible that I now have a totally NEW incorrect perception of science policy.)

There are a few things that I know that I'm good at and know that I'm interested in; the difficult part in deciding on a career path is what is best suited to those talents and interests. I, having no real-world job experience and a sub-human level of foresight, find this challenging. But I know I can teach, which is largely tied to my ability to communicate information effectively. Given a little expertise and time, I can distill the important bits of information out of a mess. I know I'm interested in how to communicate effectively and how those methods change with our culture. I'm interested in increasing the general public's awareness and understanding of natural sciences.

So does science policy belong in my pile?

#and for your daily dose of hilarity, I present to you:

http://regretfulmorning.com/2010/11/27-reasons-why-we-love-the-buzz-kill-meme/

Good Enough

... yeah yeah yeah-yeah yeah yeah! Cyndi Lauper? Goonies? Come on, people.

I've been trying to come to terms lately with my own limitations as a scientist. Good transition, right? Inconsistent posting has definitely decreased my writing skillz... anyway. So I'm not as good at this scientist thing as I always thought I'd be. I am constantly plagued with the feeling that I'm not reading all the literature, I'm not controlling for all the confounding variables, I'm not asking new questions... and I find that difficult to accept and stay motivated.

It's obvious that we all haveto accept our limitations, that we all have to find "good enough" and do our best to get there. Right?

If that's so, what happens if I teach my daughter not to strive for perfection but to do her very best? Am I setting her up to be lazy and settle for a "good enough" that's not her best?

How do you cope with knowing you could be better, especially when you've made family a priority?

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Paternal Prenatal Care

Phlogging again. (That's phone... plus blogging... equals phlogging... nevermind.)

If you were walking down the sidewalk and saw a visibly pregnant woman leaning against a building with some friends chain smoking, you would be concerned. Depending on what kind of person you are, you might even say something to her. But if a (male) buddy of yours did the same, you wouldn't feel the same way. When a woman is pregnant, she's expected to eat healthy and exercise for the health of herself, but most notably for the baby. Should men do the same, for the baby?

A recent report in Nature suggests that he should, especcially if he plans on having daughters. Because I'm phlogging, I don't know how to link to things, but trust me! Or check Nature. So they fed male rats a high-fat diet, let them breed, and looked at the metabolic profiles of their offspring. They found that in the fat rats' daughters, they should diabetes-related symptoms, such as insulin insensitivity and reduced pancreatic cell function. Because of their fat dads.

I recently read another study discussing the effect on sperm of men smoking cigarettes. Because there is one. Ah, the terrifying field of epigenetics. I'm just now discovering this Dad Effect. I think I'm representative of the majority when I say I had never thought about this before. Why is that? I don't expect all the details of paternal epigenetic effects to be common knowledge, but at least the idea that they EXIST should be.

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The Cranky Scientist

Blogging from my phone for the first time. Dont judge my lack of proper grammar\spelling\punctuation\direction.

So science has made me kind of a jerk. Sometimes it is more convenient to not think critically. I find that more and more, I am feeling irritated and increasingly intolerable toward people when they say things that I "should" be doing, for my health, for my kid's development, etc., without giving me any real reason why.

I recently attended a promotional function for my friend's Pilates class. She started it by having everyone drink a warm cup of water and urging us to drink a very specific amount each day before meals. She listed myriad ailments it would help with - arthritis, weight gain, flexibility, nutrient absorption, kidney problems... with the accompanying testimonies of her own experiences and those of her family. Okay. Maybe it's true. Maybe it does help... do something. I don't know. I haven't looked it up. But the way to convince me is not by throwing out a bunch of complicated, serious health problems and personal anecdotes and claiming you have the next cure-all. I felt so cynical, so jaded, regardless of how reasonable my attitude may seem to any fellow scientists. The issue, really, is how unable I am to hide my contempt. (This is a general flaw of mine.) I certainly can't expect every well-intentioned, advice-toting person out there to carry a reference list around, can I? Or be able to cite some specific studies off the top of their head?

I feel like although thinking critically is good, we cannot expect the research to be handed to us. We have to accept that most people probably do not investigate most things to our standards (although maybe my friend is totally right. I don't know.), and that maybe they really shouldn't be expected to? i think this is a similar plight to that of the science journalist. Scientists get angry because the writers get this or that detail wrong, but can they be expected not to? The writer's job is to bring the science to the public in a digestible, timely, accurate manner; their job doesn't allow them to dedicate the time to learn as much as every scientist would want them to before reporting on their life's work. My Pilates friend is doing what she thinks is best and her job to the best of her ability and knowledge. And that's really as much as we can ask, right?

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Anonymous Forever?

I'm feeling a bit torn about being in the blog closet.

I started this blog anonymously and with no intention of having it otherwise. As careful as I may be about what I put into my posts, I felt like I might say something damning at some point, or that I might not be as truthful or forthright if it was not anonymous, which undermined the point for me. My intention was to talk about the difficulties and joys of being a graduate student, a wife, and a mother (although that's not actually been the focus of a lot of my posts!), and I wanted to be honest about those things. I had worries about my committee seeing something I had written, or a future employer finding a post about how I would NEVER consider doing the xyz job they had just interviewed me for... or that I struggled with time management, attention span, and long-range planning (which I do). What employer wants to see that?

In the past few months, though, I've been following big-wigs like Boraz and Ed Yong on Twitter, inadvertently also reading re-tweets (I can't say that without feeling embarrassed) and replies to and from other followers of theirs. I started having out-of-the-closet jealousy! These people reply and tweet to their favorite science writers with abandon! My Twitter account is personal; its updates also go straight to my Facebook profile so they have become inseparable (Facebook and Twitter, BFF). I would like to be This Scientist on Twitter so that I can unite all of my Internet presences, comment on people's tweets, be linked to my blog, be linked to the actual work I do, talk freely about location-specific issues, etc. I wish I could either get a new Twitter profile as This Scientist or just bite the bullet and unveil myself. I know it may not seem like a big deal because I am a humble, infrequently updating, wet behind the ears blogger, but it has the possibility of dramatically changing how I see my blog and what it represents to me.

On the other hand, if I admitted to being This Scientist, that would open up my readership to people who know me in real life (I can't bring myself to use "IRL" quite yet), which could be beneficial. Any traffic is good traffic, right? But would anything productive come of that? Another one of my goals with blogging was to get used to putting together prose, possibly even about science, and maybe getting my (pseudo)name out there as a *raise eyebrows* science writer. Would it get me any closer to that goal if my friends were reading my stuff?

How do you feel? Are you in the blog closet? Do you have separate accounts for everything, living a dual e-life?

Any Day But Today

I cannot blog today. I am much too busy drafting articles that I'm really interested in and simultaneously convincing myself not to write them. It's exhausting.

There were two articles in the September issue of Science that made me jot down notes for articles in which I discuss THEIR articles. Then I realized that to be taken seriously, I would probably have to read all the stuff they read to write their article, and one of them is about the recent STEM proposals to the Obama administration. Those proposals are long (I assume, I haven't actually read them) and there are lots of other articles written about those proposals, some of which I have read when I attempted half-heartedly to find the original proposals. In doing this, I remembered how politically uneducated I am and that everything the government does is accompanied with an overwhelming amount of coverage, coverage of that coverage, and opinions from people who feel more strongly than I have about anything, ever, in my life.

And then I decide that no one really wants to read my article anyway. That everyone will know I didn't read the original proposals or they will see inconsistencies in my arguments and expose me for the pretend-writer that I am, a poser who just decided what her stance was as she was typing it and doesn't know the journalist rules for properly researching.

And my Trash grows fat with my insecurities and my half-drafts as I talk myself out of yet another opportunity to get published, get noticed, get heard.

So I cannot blog today. I am quite busy, thank you.

Hardly Conscious

As I was riding the bus home Monday evening, I was not paying any attention at all to where I was going. My least favorite bus driver was on shift, the driver that plays uncomfortable pop music as loudly as possible then sings at the top of his lungs, so I had my headphones in tightly, with my Regina Spektor turned way up. I was also on the last leg of a book I had been engrossed in, so I was sprinting towards the finish line. I was not paying attention... or so I thought.

Around the 15-minute mark, I knew the video shop was on our right, then that bicycle that's been tethered to that stop sign for years, then that eyelash extension place on the left... and I looked up and saw exactly what I expected. How did I know where we were? I had been looking down the entire time, sound blocked out, in my own little world, yet I knew exactly what was around me.

As I prepared to write this, I thought of driving home when I was a kid. I grew up in a small Texas town, about an hour and a half from the nearest big city, a sprawling metropolitan area where most of my relatives lived. Over the course of my childhood, we took a lot of weekend day-trips to the city to see family and would return late in the evening. My sister and I would usually fall asleep, but I would always start to wake up a few blocks from our house. Before I opened my eyes, I knew exactly where we were. This stop sign, that bump in the road, turn right, another bump, a stoplight... these kinetic cues told me where we were on the familiar route and I could sleep right up until we pulled into the driveway, when the slow, long turn into the driveway told me we were home.

Isn't it fascinating how our brains pay attention when we think we're not paying attention? Some mix of stops and gos, bumps and curves, and peripheral vision is being constantly monitored and interpreted. Once the route is familiar enough, you know where you are without thinking about it.

Dilettante Fo Life

This recent post at Ed Yong's blog, "Not Exactly Rocket Science," (as if you didn't know. psh.) is about one of the scads of scientific discoveries that I find fascinating, that I would love to work on... but probably wouldn't really love to work on.

In the post, Ed talks about a gene therapy treatment for thalassemia that uses the patient's stem cells and a lentivirus modified to contain the working gene for the patient's faulty haemoglobin subunit. The virus infects the patient's stem cells, some of the cells get the right gene in the right place, the cells are put back in the person, and hopefully the patient starts making their very own functional haemoglobin.

How. Cool. Is That. I originally went to graduate school wanting to work on viral-mediated gene therapy. This is what I wanted to do. Unfortunately, I didn't really look around much for graduate schools. This was partly due to my atrocious long-range planning skills and partly due to the fact that I was single-parenting a two-month-old and didn't want to move too far from my family. So I ended up at a research institution that is large and well-regarded, but did not have anyone doing what I wanted to do. The closest thing I could find was a bacteriophage lab, so I joined it.

It did not go well.

I blinded myself to a lot of things, most importantly that A) it had nothing to do with what I was interested in and B) the PI and I did not get along at all.


So I transferred to another lab, the lab I am currently in and will receive my Ph.D. from. I like my lab. I think very highly of my PI, I get along with my labmates more than it seems like most people do, I have a good balance of autonomy and guidance, we have at least some money... but the last five years have made it abundantly clear that this is not what I'm going to do for much longer. After I get my degree, I will not stay in academia. This decision was originally precipitated by the realization that no matter how many interesting questions I came up with, I got tired of them after a couple of papers. I have no scientific follow-through. I am, if I may steal the label from a friend of mine, a dilettante. I REALLY LIKE SCIENCE. I just don't want to do it. I want to learn about it and hear about it and talk about it... but I don't want to DO IT. 

So. What to do? This brought me to science writing (albeit through a long, painful path). What do you think, Internet? If I really like science but don't want to do it, can appreciate the minutiae but only for about two days, am smart, have been trained in assimilating and obtaining information fairly quickly, have an extensive understanding of some fields but am interested in almost all of them, can write, like to be busy, work best under deadlines... could science writing be for me?

The Good Wifey

Apologies for the radio silence. I was preparing to give a talk at a conference, giving a talk, and getting my act together for the beginning of the semester, in that order. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Why are household duties split up within marriages the way that they are? Is one sex actually better at some chores than the other? Do female brains find, for example, folding laundry more rewarding than male brains? Or, alternately, just less "punishing"? 

Obviously there is a strong social component that determines which chores are done by which spouse, but if we were somehow free of this influence, would we naturally end up with the same distribution of responsibilities after a few months of trial and error?

A friend of mine, a fellow (female) graduate student, recently got married. She is a fiercely intelligent, independent scientist and it would not be inaccurate to describe her as slightly more Vulcan than the general population. (And I don't think she would be insulted by such a description.) She is extremely logical and this logic largely trumps tradition, emotion, and general opinion when they conflict. In other words, she does not conjure up images of June Cleaver. That being said, she has found herself deriving a surprising satisfaction from cooking dinner for her new husband and folding his boxers while he lays down new flooring and takes out the trash.

Why does she find this satisfying? Is it because she is a better cook and he is a better floor-layer (I'm sure there's a technical term for this, but.. whatever)? Is it because they enjoy their respective duties more than the alternatives? My husband and I have also come to a pretty stereotypical delegation of household chores after a few years. I cook, clean, get the offspring ready for school, do the laundry and grocery shopping; he takes out the trash, minds the car maintenance, fixes electronic things... We do these things because we are both better at them AND we find them less infuriating (probably because we're better at them). Our inherent abilities and the satisfaction we derive are inseparable. We've tried doing each others' jobs and we end up with dirty dishes, broken machines, and bad attitudes. But is this a true sexual dimorphism that is generally applicable to humans? Or are these gender stereotypes just so deeply ingrained that no amount of education and "enlightenment" is likely to change our marital expectations? If I do enjoy getting my Swiffer on, is it because I'm naturally better at it/inherently appreciate a clean floor more, or is it because I've been taught to think that I'm a bad wife if I don't do it?


Once again, I find myself on the Fence of Feminism, probably saying things women have fought against for years. But maybe we really are better at doing dishes. Maybe he really doesn't see the dirty socks under the coffee table. We know our brains are sexually dimorphic; is it unreasonable that this could translate to a division of household labor talent?

I am in no way suggesting that we should not raise our little girls to change flat tires or our boys to scrub pots. Every adult should be prepared to take on all of the household duties and it is our job as parents to train them. However, is it so wrong for me to enjoy tying my apron on and baking an apple pie*?

*I make really good apple pie.

Snip

My kid just got gum stuck in the very front of her hair. Today, the day before she starts kindergarten. I, being hasty to fix the problem as usual, assumed we would not be able to extract the gum and deftly snipped it off. I also assumed I would be able to "blend" it with the rest of her hair.

I failed miserably.

Of course, all of the salons in town are booked with responsible mothers and their children and their back-to-school hair cuts. My kid will just have to start school with her half-mullet pinned up.

I was planning on blogging about how I feel about my kid starting kindergarten... I guess this counts. I feel inept.

I Fold.

I'm no good at card games. We have some friends that taught us to play mah jongg - I'm not any good at that, either. I'm horribly average at chess.

I find this very frustrating and kind of embarrassing. In fact, I'm probably more defensive than I realize. If someone asks to deal me in for a round of poker, I will probably oblige, but I'll preface my disappointing performance with disclaimers so no one gets their expectations up. I always feel guilty in partner games and can't help but believe I'm ruining my partner's fun, no matter how much everyone reassures me that it's no big deal. I know the truth! Having a partner that sucks... sucks.

Why am I so bad at games? There has to be some games I'm good at... Scrabble... Scattergories... I'm really good at that game where you read the words on the card and they're all disjointed and everyone else has to guess what it's supposed to say. I guess I'm good at word games.

The truth is, in card games at least, I feel like I never really get it. I get the rules, but I don't get the system. I can't remember what's been played, I can't count cards, I have no intuition regarding the probability of one hand working out over the other. I always feel like I'm playing for the first time, blindly throwing out cards and eliciting immediate groans from everyone else at the table. As soon as I play, every other person seems to get it. They get that that was the last trump, or they get that I must be trying to catch that trick; whatever it is, everyone seems to get in an instant what I couldn't get from staring at my cards for four minutes.

I think people expect me to be good at games. As a "smart person," I'm supposed to be able to work the system. Didn't you see A Beautiful Mind? Or 21? Smart people are good at these things. It may also be possible that this conception that I've disappointed everyone is my own insecurity...

What do you think? Do you expect yourself to be good at card games because you're smart? Are you good at card games? What do you think makes you better at some games than others?

NOM NOM NOM

I'm really REALLY hungry so I'm going to blog about food. FOOOOOOOD.

Several of the blogs I read have been posting recipes lately (Girl's Gone Child, Cloud), which makes me wonder if their readers are requesting ways to improve the health and/or speed of their dinners. There's always room for improvement, but I feel fairly confident about both the speed and health of our family's diet, with the glaring exception of my meat'n potatoes husband. The lack of processed and non-home-cooked food in our diet is largely accomplished by a) leaving the lab earlier than most graduate students probably do at the end of each day and b) having enough money to buy (almost exclusively) local, organic meat and produce. I realize not everyone can do either or both of those things. We all make the best of what we have.


I leave the lab (almost) every day at 4:45 so I can meet my husband at our daughter's daycare and go home. Most days, we go straight home, spend 30 minutes or so settling in and/or arguing about what I want to make for dinner (because it's not typically meat'n potatoes), and then I start cooking around 5:30 or 6:00. As a family, we have to make dinner, eat dinner, clean up, and bathe the kiddo before bedtime around 8:00, so if everything goes like normal, this is actually fairly reasonable. In other words, I don't think it's crazy that I usually cook dinner from scratch 6 nights a week (we usually go out or eat with friends at least once a week), although a lot of people respond as if it is. "Cooking from scratch" does not have to mean a 4-course gourmet meal that took you all day to prepare and $200 worth of groceries. For what it's worth, I budget $100/week for groceries, which includes non-food items like paper towels, soap, etc. 

Although I wish our meals were less meat-centric and more ethnically diverse, my husband is a creature of habit and I can only push him so far before he turns into a Grumble. There are few things worse than spending an hour dutifully preparing dinner only to have your husband wince every time he chokes down all of five bites before making microwave nachos. So. We compromise. I can make "weird things" for dinner (curry, risotto, enchiladas) about every other night, as long as I have something familiar (spaghetti, pork chops) on the other nights. Typically, I try to include a meat source, a carb source, and 1-2 vegetable sources, so even if we have fried chicken, I can at least make homemade mac'n cheese and roasted beets. The other compromise I make is that in the event that I make a meal where each component is not separate, there is usually a with-meat, without-vegetables option. For example, I made my Hapa version of pork fried rice last night and I served his before I added all of the vegetables. This also means that I have a huge stack of non-separable, non-meat recipes I've wanted to try, but have not been able to. If you'd like to come over for creamy butternut squash soup or fruit couscous, please let me know. To my husband's credit, he did not eat ANY vegetables (besides potatoes and popcorn; yes, these totally count) before we married and now he will eat a few. He will also eat Thai and Korean food with gusto, as long as he can pick out the vegetables and it's not too spicy. This is light years ahead of his childhood diet, which is also his parents' diet and consists mostly of Easy Mac, Lean Cuisine and Sonic. I put up with his obnoxious pickiness and in return, he puts up with the seven brands of Crazy I unleash without warning. MARRIAGE! If we both had our way, he would eat chicken fried steak all day and I would eat avocadoes. I doubt either of those diets would fulfill all of our nutritional requirements. We need each other.

In addition to making our dinners largely from scratch, I also bake all of our bread. This commitment is usually only a once-a-week necessity and can be largely owed to Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto". I highly recommend it (the book and baking your own bread) and it made me feel very differently about my purchase and consumption of food, but that is a blog post in itself. I make all of our bread because I put 6 things in it: flour, yeast, water, olive oil, sugar, and salt. Sara Lee fits in 24, and that's if you don't count the ingredients of the ingredients as separate. (Note that this is for their "Soft & Smooth Whole-Grain White Bread" and that the link is in favor of this miracle of food science. I am not.) I do not think I'm a Food Nazi and I will totally eat some of the grossest, artificial quasi-food you can possibly imagine.

Something I totally ate. Not pictured: ranch dressing

In fact, the quasi-food I like is just about as bad as you can get. I love me some stadium nachos and fried Milky Ways. I just try to not eat them very often and mostly eat "whole" food. Besides the not wanting to die of a heart attack at 25 thing, I also have trouble limiting my quantities. I love food. A lot. So I know that because it's difficult for me to stop eating something particularly delicious when I'm full, it's extra important for me to not habitually eat things that would kill me if I ate them in reasonable quantities.

I'm really hungry. I could use an avocado.   

PHAT LEWT

My husband plays MMORPGs*. Passionately. When I started dating him in 2005, he was coming off of a year of hermitage in which he played EverQuest, ate McDonalds, and avoided sunlight and human touch. In fact, he quit EverQuest when we got serious because he came to the realization that he could not sustain both relationships simultaneously (I had no part in this decision. I am a cool wife that is okay with her gaming husband). 

Since we've been married and have established an acceptable work-life-play balance, he has taken up Vanguard. (He says after EverQuest, WoW was a joke and intolerable. For whatever reason, he finds Vanguard acceptable.) I, honestly, don't know the difference. I am equally unversed in his other nerdery - D&D; his Stars, both Wars and Trek; DragonballZ...
I simply do not understand his passion for these things, because.. you see...


We are different brands of nerd.


I am a science nerd. As a child, my greatest desires were glasses, braces, and a microscope, and I got them all. I read. A lot. My childhood was filled with logic puzzle books, quadratic equations, headgear, band camp, and being obsessively organized. Although a lot of this was fostered by my parents and I can be as bitter as I want about it now (could have really used some social skills in high school. Thanks a lot), I was not unhappy. Crazy people don't know they're crazy! Obviously, not all science nerds were like this, but I was a walking, talking, socks-with-sandals stereotype. 

All that to say, my gamer husband is reciprocally inexperienced in my brands of nerdery. Despite his current fleshy nerd exterior, he was a late bloomer and lived the life of a meathead football jock through high school. We would have hated each other in high school. It was not until college, when a friend of his opened a comic book store, that he gave in to his secret nerd desires and he has never turned back.


Thankfully, we're both readers, which I think is the only overlap between our nerd subsets. I don't think I could have married someone who didn't read voraciously. However, this lack of overlap is not because I haven't tried. Because my nerd craving is mostly satisfied at work during the day and his pursuits are more "leisurely", it's inevitable that I'm exposed to his nerdery more than he is mine. As I type, he's playing Vanguard beside me, as he does most evenings after the kiddo's in bed and we've had some quality time. I know about raids and guilds and halfling bards, but I'm still a little fuzzy on the point of aggro. I even tried to play an RPG once... I think I was a superhero of some sort? And I was running through the ruined streets of a city trying to kill monsters? Mostly, what I remember is the eleventy billion things around the edge of my screen that I was supposed to keep up with. It is equally incomprehensible to me how he keeps up with all of those things as it is how he can enjoy DragonballZ. I DON'T GET IT.


And I'm not sure I can be trained to get it, at this point. What kind of people are attracted to playing MMORPGs, and what kind of people stick around? Obviously, there are millions of people who invest a lot of time and thought into these games (both the makers and players); what do they have in common and what am I lacking? I literally felt mentally incapable of keeping up with all the blinking panels and meters around my screen. Practice would certainly improve my skills, but I doubt I could ever get through a session without feeling terribly overwhelmed and inefficient, which would overshadow any enjoyment I would derive from playing. Maybe this is just a fault of my particular personality, as I tend to get overstimulated easily, but I wonder if it's a trait I'm missing as opposed to an inhibitory trait I possess.


Of course, there's the stereotype of the lonely, overweight 40-something white male sitting in his mother's basement drinking Bawls as he lives out his fantasies of grandeur and masculine prowess through his character. But there are plenty of people I know that play who do not fit this stereotype, my husband being one of them (for the most part). And even so, I'm not really wondering what it is that attracts people, I'm wondering if there's some kind of neural prerequisite for feeling capable of playing these games. Are our kids growing up better at paying attention to many things simultaneously? Are we becoming more visual? Are our attention spans becoming shorter and more superficial? Am I just retarded because I don't have the multi-tasking skills of a 14-year-old boy? Don't answer that last one.


*That's Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, you n00b.

A Following

Riddle me this, o reader of mine:

Why do I go to other people's blogs and see my blog in their blogroll, but they don't show up as "Following" on my sidebar widget? If this is because they're using a different blog feeder than Blogger or whatever that widget uses, is there a way to conveniently view a list of the blogs that follow my blog?
Blog blog blog blog? Bob Loblaw's Law Blog? What?

No, really.

MOOOOOOO

Hey, grad student moms! Good news! The compassionate undergrads at The University of Texas are sympathetic to the difficulties of TAing their class during your pregnancy. They're concerned they will get worse grades on their papers after that stupid kid pops out and ruins their GPA!

This is the gist of a recent article in UT's campus paper, The Daily Texan, entitled "[University Health Services] to offer discounted baby goods on campus". When I initially saw this, I thought diapers, wipes, snot suckers, maybe a nice ear thermometer. As it turns out, "baby goods" actually means breast pumps! They are offering breast pumps at a discount to UT students, staff, and faculty. While this seems a little weird to me, I guess it's nice. Breast pumps can be expensive, and if a woman chooses to go back to work while she's nursing, I guess it's also nice that they support that choice. How nice of them, to support lactation.

And they say they're trying to make it financially easier for women at UT, especially students, to juggle being a new mom and being in school. But why breast pumps?

"By having the pumps available at a discounted rate, female graduate students can get back to work sooner because they will be able to pump breast milk and store it for a later time, which will enable them to be away from their infants... The move is part of an effort to make maternity items more affordable and to reduce the amount of time graduate students in particular spend away from their jobs after becoming pregnant."

Oh. Thank goodness I'm not being encouraged to take a little time off to heal my mangled lady parts or bond with my newborn child, because that would be ridiculous! Because, really, the hard part about being a new mother and a graduate student is NOT being unable to sit on anything but a donut for two weeks or not sleeping for more than 45 minutes at a time or trying to pay hospital bills or coping with a tiny person that does nothing but screams at me and craps on me but still wants nothing but me. The hard part is definitely finding a way to get the milk from my boob to the kid in a manner that doesn't disrupt my studies. Thank you for caring so much about my research! It is rather important, and that is what you're concerned about, right?

"...Student Government Vice President Muneezeh Kabir said. 'When you’re talking graduate students, this is like our school’s rankings — these are the people that we as undergrads have grade our papers.'" 

Oh. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I just brought a PERSON into the world and you're concerned about me grading your term paper? Pardon me if I don't faint from gratitude that you're offering me discounted breast pumps. WHERE WOULD I BE without the kindness and understanding of people like you? Milking my boob into a styrofoam cup in the office bathroom, that's where I'd be! Or worse, at home with that horrible creature I spawned! So thank you, Student Government of UT. I can only hope other universities follow suit by not actually supporting motherhood, but by making it easier to "squeeze it in". 

The latter part of the article talks about a student-parent initiative that has been started on campus, which is interested in ACTUALLY providing support for parents, including having stops for the campus shuttle buses that go by the daycare on campus (because apparently it doesn't, currently), and other things that sound rather reasonable. It seems there's been a disconnect somewhere between the student-parent initiative, whose intentions sound honorable, and the people carrying it out/representing the changes. 

Wherein my brain asplodes

As I'm traveling internationally this month, I had to figure out how I was going to contact my family. We decided our cheapest option would be for me to find a land line I can use in Switzerland, make a 30-second phone call to my husband to give him the number, and have him call me back on his mobile. To do this, we had to enable international calling on his device.

Generally, I hate taking care of this kind of thing - the minutiae necessary for living an adult life. This includes resolving unfair fines, renewing driver's licenses, getting new tags for the car, and setting up doctor's appointments. I usually end up going through some terrible automated phone system that either doesn't have my option listed or dead ends at an irrelevant recording. OR I hit the wrong key (well, spot on my touch screen, which is a whole other source of frustration) and I have to start all over again. Which is why I'm so happy to see the Live Chat option becoming more popular! I'm at my computer anyway, and I don't have to listen to anyone's voice, be it automated or in person! Win.

So I Live Chatted it up with the Sprint lady, who was very nice, but the first thing she said was "Please provide your PIN number or Security question." This is a reasonable request; I'm glad she doesn't want Joe Blow being able to edit my phone plan. However... off the top of my head, I can think of a few other username/password/PIN/security question combos I'm also supposed to keep up with:
electric, gas, bank, ATM card, phone, tollway tag, student loan account, e-mail, university e-mail, university online system, computer network, lab server, BLOG, Amazon, ebay, Skype, anywhere I've ever bought anything online ever, anywhere I've ever ordered pizza online, Etsy, Facebook, Netflix, Steam... 

Does anyone remember all of these? How am I supposed to remember all of these? And you're not supposed to use any words found in the dictionary, names of people related to you, words spelled backwards, repeated characters, or words with letters replaced by symbols? And it should be 8-10 characters long, including letters, numbers, and at least one symbol? And THEY ALL HAVE TO BE UNIQUE? You're kidding me.


I often find myself wondering if the memory is a finite storage space, and if so, what got kicked out so I can remember my Papa John's password. And what didn't make the cut in the first place, in favor of remembering all the words to the Punky Brewster theme song (Maybe the worrrld is blind...). We know that we lose skills that we had in infancy, that babies can, for instance, tell monkey faces apart better and learn languages faster than we can as adults. And we know that our brains are certainly changing in response to the shifting demands of our world compared to our world thirty (or five) years ago. The remarkable plasticity of our brain is undeniable - but what about memory? Does HOW I remember change, since I have to remember ridiculous strings of numbers and symbols for all my accounts instead of how to drive to my aunt's house now that I have GPS? Does how MUCH I can remember limit WHAT I remember?


Can I please forget every line to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids so that I can remember the Krebs cycle?

We will never forget.