You win

Thanks for all the great advice about the job application. In the end, I did it. I think the application was a lot stronger than I ever thought it would be at this point in my postdoc, so I didn't feel like an ass when I pressed submit. I'm also really happy to have a research and teaching statement ready to revise for future applications.

It's funny because if I had read a post on any of your blogs that was similar to what I wrote last week, I would have responded as you all did -- totally apply! make the difficult decision when there's actually a decision to make! a man wouldn't hesitate! it's excellent practice! -- and yet, it was a real dilemma for a couple of days because my emotions were clouding my judgement. My friends have always tended to comment that I'm very rational and not overly emotional, so I'm always taken by surprise when my emotions interfere with decisions. I'm not complaining about that because I think it's helpful to listen to your emotions--your gut--to make sure you're considering factors that might be difficult to prioritize in a rational way. I'm happy to be emotional sometimes.

Anyway, I'm grateful for this wonderful blog community!

Refreshing the feeds

I've been meaning to shift over from Bloglines to Reader for ages, and I finally did it today.  I started out using Bloglines, and tried Reader some time after but I never really liked it.  The sort-of-annoying way that Bloglines has you add feeds made me decide to finally switch.  This also means I finally updated the feeds of all the blogs that moved this summer, so I can get up-to-date on all my blog-friends I've been missing.  I added some new-to-me blogs too, and I might add some more soon; I've been noticing lots of new folks around in the comments of other blogs very consistently but I haven't added any blogs to my list in a long time.  It was time to freshen things up, especially since the posting frequency of many of my old favorites has dropped off in the last 6-12 months.  I need to update my blogroll too, and maybe change my template.

Blogging hasn't been as much fun lately as it was when I started, so maybe some changes will help get me back into it.  It's never something I want to feel like I have to do, or guilty about.  However, I did find it to be a great source of camaraderie and reassurance as well as a nice way to practice regular, low-pressure writing so I think it's worth it to renew my interest in it, for now.

Flocculating

I feel equal parts curious, irritated, and bored by the dissolution of ScienceBlogs and creation of the new blogging collectives.  Apart from Zuska and the occasional lateral click, I didn't read anything on ScienceBlogs that I hadn't already been following before the blog joined the collective.

The internet is a dynamic thing; I'm looking forward to innovation that might come from the change in the science blogosphere culture.  On the other hand, the situation smacks of cliquishness that I find unbecoming.

Love Languages

After much thought, I decided to share my experience with a book, The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, for ScienceGirl's baby shower.  The thesis of the book is that how we give and receive love governs how we function in loving relationships whether that be with our spouse, our parents, or our children.  Basically, we all give and receive love in five main ways: physical touch, words of affirmation, gifts, quality time, and acts of service.  Everyone can experience all five love languages, but most of us have one that is most important, our primary love language. 

Think about this: how did you know your mother loved you?  Was it because she always told you? words of affirmation Or because she packed your lunch every day? acts of service Perhaps you had a morning ritual involving lots of cuddling.  physical touch/quality time You see where I'm going with this.  No love language is better or worse than any other, but we all have one (or maybe two) that we understand best.  It's nice if you and your loved ones share a primary love language, but it's ok if you don't. However, it's good to be cognizant of different love languages and how they can shape our behavior in relationships. Sometimes we are trying to show our love for someone, but that person has trouble feeling it because it's the wrong love language for her.

In addition to a primary love language, we all have an internal "love tank" that can empty and fill depending on circumstances in our lives and the health of our relationships.  Being spoken to in our primary love language is the best way to fill the tank and keep us feeling our best. 

Why I am I writing this for my baby shower post?  This love language concept can be particularly important and useful for raising kids.  In fact, Chapman has a whole book devoted to love languages in parenting.  Typically, an individual's primary language isn't evident until about age four, so it's critical for parents to "speak" in all of them when children are young.  Even after you think you have identified your child's primary love language, you should still use all of them.  But, you may want to emphasize the one that is most important to your child, and you may want to consider it when you invoke punishments.  For instance, a child whose primary love language is quality time will find being sent to her room particularly harsh.  By the same token, keeping a kid's love tank full can promote self confidence, good behavior, and healthy relationships.

There are a series of Five Love Language books targeted to the various types of relationships we encounter, including one specifically about children and one about teenagers.  They have a fair bit of Christian content, e.g. Bible quotes, but that's easy enough to overlook if you want.  Although the language can be a bit cheesy ("love tank"?), I have found the five love languages thesis has been crucial for my relationship with EGM as well as other important relationships in my life.

ScienceGirl, lots of other bloggers have offered their best practical advice - to take of yourself and your marriage so you can be the best possible mom to your little one.  I encourage you to read a FLL book (or visit the related website) to give you another tool to do just that.  Identify your love languages so you and your husband can keep each other's love tanks full throughout the very challenging (and rewarding!) time ahead of you, and you'll be able to keep your daughter's tank full too.   The rest should fall into place.

Buzz totally sucks

I know I'm not the first person to post about the new Buzz app in gmail, but I'm annoyed enough to add to the dialog.  If you have ever emailed me from your gmail account, I can see your name and possibly your photo.  If you have ever emailed me from your pseudonymous bloggy gmail account but had your real name attached to the account, I can see your name and possibly your photo.

I will of course keep this info to myself, but it sucks, huh?  If you have your real name associated with your bloggy gmail account, I recommend changing it to your pseud.

Lame.

Memes

Have you noticed that there have been very few memes circulating in this corner of the blogosphere lately? When I started by blog in late 2007, it seemed memes were pretty common, but they've really trailed off over the past year or so.

People act like it's a big inconvenience to be tagged for a meme, but I kind of like it. However, that attitude made me reluctant to tag people. Still, I think memes are kind of fun sometimes, provide an easy topic for a post, and are a nice way to help new bloggers grow their audience. So if anyone gets a new meme, you are welcome to tag me.


I did see that Cuttlefish started a very cool new meme last week and I'm curious to see if it starts circulating widely. A worthy effort, but my guess is that it will be too difficult for many people to write something fast enough.

Catching up

Only 134 blog posts left to read (79 of which are Lockwood's), down from, like, 600 when I returned from vacation a week ago. Although I missed lots of interesting posts on which I would typically leave a comment, I'm resisting the urge to comment on most of them in order to get through the backlog a little quicker.

Also, I'd like to start posting here a little more frequently and regularly now that the intense period of dissertation writing and defending is over. But I'm not making that a NYR. :)

Geography of my visitors

In response to a comment I left on this post, Cath posted a chart showing the location of her 500 most recent visitors. Here is a similar graph for this blog.





Maybe not surprisingly, Cath gets a lower proportion of US visitors compared to this blog. My last 500 visitors have come from a greater variety of countries though (17 for Cath vs. 21 for me). However, I hypothesize that Cath's lower number of countries is attributable to a (presumably) much higher visit rate. In other words, her last 500 probably come from what, a couple of days (?), whereas at the low posting frequency I've been maintaining lately, it takes almost two weeks for me to get 500 visits. I imagine she gets a much broader audience by virtue of having a bigger audience. Her non-American-ness probably contributes as well, but I bet her awesomeness is the real reason. I think we'd need to sample a longer time span and use visit rate as a covariate to know for sure. :)

Anyway, interesting stuff! I wonder if most English-language science related blogs have a mostly American readership, and if it makes a difference if 1) the author lives in the US or 2) the author is not American. I'm sure I've heard that the overall blogosphere is largely American, but I'd think that would be somewhat less true for science blogs, since science is such an international business.

Sigh...

I've been pretty quiet lately. Things have been busy. We had friends visiting from Far Off Land for a couple of weeks, went to an out-of-town wedding, and have been working later recently. I could have made time to blog, but I just haven't felt compelled to write. Each evening I feel more interested in reading other blogs than in writing my own. Anyway, I thought I'd check in at least. I have some posts in mind - maybe I'll get them written soon.

I think my posting hiatus started with the realization of how little time I have left to finish my dissertation. I panicked a little bit, then worked out a timeline for completing each chapter. That helped, but I need to stay focused and crank up the hours to get it all done. Between deadline fears and cessation of carpooling, I've been really productive, but that has left little bandwidth at the end of the day for blogging. I'd like to let you know, though, that I am working on the last of my lab work which should be mostly done in the next 2 (or maybe 3) weeks; I completed the revisions on my revise and resubmit and am waiting for my advisors to comment (have been waiting for >4 weeks); I have rewritten big chunks of the next paper; and finally, I have written the methods section for the paper that will come from the current lab work. So I've been doing lots of things, just not blogging.

All this has made me very tense, however. I think the venting I do on blog helps that, so I will try to get back in the habit.

What happened to Adoptic?

I suddenly realized the blog-advertising website Adoptic disappeared. Did they announce they were closing down, or did they just fade away? When did it happen, and how come I didn't notice?

Quick update

I haven't posted in ages and I'm way behind in my blog reading. We have a house guest for several weeks, which is keeping me away from my computer in the evenings. It's a very fun guest to have because the person is excellent company and a perfect match for me science-wise, so we're having lots of great science discussions. Also, I mentioned in the comments that I had to travel for a funeral. It was a sad affair for an uncle who wasn't that old (71) but had been sick with cancer for several years. He lived a high-quality life much longer than initially expected, but the final decline was very quick. I'm glad I got the chance to say goodbye and it was good to see my family (the kids grow so much between each visit!).

I'll try to get back to regular posting, but I'm sure it will continue to be intermittent as long as our guest is here. I will especially try to get on the interviews I promised to several bloggers. Sorry about the delay!

One year on

Yesterday I noted that it was my blogiversary. I have really enjoyed developing this new hobby over the past year, not to mention getting to know all the wonderful people in this corner of the blogosphere. I was reading and commenting on blogs well before I started my own; my habits have changed dramatically since I started my own blog.

I started my blog shortly after we got internet access at home*. I had been reading a handful of blogs (FSP, Sciencewoman's old blog, Am I a Woman Scientist, Dr. Shellie, Ms.PhD, Jenny F. Scientist, PropterDoc) at work. I'd do like I do with email -- I'd keep a few blogs open and refresh constantly whenever I wanted a break. It was before I knew about services like Sitemeter -- those authors must of thought I was a freak! However, I tried not to read too many blogs since I didn't want to spend my entire day at work fluffing around on the web.

Once I got internet at home, I started following a much greater variety of blogs. I found new ones by moving laterally from my favorites and by checking out blogs of people who commented here. I really appreciate the community of which I've become a part and all the latent mentorship I've received through blogs.

Now I subscribe to many blogs (>90; I'm sure many of you read plenty more than that). I still read a few during work breaks, but only in my feed reader and I almost never take time to comment until I get home. It can be difficult to keep up with them all, especially when I miss a few days. Sometimes I get confused about who said what where. Yet, I'm constantly finding new blogs. I like getting to know new people plus I want to support new bloggers the same way that people so generously supported me by visiting and commenting when I first started (and still do!).

I feel torn about my anonymity, too. Sometimes (like after election day) I want to talk about where I live and other times I'd really like to say more about my work. I'm not too concerned with other bloggers or regular readers knowing who I am, but I don't think I want everyone I know to have access to the thoughts I share here and I certainly don't want this page to come up when someone googles my name. I know, same shit everyone says. On the other hand, I sometimes want to share the treasure of the women-in-science blogosphere with colleagues who I think could really benefit from the community. But I hesitate because I don't necessarily want them to read my blog.

So anyway, that's what I think about blogging right now. How about you? Has the way you use blogs shifted over time?



*Can I tell you how pissed I was when I had put off getting home internet because we were on such a tight budget and I thought it would be really expensive (at least $60) and then it turned out to be $17/month? I waited so long to save $17?!

Blogging for writing's sake

I started blogging for a variety of reasons. One of my hopes was that regular blog writing would improve the quality of my professional writing. When I started this blog, I was mostly working at the bench. I knew, though, that I would soon be focusing some of my efforts on manuscripts so I wanted to get some writing practice.

It’s difficult to measure improvement in writing, especially one’s own. Unfortunately, I don’t think blogging has helped me that much. I write my posts somewhat quickly and while I read over them before I publish, I don’t spend any time really editing (that’s probably obvious from my frequent spelling errors and run on sentences).

However, I do think blogging has removed some of the mystique surrounding writing. Each time I post, I’m submitting a piece of writing to whoever wants to read it. That has made me a little less nervous about presenting my work for review by advisors and colleagues. In addition, I think I feel less block overall. Blogging is something I choose to do because I like it, not because I feel like I have to for any reason. Sometimes when I decide to write about something, it’s a little hard to start. I have to get over it though because I really want to write my little bloggy essay. I’ve learned that I just have to get a sentence down and it will usually flow from there. More importantly, I’ve learned that any sentence can be changed. Even if everything sucks at first, I can improve it (although usually sometimes it continues to suck). I’ve tried really hard to apply that same approach to my science writing to get me over the inertia of starting.

Someone else recently posted something on this topic and got me thinking about it. I would like to link to that blog, but for the life of me I can’t remember where the post was. I guess that’s the problem with reading two weeks’ worth of posts in a few days.

Who are you?

Drugmonkey has a post up that he wants to make all memey, so I will run with it. Most people who read blogs don't leave comments, so even with a dynamic medium like a blog, it's hard to know your audience. So the question for readers, originally from the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, is

Tell me about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.

So, Readers, please delurk if you care to.

meet-up

I'll be going to the big conference convening in the Midwest in August that puts the eco in ecogeofemme. I've got a pretty busy schedule building so probably not much free time, but it would be cool to meet some bloggers. Anybody else going and want to meet up?

Another thought on anonymity

A good thing about anonymous blogs is that they reduce anxiety that stems from rank/success inequalities among bloggers, particularly those in science. Since I don't know the identities of most bloggers, I can't be intimidated by their real-life greatness. Even when people clearly state on their blogs what level of career achievement they have attained (e.g. my profile says I am a student), it doesn't sink in the way it does when I know who they are. For example I recently stumbled upon a non-anonymous blog by a prominent scientist broadly in my field. I don't think I would leave the same sort of comments there that I leave at other blogs, even ones I know to be written by senior level people.

This observation is a small example of how the Internet can eliminate barriers. Things that might stop people from interacting in real life are irrelevant here. It doesn’t matter if in real life you have a heavy accent or smell bad or can’t make eye contact or have an appearance that is often the subject of bias. If you write an interesting blog (and I know about it), I’ll read it. Not that I would purposely avoid you in real life if you have the above traits. I’m just saying that we get boiled down to the message we transmit on our blogs, without the confounding effects of race, appearance, number of publications, funding, etc.

I know these are not novel ideas, but I still find them interesting.

How anonymous are you?

Today at work, a woman I barely know came up to me after a seminar and said, “I’d like to talk to you about something.” We were quickly alone in the room and then she laid it on me, “Do you have an anonymous blog?”

!

It turns out that through a complicated series of facts she learned from this and other blogs combined with some reasonable assumptions, she strung together my identity. Can you believe it? She didn’t even do any major sleuthing or google stalking. And our blog circles don’t overlap all that much (we compared notes).

I think it’s pretty cool to have learned this person is a blogger. We had a wonderful conversation about blogging, which developed into a two-hour discussion about grad school, careers, etc. I hope that we have more like it.

I have to admit that there are only a handful of blogs that I regularly read that I think are truly anonymous, i.e., I think there is enough information in most of them to develop a pretty good hypothesis about the author’s identity. I don’t have any false security about my identity either. My location is just short of obvious and I bet it would be pretty easy to figure out the rest of me, too. It was just a shock to have someone that close to home put it together.

I’ve said before* that my main reason for being anonymous is to keep this blog from coming up in google searches of me, my departments, etc., and that I don’t mind other bloggers knowing who I am but I don’t want people in my real life to know about my blog. There have already been things I decided not to write because I didn’t feel I was anonymous enough. I try to write posts that I wouldn’t be devastated to have real life friends/colleagues read, but also that wouldn’t devastate my friends/colleagues if they read them. I know it’s a real possibility that I will be found out someday (well, I guess I’ve already been found out, but I mean more broadly).

The moral of the story is, if you’re an anonymous blogger and you really don’t want anyone to know who you are, be pretty damn careful what you write. Anyone around you could be an anonymous blogger, too!

*I haven't actually said all that before. But that post I linked to has some great comments discussing this issue.

Meebo

I recently got a Meebo widget for ths blog. I haven't used it much yet, but it's supposed to be for IMing, Blog Style. So if it says I'm online and you want to chat, say hello. neat-o.

Another Lousy Day

Several years ago, I heard this cool piece on NPR’s All Things Considered (it's 18:30 long). Here is the description from NPR:

A few years ago, writer David Kodeski was rummaging through an antique store on Chicago's north side when he came across two diaries from 1960 and '61. He bought them, took them home and began to read. The result: "Another Lousy Day," a one-man play that details his quest to find the diary's author -- a single, working woman who lived on the south side.

The diary's author wrote meticulously about her everyday life: how she flirted with her co-workers, fought with her dad, shopped for things she didn't need, and searched for happiness as she worried about her weight and hairdo:

June 26: Another lousy day. Went to our new jobs on colored TV and are they ever awful and feel like I'm in Siberia. I asked Mike a couple of times about the controls and later on he called me over and showed me a book about a Baptist. He was so cute. Went to bed late.

Kodeski and producers Elizabeth Meister and Dan Collison, in association with Chicago Public Radio, have adapted the play into a radio story for All Things Considered.

The writer concludes that the diary author must have been depressed and miserable based on how she chronicled her life in her diary. But at the end of the story, he meets some of the diary author's friends, who describe her as happy and outgoing. I wonder if this is the case with most people, especially bloggers. The self we know inside is not the self we present to the world. Would some bloggers' coworkers be surprised by how insecure/unhappy/overwhelmed they feel? Does the blog personality match the real life personality?

It all sounds American to me

I have an American accent. When I read, I hear the text in an American accent.

I read all these wonderful blogs and I'm usually a teensy surprised when I learn the author is not American. Even after I know the writer is a native English speaker with a non-American accent or has a different first language, still I hear her blog in American. Not just American, but Midland American.

Here's how I know what accent I have, as if it weren't obvious (to those who have heard me speak).

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz