Holy Cow!

I just discovered what a bitchin' park district my city has. There are heaps of programs, some of which are located relatively close to me. The winter session has already started, but I called (had to leave a message) to find out if I could still join a nearby step aerobics class... for $10. They have walking clubs, all sorts of sports, a variety of visual arts and dance, swimming, theater, etc. How cool.

I should take advantage of this to both get some exercise for cheap and to meet new people.

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?

Will you be my BFF?

I am not religious and have no interest in becoming so. However, it seems to me that one of the virtues of church is the social network that comes with being a member of a congregation. I wish I had a welcoming place to go each week where I could meet up with a large group of nice people (but I don't want it to have anything to do with god).

It’s so difficult to meet people and to make new friends as an adult. When you’re a child/teenager, your life experience is short and easy to share. It’s easy to open up to people and make close fiends. As you age, your experience deviates from that of others and it becomes harder to relate. Plus, you have less free time so maybe you are more selective about whom you spend it with. People are more judgmental as well, which makes it a little scary to open up to someone new.

I think being an academic adds to the difficulty of making friends and adds to the desire for them at the same time. Academics move frequently, at least in the early stages of their careers. It’s hard to make friends and then leave them. As much as I’d like new friends, I’m in a position where I’m weary of bonding with new people because I think I’ll be moving before too long. I've heard other academics (e.g., FSP) say that they enjoy having friends all over the world who they get to see at meetings. I agree that it's rewarding to have a far-flung circle of friends who convene at conferences, but what about the friends I've made who aren't scientists? I really like having non-scientist friends, but it presents unique challenges, at least while I'm living in this place impermanently.

Inferiority Complex? Impostor Complex? Lazy-Ass Complex?

Many, many people feel inferior compared to others in their field. Or they feel like they have no business doing the work they do, that they aren’t qualified to teach, or that nobody has realized how much they suck but as soon as the cat’s out of the bag, they’ll be fired. I don’t really feel this way. I feel lazy. I think I could be every bit as good as anyone else but I don’t really work hard enough, so I’m just mediocre. Interestingly, I don’t have a big problem with that, at least not at this point. Maybe when it’s time to compete for jobs I’ll be cursing my mediocrity.

I think if I put in really long days and was just obsessed with my research, I could turn out awesome papers that would earn me a great reputation in my field. But I don’t do that. I want other things from my life, too. Frankly, I don’t think I’m capable of working that way, either. I just don’t have that kind of concentration or endurance. Maybe that’s what separates the women from the girls.

But then I wonder if this, in fact, is an inferiority complex. I’m saying to myself that I’m not as good as some people because I can’t/don’t want to work that hard. Inferiority is sneaky.

I wonder: if everybody feels inferior, who feels superior? This isn’t just restricted to women, so we can’t say the men are all feeling great. Does everybody feel like she can’t live up to the productivity of her colleague? Or is it a game we play with ourselves to deal with the self-motivation necessary for research? I thought I'd try a little poll to see where people stand. I use the phrase "better than me" in the context of comparing your work to that of your colleagues, i.e., I don't mean to say that other people are of higher quality overall.

A photo

*poof*

Ecogeoman and me, about two years ago (I'm on the left). Wish we were there now.

RBOC

It's a random bullets post today because I just don't have much to say about any one thing.

• I seem to be getting another cold. No fair. I already had a really bad one this season, right after Thanksgiving. At least I don't feel super crappy, just super snotty.
• Another great interaction with Academic Advisor today. I sent him another draft of the conclusions for my paper and he responded super fast again. He was happy with my progress and made a really constructive suggestion for the main theme of the paper. It will take a lot of thinking to incorporate, but will make the paper much better.
• I have had the luxury of working on this paper for the entire day, every day since New Years. I have been trying to savor that, since I know there won't be many times in my career when I have the level of limited responsibility that gives that kind of freedom.
• I had a conversation with Research Advisor today wherein I got to vent about an issue that has been bothering me for some time. I think it came across okay, which is to say I think I sounded not too bossy/bratty (always a worry for me at work with the super non-confrontational people there) but got my point across that I was upset with both the lack of support from her and the inconsideration (carelessness? cluelessness? laziness?) of some of my coworkers. I think the topic might come up again tomorrow during a meeting with Research Advisor, Awesome Technician, and me, so I will blog more about it after that.

Not so historically male?

I spent most of the last two days reading papers mostly from the 1930's -1950's. I noted several interesting things I wanted to share.

• Back then, they measured distance in inches, but mass in grams.
• Sometimes, they used a human body to measure height. For example, to demonstrate that corn plants grew taller in one part of a field than another, there was a photo of the field with a man standing at one end and another man standing at the other end. The caption noted that the plants were taller than one of the men but shorter than the other. They never actually measured the height of the plants in any units. To be fair, it was an extremely obvious gradient in plant height.
• There were women doing research back then! With their names on papers! Several different women appear in this body of early literature. Of course, many are merely thanked in the acknowledgements for what I'd bet was authorship worthy work. Still, I guess my field is not quite as historically male as I thought.

On another topic, my carpool buddy had to stay home today so I was free to work late. I stayed for an extra two hours and now I'm exhausted. Before I started carpooling I frequently worked long days -- I forgot how bad I used to feel at the end of them and how little I got done in the last hour or two. It's so hard to make myself stay in my seat for that long, even with little breaks to walk around. Plus, I was doing really frustrating literature searches. Maybe if I had been doing something more engaging, I wouldn't have noticed the time passing.