The trouble with novels

I am ashamed to admit that I am the kind of person who can abandon a novel before I reach the ending. For example, I started Catch-22 at least three times, once getting more than half-way, but never finished it. On the other hand, once I'm engaged, I have to simply give up on whatever else I have going on because I get totally enchanted by a good story.

Today I spent about 7 hours engulfed in The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which I acquired at a book exchange at work. I started it a few days ago and today I gave in to the decadence of spending the whole day curled up on the couch, not even showering until I was through. Now I'm still stuck in a fog from the story and my inner monologue has taken on the voice of the narrator, as it usually does when I read fiction.

So much for InaDWriMo progress.

There was an interview with the author at the end of the volume. Apparently she used to be an academic specializing in French literature. I thought this question/answer was particularly interesting given how much time I spend reading blogs about balance:

You were an academic before becoming an author. What promoted the change in careers?

British universities are not very happy places for their staff currently, and I gave up academic life for the same reasons as many other do and would like to do. In particular the erosion of my private reading time made me unhappy -- if I cannot escape for an hour or two every day by reading for pleasure, then small problems seem to grow large, and I begin to feel enormously burdened. After five years in the profession I was plagued by the feeling that by some absurd mistake I was leading someone else's life, and was desperate to find a path back to my own. I had always wanted to be a writer, but was impeded by the belief that to be a writer one had to extraordinary, and I knew I wasn't. By the time I was ready to give up my academic career I had realized that while books are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less special than anyone else.

Me-meme

Karina, Sciencegirl, and almost Acmegirl tagged me for this meme.

1.Link to the person who tagged you.
2.Post the rules on your blog.
3.Write six random things about yourself.
4.Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5.Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6.Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

My version will be 6 things I've never done.

I've never...
1. learned to drive a manual transmission car.
2. had a proper job interview. or a formal performance evaluation.
3. been responsible for children overnight.
4. voted for a republican.
5. lived in the same home as my oldest brother for more than ~3 months.
6. met either of my grandmothers.

I'm so behind on blog reading that I have no idea who's left to tag for this so I'm not going to tag anyone. But if you'd like to do it, go for it and you can say I tagged you.

Juiced up!

My new power cord came! I can once again connect to the sweet sweet interwebz. Hopefully the chills and shaking will stop now. :)

More to come.

Barf

I've been away. EGM and I went to my hometown to meet S4's new baby and to see S3 and her family who were visiting from the west coast plus we got to spend a little time with my BFF. EGM got a nasty stomach virus which he graciously passed on to me and my friends (it hasn't turned up in any of the family yet) which really put a damper on things. We both better but still not quite ourselves.

You may or may not be hearing more from me soon. My laptop power cord is on the fritz. fucker.

Impending doom

I put the flannel sheets on the bed. The radiators have kicked on. It's dark when we leave in the morning. There's no turning back: winter is upon us.

More on names

My uncomfortable situation with the person who calls me the wrong name and an interesting post at Accidental Remediation got me thinking more about how our names impact our professional lives.

Short Geologist wrote about how using nicknames (or not) can be a way for some people to show power over others. Since I have a name that can't really be shortened or lengthened in any way, I've never really thought about how nicknames can be used in this way. It has occurred to me that shortening someone's name could be condescending. I never considered, however, that using a long version could be equally disrespectful like it was for Short Geologist. I always try to call people by the names they prefer, but that's more because I don't want to irritate people by using wrong nickname.

I am aware that having especially ethnic sounding names can be a detriment for landing jobs or renting apartments. I imagine that super girly names can serve as similar baggage in professional settings. In fact I have an acquaintance who has described such situations at her work where applicants with funny names have lower odds of getting positions where they have to deal with the public. I think FSP has blogged about this topic as well, but I'm too lazy to scour her archives for the post.

My name is common, but not too common. Even better, it appears in some form or another in many non-Eastern languages so it's manageable for many non-English speakers. I've never really liked how my name sounds, but I now appreciate its practical benefits.

Experiments

I recently listened to a seminar about data that came from experiments. Big deal, you say. It was interesting to me, however, because my research, although basic, is not amenable to small scale, proper experiments. Responses to treatments take a long time emerge and the really interesting work happens at a scale that cannot be easily captured on a lab bench.

Much of the work in my subfield would be better defined as "studies" instead of experiments. Most of the actual experiments are large, long term affairs that attract investigators from far flung institutions who write their own large grants to fund work on some aspect of the experiment. An advantage of this arrangement is that there is very little duplication of effort, which means there is very little scoop risk since everyone knows what everyone else is doing on a particular experiment. The downside is that you can't set up small, independent projects very easily and it's difficult to get much done without outside collaborators.

During that seminar, I was really envious of the students in that professor's lab. It would be so great to set up an actual controlled, replicated experiment in a lab, let it run for several weeks, and then have data. You'd be seeing the fruits of your work all the time! If something didn't work out, you'd be able to try again with so little investment. I think the pace of research would feel so much faster.

I love the work I do and have no desire to change fields. But damn, sometimes the progress seems downright glacial.