RBOC: blah

• I was planning to write a post with real content tonight, but my THREE HOUR commute this afternoon kind of sucked the will out of me. And some of you wondered why I hate snow.
• We're supposed to be getting the biggest storm of the season right now. If it's still snowing in the morning, I'm staying home. I already called my carpool buddy to warn him. On one hand, this is a bummer because I prepared some lab work that I'd really like to do. On the other, a snow day snuggled in my pj's, working on my paper sounds pretty good.
• My traffic-induced grouch was partially mitigated by the return of Lost. Ecogeoman and I get super into it, as do a few of my coworkers. We will surely discuss it tomorrow (if I go in). I think the show is off to a pretty good start The writers need to come back now so the season gets completed.
• I ended the month with a little money left over, which I transferred to my savings account today. Good news for that resolution.

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.

Flight of the Conchords

Ecogeoman and I have been a little obsessed with Flight of the Conchords lately. They are a comedy band from New Zealand who play hilarious songs in a totally deadpan style. The did one of those long HBO specials, then they got a regular 30 min show on HBO. We don't have cable, but we got the first few episodes from Netflix. It was so funny we watched some of them twice.

This is a clip from the HBO special. It makes for a much better ear worm than Part Time Lover.

This almost ruined my day

I am breaking my no blogging at work rule to bring you this: I have the song "Part Time Lover" firmly lodged in my head. I had to take public transit today, and some jackass was playing it on a saxophone really loudly in the subway station this morning (read: extra loud acoustics). I'm all for street musicians, but that was just too much too early.

On the bright side, I had a great meeting with Awesome Technician yesterday about my paper. Now I'm all psyched up to incorporate the changes she suggested.

Sister time

I just spent 24 lovely hours with S2 (my sister) and her friends. She had a very stressful 2007, so her husband conspired with her friend to get her some R &R. I live in a more interesting city about 6 hours from where they live, so two of S2’s friends brought her here for the weekend. We spent Saturday downtown, shopping and walking around, and had afternoon tea in a fancy restaurant (nice, but sounds better than it was). Then this morning, I took her to get her hair cut by the same woman who cut mine last week. It was a fun and spontaneous thing to do and she looks great.

I miss living near my family so much. I’m sure that if I lived near them, I would spend tons of time hanging out with my sibs and their kids. When I’m bored here, I often think how great it would be to call up one of my sisters to just hang out with no plan. I feel like now if I call a friend, I have to invite them to do some specific activity, not just chill.

On the other hand, I don’t think my sibs could ever really substitute for friends. When I choose friends, I look for people with similar views so I can relax and be myself. In fact, I’m probably a little closed minded in some ways, e.g. I am not open to racist, homophobic, grossly materialistic, etc. people. I didn’t choose my family and I will love them unconditionally, so I steer clear of topics about which I suspect we disagree. I would stop nurturing a friendship with someone who has really different values, but I’m never going to drop a family member. In that sense, I feel like I keep big chunks of my personality out of my family’s view. But the unconditional love sure is nice.

Student vs. Employee Part 1: Compensation

If I’m an employee, I am laughably undercompensated. If I am a student, then my university is a bunch of suckers for giving me so much money to get this degree.

I think I’m somewhere in between student and employee, but much closer to employee. Research Advisor has funding for my thesis project, so if I weren’t doing it she’d have to hire a technician at a much higher rate to get the work done. I am lucky enough to have an outside fellowship, so neither she nor my university have to pay me (well, my university department supplements my stipend a little). If I didn’t have that funding, I would have to TA for my salary stipend. Teaching assistants play a major role in universities like mine, covering most lab and even some lecture sessions for so much less pay than faculty. In that sense, they fall into the laughably undercompensated category.

For those students with a tuition waiver, the value of tuition can be considered a big contribution to their compensation. That means a student at a private university gets compensated dramatically more than one at a public institution, even if their salaries stipends are the same. It probably doesn’t feel like more pay to the person who gets a waiver for expensive tuition.

In the end, I feel that grad school is a luxury. I am very lucky to become so highly educated, that there are opportunities for me to do such interesting work, and that I don’t have to spend my time on nothing but food acquisition. But I’ll be happy when grad school is over, both because I’m tired of its obligations and I want more pay.


It seems like the grad student's real position is a perennial issue. Posts like this made me want to write about it too, although more explicitly. More to come.

That's encouraging

Today I learned that five out of six candidates for a faculty position in my department are women. Cool.