Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

XX, or, chemical freedom I’ll regret in the morning

...and everything else, Academics, AMBI

A few days ago, a comment was left for me in another blog’s comments section, saying Hope you’re well…your blog sounds awfully depressed lately for somebody who’s doing so well as a bioethics person in training!!! Which is a sweet and kind sentiment, although perhaps one that should have been left to me in my own blog, or email, or not the major blog for the field I’m going in to – but that’s being incredibly nitpicky towards a nice thought. Anyhow, the point was to not criticize the message, but answer it, at least in part, with something that I’ve been thinking about a lot since returning from Denver. In fact, I’ve promised to write something for the Women’s Bioethics Blog about it, and it’s being a woman in a field dominated by men.

This dominance starts in my department, which is a shift for me. While the faculty is pretty gender-balanced, the student body is not. There are five female graduate students actively taking classes. Of them, two have long term boyfriends that they spend their spare time with, and the other two have families. I’m the only single, childless girl in the department – at least of the students who’re there, and not ABD and thus who knows where. But on top of that, which is weird in itself (you have to remember that CHID was 60-75% female students) for me, they treat me differently. Us differently, I should say. For a while, I had thought it was just me, until I started talking with another new female student who confirmed the same thing was happening to her.

Being talked over. Having our ideas dismissed, and then hearing some other guy bring up what we were saying a few minutes later and hearing a great conversation build up around it. Being left out. They go out, you see, the guys. Beer, night’s out, poker, weekend parties at each others homes. The girls aren’ t invited. I thought it was me, then we thought maybe it was just the first years being left out – but no, the first year guys are all invited.

No girls allowed in the club. I had thought that idea had gone out of style a long time ago, but apparently not.

So you know, I move across the country, excited about a program that stopped existing a month after I got here. Excited about a nice group of people who seemed friendly and open and like my former department, except speaking my language…and then have to hear them talking, at the start of every week, over all the fun things they did over the weekend together. Things they did without including the girls in the fun, that they talk about in front of the girls.

It took me a while to realize that it was gender coming in to play. I really did just assume it was me, at first. I can be abbrasive, and I’m not one of them. I’m not a philosopher. I have this weird background that makes them cringe, and I think in such a different way than they do, they don’t know what to do with me. (Or, I think, why I’m there.) But then I found out that it wasn’t me, it’s not even that I’m new. It’s because I’m female, and that’s something I’ve never had to deal with before – and how do you? I mean, is saying “oh hey, you’re discriminating against me?” really going to do any good or change any minds? I don’t think so.

That aside, I noticed the gender imbalance while at ASBH, and I noticed how I end up having to act in those sorts of gender imbalanced situations: either very aggressive, which makes me uncomfortable, or wall-flowering in the corner, which also makes me uncomfortable. But it seems like I either have to scream to get noticed, or fade into the background, be ignored, and spend my time silently watching and learning. This is also not a familiar place for me to be – either ends of extremes of behaviour.

What I do need to do is ask a couple of the women professors here out to coffee, to talk, and just make connections with the women I’ll be working with. But it’s sad and frustrating that I’ve to do that – that the only way I don’t have to shout to be heard is if I’m talking with another woman.

My Heart Will Go On

...and everything else, life and living

Apparently there’s some universal mind-thing going on; in the last couple of days, an awful lot of people have commented on how down this blog has been. Which, okay, fair – I’ve been whining a bit and not posting much substance.

So I’ll post even less substance, but at least it’s funny substance. And hey, I saw this performance! Which is even cooler.

The Lonesome Trio at Ten Fu@#ing Years (The Concert)
“The Lonesome Trio at Ten Fu@#ing Years (The Concert)” on Google Video
See, it really happened. I mean, I know it happened because I saw it again mostly sober on Thursday night, (which is more than I can say for, say, Ed, who was having “issues”), but still. It’s probably funnier sober, because you’re not sitting there thinking “uhm, what did I just drink? Did someone spike my drink? Is this a really sweet hallucination, or what the fuck?” But this way you, too, can see it.

Complete with balls.

brief update

...and everything else

A brief, I’m still alive update:
* Mom is still sick. She’s had repeat fluid buildups, and they’re running extensive tests to figure out why she’s not getting better. I am unabashedly worried at, at this point.

* I just got back from NYC. Saw Colbert tape again, which was interesting, and spent time exploring the city and running a couple of necessary errands. Also got to hear The Lonesome Trio perform, which was oodles of fun. Had a good time talking to two of the three band members after the show, too – nice guys.

* School is going. I’ll be glad to have this semester over with.

* It’s very hard to make vague comments that are just complaining about life, when all you want to do is complain and not actually email the specific people and talk to them about it, when the specific people read the blog and then say things like “was that me?” the next time you see them. *cough*Glenn*cough* :p

* I was delayed for hours, due to ice, leaving NYC today. So no real celebration of Bodhi Day for me, but I did end up talking about bioethics to a lot of different people while waiting for the train. A couple of the porters and Amtrak workers were being friendly, for reasons that are filed under the “people treat me oddly in NYC” category, and we got on to what I study, and suddenly there were lots of questions. And one guy ended up calling someone whose grandson has MS; she’s been trying to learn about stem cells and getting confused about it all, and he wanted to know if I could make sense of it for her. So, I did my best stem cells 101; I think I might have actually changed some people’s minds about things. I know I certainly enlightened them to other things they hadn’t thought of, like issues of GMOs and our food supply. (I swear, Michael Pollan should give me a percentage, I recommend that book to so many people.)

It was probably good to do the talking, even though it made me nervous. It gave me a reality check with how much I do actually know, and reminded me how much I enjoy talking to people about this sort of thing. Still, kind of weird to figure out how to word a reply when someone says “will this cure my grandson?” Guess I need to get accustomed to that, eh?

Jesus, my ability to form anything resembling a well-crafted sentence is apparently shot. I’m alive, life continues to be surreal, I’ll think about typing up my thoughts on NYC (from the last three visits) and uploading photos this weekend. Have some other things on my plate first, though!

the wrong place?

...and everything else, life and living

I’ve been feeling very out of place here, lately. Fill in your preferred analogy. I spent some time talking to a professor yesterday, and a small group of people today (quite by accident), and was feeling a bit better about everything. Sitting in on a class where I knew the subject comfortably, and talking about crit theory over a late lunch, helped, too.

“Fine,” I think to myself. “First year adjustments, it’s just a painful transition to make…” and then I get home to find out Mom’s pneumonia took a turn for the worse last night, and she spent almost eight hours in the emergency room. They drained two quarts of fluid, to reinflate her lung, which had collapsed, and diagnosed pneumonia complicated by pleural effusion (thanks, Sherlock – the fluid wouldn’t have told me that). And now my irrational response is to run to the airport and jump on the next flight back to Portland, even though I’ve only been homeback in Albany a handful of days. Mom’s resting comfortably, and Dad’s there, but I feel like I should be there, too. When I was in Seattle, I could have been with relative ease…

…and I’m back to where I was, wondering if this is where I’m supposed to be. It sounds like my mother, but I have to wonder if the fight I put up to get out here, and all the subsequent problems, have just been the universe’s way of saying I don’t belong here. (The tiny, analytic part of my brain would like to comment that a ceasing of these swings of mood would be nice, any day now. Just be miserable or happy, but the going back and forth is really getting tiring.)

Tracking the Speed of An Idea

...and everything else, Academics

This is an interesting idea, tracking ideas flowing around the net. It’s for an MLA presentation, so be a good person and go help the poor researchers gather data.

The fearless blogger trying this says,

People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?

Most memes, I’d wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are””to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett’s rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium”””skyhooked” into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

For my talk at the MLA, I’d prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers. Had I paid attention when “DISADVENTURE” and “My Morning” made the rounds, I could’ve completed this little experiment without revealing its existence. Since I lack foresight, I’m stuck announcing my intentions and begging participation. Here’s what I need you to do:

What s/he needs you to to do is go here and read the rest, and post similar to your own website. 😉