"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
I’m reading through a pile of documents several inches thick, for a certain project I’m working on, and I came across the most baffling term: postmodern terrorists.
The hell? Are they sitting around discussing Derrida until the very thought of post-structuralism causes them to strap a bomb on?
I think I’m most surprised by the fact that this mutation has happened before.
Two years after passing Prop 71, California has finally issued major grants for stem cell research. $45 million makes CIRM the largest financial backer of hESC research, ever.
Now let’s see what those institutions do with the money.
In hindsight, let me just say that if you think this is about you, it isn’t. Unless you consider “being about you” to mean “I keep meaning to mention this, because this is what I think of every time you mention thin skin…”
I have come to the conclusion that I need to grow thicker skin. Between having people tell me, over and again, that they don’t see the point to bioethics and intimating that there’s something dirty about being in an applied philosophy field, my irritation with being treated differently because I’m female, and my (admittedly bemused) exasperation at some things I can’t really go into, and being flat out told a couple of times that I just need thicker skin, well – I’ve decided to stop ignoring the suggestion.
I’m going to grow thicker skin. For those of you who aren’t involved in the DIYbiotech movement (also known as the biotech hobbyists), Natalie Jeremijenko is an amazingly creative inventor who works in that interesting subsection of arts and technology. I became familiar with her, and the other folks in the biotech hobbyist movement with my last adviser, who has a strong interest in this area, too (and in fact, a bunch of us ran with it and Merleau-Ponty for a class on the intersection of arts and science; but I digress). And one of Natalie’s projects is the Skin Kit, in which she not only talks about what makes something human, and how much has to be removed before it’s non-human, and even the ethics around the idea of growing skin, but she publishes the directions to grow your own skin.
And even tells you how to make it glow.
So I figure, this is the perfect solution! I’ll literally grow thicker skin!
I’m very tired. All humour aside, I only got about two hours of sleep last night, and right now it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any tonight. I’m trying to push through the tired, but one of the problems of this deep tired is that my brain gets stuck. Right now I’m stuck on the idea of expectations, and specifically how badly I react when people say something like “I’ve heard so many good things about you!” or “so’n’so’s really been talking about you a lot, you’re apparently awesome” and so forth.
Believe me, if you ever want to see me react badly, that’s a good way to go. I just… I get very flustered, but also uncomfortable and awkward. And my brain apparently decided to stick here, tonight.
I think, however, there’s a very reasonable rationale behind the discomfort. The more people praise you to others, the more chance you have to fall flat on your face, fail, be a disappointment. I think I’m simply afraid that people are going to talk me up so much, there’s no way I’ll be able to live up to the expectations.
I don’t like failing. I had a marriage dissolve because of mismatched expectations, and I don’t want the same thing to happen professionally.