Yeah, Metro opens doors...
Then it can't close them again and it offloads you.
(Offloaded twice at Gallery Place in the last week. Sigh.)
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Thursday, December 11, 2008
--Blech--
That pretty much sums up how I feel this week. On Sunday, after a productive weekend where SO and I ran our errands, went to the gym, and I tackled my novel to the tune of adding 3,200 words, my throat started to dry out and I knew I was in for it. I don't get sick very often at all - and when I do it is usually either really quick (<24 hours) or a few days of dried out throat and congestion. This was the latter, though occasionally I also felt feverish. This is the worst thing I've had for quite a while (with the exception of our Hawaii food poisoning incident, but that's not really sickness).
It didn't help that I've had a busy week.
On Sunday night, with SO's mom and sister in town for them to go look for a wedding dress and us in the guest bedroom, I hardly slept at all. The next day I got into work early, stayed until nearly six, and then went to an event a few blocks away. I got home after 9 pm. I slept somewhat better but my throat was still on fire. Tuesday I was in early again so I could get a few things done before a 9 am conference call. My SO's family left. I went home just hoping to sleep but my dad called; he had somehow managed to get a nasty piece of spyware on his computer so SO and I spent about an hour and a half helping him out with that and there went my extra time for sleep.
Yesterday I was really lagging, despite having a 9 am off-site meeting I had to get to (I was a little late). One thing about feeling under the weather is that even though I didn't take any time off or miss any activities, my productivity was still pretty shot. So last night I got home, cooked a quick dinner (I hadn't had anything to eat since lunch the day before except for a couple of protein bars), drank some water, took some Nyquil at 7:30, and was asleep just after 8:00. It was good sleep and I'm on the mend - I still have congestion but the dry throat is all but gone. And I could have stayed in bed even longer this morning but I did sleep pretty well last night.
It especially didn't help that the temperature has been fluctuating like mad.
On Tuesday it was in the 20s. On Wednesday it was in the 60s (!). Today it is in the low 40s. The outside temperatures are actually less problematic, though, than the inside temperatures. Here in D.C. we like to superheat everything and it makes it really uncomfortable when the outside temperatures are bouncing around. The Metro is probably the worst culprit; those trains must be disease incubators. On the way in today it was a chorus of coughs and snuffles, mostly by people bundled up sitting on trains where the temperature must frequently be something like 80 degrees. Even our apartment, if we don't keep the windows open and the fans going, can get ridiculously hot and stuffy very fast. I'd rather be a little chilly once a while than be totally overheated.
It being dark and gray outside also hasn't helped much. I could never live in a really cloudy place (to be fair I should say "again": where I went to college was pretty darned dismal).
Today I feel better (not perfect, though) and maybe will even go to the gym and do some cardio tonight. I really appreciated the Nyquil-induced sleep I got last night. My SO got home shortly before 9 and I heard her as if through a thick fog. She got into bed right away and I asked her if she was really tired; she wasn't and got up and I went back to sleep and that's the last thing I remember for a while. I had a dream that I was at a high school reunion of sorts, but there were way more people there than were in my class and a lot of them were unfamiliar. I found myself sitting mostly with the same group of people I'd been friends with back then - the whole reunion self-segregated into old cliques. There was some subplot involving immensely expensive beer ($7.95 for a bottle of Budweiser, I recall) and a cash shortage on my part (I woke up at one point wondering why I couldn't just charge the beer), but the fundamental feeling was one of disappointment. I was just one face among many; no one much cared that I had come, and I was bored. Why had I come?
I definitely feel like I've been in a trance this week.
It didn't help that I've had a busy week.
On Sunday night, with SO's mom and sister in town for them to go look for a wedding dress and us in the guest bedroom, I hardly slept at all. The next day I got into work early, stayed until nearly six, and then went to an event a few blocks away. I got home after 9 pm. I slept somewhat better but my throat was still on fire. Tuesday I was in early again so I could get a few things done before a 9 am conference call. My SO's family left. I went home just hoping to sleep but my dad called; he had somehow managed to get a nasty piece of spyware on his computer so SO and I spent about an hour and a half helping him out with that and there went my extra time for sleep.
Yesterday I was really lagging, despite having a 9 am off-site meeting I had to get to (I was a little late). One thing about feeling under the weather is that even though I didn't take any time off or miss any activities, my productivity was still pretty shot. So last night I got home, cooked a quick dinner (I hadn't had anything to eat since lunch the day before except for a couple of protein bars), drank some water, took some Nyquil at 7:30, and was asleep just after 8:00. It was good sleep and I'm on the mend - I still have congestion but the dry throat is all but gone. And I could have stayed in bed even longer this morning but I did sleep pretty well last night.
It especially didn't help that the temperature has been fluctuating like mad.
On Tuesday it was in the 20s. On Wednesday it was in the 60s (!). Today it is in the low 40s. The outside temperatures are actually less problematic, though, than the inside temperatures. Here in D.C. we like to superheat everything and it makes it really uncomfortable when the outside temperatures are bouncing around. The Metro is probably the worst culprit; those trains must be disease incubators. On the way in today it was a chorus of coughs and snuffles, mostly by people bundled up sitting on trains where the temperature must frequently be something like 80 degrees. Even our apartment, if we don't keep the windows open and the fans going, can get ridiculously hot and stuffy very fast. I'd rather be a little chilly once a while than be totally overheated.
It being dark and gray outside also hasn't helped much. I could never live in a really cloudy place (to be fair I should say "again": where I went to college was pretty darned dismal).
Today I feel better (not perfect, though) and maybe will even go to the gym and do some cardio tonight. I really appreciated the Nyquil-induced sleep I got last night. My SO got home shortly before 9 and I heard her as if through a thick fog. She got into bed right away and I asked her if she was really tired; she wasn't and got up and I went back to sleep and that's the last thing I remember for a while. I had a dream that I was at a high school reunion of sorts, but there were way more people there than were in my class and a lot of them were unfamiliar. I found myself sitting mostly with the same group of people I'd been friends with back then - the whole reunion self-segregated into old cliques. There was some subplot involving immensely expensive beer ($7.95 for a bottle of Budweiser, I recall) and a cash shortage on my part (I woke up at one point wondering why I couldn't just charge the beer), but the fundamental feeling was one of disappointment. I was just one face among many; no one much cared that I had come, and I was bored. Why had I come?
I definitely feel like I've been in a trance this week.
Friday, December 5, 2008
December Plans And A Few Other Things
I didn't set any real goals for November, but after a slow start I did OK. I worked out ten times, which is not great but considering we had house guests for about seven nights total and my back was acting up (I've since gotten a footrest for work, which - along with my lumbar support pad - has made my back feel much better) it's not terrible. I had several weeks where I didn't write a thing but wound up pounding out around 9,000 words for the month, most of it in the last week or so. I was reading pretty steadily, and that's good. I blogged a fair amount towards the beginning of the month (when I wasn't doing anything else), but then it dropped off. That's alright, I guess, considering how much I wrote during that time. I don't want blogging to conflict with writing fiction.
Anyway, it probably makes sense to make some plans for December. I expect December will be a busy month at work - at least the first three weeks of it will be, and we have guests coming for a few days this weekend. On the other hand, I don't think we're going anywhere for Christmas. So let me be fairly ambitious with respect to exercise and aim for 14 workouts. (An absolutely perfect December would probably see me working out 17 times; while that might be great for cardio, I worry it might actually lead to a bit of overtraining with respect to weights. I actually seem to do better working out a little less when it comes to weightlifting.)
It'd be nice to post a half dozen or so blog posts this month. I've no shortage of ideas for posts; it's mostly just a matter of finding the time.
With respect to writing, I'm not sure it makes much sense anymore to go for a word count like 10,000 words. I am about to begin writing one of the pivotal scenes, and one that I expect will launch the sequence of events leading immediately to the end of the book. I had to take a few nights just to plan out the scene and make sure I captured as many of the ideas I had for it as I could. I'd like to write a good chunk of the scene this weekend if I can. After that, I'm hoping I don't lose the momentum again until the end. Could I finish a first draft by late February or so? If I work hard, it certainly seems possible. All that being said, I guess I was wrong at the beginning of the paragraph: a word count goal still makes some sense, so let's go for 10,000 again, but let's try to make that a minimum. I'm at around 83,000 words right now.
I've started to think of ideas for New Year's Resolutions, and there seem to be an abundance of possibilities. One is to drastically (but gradually) reduce my consumption of caffeine and artificial sweeteners. Cold turkey works when you're at home (like I was in early September), but not when you're at work sitting 30 feet from a giant refrigerator filled with free all-you-can-drink soda. Another involves eating less carbs and more protein to try to trim up my middle a little (my SO and I were talking about trying to have salads with meat for dinner at least two nights a week; just as important for me would be limiting the number of times each week I have pasta and bringing my consumption of food at work down). I'm not overweight, but if I take off my shirt what I see is a pretty well-built guy carrying a little extra around the middle. If I could get rid of that extra, it'd be great. But I'm not going to "diet" because I don't want to lose weight and I especially don't want to lose muscle mass (given a choice between keeping the muscle and the extra or losing both I'd choose the former). Then, I would also like to set some writing goals. I have some short story ideas, as I mentioned in a previous post, plus I am really interested in making another attempt to get some of my stuff published. This could go on while I revise my novel and think through some ideas for what the next big project will be. A detailed plan with goals would probably be helpful to keep me on track and motivated.
The debate over whether Jimmy Lerner is dead continues on his Wikipedia page. Someone says he OD'ed. Someone says he shot himself. One says it happened in February, another says it was in April. But I'm almost positive he's still with us. For one thing, I found him on whitepages.com, living in Miami with his (new, I guess) wife. It's the right Jimmy Lerner too, given you can click on a "background search" page and see all the towns where a person has previously lived. His number was even listed; honestly, I could just call up and ask! For another, he's not on the Social Security Death Index. And last but not least, if he committed suicide or died there'd be some media coverage somewhere. Now, whether he's ever going to write something else is a different story (and it'd be a shame if he didn't), but I think he's still alive.
For the better part of a year, I've been periodically visiting the blog of a female postdoc in the life sciences who is having a hard time of it. Her blog was around long before I visited, and evidently she was always having a hard time of it. I started off quite sympathetic but as time has progressed and her posts grow more shrill and blaming of everyone but herself (or maybe her posts stayed the same and I just got a better sense of who she actually was) I grew less and less so. Last night I looked at her blog and she had yet another post and I just lost patience and left a comment asking when she was going to finally do something to get out of her rut. I'm not sure if I'm even going to go back to her blog to see her answer; I'm pretty fed up.
What really annoys me about her is that she can't get it straight in her head which of her problems are because science in general sucks, which are about her particular personality not meshing with others, and which are about her being a woman. She is extraordinarily sloppy about parsing out the causes of her angst. I finally articulated this to myself (and her, in my comment) last night, after struggling for a long time thinking there was something wrong with the whole way she portrayed herself and her situation but not being able to put my finger on it. The problem with such muddled thinking is that it forces everyone into a fake either/or dichotomy. EITHER all her problems are the fault of the evil white men who control science OR she is a whiny bitch and everyone is treated the same in science. Obviously neither of these is a true or constructive way to think about things.
Women do have it harder much of the time in science. I know someone who was fired from her postdoc for getting pregnant. There is crazy sexual harrassment going on in many places. The whole tenure-track clock conflicts directly with the biological clock. And science requires women to be poor and unstable during their reproductive peak.
But this is never what the postdoc whose blog I read is complaining about: it doesn't apply to her situation at all. Her problem is she thinks people don't listen to her. And because some of those people are men, it's because she's a woman. (Oddly, my own experience seems to indicate that it is female faculty - not, in general, male faculty - who are really tough on female students and postdocs.) Her PI doesn't give her enough constructive feedback, but he spends more time with the newer white male postdoc, and so it must be because she is a woman. Etc. etc. First of all, she's not a minority and everyone in this story appears to be white, so it's not clear to me what the relevance of the white label is, anyway, except to set up a strawman to blame.
Her problem seems to be that she doesn't pass the personality test (and if she is anything in person like she is on her blog, she must be utterly insufferable). Now, passing the personality test is important in many fields, but in science - where the PI wields tremendous power and the postdocs have none - it is especially problematic. That's a problem with science in general.
One example and then I'll stop. She was PO'ed a few months ago because she was mentoring a grad student in another lab and the grad student was taking credit for her ideas with his/her own PI; meanwhile, when the student didn't take her advice or screwed something up, the other PI was blaming her. So it was lose-lose. (And a grad student is obviously below her on the totem pole so it's not like she's always on the losing end of the power dynamic.) Several commenters suggested quite reasonably that she should either cut the grad student off or start following up discussions with this grad student by sending e-mails reiterating what she said and cc the other PI: this would both get her credit for the good and be CYA for the bad. (This latter solution is something almost all of us in the professional world have had to do at some point.) But she refused, she thought it was a bad idea. And just kept complaining. And seemed to somehow think her being a woman made it worse.
When I first found her blog I was really incensed by the negative commenters. I started off feeling pretty defensive about her, since I know how bad a bad postdoc can be. But now I've become one of those negative commenters. I can't stop her slow self-immolation, and it really pisses me off when she randomly ascribes various things to sexism without providing the slightest bit of evidence, so I think I've got to stop visiting. And it occurs to me that there is a little irony here: I'm being the stereotypical male in thinking I need to solve her problem, even as she spits back hate at all the men on the planet for no apparent reason. Her basic problem is not that she's a woman in science; it's that she's not willing to hold herself responsible for her continuing unhappiness. I asked her, in my comment, what she was going to do about her rut...but the answer is probably nothing.
The strength of inertia among those who want to be TT professors in the sciences, even when the situation is obviously hopeless and destructive to one's psyche, is something even this heartless white man can relate to.
Anyway, it probably makes sense to make some plans for December. I expect December will be a busy month at work - at least the first three weeks of it will be, and we have guests coming for a few days this weekend. On the other hand, I don't think we're going anywhere for Christmas. So let me be fairly ambitious with respect to exercise and aim for 14 workouts. (An absolutely perfect December would probably see me working out 17 times; while that might be great for cardio, I worry it might actually lead to a bit of overtraining with respect to weights. I actually seem to do better working out a little less when it comes to weightlifting.)
It'd be nice to post a half dozen or so blog posts this month. I've no shortage of ideas for posts; it's mostly just a matter of finding the time.
With respect to writing, I'm not sure it makes much sense anymore to go for a word count like 10,000 words. I am about to begin writing one of the pivotal scenes, and one that I expect will launch the sequence of events leading immediately to the end of the book. I had to take a few nights just to plan out the scene and make sure I captured as many of the ideas I had for it as I could. I'd like to write a good chunk of the scene this weekend if I can. After that, I'm hoping I don't lose the momentum again until the end. Could I finish a first draft by late February or so? If I work hard, it certainly seems possible. All that being said, I guess I was wrong at the beginning of the paragraph: a word count goal still makes some sense, so let's go for 10,000 again, but let's try to make that a minimum. I'm at around 83,000 words right now.
I've started to think of ideas for New Year's Resolutions, and there seem to be an abundance of possibilities. One is to drastically (but gradually) reduce my consumption of caffeine and artificial sweeteners. Cold turkey works when you're at home (like I was in early September), but not when you're at work sitting 30 feet from a giant refrigerator filled with free all-you-can-drink soda. Another involves eating less carbs and more protein to try to trim up my middle a little (my SO and I were talking about trying to have salads with meat for dinner at least two nights a week; just as important for me would be limiting the number of times each week I have pasta and bringing my consumption of food at work down). I'm not overweight, but if I take off my shirt what I see is a pretty well-built guy carrying a little extra around the middle. If I could get rid of that extra, it'd be great. But I'm not going to "diet" because I don't want to lose weight and I especially don't want to lose muscle mass (given a choice between keeping the muscle and the extra or losing both I'd choose the former). Then, I would also like to set some writing goals. I have some short story ideas, as I mentioned in a previous post, plus I am really interested in making another attempt to get some of my stuff published. This could go on while I revise my novel and think through some ideas for what the next big project will be. A detailed plan with goals would probably be helpful to keep me on track and motivated.
The debate over whether Jimmy Lerner is dead continues on his Wikipedia page. Someone says he OD'ed. Someone says he shot himself. One says it happened in February, another says it was in April. But I'm almost positive he's still with us. For one thing, I found him on whitepages.com, living in Miami with his (new, I guess) wife. It's the right Jimmy Lerner too, given you can click on a "background search" page and see all the towns where a person has previously lived. His number was even listed; honestly, I could just call up and ask! For another, he's not on the Social Security Death Index. And last but not least, if he committed suicide or died there'd be some media coverage somewhere. Now, whether he's ever going to write something else is a different story (and it'd be a shame if he didn't), but I think he's still alive.
For the better part of a year, I've been periodically visiting the blog of a female postdoc in the life sciences who is having a hard time of it. Her blog was around long before I visited, and evidently she was always having a hard time of it. I started off quite sympathetic but as time has progressed and her posts grow more shrill and blaming of everyone but herself (or maybe her posts stayed the same and I just got a better sense of who she actually was) I grew less and less so. Last night I looked at her blog and she had yet another post and I just lost patience and left a comment asking when she was going to finally do something to get out of her rut. I'm not sure if I'm even going to go back to her blog to see her answer; I'm pretty fed up.
What really annoys me about her is that she can't get it straight in her head which of her problems are because science in general sucks, which are about her particular personality not meshing with others, and which are about her being a woman. She is extraordinarily sloppy about parsing out the causes of her angst. I finally articulated this to myself (and her, in my comment) last night, after struggling for a long time thinking there was something wrong with the whole way she portrayed herself and her situation but not being able to put my finger on it. The problem with such muddled thinking is that it forces everyone into a fake either/or dichotomy. EITHER all her problems are the fault of the evil white men who control science OR she is a whiny bitch and everyone is treated the same in science. Obviously neither of these is a true or constructive way to think about things.
Women do have it harder much of the time in science. I know someone who was fired from her postdoc for getting pregnant. There is crazy sexual harrassment going on in many places. The whole tenure-track clock conflicts directly with the biological clock. And science requires women to be poor and unstable during their reproductive peak.
But this is never what the postdoc whose blog I read is complaining about: it doesn't apply to her situation at all. Her problem is she thinks people don't listen to her. And because some of those people are men, it's because she's a woman. (Oddly, my own experience seems to indicate that it is female faculty - not, in general, male faculty - who are really tough on female students and postdocs.) Her PI doesn't give her enough constructive feedback, but he spends more time with the newer white male postdoc, and so it must be because she is a woman. Etc. etc. First of all, she's not a minority and everyone in this story appears to be white, so it's not clear to me what the relevance of the white label is, anyway, except to set up a strawman to blame.
Her problem seems to be that she doesn't pass the personality test (and if she is anything in person like she is on her blog, she must be utterly insufferable). Now, passing the personality test is important in many fields, but in science - where the PI wields tremendous power and the postdocs have none - it is especially problematic. That's a problem with science in general.
One example and then I'll stop. She was PO'ed a few months ago because she was mentoring a grad student in another lab and the grad student was taking credit for her ideas with his/her own PI; meanwhile, when the student didn't take her advice or screwed something up, the other PI was blaming her. So it was lose-lose. (And a grad student is obviously below her on the totem pole so it's not like she's always on the losing end of the power dynamic.) Several commenters suggested quite reasonably that she should either cut the grad student off or start following up discussions with this grad student by sending e-mails reiterating what she said and cc the other PI: this would both get her credit for the good and be CYA for the bad. (This latter solution is something almost all of us in the professional world have had to do at some point.) But she refused, she thought it was a bad idea. And just kept complaining. And seemed to somehow think her being a woman made it worse.
When I first found her blog I was really incensed by the negative commenters. I started off feeling pretty defensive about her, since I know how bad a bad postdoc can be. But now I've become one of those negative commenters. I can't stop her slow self-immolation, and it really pisses me off when she randomly ascribes various things to sexism without providing the slightest bit of evidence, so I think I've got to stop visiting. And it occurs to me that there is a little irony here: I'm being the stereotypical male in thinking I need to solve her problem, even as she spits back hate at all the men on the planet for no apparent reason. Her basic problem is not that she's a woman in science; it's that she's not willing to hold herself responsible for her continuing unhappiness. I asked her, in my comment, what she was going to do about her rut...but the answer is probably nothing.
The strength of inertia among those who want to be TT professors in the sciences, even when the situation is obviously hopeless and destructive to one's psyche, is something even this heartless white man can relate to.
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