No one specifically tagged me, but everyone else is doing it. Lots of people have been too lazy to actually tag anyone, so I'm taking it as an invitation. Academic Cog posted the rules, which helps.
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
7 things (in chronological order)
1. When I was a very small child, my father was an organic farmer. His big cash crop? Watermelons. Later, after the divorce my mother told me she hates watermelons. I like to imagine that is why they divorced. (There are tons of pictures of me as a small child in corduroy with straggly hair, standing next to the trailer we lived. I look very 70's white trash.)
2. After the divorce we stayed for a while at a commune. This is where I tasted pop-tarts for the first time, as my parents were macrobiotic vegetarians.
3. In high school I was a drama geek. Mostly I designed costumes, but I had some small parts, including Jaquenetta in Loves Labors Lost.
4. When I was 16, I traveled to Russia with a group of high school and college students. My last night in there I stayed out all night with a Russian artist I had just met.
5. In college my friend asked me to go with her to an audition and I ended up playing "Old Woman" in Ionesco's "The Chairs." That was fun.
6. Beorn and I met online, before people did that. On UseNet. For a long time I was embarrassed about it, now that seems silly.
7. We now live in a 600 sq ft cottage, that used to be part of a motor lodge. (Isn't it cute?)
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
7 things meme
Did you know?
Beorn and I have given up watching broadcast (or cable) TV. We pay far too much for internet now, as we had to get satellite internet at my grandmother's house and are locked into an 18 month contract. Luckily, many interesting programs are available on the internet. I watch the videos at home, but apparently it's common for people to watch them at work, because CBS's video player has a "BOSS Button." Press it, and a fake email pops up to hide the video.
There are also some weird differences between the players for different networks. CBS's seems buggy and keeps playing the same commercials over and over or suddenly going blank. ABC's works find for me, but you have to click every time the commercial ends, which is annoying. How am I suppose to get my CSI fix???
Saturday, December 01, 2007
I need to be writing my thesis and applying to PhD programs
so what am I doing? Anything but what I should be doing.
I feel really conflicted now, because officially I have already been accepted into the Phd program here and suddenly, they have hired new professors, who work in exactly the subfield I'm interested in. Strangely, three new professors in my discipline were hired in the last year, two in 'hairdressing' department. One of these, lets call him "enthusiastic new adviser," as repeatedly offered to be my dissertation adviser. He also gave me tons of useful advice, recommended appropriate literature, and generally acted interested and reliable. I'm not sure how to take this, because while I'm excited to have found someone who is interested in working with me, I still have a number of misgivings about staying in a program that has basically no support from either the university administration or from individual departments (where the money is.) I don't want to sound like a big whiner (although I'm considering including the word "whining" in my new blog title), but I don't trust the faculty in the 'hairdressing department.' Its not that they aren't nice people, its just that they have no idea of how to work with graduate students and they are wealthy and from upper middle class/upper class backgrounds, so they have no clue. They are generally clueless. Nice, smart, but clueless.
My class background and general poverty are beginning to give me a clue about how people of color feel. A while back, I was involved with a group in which one woman was a Latina. She is a chemist and kind of weirded out by the touchy-feely meeting we had. I really appreciated her honesty though. I forget why this came up, but for some reason she just said to us one day..."I don't trust any of you. You are white people, and when I meet white people I don't trust them, until I learn different." (Or something similar.)
I can understand her feeling. "Class" isn't even part of the vocabulary in this country. I have trouble when I hear people talking about their housekeepers and their trips to Italy. It's difficult for me to take advice from these people seriously.
Here's the unusual situation I was in coming into grad school...
I had a job that in some ways I loved, but it was paying me like a grocery store bagger.
Working part time as a grad student paid me a similar amount to what I was making full-time previously.
Since starting grad school I have worked 75%-100% most quarters. My first quarter in grad school I worked 33% as a TA and 20hrs a week running a field trip program for elementary students. So that was 33 hrs a week, while starting a new grad school. No wonder I was crying all the time.
For whatever reason, I'm a masochist, unless I'm overworking myself, I tend to feel I'm not accomplishing anything. Luckily, as a grad student I have good health insurance. My therapist has been so great.
My point is, I feel conflicted. I have struggled so much with my adviser. I still think she is clueless about the particular project I have been working with her on. In general, she has been unavailable, and given me little to no helpful advice or feedback. Also, there was a lot of confusing about research sites last year. I want to be mad, but still, compared to the other people in the hairdressing department, she is pretty cool.
Enthusiastic new adviser seems to have his heart (and mind) in the right place. I don't want to come off angry and bitter, but when he suggested a particular, senior professor from the 'hairdressing' department as a possible chair for my qualifying exam committee I wasn't sure what to say.
Thoughts on having a newly hired, tenure track professor as an adviser? Thoughts on getting a PhD from a crappy program, a R1 U, but with excellent advisers? Feelings/thoughts on changing PhD programs part way through? Is it worth it?
Beorn is finishing his undergraduate degree and is ready to move to another part of the country and a new graduate school.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Moms, give yourself a break
I love Shannon Hayes recent post, "Homespun Mom Comes Unraveled." Shannon's story was featured recently in the New York Times. Reading these articles got me thinking about the discussion I witnessed last weekend at a screening of The Business of Being Born. Moms are so hard on themselves and each other.
The Business of Being Born is the brainchild of Ricki Lake. Apparently Lake wasn't satisfied with the birth of her first child in the hospital and sought out midwives and home birth for her second. She became somewhat obsessed with the topic, attending conferences and reading all she could. Rather than become a midwife, she decided to enlist the help of a friend, who happened to be a filmmaker. During the filming her friend gets pregnant and has to decide whether to go with a home birth or not.
I enjoyed the movie itself. Some of the statistics and historical footage of hospitals from the early twentieth century were shocking. I didn't realize what the standard procedures in most American hospitals were. The movie is definitely pro-midwife, but I thought did a fair job of being open minded.
On the other hand, the post film panel turned fairly quickly towards accusations and judgment. I don't know if the phenomenon is exaggerated in this time and place, but the pressure to be a perfect mom is on. For whatever reason it was amazingly easy for the discussion on the pros and cons of home birth to turn nasty. Home birth advocates are often highly judgmental of anyone advocating painkilling drugs. One the other hand, doctors are often dismissive of the risks of caesarean sections. According to the documentary approximately 1/3 of the births in the US are caesareans, a much higher rate than an other industrialized nation. The US also has extremely high rates of death and injury to both mother and baby in comparison to most industrialized nations. What's not clear, is whether one factor causes the other, or whether they are both simply the result of a substandard health care system. The movie also implies that in most European countries normal births are supervised by midwives and the outcomes for mother and baby are better. Again, the two things aren't necessarily causal, but it's certainly something to consider.
I haven't had a baby (yet) but the wisest advise I heard during this discussion was for women to share their birth stories with each other. Women have wildly different experiences of labor. Some women have massive orgasms while giving birth, most don't find it so pleasant. When I asked a friend about her experience of having her first baby at home she said, "It was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was like climbing a mountain." I can sympathize, having done some mountain climbing. I'm familiar with the feeling of just putting one foot in front of the other, taking it one step at a time, the entire time thinking to yourself, "I can't do it, there is no way I can do this, I have to stop." Only with a baby you can't just stop and turn back around. The funniest part of the movie was the film a New York midwife giving birth, the entire time whining and whimpering that she couldn't do it.
Many home birth advocates love the book Spiritual Midwifery, a classic from the heart of the counterculture. While I'm fascinated with the birth stories and the gumption of the midwives, I'm not sure the tone of the book is entirely helpful. Denying the fact that labor hurts isn't going to reassure expectant mothers that they can deal with labor. Passing judgment on anyone who decides to get an epidural isn't going to improve things for mothers and babies. On the other hand, the movie pointed out that most labor room doctors have never seen a birth without drugs. Many new moms don't seem to understand that having a caesarean section is major surgery. It's risky. The second or third caesarean is all the more risky.
Useful information about the risks and benefits of various choices is helpful. Declaring one way of giving birth is the only "right" way, no so much.
One Day Until Thanksgiving...
Beorn and I went out to lunch at an Afgani buffet. As we walked back into our little cottage we discussed the fact that we are expecting a call from my father. After all the drama over the summer with my family Beorn and I agreed not to spend the holidays we them. My father never tells me the family plans until a day before the event. We already made plans to have Thanksgiving with another couple and Ian's best friend. So I wasn't surprised to find a message on my cell phone from my father. He called while we were out. He's feeling really bad if he didn't tell me about the Thanksgiving plans, of course he can't remember. He wants us to come to dinner at my grandmother's house. My uncle is cooking. The uncle who threatened to kill my father. The uncle who threated to call the cops on us or to sue us. The uncle who called us "welfare cases." Guess what? I'm not interested in breaking bread with him. My father seems to think it's OK for my uncle to behave that way. My uncle has my phone number, if he wants me to come to dinner he can damn well call me and apologize. I can't believe my father thinks I would be willing to sit down to dinner with my uncle. If I was at all important to my father I think I would rate more than a last minute call attempting to guilt trip me into spending Thanksgiving with them.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Hairdressing as an Academic Discipline, take two
Last winter, almost a year ago, I briefly discussed my discipline, let's call it "hairdressing." What I didn't realize then is that I was up for a rather large ass-kicking related to my involvement in the discipline and the direction of my academic career. Although I didn't know it at the time, April 2006 signaled the beginning of the end of my career in hairdressing.
Sometime in April 2006 I broke my foot. Considering the fact that I had been, once again, rushing from one obligation to another, the universe, it seems to me now, was signaling me to slow the fuck down. Maybe the fact that all my hairdressing classes were held on the second floor of a building too old and run down to contain an elevator should have been a clue. At the time all I knew was that I needed a break. I assumed that I would get back to the hairdressing curriculum as soon as I was well. But that fall I decided I had better not take more hairdressing classes, and instead took research units and became, unfortunately, embroiled in a confusing attempt to do fieldwork related to hairdressing. After nine months of "field work" I came out with virtually no data, completely frustrated and demoralized about applied research in hairdressing. During this time I also began to confront the mess that is qualitative data coding. It took me six + months to convince my adviser that the coding on her data was incomplete and inconsistent.
In the spring of 2007 I attended my first two academic conferences. A large one and another small one, recommended by my adviser. To my surprise, during the large conference I attended few hairdressing related presentations, being attracted to another sub-discipline entirely. The presentations in this new sub-discipline opened my eyes. True, many of these folks where unnecessarily pretentious and obsequious, but at least they were interested in the kinds of questions I was. In contrast, I felt strongly out of place at the small conference. I was neither comfortable with the practicing hairdressers reporting on their latest hairdressing projects, nor the academics trying to mix research and applied projects in hairdressing. The quality of research presented varied wildly, but more importantly, it became clear that hairdressing researchers were afraid to admit the fact that some of their projects were less than successful. No one wants to write up a new haircut if that cut is unpopular with it's recipients or in other ways problematic. Unfortunately, the haircutting process is not simple, requiring a significant investment of time and money, and so academic hairdressers need to produce journal articles for each hairdressing project they are involved in.
Also, during the 2006-7 school year I spent a significant amount of time searching for an internship at a hairdressing office. I had a couple of interviews, but it became clear that entry level positions involved the rapid production of haircuts using computer programs and long hours in the office for low pay. It would take me 3+ years as an apprentice hairdresser before I could take my hairdressing exam. During that time I would have trouble making a living and paying my student loans. Hours would be long and hairdressing offices are not known to be family friendly. Once I had a hairdressing license it would likely be quite a time before I could have my own hairdressing office, which is what I really wanted. If I really had my heart set on hairdressing maybe I would have stuck it out, but during the last school year I discovered other interests, other passions, and people who shared my interests.
If I hadn't had my ass kicked repeatedly, I might not have realized that hairdressing was not my thing. Don't get me wrong, I'm still fascinated with many aspects of hairdressing and may pursue it as a hobby or side business, but I have let go of my academic aspirations in that area. My new subdiscipline fits much better with my central concerns and questions. People researching in this area aren't expected to be both practitioners and researchers. My questions and interests are no longer marginal. Also, I no longer work for the hairdressing department, which abuses it's TAs terribly.
In my experience, this is the way of life. At the time I never understand why I'm facing a particular trouble, but looking back, I see the pattern, the direction I'm being pushed. The key is to understand the difference between patterns that direct me into more productive directions and those which, shaped by the over-culture (whether you call that capitalism, the patriarchy, or the man) seeks to put me in "my place."
Joss Whedon, a Writer Before His Time
Beorn and I have been watching lots of Sci-Fi since we no longer have cable. Giving up on broadcast TV (including cable) is a relief. I know lots of people enjoy their TiVo, but that's one area in which I don't feel the need to be surveilled. Now I'm watching the occasional new episode online and mainly relying on our extensive video collection. Recently we re-watched the entire FireFly series and Serenity. When FireFly was first broadcast in 2002 I wasn't a big fan, but after five years the series has grown on me.
In 2002 FireFly's western setting appeared strange, in my mind consigning it to B-movie land. For whatever reason I couldn't get past the mixture of space travel and the wild west. Fast forward to 2007 and the mixture doesn't seem so strange. Considering the recent surge in science fiction and fantasy TV series, Firefly's eccentricity seems less geeky and more visionary.
Once you get past the strangeness of the western costuming (I used to be a costumer for a community theater company, so costumes are important to me.) the characters are just as challenging and fascinating as those from the more widely appreciated Buffy. Like the new BattleStar, Firefly deals with challenging, relevent themes, like what happens to veterans after the war is over and the freedom to be unhappy.
The special effects rather than distracting from the story, either through their showiness or amateurishness, are almost invisible, a natural part of the world. Characteristic of Joss's world, the female characters break out of stale stereotypes. Kaylee, the ship's mechanic, manages to be girly, sexy, and a mechanical genius all at once. The character isn't tough or boyish because she has mechanical abilities and although she sometimes displays little-girl characteristics, she's not asexual as female geeks are frequently portrayed.
If there is anything to find fault with in either the series or the movie, it's that the male characters are less interesting than the females. At times the men seem flat and predictable in comparison. (Also the naming of the series, which rightly should be called, like the movie, Serenity.)
If you haven't watched these sci-fi classics, or were turned off five years ago, I highly recommend you take a second look now.
