The places my brain meanders

I have been writing all day and am now a little mental. In case you were wondering about the weirdness of this post. I am writing the discussion section of my paper. It is the final section to finish while I wait for my last bit of data that depends on some critters (who don't seem to want to grow). I think my critters know when I am getting close to publishing and suicide as a way to thwart my efforts. "Damn you scientist lady for your experiments, we are going to all die to teach you a lesson" is what they are thinking. Seriously, all I need is ONE more replicate. But no, I can't have it, instead I have to keep waiting and waiting and waiting for these sensitive fuckers to grow. Don't sneeze, or they will all die. Don't breathe on them, or they will all die. I shake my fist at you and your god damn insanely sensitive, die for no good reason, critter ways!

BTW where are the pictures of angry brown women shaking their fist? When I try to google it all I get is pages and pages of angry white woman. It makes me want to post my own pissed off picture of myself but I don't really want my face out there. If I had more time perhaps I make a picture and pixelate my face and maybe my chest area to make it look like I was doing something naughty when I clearly am not.

I worked all day today and wrote a whole page (with references) of my discussion section. I don't know how fast other people write but this is really really good for me. I think I am slowly getting better at the writing thing because what I wrote doesn't totally suck ass. Yeah me!

In other news, something is wrong with my left foot. It has been aching for a while and the last few weeks the pain has been getting way worse. I went to the foot doctor some time ago and got the special, super expensive, shoe inserts and that helped with my arch pain but not this other pain. So today I went back and they gave me a cortisone shot and this special foot stretcher thingy to wear at night.

The shot really freaking hurt and went deep into my heel and kind of scared the crap out of me. But... BUT this will hopefully work and I won't be in too much pain to take the baby for a walks at the end of the day anymore. Hopefully, this will also help me get more active and continue my weight loss regime.

Oh and I have a co-mentor now, the mammals person said yes to me and my fellowship ideas. So now I have those to write too, and another paper, and a review all before December. I made my to-do list and it made me freak out and ask our lab manager for a hug. Instead he asked me how I was going to possibly do everything on my list in three months, called me crazy (in a good way), and made me some coffee. Which is kind of helpful I guess.

And finally my ~11 month old daughter is full on walking now, without the assistance of walker, and keeps taking huge face plants into various objects at daycare. They have called me twice today to let me know she has bruised her cheek and her forehead. Apparently, she is completely unfazed by it and continues to meander through out the room, while holding her bottle, and babbling like a mini-version of a drunk sorority girl on spring break.

Co-mentor

So I am going to apply for a K award based on an idea that I had quite some time ago that my professor wasn't fully ready to get behind. However, now boss-man is coming around in part because he is realizing there is serious mula to be had when doing mammalian studies, not that we don't love our critters, but mammals pay the big bucks.

Anyway, due to the fact that I am going to be looking at the intersection of two, that is right TWO, diseases now I went looking for a co-mentor for the K award. I have plenty of experience with our critters, with mammals, but not with this second disease. I spent a bunch of time searching the interwebs for info on people at our university who have recently worked with both this disease and mammals. I found such a person and went to my professor to ask if I could contact him.

He wasn't sure this person was the right person so he wanted to do his own looking. After a month of emails, discussions, and getting shuttle from this person to that person. Do you know who he ended up with in the end... the original person that I found. Oh sweet irony. I feel a bit vindicated but can't be mad at him since he spent all this time advocating on my behalf.

Anyway, we are having a phone convo about it tomorrow. He seems interested and we have heard good things about him as a PI so hopefully this will come together nicely.

Cross your pipet tips for me!

We are not the Kardashians

So one of my vices is reality TV and I have sucked my husband into this as well. A particular show we like to watch and then discuss is Keeping up with the Kardashians. Their semi-scripted shenanigans are fun to watch and make fun of and in there most recent episode the family goes for a super cushy vacation in Bora Bora.

Looks lovely right?

This is the conversation we had before going to bed that night:

Hubbie: "I am sorry I can't take you on a vacation to Bora Bora."

PQA: "But I don't want to go to Bora Bora"

Hubbie: "I wish I could take you to somewhere like Bora Bora, when I am done with law school and making the big bucks"

PQA: "But I don't like beach vacations, I don't want to go to Bora Bora either"

Hubbie: "Fine a vacation like that somewhere that you want to go, I promise we will do it in the future"

PQA: "Why are you so fixated on this vacation thing?"

Hubbie: "I just wish that I could relax like that without worrying about how when I get back from vacation I will have twice as much work to do"

PQA: "We are not the Kardashians. We are normal people, and normal people always have twice as much work to do after a vacation."

Hubbie: grumble. grumble. SNORE

Since he fell asleep mid conversation (again) I am going to finish my thoughts here. The trick to having a relaxing vacation, dear husband, is not to travel halfway across the world to a super humid hot place that is extremely expensive. It is to let go of the work world mind when you go on vacation and not obsess about what you are going to have to do when you get back. You can do that by the pool, or in the mountains, or on your drive home from work. You don't need to go to fucking Bora Bora to get relaxed.

Also I would prefer if you not make the big bucks post law school because that means you will be working 80 hr work weeks for somebody else and we will never see you and you will miss all the cool stuff with our daughter. No vacation in god damn Bora Bora is going to make up for that shit. I would rather you be home at 530 pm every night and not have to commute 2 hrs a day and have our vacations be little weekend trips to the mountains. 

So fuck Bora Bora, is basically what I am saying. 

double face palm

Dear Grad Student,

I have question.

Why did you go online look up the very common, everyone in the lab uses it, antibody to protein X, and order it? Why didn't you use the catalog number on the tube, or the list stuck to the freezer where the antibodies are stored, or the protocol I emailed to you, or the list that was emailed to everyone?

WHY?

Are you silly enough to think that the company only has one antibody to protein X? 

I see, you are. 

Well, thanks for ordering the wrong antibody, aliquoting it and mixing the old and new aliquots in a way that no one can tell the difference. I really appreciate the new and novel ways you are constantly coming up with to fuck with my experiments. It makes my job so much more of an adventure. 

Baby Talk vs Science Talk

So this weird thing has happened to me every since I had my supremely cute baby... no one asks me about my science anymore at work. Every time I run into the department chair (who is a woman) or other professors everyone asks me out the mini-me is, how motherhood is going, etc.

It is not that I mind talking about the mini-me or making small talk but before this when I ran into other people in the department we would talk science. How is your project going, that sort of thing. Which was actually helpful in that sometimes people would have solutions to issues I was having. But also it kept me on the radar of some pretty important PIs who could be useful in the future.

I am worried that they know think of me as a mom first and a scientist second. Am I just being paranoid? Most everyone that asks me about the baby has children and families themselves and in general the campus and my department are very family-friendly. I have yet to run into the overt sexism that I encountered during my PhD program (which is good).

But still, I can't help but feel like my science is get the shaft a little bit. I mean how else can I let them know about some super cool technique I invented or how wonderfully my undergraduate mentee did during his presentation. I am an extroverted person, I have mad people skills, and lots of people know who I am which is great, but I also want them to know that I am doing good science. This kind of positive word of mouth has served me well in the past and I don't want to lose it now. I present at a seminar series once a year but that really doesn't seem enough. I haven't come  up with a good way of switching topics from parenthood to science in a two minute conversation yet.

Has anyone else run into this? How do you deal with it? Am I making too big a deal about it?

Reaching out

This weekend was one of the lower points of parenthood. My husband has thrown his back out and rather then help with the baby has become another person to tend to. On top of that we both came down with some kind of 24 hour stomach bug that the baby had on Thursday. Baby bounced back in like 6 hours, we were not so lucky. But I am choosing not to dwell on this spectacular poopy weekend.

Instead I want to write about what it feels like when ever the baby needs something... a diaper change, food, a nap, etc and she crawls to me and reaches up for me. I can't really communicate fully the sweetness of this experience. The way it makes me feel when this adorable tiny person trusts me, and only me, to fix what is wrong for them. When I have the power to makes things less scary just with my touch. To be someone's safe harbor, to be someone's home, to be trusted so fully and completely is a feeling that no words can describe.

Maybe because I have never had this feeling about my mother, who has always been unpredictably mean, I didn't really realize that this would be part of my role as mother. I wasn't expecting this, the gentle sweet joy of little chubby arms reaching up to me for comfort.

The 'Help"

I read 'The Help' recently and found it really disappointing. I would not really recommend the book to people and don't plan on seeing the movie, which it seems is even more annoying than the book. Here are my problems with the book...

1. It was badly written, I didn't like the style of prose
2. It ended really abruptly
3. I found the main character immensely annoying
4. It made me uncomfortable about how it presented the relationships between the main character and the black maids but I couldn't quite put my finger on why

Then Cloud linked to this post by Dr. Bernestine Singley about what it was like to be the help in 'the help' which is awesome, you should totally read it, and all the comments. It is a very mature conversation happening with lots of interesting links. But Dr. Singley very succinctly summarizes and puts into clear prose where my vague feelings of uncomfortableness were coming from. This led me to a tangent of sorts on the issue.

I have encountered quite a few people that think it is inappropriate that I pay someone to clean my house twice a month. I am perplexed by the idea that employing household help is wrong on principal. (Live-in help I do find a bit weird though and need to think about some more). I personally don't think there is anything wrong with paying someone a proper salary to do a defined set of household tasks while treating them with respect. In fact, I don't think I could work outside the home and maintain a family if I didn't do so.

There seems to be this belief that household work (usually defined as women's work) is demeaning by definition and I think we need to make the distinction between the work itself and the way people who are doing the work are treated. I don't think that cleaning toilets or doing laundry or taking care of someone else's children is inherently demeaning work. Anymore so then mowing someone's lawn or taking care of their gardens is. I think the way that domestic workers have been treated, and continue to be treated in the majority of situations, is what is demeaning and explotative and wrong.

Anyway, it made me realize how much of the shame/guilt/wrongness of hiring household help is centered around the de-valueing of women's work. After all, as my husband said, working men don't experience all this drama over hiring a gardner. It is not as if they are somehow a bad person for asking someone to do the tasks that they don't have the time or desire to do.

Food vs Me

I am a fat lady. I have always been fat as an adult but having a baby has made me really really fat. Nice people tell me that I am not fat but what they really mean is that I am not the negative things associated with the word fat, like lazy, or dirty, or stupid. I am well kept, put together, intelligent fat woman. But I am still fat.

I do not wish to be fat, I hate being fat, but for a long time I have been fat. I have had a horrible unhealthy relationship with food. I have a tendency to binge eat when stressed. I will eat whole boxes of crackers or 8 bananas or the stereotypically carton of ice cream. I have, on occasion, tried unsuccessfully to become anorexic but thankfully have a really weak gag reflex and couldn't make myself vomit. If I am not paying attention when I eat, I will, without fail, dramatically overeat until I feel ill. For most of my life when I had something to celebrate I would do it with food, when I had a bad day I would treat myself to happiness with food. I can not resist free food, if someone brings in candy I will not just have a piece, but ten. If someone brings in cookies I will have five, never one. Food has been for a long time both my enemy and my friend. In the past when I have tried to diet or exercise it makes me think about food more and my weight more which depresses me and leads to further binge eating and weight gain. Oh the irony.

The weird thing is that my self-esteem and my waistline have had an inverse relationship. When I was a child, teenager, young adult I was slightly overweight (at most). But I felt horrible, I hated myself, I believed everyone found me disgusting, that no one would love me ever, that no one would hire me or want to work with me because I was fat, and so forth.

As I have gotten older and fatter, I am more confident and happy and optimistic about my life. Which is kind of bizarre situation isn't it? There is obviously a lot of shit there to unpack. Shit I need to unpack if my current 532 attempt at getting healthy is going to stick. The thing is I really don't want to examine my relationship with food too closely, its painful, its hard to admit that I can't seem to control certain behaviors even when I know they are bad for me. No one likes admitting that they are weak, least of all someone like me who is strong and in control in every other way. I succeed and conquer almost every other thing I have ever tried in my life but food... oh food... it thwarts me every time.

I say food, and not exercise, because I have always been an active person and my relationship with exercise is pretty normal. When I have the money for a gym membership and free time I go. I ride my bike to work most days, I go for walks, I like to hike, etc. Obviously for weight loss I need to up my energy expenditure but this is not the problem area. This I can do and be okay with. I don't love the gym but I can get my ass there when I am not a sleep deprived zombie new parent.

Which brings me to why I am trying once again to get healthy, I am a parent. I may manage to lose weight, I may not, but what I really really don't want to do is pass on my extremely unhealthy relationship with food to my daughter. I don't want to burden her with my shit. So what is my shit exactly? Where does it come from? I can for the most part trace it back to my own mother, which makes me part of scary cycle, one I want to break forever. I don't want to do to her what mother did to me. And least you think I am parent-blaming to excuse my behavior let me tell you a few stories...

My mother always bought clothes for me a size too small so I would be uncomfortable and encouraged to lose weight. I was placed on my first diet by mother when I was six. I can not remember a family meal as a child where I was served the same food as the rest of my family. I often left the dinner table hungry and would sneak food late at night after everyone was asleep. My mother would always point out obese people to me and say if you don't stop eating like a pig you are going to look like that person some day and no one will ever love you. Seriously, she said this EVERY time she saw a fat person. My second grade teacher was a really large woman and every time she picked me up from school she would say this.

My mother would say things like "you would be so pretty if only you lost some weight" to me regularly when I was in elementary school. She told me that my father was ashamed to come to teacher/parent night for me because I was so fat (this was a lie). She used to offer me money to lose weight. She would pinch my stomach and ask me why I wasn't more ashamed to look this way. When I was sixteen she offered to pay for lap band surgery because no one would ever respect a woman professionally who was fat and she wanted to see me succeed in life (for perspective at the time I was 5' 8" and 155 lbs). She would say really super manipulative things like "I only say these things to you because I love you, all your friends think the same thing, but they don't love you enough to say it." And of course my favorite, "someday you will have kids and you will understand". She recently tried to convince me to stop feeding my 10 month old daughter formula and instead switch to skim milk so she doesn't get fat like me.

The sad irony of all this is that I wasn't fat when she was doing all this, I was very healthy normal weight for my height, but that wasn't good enough for her, she wanted me to be THIN damn it! Of course that never happened and once I left home I became clinically overweight, I think in part to spite her. My mother's insidious comments just stayed in my head, my unhealthy bizarre relationship with food had been forged and took on a life of it's own, and I have attempted to break the pattern over and over again with incremental successes at best. Oh the power that we mothers have. Even just typing all this out makes me want to go get a candy bar to soothe myself.

*sigh*

So I am trying once again to change how I think and interact with food, I am trying to unpack and put away the weird emotional baggage that goes along with the simple act of eating. But I have a long way to go. Getting healthy and losing weight, at least for me, is about a whole lot more then just calories in and calories out.

K - awesome!

Alright people I failed at the F32 thing so I am going big or I might be going home (well teaching or industry probably).

But really the news is I have been cleared by my P.I. to give chase to a K award.

This along with a paper, review, and pilot experiments for the K award is what I am working on.

YEAH! and HOLY SHIT!

I will not fix your problems for you for free

I recently signed up for an internet service, I don't want to go into details cause it is kind of personal. Anyway, their interface totally sucks ass! Which considering that I am paying $40/month for it is rather ridiculous. So after attempting to use the interface for about 20 minutes to no avail I sent the following email to their customer service:


I just signed up and your website totally sucks. I am connected over a stable ethernet connection and your interface window crashes every time I search for a *blank* or try to enter one. If this is the level of service I can expect I will be canceling tomorrow.


I received the following email back:


Dear PQA,

We appreciate your patience while we work to find the cause of the problem you are experiencing. Would you mind answering the questions below so that we may help you to resolve this issue?

1. What error messages you receive, if any? Can you paste them into this message?

2. On what page or step in the process do you get them? What did you click on to get the message? If you were using the blank program, what did you enter?

3. If you use Windows with IE8 or higher, have you tried using the Compatibility View button?

4. Do you have a Mac or a PC?

5. What operating system you are using (Windows XP, etc)

6. What browser are you using? (Chrome/IE/Firefox)

7. What version of the browser is it? (Under Help/About)

8. Are you accessing the Internet on your work or home computer?

9. Does your office network or home computer have a firewall?

10. Do you have Zone Alarm, Zone Alarm Pro, Norton Internet Security, or any other similar computer protection software on your computer?

Your response to this e-mail will surely help us get a better understanding of the problem you are experiencing.

Here is the thing, I am PAYING for this service and they want me to spend time helping them de-bug it. To that I say F-U! If I am paying you, I am NOT going to spend time helping you fix the broken service that I am paying for. I reported the bug, for that you should be grateful, beyond that... hells to the NO! So I sent this email in response:

To whom it may concern:

I am happy to answer your questions. I estimate it will take at least 30-45 minutes to do so, as I currently make $20/hr I estimate doing so will cost me $10-20. Once you refund this money to me, I will happy to help you solve the problems with YOUR service. However, seeing as I am the one paying you for the service I feel no obligation to help you fix the bugs in your system.

Sincerely,

PQA

Too snarky?

Religious nerds are the worst!

via college humor

Best line in the whole thing.... the end result is little to no premarital sex (hee!). Also I tots love Settlers of Catan and wish I had people/time to play it more.

Baby vectors

I present to you an image of the movement vectors of babies in the infant room of my daycare for a period of ~10 minutes. 

The mini-me is the dotted line in case you couldn't tell, and she actually crawled over a couple of sleeping babies as well. Why yes, she is rather hyper, thanks for noticing. I can't even imagine what is going to happen once she starts walking.

How do lab people perceive each other?

via http://sotak.info/sci.jpg
hat tip to pharyngula

Saris, spanx, and lab coats

We went to an Indian wedding this Sunday and I was in shiny heaven. All those beautiful colorful saris with all kinds of rhinestones, gold, and shiny on them. It was so pretty to behold.

What was really impressive to me was how comfortable the outfits looked. I have seen saris before but there was something about seeing 100 different kinds of saris all at once that left an impression on me. Saris do not appear to be clothing that requires one to wear torture devices underneath, like spanx. I think if a dress is so unflattering that even super-fit thin people need to wear "flesh compression devices" underneath, then this is some badly designed shit, isn't it?

Side note: I just went to the spanx website and WTF is up with this shit for pregnant women??? 

Are you fucking kidding me! Ugh.

Anyway, all this shiny has made me look seriously into buying a bedazzler for my lab coat. Not sure what will happen to the dazzles once my lab coat is professionally laundered but if I go through with it you can be sure I will be posting pictures!

Compromise

I listened to a story from NPR today on what the word compromise actually means and it included this great quote from On Compromise and Rotten Compromises by Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit: 

But even so, the choices we make say something about our character. In fact, Margalit suggests that we really should be judged by our compromises more than by our ideals. As he puts it: "Ideals may tell us something important about what we would like to be. But compromises tell us who we are."

This really resonated with me. It has been bouncing around in my head since I heard it. So often a person is praised for being uncompromising, and there are times and places where that is called for, but I think compromising is praise-worthy too. 


I tend to see compromise as a weakness, as giving in, but compromise is what gets things done politically, in a marriage, amongst friends, in the workplace. I want to celebrate it more and not see it as such a negative. Life is not black and white, we live in the gray, and we all need to bend a little bit for each other. 

No I will not make my own almond butter

I was at Trader Joe's which recently opened a store about five blocks from where I live. I HEART trader joe's and now there is one super close which is super awesome. Anyway, we desperately needed groceries. We were down to eating pasta with canned tomato sauce and feeding the baby only milk because we had no proper solids about. So after a long day at work and then coming home to play with the family, feeding baby, making dinner, and doing the dishes I headed out to TJ's at around 9 pm. The hubbie was home watching the baby monitor doing laundry and law school stuff.

I am comparing the sodium levels of almond butters versus peanut butters because I want to make some sort of almond butter ball thingies for the mini-me to feed herself. She has no teeth but really really wants to feed herself and I am constantly looking for more mushy but not too mushy things I can give her.

While I am doing this some a random guy in his late 40s comes up to me and says "you know it is really easy to make your own almond butter?". My response is along the lines of I have no time. He then proceeds to tell me again in more detail about how easy it is and doesn't take that long to make. This whole time I am not making eye contact, trying to read labels, and give the signal of GO AWAY. Again I tell him I don't have time to be making my own fucking almond butter (I didn't swear but in hindsight perhaps I should have).

Seriously, it is almost 10 pm on a Monday night and I am grocery shopping. Obviously I don't have time to be making my own god damn almond butter. Yes, I realize it would be cheaper and *maybe* healthier but what the fuck dude? I don't want to discuss recipes right now. Again I tell him that I have a baby, work, and have no time. Which prompts him to share with me how now he makes his own pancakes for his kids who are 11, 8 , and 5 (side note : when did 3 kids become the norm?) with wheat germ, and almond flour, and some other shit. At this point I am actually walking away while he follows me and continues to talk to me.

I realize I live in a small town and usually I enjoy random conversations with people as part of the charm of living in a small friendly town. But there is a time and place people. When I tell you I have no time and the grocery store is almost closing... take the hint, leave me the fuck alone! This was some serious mansplaining shit and I wish I had had the energy to call him on it instead of just politely ignoring him and walking away.

Good Minions

Good undergraduate minions are difficult to find and hard to train. But when you find the right combination of eagerness to learn, native intelligence, and good attitude it is like winning the lottery. They start to run your experiments from start to finish without supervision, they analyze data and plan future experiments before you get to it, they start on their own mini-projects, they present at lab meeting, in short they become grown-up scientists.

It is a joy to watch someone's critical thinking skills coming into being. It feels so beautiful to me, like watching the sunrise over the ocean. I have had the distinct pleasure of having had three excellent minions. I love my minions and when I get a good one I do everything I can to shove every spec of knowledge I have into their brains. I also always make sure to let them know how much I appreciate their hard work.

One of my awesome minions recently graduated and has gone on to a real job making 'real' money (his words not mine). This particular minion worked with/for me while I was on maternity leave. He was a fantastic, amazing, wonderfully efficient and effective lab assistant. He single handedly generated two of the figures for my paper while I was on maternity leave. Do you have any idea how amazing that is? I went and had a baby and came back three months later to lab to find mountains of statistically significant data. STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT DATA! I appreciate him to no end and feel very lucky to have had such a talented person working for me.

Today he stopped by to say hello and brought me these flowers as a thank you.

He that he doesn't much like his job as a wilderness fire fighter even though it pays really well. He enjoyed being a volunteer firefighter while he was an undergraduate but he thinks working in the lab has ruined him for other kinds of jobs. He said working with me taught him how enjoyable it is to be able to work independently, to use your mind, and now he wants a job where he has to think not just 'follow orders'. He is considering some kind of graduate school, but isn't sure exactly what he wants to pursue quite yet. He told me that he never thought he was that smart before working with me.

So although I didn't receive my NIH fellowship, I still feel like a winner today.

Fellowship Fail

I did not get the fellowship. Sad times at the PQA home. The main criticism was that I have been in my lab too long (2+ years) and the 'training potential' is not high enough. I got bonus points for switching fields for my post-doc but then penalized for taking so long to submit a fellowship application from my new lab. My frustration is that it took me this long to apply specifically because I switched fields and had to learn a whole new system of critters to work with.

le SIGH

So close, yet so far away.

Atheists are funny

I love Ricky Gervais, I think he is hilarious and the Office is brilliant, and I love that he is an outspoken atheist. It looks like he is working on a new show called "Afterlife" about an atheist who dies and goes to heaven. Sounds interesting doesn't it?

Link, video, stuff - fest

I learned about how indirect sexism has been described as creating a "chilly environment" that can be insidiously hurtful to women.

Yes, I play video games, no you can not see my boobs is a great post that explains why I personally avoided playing video games online back when I had time to play them.

Don't douche, also this new ad campaign for summer's eve is really douchy.

Other women sweat shit-tons like me and discuss creative solutions in the comments section.

This article on raising siblings to be friends, reminded me of how lucky I am to have such a good relationship with my brother as child AND as an adult.

Via ">Boing Boing a really cool, energy efficient way to bring light to poor communities:



I don't know why but I find this video of Maru the Japanese cat super star really entertaining: