only a month?

Dear me, has it only been a month since I last updated this journal? It feels like much longer. I've spent the last 2 days baking gingerbread and gingerbread cookies. I just mixed up a batch of a new recipe Robert found, and used my cuisinart for the first time ever. It was quite convenient; the butter actually looked sandy. Tomrrow is my birthday and I have to wake up in 7 hours to go hiking with my grandfather. Should be exciting.

Has my enthusiasm for life temporarily left me?

In the very distant past, in the age of Napster and before the advent of facebook, Thanksgiving used to be a big rocking party. We had two days off--two!!--and I remember always gearing up for thanksgiving and feeling quite festive when it came. Now, not so much. I don't have to go into lab tomorrow, because my main activities for now are reading papers and doing homework, and I'm not even all that enthused about the prospect of not going to lab.

Maybe it's because all my friends are much further away, geographically, and inviting them over tomorrow night just isn't going to work. Maybe it's because I'm older and have been disappointed more often. Maybe it's because I like my work, and don't feel particularly overworked, and so I don't feel like I need or deserve this break. I'm excited to see family on Thursday and Saturday, but I'm not necessarily excited to not go into lab. But on the other hand I don't feel that excited about going into lab either. Hmmm.

I discover food blogs, obsess a little, and wonder if perhaps this is nothing to be ashamed of

I called my grandmother this morning. She was really really sick over the past few weeks and it's a huge relief to hear her sounding happy and cheerful, and to know that she can go out for walks again. I told her that I made waffles for breakfast. Her reply? Oh that's wonderful. But you know, those things are too tasty, you have to watch yourself. I laughed it off, but that's the typical response I get from my grandma and my mom about various new endeavors I've attempted. Like when, about a month ago, I told my mom that I got worms for composting and she told me that I have a very patient husband, and that I should keep him away from other women so that he doesn't try to compare me to anyone else.

Anyway, so I think that these kinds of comments from my family have kept from truly getting into something. And to an extent, they still do.

But this last summer things were a little different. First of all, I'm older and wiser now, and have a husband who doesn't believe in the idea of moderation. Second, I lost weight in China (I'm not sure why, but I think that swimming a lot spring quarter had a lot to do with it. I never lose weight when I start swimming, but I do tend to lose weight when I stop swimming. This has happened to me only twice now, so this isn't too scientific a conclusion). I think I only lost about 5 pounds, but it was enough to make me feel better about my body. Furthermore, the fact that I could lost weight while eating tasty food made me thing about quality vs quantity of food. We always had a large amount of food in our house--I think this had to do with the excitement of having access to massive quantities of food that ex-soviets necessarily experience--and no one in my family has particularly good eating habits. So while we're all pretty healthy and not obese, we don't exactly have slim bodies at all. And this made me very very self-conscious all through high school, and through some of college. Anyway, having visited China made me think about how we view food; maybe it's better to spend more money on a small quantity of a really tasty thing, eat it, enjoy it, and then stop eating it. It helped that I came back to a summer with no research to do, and no real plans other than moving to San Francisco. So I read about food (and also investigated composting). Then we went to San Diego, and oh boy was that a lifechanging trip for me. First, I was on my own for a large part of the time. Second, I wasn't really counting dollars. So in terms of what we ate and what we did, the point was to maximize enjoyment, not necessarily get the most for our dollar. I tasted a mojito, I had spanish food, I truly enjoyed a shakespeare play for the first time in ages. This was all very sensual and very epicurean andd very nice, and a very welcome change from college.

In particular, at this lovely Indian Restaurant called Monsoon, in the Gaslamp district, I tried saag. Which is something I've tried before many times. It's basically Indian creamed spinach. But this time, I returned to my shiny new apartment in San Francisco and thought, hmm, I should find a recipe and learn how to make saag. And so after a google search, I found a recipe on a lovely food blog and then I learned what a food blog was. Oh my! People obsessively writing about food. My mother would never approve, or rather, my mother would never judge this to be a valuable use of time. And yet, how appealing. I read a read some more. I learned that mojitos require a lot of love from bartenders. I still haven't made one, but when I decide to try I know that I'll have lots of help from the internets.

I think the point of all this is that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about and reading about things that my mother would never think to do. My mom says that she is not very domashnaya--she doesn't stay at home and tend to her household, because she has bigger and better and more exciting things to do like ski and climb rocks and hang out with uber-cool 20-something year olds (who are now 30-something year olds) from poxod.com. And while my mom actually does cook very tasty food very well, and has a deceptively impressive garden and beautiful (and reasonably clean) house, all this stuff that she does around this house was always done as somewhat of an afterthought, at least in my view. And so I never learned how to do certain things because I felt like it would be shameful to think about them. But I don't feel so bad about my interests in cooking and composting and gardening now. Cause I'm a grad student now, I have no children, and so no matter what I do I won't be my mom. So I guess I can just be happy being me.

Grad school frustrations

There is a fine line between a friendly, social atmosphere where I feel free and comfortable asking questions, and a distracting, unproductive atmosphere. Yesterday, I felt like that line was crossed. I felt like I got very little work done, due to unstoppable complaining and lab drama that I won't describe in detail, but that has to do with not all the grad students in the lab getting along.

To be fair, I like drama to an extent. It entertains me, it makes my life more fun, and it keeps me from having to invent drama. I think if there were no drama I would make some up just to amuse myself. But I don't like it when drama becomes destructive or distracting. Sometimes I think I'm being insensitive, because I am just new and I will maybe complain just as much in the future; other times I just think other people need to be more easy going, at least professionally.

How I do physics today

1.) Bang head against table.

2.) Find typo in revered professors lecture notes

3.) wait 3 hours for said professor to confirm that typo is typo

4.) eat lots of oatmeal and chocolate chips

5.) write down 2 lines of problem set answers

Repeat steps 4 and 5 until thoroughly disgusted with myself.

It may not be efficient, but I'm slowly understanding angular momentum. Hooray!

Lectures and classes and learning

Yesterday, I returned to lab traumatized by Statistical Mechanics class. I came in making a face that apparently amused my labmate enough that she asked me what was wrong.

"Class was BORING" I tell her. She laughs. "No, I mean it, it was REALLY BORING." She laughs some more.

"You know, class isn't always supposed to be exciting."

Yes it is folks, especially when you're a graduate student. See, learning is fun. If it wasn't fun we shouldn't do it, or more precisely, shouldn't try to make that our profession (which, in my idealized little world, is how a graduate student ought to be defined).

We were covering electrons in metals. I've learned about electrons in metals three times now. It's incredibly important. And, in my experience, incredibly painful and incredibly boring. Why is it so boring? Was it boring to the various dudes who developed it? I hope not. Is it boring to our professor who teaches it? Maybe, but I'd like to think not, because if it were boring to him he shouldn't teach it. So then why is it boring to me? I'm interested in semiconductors, or at least I appreciate them. Someone should make fermi statistics and density of states fun to learn about. Please? Any takers?

I stayed home today for the first time since starting grad school because I felt intense nausea all last night and this morning. Were I not on birth control pills I would be certain that I'm pregnant; when I talked to my mom last night and told her I've been feeling down and immobile for the last few days she asked me if I'm pregnant. So, although I've never been pregnant, I imagine that what I experienced this morning was a mild version of morning sickness. I'm better now, thanks to time, lots of fiber-rich foods like carrots and apples, and the close proximity of the toilet.

I've been sort of working on my quantum mechanics problem set since I woke up, but I've also turned to the internet for solace. First I asked the internet why I'm nauseous. I learned that some people do experience nausea as a side effect of birth control pills. In fact I knew that already, but I'm skeptical that the pills alone are responsible for this because I've been taking them for more than three years without problems.

Then I asked the internet if its okay for me to gorge myself on food today. You see, in this current nauseous state, eating makes me feel better. I think that the food gives the nausea-causing things in my stomach something to distract themselves with. But I'm scared of gaining massive amounts of weight. Or even small amounts of weight. Because I feel like I'm on the border between where I'm happy with my body and if I cross that border I will enter the unhappy with my body regime. It doesn't ruin my life, or even really keep me from doing things that I'd like to do, but it does make a pretty significant difference to me when I feel good both about how I look, and when I just physically feel good and comfortable.

The reason why I turned to the internet for solace is because I discovered food blogs this summer. This summer had lots of culinary discoveries for me. And the relationship between food and weight is an obvious one, yet learning to appreciate food made me reexamine how I connect my eating and my weight. I haven't come to any new conclusions--and I still eat lots of chocolate, although I do it unapologetically--but it's an interesting dillema where people write about tasty food and still have to face the reality that they don't want to fall into an abyss of obesity, or even mild chubbiness.

And it turns out that many of these food blogs that I like so much, and would link to if I didn't feel like figuring out hyperlinks in blogger was way way way crossing the line into stealing precious time from quantum mechanics. Yes, they think about not turning into complete and total fatties. That's all I really want to say about it, because going into more details is embarassing, since all my friends are thin and beautiful.

I learned that my nausea was probably caused by some meat that I ate for lunch yesterday. It is in the lab right now, and I now feel compelled to throw it out tomorrow. I feel bad, because I put a lot of effort into preparing it, but it's better to throw it out than to get sick again.

I miss my lab. I want some warmth, and fuzziness. And until Robert comes home this evening suppose I will seek it out in steamed cauliflower and angular momentum representation matrices. And maybe some chocolate chips.

Prudent life decisions?

Over the last week or two I've had several conversations with fellow grad students who seem to think that the world is a force they must fight with. They seem to think that the world is basically out to screw them over, and they have to fight it in order to not be screwed over. I think I understand where they're coming from. Resources are scarce; they always have been. A couple of thousand years ago people had to fight various forces of nature in order to find some grub and not become the grub of a bear in the process; now, they must fight the force of society to not be unemployed and starving and homeless. Or something.

I wonder, then, why do I not feel this way? Is it because I'm female? Because I'm married to a smart, kind, sane, and gainfully employed man? Because my parents made sure I was never hungry, weren't abusive, and put my safety and education and health quite high on their list of priorities? Why do I not feel like the world is out to screw me over? I feel like I'm limited by my own motivationl; opportunities abound, and I think I'm more limited by not taking advantage of opportunities that are presented than by the lack of opportunities.

Stress time

Last friday, i decided to drop my useless Electromagnetism class and take this useful and well-taught statistical mechanics class. Because it is five weeks into the quarter, I have a fair amount of catching up to do. I am currently working on a problem set for this class, and the last 12 hours have been fruitless. I need to get my ass over to campus and ask someone for help.

I've consumed two fairly large pieces of chocolate in the last hour. This does not bode well.

Voting with your feet

I'm about 100 pages into Howard Zinn's "People's history of the United States." It's interesting, but not very new or shocking, and irritating when it gets sentimental. One of the things he mentions in his chapter on the Colonies is how white people would often end up living with Indians and choose not to return to white civilization when given the chance, whereas no Indian chose to join white civilization.

This idea caught my attention because I believe that people's choices reflect their values. We hear so much about our American values being destructive, and yet many many people choose to come to America, and not just people who are suffering or are refugees. My family came as refugees, yes, but many people came for work or grad school and tried to get green cards and stay. So I wonder a little bit sometimes why people criticize our country so much and yet choose to live here.

Furthermore, there are things like better healthcare and sanitation that people accross the board seem to want. I learned this from the book "Three cups of tea," written about a philanthropist who builds schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It seems that women dying in childbirth is pretty sucky, and if someone could prevent this then it seems like everyone in that woman's community would be happier. But perhaps that isn't true. Maybe the cost of better healthcare and nutrition isn't worth it.

Eggplants and Salmon

Ever since our vacation to San Diego, where I stumbled upon Julie Powell's book "Julie and Julia," acquired one of Julia Child's cookbooks at a used bookstore in La Jolla, and experienced 2 weeks worth of fine dining, I've been getting in touch with my culinary tastes. I used to think of baking as the ultimate thing to do if I want to cook, but the trouble with that is that we don't actually eat that many baked goods, so my baked bread would often sit there and grow old. Since I don't like to waste food, it becomes difficult to refine a baking process when the end result won't be consumed.

Now that we've moved, and grocery shopping is much easier, and my attitude has changed a little bit, I've come to realize that two foods that I really like, and also can cook fairly frequently because they are normal meal foods, and not desserts, are salmon and eggplant. So learning how to cook these two foods well will be my tentative culinary goal for the time being. Right now I have some mashed up chinese eggplant baking in the toaster oven under parmesan and manchego cheese. We'll see.

Gluttony and quantum mechanics

My dearest husband is out of town as of this morning, and I am already revering to my undergraduate habits of stuffing myself full of starchy sugars late at night and plugging away at quantum mechanics. Part of me hates me for this gluttony; another part of me appreciates the freedom (to stuff myself) and the freer thinking that being home alone seems to afford me from time to time. Of course I can't let this continue indefinitely if I want to fit in my pants in a month, but fortunately Robert's absence is only for 4 days.

I tried cooking the eggplants I purchased on Saturday. They were bitter and not so tasty. My quest to cook eggplants well will soon have to become a real quest, since I love eggplant but seem to be less than successful at preparing them well.

I had two minor epiphanies over the last two days. The first one happened yesterday; it's the more significant of the two. We had a substitute lecturer in quantum, one of our Professor's grad students. I stayed after class and asked him about the dot product of position and momentum space, which was necessary in order to do one of the homework problems. After he helped me over the hurdle I was stuck at, I asked him how to go about thinking about this problem. I basically said "I understand what you did but I would never have come up with it myself. What am I not understanding?" He proceeded to explain basic rotations to me, but I was still confused. So I asked him if there was a good reference to read up on this. His response:

"There are lots of references, but it's far more valuable to try to figure it out for yourself."

Oh my. What a thought. There are several thoughts here, actually. One, that I can figure out for myself what the dot product of position and momentum should be. Not too much to ask I guess, given that someone somewhere had to figure it out for the first time. Second, that I should figure it out. That's reading books and being studious is the intellectually lazy way to go. I suspected that all along, that turning to books when something puzzled me wasn't making me a better scientist, but here it was spelled out for me. Duh! Just because books exist doesn't meet I have to read them. Sometimes I should try to figure out what's in them for myself.

The second epiphany was realizing that I love talking to people, but don't like working with them. I like working independently. Unfortunately, I don't like being alone or lonely; that makes me feel isolated. There is a fine line through the desert of interpersonal communications that must be tiptoed if I am to be a happy and successful graduate student.

Science and Writing and Writing Science

I like science a lot. And I like writing, a lot, although not everyone knows that because my fine undergraduate institution completely turned me off of the humanities (with the excellent exception of history). But I'm not interested in writing about science. Why not? Maybe I should be? Why am I prejudiced against science writing and is this prejudice well-founded?

I think my awareness of science writing began with a negative impression. When I was fifteen, I stupidly decided to go to some Nobel Laureate Symposium at the Palace of Fine Arts. It was a stupendous waste of time, and the worst part is that I missed school for it (I suppose it doesn't matter too much now, but it is embarassing to remember). One of the speakers involved there was science writer K.C. Cole, who told a pretty bad story about a friend of hers, was generally socially awkward, and really annoyed me. She was introduced as a science writer. At the time I didn't even know what a science writer was, but from that point on science writers and embarassing emotions have been inextricably associated in my mind.

Subsequent experiences that involved actually writing science, mostly in the form of psuedo-grant proposals to get the Undergraduate Research programs to give me money were reasonably pleasant and successful. Hey, I was proposing the research I was going to do! And of course on paper it would all work! However, when it came time at the end of summers to write reports of my research, there was always a tension between being honest about what I did and making my research look good. And that's where I saw that for many people honesty didn't quite fly out the window, but did get negelected, a bit, for the sake of artistry.

But see, artistry is what writing is all about. The great thing about fiction is that it doesn't have to be real. In fact, it's not supposed to be real because then it wouldn't be fiction. Fiction-at least good fiction--just has to entertain. That's it. Voila. Nothing real, no honesty required, at least not in the literal sense. Some peevish folks--and I am among them-- might request that fiction be "believable" or "true to life" but those are mere luxuries and preference, not hard rules.

I realize that not all writing is fiction. In fact, the writing that we learned in high school, writing essays and research reports and whatnot, was most definitely not fiction. Incidentally, that's the writing that my teachers in high school liked me for, the writing that let me to beleive that I'm not a sucky writer. But the writing that I've always loved was fiction, in the form of big long books that go on and on telling their beautiful made up tales. And even the columns I used to write for the school newspaper didn't have hard rules about truthfullneess. I expressed my opinion, tried to be honest, and never lied, but it was impossible to be completely dishonest about something because I was just expressing my opinion.

In science, there should be hard rules. Such as, first of all, No Lying. No Fiction. No making up pretty stuff that sounds good. And more importantly, no covering up your lack of progress with the tale of exciting applications. [I guess I should note that when I talk about writing science, I am speaking more generally about presenting science--it can include oral presentation as well. This is how my undergraduate Writing and Rhetoric classes have skewed me.] I undertand that people who present science to a more general audince, one that isn't going to go work on your same research question, want to tell a neat story. But I also know, from being in the middle of things, that neat stories are hard to come by. That's why research exists and why research groups are still doing their work. But I can't help but feel that people who present their research at colloquia are not giving me the fully honest story, but rather a dressed up and prettified version of the truth.

And so, because the writing I most love is antithetical to the way I think science should be written, I've developed an aversion to science writing. But maybe I should, instead, try to find ways to write about science that I don't find to be repulsive. I could then convince myself that I am doing a great public service. Robert suggested something about working on educational science for elementary school kids. Science education is important, and is also pretty crappy because it's not very deep. It needs work.

All Female Research group

I've been in my new grad school lab for 4 weeks now, and the biggest difference from my previous lab is how many girls there are! I sit in an office with 2 other girls, both second years, and there are 2 other grad school girls and one postdoc girl (woman, really, as we all are, but no matter) who sit in the other office. In fact the lab is probably split male-female about 50/50 but the girls are more social and we interact with each other more. Furthermore a lot of the male postdocs don't socialize so much with the rest of the group because they are a lot older than us, so this leaves me surrounded by an unprecedented level of estrogen.

It's fun. I've learned more about some people in 4 weeks than I learned about some of the guys in my old lab in 16 months, and it's not because I was antisocial or reclusive in the old lab. I'm not trying to suggest here that i've met my grad school soulmates. I haven't. I don't think I'm going to have grad school soulmates. I try to be friendly and nice and listen and be open, and I like everyone and people seem to like me just fine, but I'm very much making my own path as far as the science goes, with taking physics classes and working in a chemistry lab and not really finding a mentor for myself inside the group just yet. (That's something I need to get on, incidentally, but that's a subject for a different post). But the point is that working with girls, or at least with these girls, means that there's more conversation and interaction. I feel a lot more comfortable asking silly science questions, and also sharing personal stories. In my old lab, no one knew I was married for about 4 months, and the professor didn't know until he had to write my grad school application letters. Here everyone knows, because I've felt comfortable enough sharing things that begin with "my husband..."

On the other hand, I feel like all this socialness wears me out a little bit. I'm always worried about saying something awful that will offend my labmates and alienate them for weeks. I know that people have their differences and I'm not worried that sasying something offensive will ruin my career prospects or anything like that, but I do want to be on good terms with people and it takes energy to watch what I'm saying all the time.

Religious Wedding

Two of our friends from high school got married yesterday. Their wedding was a very Christian wedding, in a church, with lots of hymns and prayers. During one of the Bible readings, from Ephesians, it occured to me that while there's a lot of wisdom in the bible that everyone could benefit from hearing, it can be very diffucult for non-christians to extract this wisdom because it's sandwiched between lines and lines of Jesus Speak.

Letting go of Undergrad

I've returned from San Diego and I learned that there are several social dance events happening in the next week. I could go to all of them, if it was my top priority. I could go and have fun, and I am used to always going to the social dance events that I can go to, if homework or lab work or dinner with friends is not in the way. But now that I've moved up to San Francisco it's a more significant committment to go to Jammix or Friday night waltz, and therefore I have to think harder about how it's going to affect Robert too, and not just me. That makes it a little bit harder--part of me really wants to go to these dances, part of me thinks I should stay home and spend time with Robert, and part of me wonders if I really want to spend an evening dancing with random people I don't know. And these parts of me aren't mutually exclusive.

I realized just today, although this is obvious, that there are plenty of places to go dancing in San Francisco, and I just need to find them. It's just that finding them, and then convincing Robert that we should go check them out (or maybe I'm projecting--maybe the effort to go check them out is hard for me)--isn't trivial. But it should be fun.

Travel Guide Books

Ever since I saw them in use, I've been vaguely averse to guidebooks. They basically tell you the "insider scoop" on what's worth seeing in a place, what restaurants are worth eating at, and what to expect and how to enjoy a place best. The compelling argument for them is that they keep you from wasting your time on flashy but bad tourist attrations. My parents just went to Spain a few months ago and complained that the food there is bad. Had they had one of these guide books from Fodor's or Frommer's, then they might have been able to find high quality restaurants.

I believe at this point I'm "arguing with myself," in the words of my latest history TA.

Ok, so having presented the arguments against my poit, I will now argue my point. The thing I don't like about guide books is that one of the things that appeals to me about traveling, in theory mostly but in practice too, is that I can discover things for myself--things like how yucky the water is in Mission Bay park and how long it takes to walk to Balboa Park from downtown. With a guidebook, it almost seems like part of the fun is gone, because then all theres left for me to do is arrive at point A, "enjoy it", leave, arrive at point B, etc etc. But maybe not having a guide book means that you're not using all the information available to you, and maybe that is also undesireable.

Here commences my Blog

Here I am, under the granite staircase of the San Diego convention center, starting a new blog on a black MacBook with TI calculator keys. Why am I doing this? And Why do I need to ask myself Why I'm doing this?

For one, livejournal has gotten kind of annoying. I've historically used to it to vent about things that have pissed me off. It has been the forum of much angst and much drama. While I have undoubtedly fond memories associated with that drama, I no longer want to write about things that foster that kind of drama. Also, livejournal makes it very difficult to navigate past entries, and thus makes it hard to go back and find a specific entry that I wrote years ago. It seems that blogspot offers better navigation of past entries. And it's also prettier.

And then, why do I really want a blog? Is it because I'm so vain that I think the world is interested in what I have to say? Maybe. I'm still insecure about putting my thoughts out there in the world, about presuming that someone would care about them. I don't think I'm any less insecure about this than I was when I started my livejournal. But the world doesn't have to care. That's what's beautiful about the internet. And I like to write. At my college graduation, the speaker said that the point of including arts curricula in schools wasn't to make more artists, it was to make complete human beings. The world doesn't need more artists, but the world does need complete human beings. The internet doesn't need more bloggers, and the world doesn't need more writers, but I need to write, and memory on blogger's server is apparently free to me.

I think lots of people are willing to exhibit their lives. Justin TV comes to mind (http://www.justin.tv/ --it's the "lifecast of a dudes life"). Art mirrors life, and in books and TV shows and movies we often identify things with our lives, but this lifecast isn't an art--it's just life, practically unfiltered. I'm not interested in getting into a debate about the meaning of art. The point is that there's nothing artificial about a lifecast. And in the same way a blog is just the unfolding of a life. Lots of famous peoples' diaries have been published after they become famous. With blogs, we don't know who will become famous and who won't, but we get to read the unfoldings of these lives anyway.