FML.

As I think all of you who read this blog know, the last few weeks have been rough. My grandpa's sudden death, awful enough by itself, was followed by a scary storm in Chicago that damaged my parents' house and stranded me in Chicago after 7 hours of sitting on the runway in tornado-level winds. As if those events and a sudden trans-Atlantic flight weren't rough enough, Bad Things have continued to follow me... to the point that you just have to laugh.

I eventually got to Heathrow, two days late, on a very full plane of cranky people who were just as many days late as I was. We even landed early. Yay, you'd think. But no: we landed so early (5:45 am) that they hadn't turned on the moving walkways yet so we walked *miles* from the plane to the customs desks, past the lifeless (not-)moving walkways. We all looked and felt like zombies. When I finally rocked up at the customs desk, literally 35 minutes after leaving the plane, sweaty and with my eyes basically closed, I must have looked so shit that the customs officer actually said, "Are you ill?" OMG. Imagine how awful/unbelievable/kind of funny it would have been if they'd detained me for poor health! Luckily my eyes popped open at that question and apparently my assurance that I was just tired was convincing enough to let me into the country.

After that, this week has seen more ridiculous occurrences of bad luck and why-me moments. I'll spare you those, and tell you instead about someone else's FML moment that I happened to witness and giggle at more than I should have:
Last night I was in line to check out a book at the University Library, The Most Inefficient And Needlessly Stressful Place Ever. The line was several people long because the library was about to close. When I finally got to the front and a librarian was scanning my book, a guy quietly walked up next to me and calmly said to the librarian, "Excuse me, but it seems there's someone caught in the lift and quite upset." To which the librarian said, "Right, I'll be along shortly," and reached for my library card.

!!!!! WHAT?!?! How could that guy not scream OH MY GOD YOUR ANCIENT TINY TERRIFYING LIFT HAS CAPTURED SOMEONE INSIDE IT WHO'S SCREAMING, AND THE LIBRARY'S ABOUT TO CLOSE AND TRAP THEM FOREVER!! HELP!!
and how could the librarian not drop my stupid book and sprint to their aid?!?!

Sometimes other people's moment of crap luck put our own in perspective.

The Cabinet

Today was the end-of-year party for the seminar that I've been running all year, called the Cabinet of Natural History, and the party was such a success!! PHEW, I've been worried about it for weeks because:

1. The Cabinet attendees have high expectations and can be hard to please and will def tell me if they don't like something (eg if the free food at the party is bad, that kind of thing. Come on.).

2. The speaker I'd asked to give the talk for the party is a postdoc who I think is brilliant and a great teacher. She is applying for a permanent job in the department and decided to treat this party talk as her "job talk" and show off to the department bigwigs. Which is great, but that meant that she was nervous. There was a lot more riding on her talk than on a normal post-lunch party talk outside in a garden!

3. The party was planned to be outside in a beautiful college garden with a buffet lunch, and it was forecast to rain like crazy today.

So, luckily,

1. everyone had a lovely time, although - Mom's worst nightmare - more than 40 people showed up when we'd expected about 20! Whoa! I def didn't get any lunch, but no one else seemed to leave hungry, thank god. Our department did get in trouble with the college's caterers for having too many people show up... but I took it as a huge sign of success that this was the best-attended Cabinet garden party in the Cabinet's 23-year history! Hooray!!

2. Our speaker gave a fabulous talk, as I'd known she would, and impressed all the bigwigs with her thoughtfulness and her fun fast-talking lecture style. She was nervous as hell, but she held it together and I don't think anyone noticed.

3. The clouds held and there were even - gasp - instants of sunshine. The rain started *right* at the end of the party, so it worked very conveniently to chase people out of the garden.

4. Bonus - everyone thanked me for running the Cabinet all year, said really nice things about how good the speakers I'd invited had been, and gave me a card they'd all signed (during the lunch, which I tried to ignore :) ) and a present of books about dinosaurs! It was wonderful. I felt very appreciated and proud, and I didn't put my foot in my mouth too much in my response.

WIN.

lunch pre-talk

Our speaker answering questions while I "chaired" (without a chair?) beneath the college's famous mulberry tree

The audience, with my supervisor in the middle (the gray-haired grinning guy wearing the tan windbreaker)

The head of the Cabinet, Nick Jardine, thanking me and giving me a book about dinosaurs :)

Handing off the Cabinet sign-in book to next year's Secretary!

Competition.

There has been a sudden swell of competitive spirit around me these days. My PhD office-mates started a "Winning Board" on our communal blackboard, where we each get a little icon and a tally mark if we get a "win", meaning we accomplish something awesome. Most wins are compliments from our supervisors, publications, getting student visas approved, etc (though some people's wins include getting a cool Band-Aid from the Emergency Room when she crashed her bike, or being mistaken for another student who is considered very hot). Pretty significant stuff. And supposedly you have to be nominated for a win by another student, to avoid false self-declared wins.
While I thought drawing our identity icons was cute (mine is, what else, a dinosaur) and I love using blackboards (which were the topic of my master's thesis), I hate the Winning Board. It's supposed to be a mode of recognition for achievement, since PhD students get very little feedback and even less positive feedback. But it's turned out to inspire competition among us... how ridiculous is that? We are all dangling from the bottom rung of the academic ladder, desperately struggling to join the actual academic hierarchy - so why on earth would we compete with each other? More importantly, why should we care what our fellow students think of us, when it's our superiors' opinions that actually matter? We should be helping each other, not counting who has the most wins each morning.
I suggested a communal Winning Board, with tally marks for everyone's wins combined with no names, but that got vetoed. So currently I have the least number of wins - 2 - because I refuse to play. I don't want my wins to be on show for public approval - I want internal motivation! And the 2 wins I do have are for 1) not having any wins (lame), and 2) for organizing a PhD Writing Group, which did deserve a win, if I do say so myself. But that was also a move to combat this growing culture of bragging and asking each other how many words we wrote today or how many publications we have or even how old we are... things that I think are irrelevant to our academic success and identity.
So the result has become that I don't tell anyone that I've started running again and miraculously haven't hurt my ankles, because that would inspire the response of "oh yeah, well I went to the gym every day last week" with a "so there" tone. I can't even seem to tell them what I did over the weekend without ticking off somebody else's ego and competitive spirit. So I don't tell them that my second real journal article is coming out soon, or that I got lovely feedback from my students, or that living in my new house is wonderful, or that I'm dating a boy who is "winning" oh so much more than any of them and somehow he thinks that I am too. I don't want tick marks, or my classmates' approval, to measure my success.
(But I do, apparently, need to talk about it on a blog. Isn't it ironic...)