Welcome to Clare Hall

This morning I welcomed new students at my college, students who had just stepped off planes from Beijing, Vienna, Rome, Miami. They had huge suitcases and were really sweaty from carrying them across continents. I took them to their rooms and got to watch while they got super psyched about the Clare Hall balconies. We walked through the college to visit the bike racks and the laundry room and the dining hall and the bar. And I started to get just a little bit excited about the new school year.

Five years ago, when my family was living in London, we went to Cambridge as tourists on a randomly selected autumn Saturday - which turned out to be Move In Day for all the undergrads.

Mom in 2006 in front of CUP, which published her book! Note the reflection of both Kings College Chapel and me in the window...

That was weird foreshadowing of October 2008, when me and my worldly possessions (including my Mind the Gap keychain, but not including the Obama yard sign...) left Illinois to go be welcomed by a current student in Clare Hall.

Now - today and tomorrow, for £6.50/hour - I get to be the one who points out a student's pigeonhole and gets to watch while they frown and wonder what that means. I get to laugh with them at the crazy health and safety rules posted in their rooms. I get to give directions to the grocery store, and remind them to ride their bikes, once they buy them, on the left. When I explain how to sign up for dinner, they listen intently. It's really nice to feel like you know things that are useful... doesn't happen often in grad school. And next year, at this time, these new Clare Hallers will know everything I know and be just as psyched to share it with our new college-mates.

Cat-lin and Toe-by-us

A renowned columnist for The Times newspaper, Caitlin Moran, wrote a book recently that has kept me on a weird roller coaster of laughing out loud and very strongly disagreeing with what she says, called How To Be A Woman. It's part autobiography and part Caitlin's (pronounced "Cat-lin", of all things! How could famous Caitlins mispronounce their names and make life difficult for all the rest of us?!) views on today's feminism.

One chapter is called "I am in love!" and describes Moran's love life and how women in general handle relationships, which Moran portrays as lots of talking and analyzing with girlfriends if the guy is really into her and what counts as subtle messages of love, etc. Moran writes of a lovestruck-and-won't-shut-up-about-it friend: "She's in the Girl Matrix - trying to catch invisible, slo-mo bullets those of us outside the Matrix can't see", invisible bullets supposedly sent by the guy in question to communicate. Moran argues that women discussing relationships like that is a sign that "HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU", because men are not that complicated and they will tell you what they think loud and clear and not invisibly. Despite using these huge dumb stereotypes (along with really funny stories), I think Moran does get one part right:

"When women find the right person, on the other hand, they just... disappear for six months, and then resurface, eyes shiny, and usually about six pounds heavier. 'So what's he like?' You will say. But she will be oddly quiet. 'It's just... good,' she will say. 'I'm really happy.' And then that will usually be the end of the discussion. Usually forever. You stop talking about things when you've worked them out. You're no longer an observer, but a participant. You're too busy for this bullshit."


Enter Tobias, a 28-year-old German PhD student who builds computer models of weather patterns over Tibet. Pronounced Toe-bee-us. There's not much to say, except that it's been four months since our first kiss (which is when a relationship starts, obviously...), neither of us can pronounce the other's name, and last week he was away at a conference for the whole week and I almost went crazy with boredom. Luckily, we had planned ahead and met up in Brussels for the weekend. Why Brussels? Well, basically because it was equidistant from where he was and where I was, and because it had cheap flights for him and cheap Eurostar for me. And it had, you know, culture and stuff. Chocolate. Beer. Waffles. Did you know French fries were invented by the Belgians? Because I didn't, until the Fry Museum in Bruges taught me otherwise... (seriously!)


Point being that there's nothing to say because it's SO GREAT to have a companion whom you expect to talk to every day and who - get this - expects the same of you. So great, and so easy, and thus so boring. Nothing to complain about = nothing to say, right? :) And, by a funny array of coincidences, Tobias quickly met tons of important people in my life, including my parents, Deena, and all of my friends in Cambridge, and he'll get to meet Sean and Laura next week. What a lucky guy! When we got back from the super fun (and also slightly scary for him) weekend with my parents - only two months after Kiss Day - Tobias said we had to book flights to go visit his mom in Hamburg. Yikes. Fair enough, I guess, maybe a little fast if it's a Meet My Girlfriend weekend, which my parents' weekend was not... but hey, it's another travel weekend with Tobias! Wooooo!

4th of July party at my house. Note Tobias's red, white & blue clothes! What a sport.

Deena punting and looking panicked, Tobias (and me) having a great time enjoying her punting (and her panic!)

My favorite place in Paris - Notre Dame

Strolling through Darwin, Tobias's college

Taking a break in Brussels

My entire thesis in one conversation

I've spent the past few weeks mining my interviews and fieldnotes to separate quotes, scenes, etc, into files for each chapter... and it's been a BLAST. Man, fieldwork was SO FUN and it's awesome to get to re-live it now, a whole year after I was at the Smithsonian and 6 months after the Field Museum (wow, where did that time go?).

One of the many gems (a good geology-related metaphor!) from my fieldwork:

A volunteer asked a preparator what species the specimen they were working on was, and the preparator said, "Eolambia" (pronounced ee-oh-lamb-bee-ah). Then a researcher said, “Supposedly”, because he said he hadn’t seen any diagnostic evidence that that specimen is actually Eolambia and not any other species. The volunteer said jokingly, “Oooh, I’m in a controversy! One little slip [with his preparation tool] and it won’t be Eolambia...”. Researcher: “It’ll be Neo-lambia!”

HAHAHAHAHA!! The power of the preparator over scientific knowledge, AND a wordplay! 

Thank you, people who work with dinosaurs, for being the best data sources EVER.

Transitions

My friend was looking at some calendars (diaries in British) in a shop and I jokingly said that maybe someday I'd buy a calendar that starts in January and not August. Funny that August and September have always been the year's transition time for me, for my entire life. What could be more transitional than the start of school?
Cambridge, in its infinite weirdness, starts in October. September here is a strange time when staff and grad students are back from their August holidays but the department's halls are still empty because there are still reduced summer opening hours, no undergrads, no seminars. Instead the department and the whole city is full of workers painting and hammering and fixing, doing the annual battle against these ancient buildings' desire to fall apart.
So it is that in a construction-noisy and paint-smelling and empty department, Geoff and I are cleaning out his desk. My goofy Canadian friend is now a PhD, "viva-ed" (meaning he had his oral defense and passed) and now moving away. Last night we all went to a "super hall" - an unusually fancy dinner - at Geoff's college as a goodbye party... but Geoff had a job interview during the day, which he and all of us were very nervous about. Geoff has applied to countless postdocs over the past 9 months and gotten only one interview. Ahh! So this one interview, scheduled days before Geoff jets back to Canada to live in his parents' basement and hope for a job at IKEA, had a lot riding on it. Geoff strolled into the formal hall, straight off the train from his interview, in his interview suit and his academic gown, freshly shaven to make him look "professional", smiled at the crowd of HPS-ers clapping for him, and said, "I didn't get it."
It could have been a dinner of celebration and joy, or at least relief that his interview was over and he'd find out the result later. We did a good job of forced cheerfulness and dissing the employer, but I think we were all a bit depressed and didn't know what to say. Now Geoff is clearing his desk for good. His phone contract is over, so his phone has stopped working. He took his books back to the library. He's having lunch with his supervisor now, saying goodbye.
Funny how transitions are not negative or positive, they just mean things will be different.