The Future Is Now

Well, my encroaching madness has been fought back by invisible forces of luck and hard work. Suddenly I have a job that is pretty much exactly what I wanted – teaching undergrads, in a city, in a new place, with colleagues who seem incredibly kind and helpful. It took me a while to figure that out, but eventually I did, thanks mostly to my friend Jenny.

Everyone had very mixed reactions to my being offered a lectureship in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. (I know you all know this already, but let me backtrack to the completely unreal three days that I spent quizzing everyone I know about whether I should take this job.) My parents worried that it wasn’t prestigious. Cambridge people wondered why I would ever deign to accept a teaching job, and most recommended that I spend a jobless year writing up my thesis into a book. After all, why would I ever want to do anything but research, and in anywhere but Cambridge? (OMG.)

However, my beloved advisor Eleanor was full of positive thoughts and very convincing reasons of why teaching is great. So was Jim, my supervisor. Both of them had started in full-time teaching jobs, which I didn’t know, and both of them love teaching, though they rarely admit it. They independently articulated that Cambridge people don’t value teaching much and therefore it’s not a good idea, professionally, to acknowledge that you value anything besides research.

Then there was Anna, a new professor in my department who was hired from a big state university in the US. At our weekly Jobseekers’ Coffee Meetings (a terrible name but a wonderful idea), she had once denounced full-time teaching jobs as below us, as Cambridge graduates, and as an effective way to sink your chances for a permanent job. Gulp. When I emailed her about my job offer and asked her advice, she knocked on our office door ten minutes later and invited me to lunch. She started off saying that full-time teaching jobs are terrible, you won’t have time to publish and therefore will be a failure in future academic job applications and thus in life, and also teaching is so tedious and unrewarding, why not just do research for a year and re-apply for fellowships next year? I stared at her and, unfairly, unleashed my frustration with everyone else who had said the same thing. Basically, I think teaching is the most worthwhile thing academics do. In addition to being important, it’s also fun.

The other caveat to this story was that that morning, before my impromptu lunch with Anna, I’d interviewed for a 4-year pure research job in HPS, on a well-funded and well-respected project that I found alarmingly boring. I despaired to Anna that I had just finished four years of research in HPS and was not happy to do it again just now. She looked shocked. It’s true that most Cambridge graduates are desperate to stay – forever, if possible, and by doing whatever job available. But when I looked upset enough to convince her that I really meant all this, she – glancing around us – changed tactics. She echoed Jim and Eleanor that Cambridge people lose face for admitting that teaching is important. She’d been giving me the spiel that matched most Cantabridgians but now, in a low voice and a confiding manner, she told me how much she had loved teaching philosophy at her former university, to mostly nontraditional students:  “How often do you get to talk with a poor, overweight, underprivileged single mother about the meaning of life?” She talked about really making an impact on students (unlike Cambridge, where students are well-prepared and can learn with little guidance), about the fun of controlling everything about a course (unlike Cambridge, where all assignments and exams and grades are out of the professor’s hands), about really getting to know the students (unlike Cambridge, where professors lecture two hours per week and never hear the students’ voices, let alone learn their names or know if they understand or are interested). The fascinating thing about this conversation with Anna was how she’d automatically given me the party line – research > teaching – without asking me what I thought, what I value, what I want to do with my life. It could almost be considered a Cambridge mistake, where professors are used to not engaging with their students. It was not until I argued with her, and probably looked tearful, that she reassessed her advice and gave me what actually seemed like a more sincere answer.

Walking back from lunch down Free School Lane, the iconic street that is home to HPS, I ran into Jenny. She had been the first person to react to my job offer as purely positive and wonderful news. Since then she had been getting increasingly excited about this job on my behalf, and she said to me there in the street something like, Wasn’t this exactly the kind of job you wanted? And I started to cry. Because she was right.

After the barrage of conflicting advice and a complete lack of information about the Cambridge job even though they knew I had to respond to NJIT after three days, I felt very sure. I’m thrilled to get to design courses and teach. I’m thrilled to leave Cambridge. I’m thrilled to go somewhere completely new and honestly just as foreign as Cambridge was four years ago. At the same time, it’s terrifying to make another new start, knowing no one and in a completely different role. At least there were a lot of new students arriving at Cambridge in September 2008, who all needed friends as much as I did, and I was just being a student again, as I always have been. How will I make friends without “Freshers’ Week”? How will I plan courses on technology and society, when I’ve barely studied that? How the hell will I lead 60 freshman science majors in explorations of the social sciences? What will I do about having a boyfriend an ocean away?

It was this mix of happiness and terror that spurred me through finishing my thesis, and I can only hope that it leads to other huge and seemingly superhuman abilities. The next month will see the biggest changes in my life so far and maybe any time after that... hold on to your hats. 

"That way madness lies..."

Lately I've been stumbling all too far along King Lear's epic path to Crazyville. First, everyone thinks I'm crazy because I'm SO EXCITED about the Olympics. Everyone else is leaving the UK to avoid the madness of crowds and tourists and terrorism, but I'm desperately stalking internet sites promising tickets. Last week my stalking paid off - I bought two highly coveted (by me...) tickets to the "London Prepares" field hockey tournament!! London is hosting a series of sporting events this spring to "test" their Olympics venues and security measures and transport links, and I was all too happy to be a guinea pig. (Hockey was the only sport available... They didn't tell you who was playing... turned out to be women's games, Korea v Argentina then TEAM GB v China. The men played that afternoon, but we didn't have tickets, obvi.) After Tobias reluctantly succumbed to my enthusiasm, we boarded a few super early, super expensive trains to the Olympic Park in Stratford, London.

There are lots of details about security (they don't use barriers to show you where to walk - they use PEOPLE. Hundreds of staff and volunteers line the walkways pointing your way, ALL SMILING and ALL SAYING "GOOD MORNING". This is not typical British do-not-speak-to-strangers behavior, and clearly this friendliness was mandated because EVERYONE did it and it was an effort for some...). There is lots to say about the Stadium and the sculpture that will hold the Olympic Flame when it arrives by torch after being jogged all around the UK and the wind-power/solar-powered streetlights and the ENORMOUS expanses of sidewalk and the expensive beer and "British" food of meat pies or sausages. Ask me, because I'm PSYCHED to tell you way more than you want to hear. :) Basically, we toured through the Olympic Park to arrive at the Riverside Arena to sit on bleachers in about 40F degrees and pouring rain for four hours of field hockey (which neither of us really knew the rules for - luckily the very thoughtful Olympics Committee provided us with rule booklets!). And it was AWESOME!!!! I can't wait to spend two weeks on my couch this summer watching The Real Thing. If only I could get Real Tickets!

Tobias with stadium behind. Note that the sign shows pictures of all the buildings so you can identify them! And note that EVERYTHING is in English. Strange. Other cities include lots of languages in their Olympic Parks...

Stadium at right! Flame sculpture in center! Psychedelic recycled rubber pavement! Grey skies...

The striking and apparently very unusual "London Blue and London Pink" field hockey stadium. It was so rainy that every time they hit the ball there was a splash. Game 1: Korea v. Argentina!

TEAM GB (left) and China singing national anthems

When the home team played, a five-piece brass band appeared in the stands! Very fun and I love Pep Bands, but having one only for Team GB games doesn't seem very fair...

As we are ushered out of the Park after the games. First game: 0-0. second game: GB won! (I don't remember the score...)

London Prepares!! Note huge security list on the fence, of Things Not Allowed in the Park.

Besides being excited about crowds and sports, my other paths to madness lately are Thesis Revisions and Job Seeking. These are specifically British terms for universal processes, and both the terms and the processes suck. My supervisor consistently emails me on the day of our scheduled meeting, days after I've emailed him revised chapters, and admits that he hasn't read them but he'll see me in an hour. Grrrrrrrr. Also, it sucks to re-read what you thought was okay and then realize that it's not. AND then have to re-write it. And then have your supervisor eventually read it and say that it needs work and "have you thought about re-writing this?". Editing a dissertation is a potentially never-ending and definitely self-esteem-destroying exercise.

As what should have been a welcome distraction from editing hell, my First Academic Job Interview should have been very exciting and ego-boosting. Unfortunately, the terror of preparing for it prevented any resting-on-laurels. My interview prep included a lot of reading the university's website and scary advice on websites about academic interviews, a practice interview with my mom, a practice interview with the Cambridge Careers Service which they videotape and then make you watch and criticize you for smiling too much, talking too quietly, and being "too honest", buying an interview-worthy blouse, and a fair amount of nightmares. In comparison to a week of that, the interview itself, on Skype, felt like a breeze. And I must have done okay, because they invited me for a second interview. HOORAY, I should have felt. And it did feel like an accomplishment. So I strolled out of my department at 7pm after the interview, feeling relieved and sort of adrenaline-rushed. I met Tobias at his office, we headed down the street for a curry, and I burst into tears. Out of nowhere. Huh. Someone must be under a little stress.

To avoid this trend of mounting madness, I need some positive feedback. I can't take much more "re-write this" and "smile less". I need some all-around good news, that doesn't require nightmares or shopping or making gut-wrenching permanent decisions. Thank you, Brendan Wylie, for choosing next week to graduate from college and giving your almost-crazy sister an AWESOME, LEGITIMATE, UNCOMPLICATED REASON TO CELEBRATE.

Professors are people too.

Last night my PhD advisor (who is my secondary/back-up supervisor) invited her students and postdocs to her house. Her students are all Assyriologists (as is she) and all know each other. As a non-Assyriologist who had only met a few of the other students, I have no idea how I got on the invitation list but I was REALLY EXCITED to go. Visit a Cambridge professor's natural habitat? Cool!

My advisor has just moved into a "cottage" in a little town outside of Cambridge, called Waterbeach. I often cycle to Waterbeach along the river path just for fun (although my suggestion that my friend and I cycle to the party got rejected by a hailstorm) and it's a beautiful little place with narrow streets lined with rowhouses. My advisor's new house has a garden with a pond, and her ceilings are low and stairs crooked. There's a shelf full of nail polish jars in her kitchen, and every wall has a bookshelf. But instead of academic books, these shelves are absolutely full of novels, alphabetized by author's last name. For example, only A-C fit on the first floor, and the rest, she told me, are on her bedroom shelves or in boxes.

My advisor lit a wood fire for us, and we all chatted about new projects to digitize clay tablets with cuneiform writing on them (which is what everyone there studies). A few people independently promised me, smilingly, not to make jokes in Akkadian (the ancient language written on the tablets, whose jokes I obviously wouldn't get). I didn't know whether to feel welcomed by that or feel like this joke ban was killing their fun. We talked about the crazy things people do at academic conferences (last year's Assyriology meeting had an impromptu pole dance?!) and the dire job market. We talked about Germany, where my advisor has just spent a year and where several of her students are from, and France, which was having its national election yesterday, and the US, whose national election campaign promises more future comedy for European (and all other!) observers.

Funny that we study people who span literally 20 millenia (ancient Babylonians to my preparators), yet we as academics have a lot in common.

When it rains, it pours.

England is in a severe drought. They're already calling for "hosepipe bans" this summer (so you can't water your "garden" with running water from the "hosepipe" but instead have to use water you catch from your roof in a "water butt". Really!) and there are clips on the news showing fish being rescued from  rivers whose water levels are too low for the fish to survive. (No one says what happens to the "rescued" fish... I wonder if there's a recent glut of fish and chips on the market?)

So I meant this title as a metaphor, in the sense that I got 5 job rejections in 7 days, followed by a few dark days of disappointment, followed by two of my articles being printed on the same day. ?!
It would be nice if these rollercoaster peaks and troughs could be spread out a bit across my usually boring life. But I'm just really glad they happened in that order. Having two shiny new journals on my desk made it feel worthwhile to get back to work even though no one wants to hire me. At least I can tell myself that I'm producing knowledge, if not income.

Naked

Nakedness was an unexpected and unusual theme of this week.

Last weekend, one of my favorite friends invited me on her annual birthday trip to the nudists' colony on the River Cam, for a naked swim with a bunch of her friends. Whoa. Honestly I was more concerned about the temperature than about the nudity, but when her birthday turned out to be a gloriously sunny day, I got talked into it. Funny that when everyone's naked, it doesn't matter, and you forget about it!  What a surprise. There were groups of naked old guys hanging out on the grass in the gated nudists' colony, with a shoulder-high shrub between them and the fully-clothed punters on the river. They said hello and offered to share their bottle of wine. (!) We declined and went straight for the water, which was, according to the nudists' official blackboard, 7 degrees C, 45F. OMG. It was not so much swimming as being shocked and gasping and desperately trying to not swallow the notoriously polluted water. We stayed in about three minutes, which the regulars on the grass said was about normal for this time of year. My friend was satisfied that she'd marked her 25th birthday with her usual annual swim, and I didn't have hypothermia, and none of us got the 24-hour vomiting bug that people who drink Cam water get, so overall it was a success? Funny how different things make different people happy... it was kind of idyllic to swim in a river and then to sit in the sunshine with your friends - and some strangers - for some peace and natural drying-off. And no wet swimsuit to deal with. :)

Today my college offered a life drawing class, which means drawing a naked model. I have a friend who does a lot of modeling for art classes like this, and talks about it as very calm and art-focused and not sexy. I didn't really believe her, but life drawing classes are a bit of trend in Cambridge lately and I really like to draw, and - let's face it - I was really curious. So ten of us sat in the Clare Hall meeting room this morning with a pile of paper and pencils, one art teacher, and one naked woman. My friend was right that it's amazing how quickly you forget that the angles and negative space you're drawing belong to a person. However, the teacher kept breaking the sort of unspoken denial of that fact by looking at our drawings and saying things like, "No, you've done her breast all wrong, it's got more of a peak to it" and "Measure the nose-to-bottom distance carefully"... but everyone kept their focus and there were no giggle outbursts (though I came close - when the model sneezed. Have you ever seen a naked woman sneeze? Apparently I hadn't! It is a whole-body experience.). But honestly, I'm not convinced that the class would have been different - besides being less awkward - if we'd drawn a bowl of fruit. Trying to get perspective right and measure proportions and sketch in shadows is really fun, whether you're drawing somebody's armpit or a coffee cup. Also, I suspect that there are rarely male models in drawing classes, and that doesn't seem right. If women are going to be objectified in the name of art, men should too. Although I wonder how the class's attendance rate would have been affected if we'd drawn a still-life instead of someone naked?

It's funny how few naked people I've seen. Not on TV, I mean, but in person. We always had individual locker rooms in high school. I don't remember being naked with my brothers, to swim or play in the bathtub or whatever. Is this an American prudism? Germans are well into nakedness, such that kids rarely wear anything at the beach and both their parents tend to wear only Speedos. The French and Spanish are similar. The Brits are more like us - they wear full wet suits at the beach, but more for reasons of temperature than modesty I suspect - but even they have a nudists' colony on the river Cam. Maybe my experiences with nudity this week are one more step in my Europeanification?

An unpleasant feeling of nakedness also happened this week, with the arrival of my first job rejection. Ouch. Sending an application detailing who you are as an employee, as a scholar, as a person, feels revealing, and makes you vulnerable. Then when that application is not wanted, you feel personally violated. Right? This could just be me, and everyone says it gets easier as you get more rejections (really?!), and of course the worst thing you can do is take rejections personally, but still... it's hard not to feel naked in front of a selection committee. And not in the interest of beauty, like art models, or the liberating joy of a German kid at the beach, but in the self-centered hope of getting your onlookers to hire you, despite your vulnerability. Strange. And awful. I'd rather jump in the Cam naked every day forever than face another slim envelope saying "thank you for your application but...".

My supervisor

I ran into my supervisor today. As he was entering the University Library and I was leaving it, he stopped and teased me - "I didn't know sociologists went to the library!" (As a book historian and the lead editor of Darwin's letters, he spends a lot of time in the library, and - it's true - way more than I do!)
I suddenly felt very grateful for being his student. I have often felt that way - almost every time we have a meeting, really - but lately a lot of my friends have been complaining about their supervisors, for being distant, harsh, not "getting" the student's ideas, etc. How did I get so lucky? Let me count the ways that my supervisor could be terrible but is instead, somehow, amazing...

1.  My supervisor is not in my field. He told me with a smile after my first six months as a PhD student that I now knew more about sociology of science than he did. Usually that's a crash course for disaster, but for us it worked, in part because it meant he had to listen. He usually couldn't suggest readings for me, but he could ask intelligent questions about my ideas and be a fabulous editor of my writing.

2.  My supervisor doesn't answer email. Ever. He is a professor and runs the Darwin Correspondence Project - two full-time jobs, really - and he was also Head of Department for 2010-2011. That means he is impossible to track down, electronically or otherwise. He actually has a reputation in the department for "feigning incompetence", as our all-powerful administrator put it, with regards to email and other technologies, so that he is never assigned to do administrative work. Brilliant move by him, but how is all this not a train wreck of a supervisory situation for me?
Because when you do manage to arrange a meeting with him, you have his 100% full-on attention. He sometimes hasn't read the stuff you emailed him to read and so he'll send you away for a few minutes while he reads it (in about a page per second, it seems), and when you come back to his office he is guaranteed to be full of insightful comments. Magic. Also, another benefit of having an e-distant supervisor is that we are not friends. We don't share info about our personal lives. I don't send him the upset and ranting emails that some PhD students send their supervisors, because I know he won't respond and he most likely won't read them anyway. He doesn't have time to chat. And honestly, I think it's better emotionally and professionally for me (and maybe all of us) to NOT voice my occasional rants to my supervisor...

3. My supervisor is super famous and successful and goes on TV fairly often to talk about his work. (Which maybe explains #2... too much fan mail!) Isn't he therefore a jerk?
Absolutely not. Never. He is the nicest person you can imagine - full of the homegrown friendliness of his Wisconsin roots. He smiles all the time, which should be off-putting but he makes it charming (perhaps so that you'll forget that he's ignored all your desperate emails?). As I said, he gives you all his attention during meetings. No chat, but also no complaining (or maybe minimal complaining) about his own workload, which happens often to other students I know. He cracks jokes and uses outrageous metaphors while verbally ripping apart your crappy chapter, to keep you smiling and in a favorable mood despite the (almost always well-deserved) criticism.

So how did I get so lucky? And it's not just me, of course. He has shared his wisdom through kind teaching with countless PhD students, though his style seems to work best with those who are self-motivated, don't rely on him to listen to their rants or reply to emails, and have a sense of humor.

Other crucial reasons that my supervisor is awesome? He is cross-eyed, sleeps during seminars, and picks his fingernails til they're bloody - JUST LIKE ME.

With a little help from my friends...

(Sorry for all the song titles lately, but they're all just so RELEVANT!)

Yesterday I submitted my fourth postdoc application, and it was the hardest of them all. Why?! Shouldn't this get EASIER (and hopefully better) with practice? Writing that research proposal - to compare fossil preparators and their work practices in Germany with the ones I studied in the US and UK, because Germans have official training programs and Americans and Brits don't - was brutal. First I got conflicting feedback from my supervisor and advisor, so I wrote a compromise proposal, which won the disapproval of my most reliable and most attentive source of job advice (my mom). Then I changed lots more things and totally lost my ability to read this proposal because I'd been reading it in different forms for like a month.

So I sent it to my friends. Those wonderful sources of support and encouragement, my fellow PhD students, who are just as clueless about job applications as I am but are good at grammar, came through for me in the last 12 hours before this application was due.

I didn't need - couldn't take - any more advice, I just needed some confidence that my proposal made sense and had correct verb tenses and punctuation. My first reader-friend, bless her, was smart enough to ignore my pleas for only grammar-checking and sent back my page-long proposal absolutely covered in Tracked Changes. Turns out she was a former editor at Nature (as in, the top academic science journal! Wow!). But she was worried about hurting my feelings, so she called me first to discuss her suggestions and denounce Track Changes for seeming too final when actually her changes were just ideas... and of course her changes were right-on and insightful and good. So I changed things AGAIN. And again couldn't read the final product effectively, and had to call on the kindness of yet another PhD pal. This time my email was more clearly worded about I CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING MAJOR and she must have sensed my rising panic about the deadline, so she pointed out some actual mistakes (and added in some Britishisms, e.g., "program" -> "programme", which was funny and which I did not include...) and inadvertently gave me permission to send it. Finally.

Who knows if that proposal is actually any good, but the process of writing it cemented my belief that knowledge is social and that doing things in groups is VERY DIFFICULT and extremely worthwhile. My proposal is SO MUCH BETTER after all these revisions, at least according to me. And honestly, that confidence is all that matters when you're submitting an application that has a lottery ticket's chances of even being carefully read, let alone earning an interview...

"It's always better when we're together..."

Jack Johnson's song "It's always better when we're together" was playing in the hipster cafe near Sloane Square in London, where I met my friend Becky to study today. I love that song, and it was the wedding theme song for my friends Zarah and Robert. It also became the theme of today...

I'm cat- and flat-sitting in my friend's posh flat near Greenwich this week, to prevent the cat being lonely. But that means that yours truly is at risk of being lonely... I have like three friends in London (and one is obviously away since I'm staying in her flat). So I've been hanging out with Becky in her fav study spaces around London. Great fun!

But Becky was busy every evening, and after one night of watching BBC TV and one night of skyping and working, I had run out of evening entertainment. So I went to the movies - by myself, to see a silly and not-cultural movie. I was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, and all the more so when the theme of the movie turned out to be how important it is to do things TOGETHER, with other people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZBe7_lE9lE

Yikes. After the movie (which I really enjoyed, despite its badly-timed moral!), I trekked across Greenwich's labyrinth of 18th-century, badly lit streets and then across Blackheath, a giant open field of scariness, to the flat, clutching my "London A to Z" map. It was dark and lonely, and I was hungry and tired. So obviously my mind wandered to muggers and rapists and - worse - the legendary ghost of a horseman who roams Blackheath at night. So it seemed only to be expected when the hedge next to me started to rustle. I ignored the crashing for a bit and then tried to nonchalantly run across the street to avoid the mugger/rapist/ghost in the hedge, but a BEAUTIFUL BUSHY-TAILED LONG-NOSED FOX beat me to it. Ahh! Awesome!! The most English of all possible nighttime wanderers, besides maybe a hedgehog...

I would have liked a companion tonight, if only to witness the gorgeous fox as well as make the walk less scary, and, although I complain about sharing a house with three other people (who are all very nice), I would like another human in this flat (although the cat is very friendly). It's great to have the quiet and to find things in the same places you put them and to have only your dishes piled in the sink... but it's just not very fun. Maybe my days of student house-sharing are not as numbered as I thought... and maybe I'll be a little more appreciative of my housemates.

Week of wonders

This week has been epic. Maybe even this whole month has been a whirlwind of being busy and thinking hard and getting shit done. Yay!

On Monday I gave a talk at my favorite seminar, the Cabinet, which I ran for a year and which is attended by all the people I most respect in HPS. It was my first talk on my PhD research, and it was on a chapter that's still an Ugly First Draft (though a really cool topic with awesome quotes from preparators and great photos). Also, I wanted to TALK it, not read it.

Clearly this was a lot to ask, especially in front of an audience who pretty much all knew me, which could have meant either that they didn't hold back and destroyed my argument with merciless questions, "friendly fire" style, OR that they would be laid-back and super nice. In the end I think they were a combination of the two - tough and wide-ranging and very insightful questions, but said with a smile and a sense of competing with each other to get to ask their question. Really - there's ALWAYS a pause of about 20 seconds before anyone asks a question after a Cabinet talk (I know - when I was the Chair, I sweated buckets during those 20 seconds every week hoping desperately that someone would ask a question) but as soon as I shut up there were like 5 hands in the air. Phew! AND people stayed late because there were so many questions - we finished 20 minutes after Cabinet officially finishes. And that NEVER happens. A compliment, definitely, but man, was I brain-dead when I finally got to leave. :) AND - the biggest compliment of all and one that I had never even hoped for - my beloved supervisor, who sleeps through every talk regardless of its quality or his level of interest or the amount of caffeine in his blood, STAYED AWAKE THROUGH THE WHOLE 35-MIN TALK AND THE 45-MIN QUESTIONS. Wow! My ego about tripled in size when my friend told me that. (I hadn't dared to look at him the whole time because I knew it would hurt my feelings to see him asleep...)

So the careful writing and editing and practicing were all worth it for the glorious interest and compliments of my colleagues, even though I wasn't hungry and didn't sleep for about three days before the talk. Strange, that never happens to me. It was so bad that Tobias learned a new English word - "cranky". That part of the talk prep process was perhaps not worth it...

In addition to the Cabinet talk, I turned in four job applications this month, with the crucial help of my supervisor and my mom in editing CVs and cover letters and research proposals. I also edited one of my old MPhil essays to be published in a little informal booklet for the Whipple Museum, celebrated the vivas of two of my favorite HPS PhD students (Drs Susannah and Katie), and marked 11 student essays. And I got off the plane 19 days ago... no wonder I've been cranky.

Other huge wins this week - New Hall/Clare Hall women's football team beat Downing College 4-2. It was SO FUN to slide around in the mud, sometimes connecting with the ball but mostly not, in the pouring rain while the other team of mostly posh undergrads cheered each other on with cries of "Don't let the rain dampen your spirits, girls!" and "Go [insert posh girl's name, e.g., Dora, Caroline, Sophie, Annabelle...]!" Hilarious. And we - the unposh, mostly graduate, mostly out-of-shape, and many never-played-football-before team - actually somehow won!

Then yesterday I got an email from a researcher whose survey I took about students' reading habits (where, when, how long each day, with technology or not, etc...) saying that I'd won the survey prize! I always thought those "chance to win a prize if you take this survey" claims were mythical, but I actually will get a shiny new Kindle! Awesome!!

And today, finally, I was chosen to be interviewed and in a photo shoot for Clare Hall, for an article about the telephone fundraising campaign we did a year ago. The whole thing was pretty surreal, in part because I have not-so-good memories of being a telemarketer for Clare Hall and had to be careful what I said on record, and in part because the photo shoot was not a smiling pose of the group of us, but a literally surrealist shot of us carefully arranged between birch trees in the college gardens, holding retro rotary-dial telephones and pretending to talk on them. ?! It was also cold and and the photographer would yell things like "step 10 centimeters to my right, please!" (I have no idea how far that is, by the way) and fuss with the light exposure while we shivered (because he wouldn't let us wear coats in the shot. Obviously.). I was not impressed with the whole process, but my face (and its turquoise rotary phone prop...) will be in the glossy magazine received by all the Cambridge alumni! Another addition to my ego.

Even after all these successes, I'm still feeling more dazed than celebratory. Hopefully I can shake it off and get my ego under control before it gets destroyed by the first wave of job rejections in a few months. Until then, I really hope I can relax in time to turn 26 and a half tomorrow. :)

I hope you all have a week of successes too, but without the crankiness or the daze or the gigantic ego!!

"Brace! Brace!"

On EasyJet flights around Europe, the safety talk before takeoff includes instructions for what to do "if you hear 'BRACE! BRACE'!" - namely, bend over in your seat and put your arms over your head. If you're flying to Germany, for example, all the instructions are in German, except the "BRACE! BRACE!". If you're flying to France or Italy or Spain or wherever, same thing - "BRACE! BRACE!" rings out in English in the middle of the local language. That line stood out to me, because airlines don't say that in the American safety talk and because "BRACE! BRACE!" said in English is apparently an international signal for "look out", "take care", "something's about to happen to you".

That's how I feel today - the need to "BRACE! BRACE!" for 2012. Holy crap. The past two new years have been pretty much the same for me, just researching and writing in the same place on the same topic. On New Years Eve 2009, I knew where I'd be for 2010; on NYE 2010 I knew where I'd be for 2011. But on NYE 2011, I had no freaking clue what 2012 will bring.

Will I finish my PhD in June as planned?

Will I get a job in 2012?? Where will it take me? Where will I be on NYE 2012? What continent, even?! (Man, wherever I am, I hope I have a paycheck.)

My dad retired *today*. What will his new 60%-time work schedule be like?

Two Wylie cousins are expecting babies in 2012... will we have any other new family members?

Will Obama be reelected?

What will happen at the London Olympics?

.... ????

OMG. This all feels so out of my hands. I'm bracing myself for whatever 2012 will bring.

May you feel prepared for this new year's adventures, and may all your adventures be GREAT.