Sharing America

My friend Deena is visiting from Chicago. She and I threw a 4th of July BBQ at my house in Cambridge - complete with imported Reese's peanut butter cups, imported yogurt-covered raisins, imported s'mores, local watermelon (but not enough room for a seed-spitting contest, unfortunately...), popcorn, corn on the cob, yellow mustard, BYO meat (Deena and I grilled veggies for everyone, but they had to provide meat if they wanted it, which was maybe not a very American requirement but no one seemed to mind), Waldorf salad, ants-on-a-log, and a red cocktail (sangria), a white cocktail (pina colada), and a blue cocktail (mystery blue alcohol + lemonade!).

It took us all day to get ready, even with the noble help of Tobias, my (I think?) boyfriend and also a skilled vegetable-slicer and a muscled alcohol deliveryman. Deena and I even bought sparklers! (And had to get carded and given a Safety Talk by the guy at the hardware store. Just to buy 20 sparklers! They also sold Roman Candles - I wonder what the Safety Talk for those is like.) We used my (few) American t-shirts to decorate the chairs in my adorable postage-stamp back yard, and hung up red white and blue bunting (£1 from Tesco) and strings of glittery stars (£2 from Tesco, and now recycled to hang in my room!) and Deena's hand-drawn US flag. We put the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain on my iTunes, and fired up the BBQ. (Minor hiccup - the bag of coal I found in our garden shed, which I assumed was leftover charcoal that my housemates had bought, turned out to be COAL, like actual dig-up-in-a-mine, burn-in-your-stove coal. We spent a few confused minutes trying to light it, before I made a dash to the corner store for CHARcoal, which is somehow different from coal. Why anyone is selling coal in 21st-century Cambridge is another interesting question...)

20 or so of my friends were very good sports and came wearing red, white and blue, a Wonder Woman t-shirt, a NASA t-shirt, even a giant US flag shirt that my friend found in a charity shop. They tried all the strange American foods Deena and I had made, and admired the colorful alcohol. One friend even brought peanut butter cookies and a homemade cake decorated with a US flag in frosting and fruit! Deena, ever the teacher, gave a fabulous lecture and demonstration on How To Make S'Mores, while my Cambridge-PhD-student buddies watched, engrossed, before elbowing each other out of the way to get the best spot around the BBQ. How heart-warming to see the subjects of our former ruling country (as well as Canadians, a German, an Irishwoman, and a Mexican) join in the celebration of our country's birthday!

S'Mores 101

Crowding the "campfire"


Star-spangled sparklers

Tobias cutting Melanie's flag cake, while I struggle with the graham crackers that traveled from Chicago with me a few weeks ago (the marshmallows came in Deena's suitcase!)

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...)

the best book ever - now on a blog!

http://whipplelib.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/nature-teaching-on-the-blackboard-by-william-plane-pycraft-and-janet-kelman-london-caxton-publishing-co-1910-donated-to-the-whipple-library-by-jim-secord/

I wrote this like a year ago for the Whipple Library (my department's library, tiny and oh so full of history of science books), and they just put it online. Cool!! And somehow funny that pictures from a 1910 book on blackboard drawing would be on the internet?

My favorite part is the comment. :) Whipple Library, I <3 you!

the woes of a supervisor

My dear friend and classmate Emily is a philosopher. She has studied basically only philosophy since she was 17. Her PhD is on what makes a just society. She also supervises the introductory class to Philosophy of Science, which has nothing to do with justice or society, really.
The students' essay question this week was about the philosophy of quantum physics. After giving the Philosophy of Science supervision, Emily walked into our office looking pale, exhausted, and shell-shocked. When I said "what's wrong?", she said in a small and defeated voice, "They asked me what quantum physics was."

Maybe this is one of those you-have-to-know-her stories, but to see a very accomplished and dedicated philosopher completely done in by undergrads' questions was unsettling. It happens all the time, sure, but it highlights the narrowness of knowledge that we all get from postgrad degrees. Trusting undergrads think that we have all the answers. They call me Dr Wylie in emails no matter how many times I tell them I'm not. They trust our inked-in-the-margins feedback as the way forward. So did it shake Emily's students' whole worldviews that she didn't know what quantum physics was? Did they leave the supervision looking as traumatized as she did?

Probably not. My guess is those students were super relieved that Emily didn't know what the major topic of their essay meant, because that meant it isn't important and thus that THEY don't have to know it either. Rather than necessarily failing her students in her role as their teacher, as Emily felt, instead she probably did them a huge favor by showing that philosophy is not about knowing all the facts but actually is a frame of mind, a worldview, a way of thinking. Insert any old case study, even something as daunting as quantum physics, and Philosophy will analyze it just fine.

Even so, I'm going to Google the topics of my students' essays so I can rattle off some kind of definition for everything. Like a good all-knowing (egotistical, bull-shitting...) supervisor should. :)

Gone too far?

One of the paleontologists and I were walking down the museum hallway, discussing his work on fossil microvertebrates (small furry animals) and I was asking my usual questions about why paleo-rat teeth are useful for his research, etc, and he looked at me and said, "Can I just say, I feel like I'm on the couch here."
OMG. Ethnography turned psychoanalysis?! Good thing fieldwork has given me a lot of experience and skill at BACK-PEDALING.