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.

Science & Scouts

Last week I joined Cambridge Hands-On Science (CHaOS) to lead 5 days of science activities for kids. Our "venue" was "CamJam", a "jamboree" for "Scouts", "Guides", "Beavers", and "Explorers" held about an hour outside of Cambridge, on the grounds of what is normally a horse-racing course complete with betting rooms and bars.

If you couldn't guess from all the quotation marks, I had no idea what this event was. This was my third CHaOS Roadshow, where a group of Cambridge science students, ages somewhere between 18 and 30, take about 50 science activities on the road to schools and festivals around the UK for about a month in the summer. So I *got* the activities, the science, the camping, and the fact that basically all of the "demonstrators" (us) would be English, white, younger than me, and very nerdy. Nothing new. What I didn't get was The Scouts.

So 13 of us signed into the camp with our "MPV" (Multi Passenger Vehicle, not to be confused with a MiniBus, which is somehow different) and our huge white "paedo van" (short for "paeodophile"... who apparently drives a white van?) which was full of science equipment and tents and food. We got very official Staff name tags - logical, right? - followed by a "necker" and a "woggle" and a CamJam 2011 "badge". Having never been a Scout, I had no idea what to do with a necker or a woggle or a badge. Everyone else in the camp was wearing their necker tied around their neck, so I tied mine around my neck and immediately got chastised for not rolling it correctly, and "how dare you leave off the Friendship Knot?!" Whoa. What planet was this?
A kind Scout who apparently took the "Scout Promise" to heart rolled my necker for me, tied my Friendship Knot, and showed me how to slide my "woggle" under the knot. I was initiated. (Or so people thought... my favorite quotation from Planet CamJam was a lady asking us "What troupe are you from?", clearly expecting us to answer "Scouts", "Guides", "Beavers", "Explorers", etc, (these are names of scout groups according to the kids' age) and we said "We're scientists". That apparently didn't fit her known categories of scout groups, so she said "What's that?")

I learned lots about scouting ("for God, Queen, and country") and hopefully the scouts learned something about science. I "demonstrated" activities named Cuddly Microbes (cute stuffed toys that represent viruses and bacteria so kids would pick them up and play with them and then read the label and say "That's diarrhea?!" :) Then we'd talk about germs. It was great!), Mini Explosions (lemon juice and baking soda in film canisters so the reaction blows the lid off), Cornflour (cornflour + water makes a really cool sometimes-liquid/sometimes-solid that kids love to stick their hands in and get all over themselves and you), Trebuchets (homemade catapults that the kids can build and test), Suspension Bridge, and, my all-time favorite, Arch Bridge (the kids put together 5 wedge-shaped blocks into an arch bridge and then get to walk over it, while we talk about forces. I just love watching the wheels turn in their heads as they try to cram the blocks together in different ways until they figure out that the short sides all have to point down to make a bridge. I also love their shock and mistrust when I invite them to walk over their new bridge! They always get over that super fast though, and scramble over it like monkeys.).

Me in necker and woggle, and CHaOS uniform t-shirt, on my beloved Arch Bridge


And look what the Scouts did today! Cooooool.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14425903

So so so so so good

A few weeks ago my iPod's shuffle function showed its usual prescient wisdom and played Destiny's Child's song So Good. It wasn't the message of the song that felt so appropriate at that moment (it's actually kind of a tragic song), but its chorus:

I'm doing so so so so so
I'm doing so so so so so
I'm doing so so so so so good good good good good good

You get the idea! With this pounding into my earphones as I strolled through Cambridge on my way to my office, I sang along (as always) and, with the self-reflection that comes just before a birthday, I really meant it. I AM doing so so so so so good. I've had a really fun and productive year. I did two super fun stints of fieldwork in amazing places, met tons of interesting people (and interviewed a lot of them...), saw my family a lot, lived in two houses with tons of character (and characters!), really enjoyed teaching, ran a seminar that I was proud of, really enjoyed *not* rowing... Things are so good. I didn't get sick this winter like I did last winter, I didn't sprain or break anything (a rare occurrence in my pre-Cambridge life), and I avoided the crippling loneliness of last year's term breaks (mostly by leaving town :) ). My friends are wonderful enough that they sent an outpouring of attention and good wishes yesterday for my birthday. Everyone was genuinely excited about it... way more than I was, somehow. They gave me facebook posts, lunch, roses, books, art supplies, hugs, emails, texts, and a Dixie Chicks bag all the way from the US (thanks, Deena!). My family gave me Happy Birthday sung over the internet and money in all kind of forms, including a check for $20 in the post from my step-grandma. Awwwwww. I was doing so so so good before all these moments of thoughtfulness, but they make things even better. :)
Thanks to all of you for making my year and my birthday so so so so so good!

Britain's beach

Last week I was in Devon and Cornwall, the two counties in the "boot" of England - the southwest tip. The first four days were at the British Society for the History of Science conference in Exeter (a beautiful town with hills and a medieval cathedral!), where I gave a talk, chaired a session, attended many many sessions, and slept through only one. What a success! It's a really fun crowd, almost everyone knows each other and is super friendly. I made 7 new facebook friends, if that's a measure of the friendliness of a crowd...
Then came my first UK road trip, in the backseat of a postdoc's car for about 90 minutes from Exeter to Polzeath, Cornwall, a little chunk of cliff on the north Cornish coast, right on the Atlantic. I kind of like road trips in the US and I've been on lots of them, including to New York, Toronto, Texas, and Florida. But the idea of being on the "motorway" (highway) for hours in the tiny flimsy cars this country drives did worry me a little. Themes of the drive included "what does that road sign mean?" (me), "should we trust the SatNav?" (the driver), "are we nearly there?" (her boyfriend, jokingly using the British translation of "are we there yet?"), and "DID YOU SAY SOMETHING?" (the cars are basically not insulated, so you can't hear over the noise of the road. At least that negated any fights over choosing a radio station!). Then we spent 4 lovely days walking the coastal path, drinking tea and Cornish cider, hanging out, splashing on the beach, SURFING.... all in the rain. Cornwall is usually cloudy and cold, so no one seemed surprised but it was inspirational to see how they just kept going and ignored the weather. The guy who rented us our SURFBOARDS was wearing shorts, flipflops, a down jacket and a wool hat. He said we'd be fine in our super awesome borrowed wetsuits because the water was warmer than the air... Who knows if that was true, but we were too busy getting tossed around in the enormous waves and chasing our surfboards and then very briefly riding the waves before getting tumbled under them and scraping the sand to emerge triumphant into the wonderfully salt-free rain to notice our shivers. It was SO FUN. We were out there 1.5 hours and had the best time ever and then ate pasties on the beach (which we bought in our dripping wetsuits, and no one in the shop even looked surprised) and went home to shower and pretend to read while actually passed out with exhaustion. We also read the guidebook's entry for Polzeath, and it described the Polzeath beach as "for wannabe surfers"! We took that to mean "everyone", rather than "losers who can't surf", especially since the guidebook added: "Even the babies are in wetsuits." :) Hooray for holidays!


the wannabe surfers in our super hero outfits

Why should rain stop a BBQ?

Pasties on the beach

One of the three cars we arrived in - a two-seater SmartCar! (I rode in a slightly bigger non-smart car.)

Cornish Rattler - the best cider EVER

Historians of science on holiday!

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!)