Nerves could be contagious

Thursday. 6:00 am. Four hours to the prelim, and I'm hunched over the toilet, throwing up the entire contents of my stomach. Funny thing about throwing up: it's an oral diary of the last few meals. The baked potato for dinner. The orange juice for breakfast.

I stumble back to bed after tossing my favorite pants in the dryer. The boyfriend says, "Are you okay?" Not really. I don't think I can do this today. But I can't stand the idea of postponing it either.

I say, "I think I have food poisoning or something." He says, "Maybe it's just nerves."

I've never had a problem with nerves, but I conceded. I slept right up to 9:30 am, and the boyfriend drove me to school and dropped me off at the front door.

I don't remember much about the prelim. I spoke for 40 minutes. My advisor spoke for 15. One committee member asked two questions. Another made a comment. Another said nothing at all.

I passed.

The boyfriend was in the audience, along with two of my research group members. The boyfriend says he couldn't tell at all during the prelim that I was sick; my acting performance made it hard for him to understand why I napped lethargically the rest of the day. Between naps, I took trips to the bathroom, surfed the internet, concluded I had stomach flu, and worked on my research proposal due that night for a post-doc position.

He went to the store and bought me juice. He took care of the dog. He remade the bed while I half-slept in it.

Saturday. 6:00 am. The boyfriend is hunched over the toilet. Poor guy.

Final Vacation Highlights

Three Amtrak train rides. $72

Three Sound Transit bus rides. $8

Four tanks of gas. $120

Effortless Shopping. > $100
- Olive linen jacket.
- Oversized linen sheer sweater.
- White camisole.
- Black Pat Benetar-esque t-shirt.
- White notched t-shirt.
- Textured button down shirt.
- Flattering jeans.
- Comfy cardigan.
- Gifts.

Most relaxing moment. Laying in a field in Discovery Park, soaking in the sun, letting the bugs sleep on me.

Luckiest moment. Getting a $400 travel voucher to volunteer to take another flight three hours later. Having a great friend in "The Big City" to put me up for the night.

Foodiest moment. Eating a demi-poulet with mayonaise at a hip French restaurant near Capitol Hill in Seattle. Sharing a taste of it with the boyfriend who is eating baked fish in a lentil ragout.

Funniest moment. I'm telling a story about this couple I know to my boyfriend and his friends. The story is about the woman who takes care of the kids, the man who does nothing with the kids, and the nosy co-worker who tells him he's a bad father during a staff meeting. My punchiline, "It's important to marry well."

One of the boyfriend's buddies asks, "Well? Doesn't that mean rich? What are *you* doing with a graduate student?"

I'm suddenly unable to speak English. I stutter, "We aren't mah...'Well'...by 'well' I mean, you know...not..."

The boyfriend leans back and proudly says, "She means well-hung."

Honorable Mention. Eating a sandwich on the train back to GradShitTownVille; the sandwich my friend Iu made for me while I slept in this morning.

Awesome functions

Over the phone, the boyfriend and I laugh at horrible research proposals.

Me: I think I'll work on writing a "Do-Over" system, so that when something bad happens in the computer, it will just do it over, and everything will be fine.

Bf: I'm going to write a "No Take-backs" function that will increase security of a system and enforce safety protocols.

Me: I'm going make a "Triple-Dog-Dare" function that will cancel out your "No Take-backs" function.

But I'm not playing!

Walking back from lunch, I tell the boyfriend the good news about my friend K.

"K. is defending on Monday."
He thinks about it, "Because the best offense is a good defense."
He thinks about it more, "And we know that CS majors are offensive."

* * *
I was a mean big sister. Was. In 1992, my brother puberty-ed up to 6 feet, and I became the nice big sister that I am today.

Back when I was a mean big sister, I played competitive games without my brother's knowledge. We'd be walking to the car, and I would quietly walk a little bit faster, knowing I'd reach the car (store, house, tree) first. "I WIN!" I would declare. He'd cry, "But I'm not playiiiinggg!!" And I would laugh in my mean big sister way. Horrible. I realize that I deserve the bad things that happen to me.

*
The University of GradShitTownVille is exacting my brother's revenge. They are playing a competitive game against me. Unlike my brother, I know they are playing. Thing is, I just don't want to play. There's a variety of names for this game,

Publish! Get the biggest pile of publications and work at a Top 10 school!
Buzz! Lie to your colleagues about your accomplishments, and make people think you are better than you are!
Plagarize! Steal from old publications and put them in your own!
Intellectual Starvation! Need things other than CS Research to make you happy? Forget about it! You need to focus to get that Top 10 job!!

[ages 22 and up]


Because I'm not playing, people often tell me, "You are losing. You aren't good at this game. You aren't going to win if you keep this up."

Well, that's not exactly what they say. Their messages sound more like, "You don't have enough publications to get a good job. You aren't going to get a good academic job with this publication record. You can't prelim with this few publications."

And yet, I get all these recruiter e-mails. Google. Lockheed Martin. Wind River (which is a funny one, since they laid me off in 2002). They tell me they are interested in me. They tell me that my skills are a good match. They say nice things about me. I feel like that 13 year old girl with low self-esteem sought out by the 26 year old man. Perhaps you know her. She makes public phone calls to Dr. Drew Pinskey.

A heart to heart

I asked the boyfriend,

"Do you think I'm mean?"
"No."
"...not to you, but to other people."
"Yes, but only to people who suck."

Spring means mixtapes and Disney characters

I've been going to bed later, getting up later, and having trouble sleeping. It's either the depression, or the asthma medication I resume taking in the spring. Either way, it's the perfect set up for bedtime antics.

Last night was all giggles. The boyfriend and I were trying to think of the worst romantic mixtape ever. It wasn't just enough to say the title of a song, like "Reunited by Kool and The Gang," because the boyfriend can't remember artists and titles. Instead, I'd say,

"What about the song from Ghost?"
"Song from Ghost?"
"Yeah, the song they make out to when they're makin' clay."
"Is that the...I can't help fallin' in love with you..."
"No no. That's Elvis, but covered by UB-40. Which version?"
"Definitely Elvis."
"Ah. No, the Ghost song is Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers."
"I don't know."
"oooooo...myyyiayyyy loovvee....my darrrlin'....I hunger for..yourrrr toucheh!"

And so on. Keep in mind, I can't sing. I assume the voice of an unknown cartoon character when I sing.



And now that Spring is here, the pajamas are evolving for increasing warmth. We are calling each other "Mickey" and "Donald."

Minnesota Gift Baskets

A recent conversation with the boyfriend, not at all related to Minnesota Gift Baskets,

I say, "My brother sent me a video today."
"Like on UTube?"
"No, a video."
"Like in an e-mail?"
"No...a tape."

How quickly the old technology gets forgotten.

The first time I ever heard Bjork's song "Isobel" was on a telephone. The local paper had done a review of her album. Following the review was a small blurb, "If you'd like to hear a track from the new album, dial 503 555 1212." At that point, I hadn't yet heard of TMBG's "Dial A Song," but it was a similar idea. "Dial a song" is much different these days.

How quickly, indeed.

And yet, the really very old continues to be revered. An Australian website was recently launched, providing high school teachers with resources to discuss careers in science. The graphic design and writing style suggests that it might also be intended for a younger audience. Among other things, the site features Australian Nobel Prize winners:



To me, this is a corrollary to what I mentioned recently regarding the stock photo diversity poster. This line-up of white dudes in dated frocks is an equally unrealistic reflection of what science looks like. In high school, I was presented with similar line-ups, though Marie Curie was usually involved, and I always felt so far away from the excitement of scientific inquiry when faced with those grainy black and whites.

So what's the answer? You don't like the diversity poster. You don't like the Nobel Prize winners. What would make you happy?


A better alternative can actually be found at the same Australian website. There, we see a list of scientists, both men and women, ranging from biology to engineering, from geology to scientific journalist. I feel this is the most engaging part of the website, but I really wish it were expanded. Perhaps, I dunno, adding pictures of these real people would really brighten things up. It's so much easier for a kid--a potential member of the scientific community--to relate to a "Scott Burgess: ecologist" or "Suzanna Turk: engineer" than it is "Old white dude: Nobel Prize winner."

Time Travelling with Scrooge McDuck

So say the boyfriend,

I can't believe it's 11:25 am on a Saturday, and I'm already pissed off at the department today.

Okay. Let's back up.

I attend panels. I don't know why, because 90% of the time, the panels I've attended are less than mediocre. They are generally made up of four people with the exact same perspective. They are all the same because whomever was given the task of organizing the panel did so at the last minute. Moreover, the panel moderator doesn't moderate, and instead talks more than the panelists themselves. The result is a panel that answers 3 questions in 1 hour, and thanks for coming folks!

There have been one or two panels that have been really valuable. The panelists were caring, informed people with good ideas, and the panel was well-moderated. Maybe that's why I keep going. It's like the time I did a really awesome flip-turn in the pool. I keep trying to do flip turns, thinking back to that awesome one, but I usually just get water up my nose, and push myself into the floor of the pool.

Ow.

I'll be honest. My perfect panel would consist of multiple clones of myself that had made very different life choices and gone forward in time to live out the next 10 years of their lives. For the panel, they return from year 2017 to report back to me what they'd seen. I'd ask questions like,

"So, "fcsgs B," who decided to get married but stay childless. You now work at Carnegie Mellon. How are things for you? You published 10 papers this year? Wow! But, do you have enough time to do the things you want, like practice yoga and write your novel? Do you regret not having kids?"

"And you, "fcsgs A," who quit school, had two children by 36, and started a successful chain of self-serve dog washes in Seattle. Do you feel intellectually fulfilled? How do your children feel about your upcoming divorce?"

"How about you, "fcsgs C?" You are still single. You haven't published in two years because of all your teaching responsibilities at University of Portland. Are you hopeful that your sporadic research will make an impact on the field? Is it important to you to make such an impact? Did your shoulder ever get better?"

And for some reason, Alan Young of the original Time Machine would be there as moderator, entertaining us with his Scrooge McDuck voice acting.



Okay, I didn't say "ideal" was at all "realistic," so I keeping attending the panels of this world, hoping to catch a glimpse of my own future clones. I haven't found them yet. It's been a little wearying, really, not having anyone that I can talk to about this. It doesn't even have to be a clone. I'm just searching for someone with an open mind. Someone who doesn't want me to be just like them. For most people here, students and faculty, any mention of not applying to the Top 10 is received with scoffing. "Why wouldn't you?" Or, "At a small school, you'd be teaching all the time, you don't want that."

I don't?


In an effort to have a real conversation about this, I got a membership at MentorNet. It's a website bringing together people who are looking for mentors with people who would like to be mentors. I decided to be more proactive in looking for this magical person I've described. I decided to find that human being interested in mentoring, one who would give me advice about the small school vs. big school issue. A person who'd been through something other than working like a dog and making sweet love to the University of GradShitTownVille.

At MentorNet, members can configure their profile, including setting preferences for a mentor. The preferences are things like,

Field of Study
Education
Work Sector (e.g., private, government, university)
Gender
Alma Mater
Employer
Geographic Location
Ethnicity
Professional Memberships

My only preferences were "[Computer Science or Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering] + PhD + University." And MentorNet reported,

Unfortunately, there are no mentors that match with your preferences at this time.

Sigh. In fact, the only PhD's in MentorNet in my preferred field of study, are these five people that all work at Texas Instruments. I appreciate that they've volunteered, but I don't need to talk about industry, thank you.

Here at University of GradShitTownVille, there's been a lot of attention lately paid to graduate students getting academic jobs at the top schools. Perhaps by "attention" I should say "propaganda," which is honestly getting quite old. Recently, a "club" was started for students interested in academic jobs. I inquired with the club president that perhaps a panel would be of value. Perhaps a panel of people who could candidly discuss the pros and cons of working at the small liberal arts school versus the Big Top 10 University. The question was essentially ignored, translated into this defensive "Why not work at top 10?"

To these people, when I ask questions like that, I may as well ask, "Explain to me the benefits of breathing in and out, versus not breathing at all."

And so, with telling the boyfriend that whole story, comes that quote,

Die-Khat-Oh-Me

I am dang jealous of the boyfriend today. He's been in Seattle the past couple of days, interviewing with Bbbbilll! We spoke on the phone tonight, talked about how his interview went, his $24 shopping spree at REI, and his Baja Fresh intake. His most interesting comment about the interview was,

"It was strange to me that whenever I talked to a man, I was talking to a researcher. Whenever I talked to a woman, she was a non-researcher."

That wasn't a comment on his attitude towards women in science, it was what actually took place. Only the recruiter and the HR rep. were women. The five or six people that interviewed him were all men.

It's too bad that Microsoft appears to suffer the same problems of diversity that many universities around the country do. Though, if you look at websites alone, you'd think there were women EVERYWHERE. I do appreciate what academic institutions are trying to do with these photographs, but it really seems quite contrived. For example, the following picture has a diverse group of people doing something obviously technical,



I have an engineering degree, but I have no idea what they are looking at. Moreover, I wish someone would just give that girl a step-ladder. I can see the thought-bubble above her head, "Almost....allllmoosst."

Other pictures seem less contrived, like this one of a woman in a clean room. Though, I don't think visual inspection alone can pass a silicon wafer out of quality control.



MIT seems the most honest with this photo from a recent EE freshman orientation,



Still, I'm always quite suspicious of these pictures, no matter how realistic they are supposed to seem.

Why do you always have to be so paranoid?


Sigh, you again? Well, for the past two years, there have been some "Diversity Posters" hanging around the hallways of my building. It's a photo montage of about 6 people; including a Latino man, a couple of African American woman, and this other woman who looks like she could be Rene Russo.

Can't you just be happy that there are female icons in your building, even if only in paper form? The department is trying to make an effort!


That's just it. The women in that particular poster are just icons. I realized this one day when I was visiting the Planned Parenthood website. One of the African American women depicted in the "Diversity Poster" was also in the photo montage on the P.P. homepage. Either this woman is a high-profile computer scientist AND birth control pill user or ...

Damn you, stock photography!

Can't even find enough "real" female computer scientists to make a stupid poster?

Alanis Morissette, voice of the graduate student

Many of my life's milestones have taken place in the desert. My mother took my brother and I to the desert for our first post-divorce vacation. I witnessed my grandmother's burial in the desert. I travelled to the desert to say goodbye to the leave behind the girl who dated that awful jerk, and hello to the woman who would become this graduate student. My most recent trip to the desert was five years ago, to visit my auntie in Las Vegas. I had just bought Alanis Morissette's "Under Rug Swept" album. I listened to it on my portable CD player as I walked the neighborhood streets, in a time that did not yet know the iPod.

Back then, Alanis songs always represented to me some unresolved anger at some stupid boy that had treated me badly. I know all the words to each song assigned to these boys. These days, thanks to having a decent boyfriend who doesn't call me bitch and who does his own dishes, I've not really listened to her albums as regularly. Today, I got out the "Under Rug Swept" album. It's been a bad 10 days, and I needed something for a structured screaming exercise. Upon track 2, I suddenly wondered if Alanis had ever been to graduate school. With all my frustrating faculty issues lately, it didn't seem appropriate anymore to think of old boyfriends when I hear lyrics like these:

The faculty members who won't let me finish my sentences:

Dear narcissus boy I know you've never really apologized for anything
I know you've never really taken responsibility
I know you've never really listened to a woman

Dear me-show boy I know you're not really into conflict resolution
Or seeing both sides of every equation
Or having an uninterrupted conversation

The faculty member who did that not-so-appropriate thing:

We'll fast forward to a few years later
And no one knows except the both of us
And I have honored your request for silence
And you've washed your hands clean of this

The faculty member who turned me away for advising:

Wait a minute man
You mispronounced my name
You didn't wait for all the information
Before you turned me away
Wait a minute sir
You kind of hurt my feelings
You seek me as a sweet back-loaded puppet
And you've got a meal ticket tast.

Weird.

I got a lot of "grrr" in me right now, in part due to the 12 hours of meetings I had last week. 12!?@#$What the$#@!? I'm trying to keep perspective, but it's tough, as I feel I've hit a local minimum with my research. My advisor is unhappy with my progress and wants to shut down my project. Grrr. Right now, I'm trying to recollect and try a new strategy to get him to listen to me. Without. Interrupting.

Still, I'm learning more and more. I've noticed that there are fewer and fewer things that folks say that sound like alien language, which is great progress for a EE in CS. Even the formal methods boyfriend hasn't stumped me for a while. That's something...right?

* * *

To keep things light-hearted, I'll end with a good boyfriend story.

These past couple of weeks it's been dang cold in GradShitTownVille. I whine about the cold at least three times a day. I thaw myself in the bathtub every night. I take heat-cuts through three buildings on my way to lunch. During one of my whiny moments, the boyfriend said,

"Whaddya mean it's cold? It's 261 Kelvin!"

Room for Rent

Looking over the GradShitTownVille newspaper to find the Sudoku puzzle, I saw an ad that said,

Room for rent in Artist's home. $225 per month. 555-1234

I paused a moment, and tried to remember how many times I've seen such an ad. Quite a few, really, but then I'm from the West Coast. The phrase "artists's home" is inviting, I suppose. I think of backdrops in movies; those very well-lit, airy lofts with maple floors and high ceilings. There's original art on the walls, a pottery wheel in the living room, and in the background, Demi and Patrick are making out. I doubt that this is what the ad's "room" looks like, but that's what comes to mind.

I also realized that you hardly ever see the following ad,

Room for rent in Scientist's house. $225 per month. 555-1234

What would this room look like? Would there be test tube racks and nested beakers everywhere? Posters of Professor Honeydew and Albert Einstein? Maybe an intriguing, gigantic boiler in the basement? Odd.

Anyway, it's something to think about, because these days my brain is stuck in a rut. The boyfriend is out of the country for a few weeks, and I've entered what I call "Hamster on the wheel" mode. The only thing that occurs to me to do is workout or work. I'm never sure why I go into this mode when he's gone, except to perhaps admit that I'm a raging workaholic. The boyfriend, too, is a raging workaholic. But, as I learned from my House MD DVD, he and I are like ethanol and methanol. Alone, we are potentially poisonous chemicals in the human body. Together, we bind together and are pretty harmless.

What?

Which makes me wonder why doctor shows can be so good and shows attempting to demonstrate graduate school are so so so bad. St. Elsewhere, House MD, ER, Grey's Anatomy are all pretty good television shows featuring the trials and dramas of TV doctors. Now, I understand that it's very unrealistic that every single doctor in a staff at an emergency room or hospital would be totally dreamy.

Oh Dr. Burke!

Yet, the medical science featured seems decent. Perhaps that's because I know nothing about medicine, so as long as there's beeping machines and blood and needles, it looks okay to me. Contrast this with that dumbass "NUMB3RS" show. There you get a poorly written show about mathematics, the FBI and graduate school written by people who have no clue. The professor characters say things like, "I'm very glad I hired him as a collaborator."

You don't *hire* collaborators!

You're telling me. Moreover, these guys never seem to have paper deadlines.

You said you were in a rut?

Ah, yes. These days I'm thinking about two major issues that aren't particularly joyful. In a recent turn of events,

I think you already mentioned this, but maybe it was just to me, because you whine about it ALL THE TIME,

my advisor says I need to publish 10 papers in the next three years. So, it feels that I have to look forward to three more years of living in this hell on earth measuring out my life not in coffee spoons but in paper deadlines. I lift my head a bit to look past graduation, and I have the passing realization that the rest of my life will be measured out by paper deadlines. With this huge "10" number looming over my head, I have this horrible stomach ache; that I will have to fit marriage and children and parents and friends between the paper deadlines. I will be either a horrible mother or a horrible researcher.

I guess I'm being overly dramatic, especially with the TS Eliot reference, and I suppose that life has to measured out in some kind of unit, but ...

but you said you were thinking about two things?

Wait for it. Jeez.

I suppose, after almost five years of this crap, I'm just a little exhausted. I'm tired of feeling like Bill Murray waking up every morning to Sonny and Cher's "I've got you babe." I'm tired of getting paid shit to work constantly, and I'm tired of being told to be an independent researcher when I'm trying my very, very hardest to do just that. Okay, so I am whining, but isn't that what "to blog" means?

It's the same root as the verb "to blave," And, as we all know, "to blave" means "to bluff."

Exactly.

...but you said you were thinking about two things?

Yes, I did. But I realize now that don't think the other thing is bloggable. So I will let T-boy finish this one up. Take it, Stearnsy:

For I have known them all already, known them all:--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

The Love and Romance of LTL

Very recently, I've seen an intense integration of my work life and my personal life. My boyfriend, who is another graduate student in my department, is presenting at meetings in my research group. The purpose of these presentations is to educate my group's professors and graduate students on the main ideas of another research area of Computer Science.

This week, his presentation was rather reminiscent of how we met. We met during the qualification exam. We had been assigned the same paper to present to our respective committees; 61 pages of satanic verses on the topic of the synthesis of fault-tolerant concurrent programs. Recently, I heard the original copy of the paper was actually printed on human skin.

If you know me personally, you'll know that my research area has very little to do directly with Kripke structures, AND/OR graphs, CTL, or soundness and completeness. One could argue that any field of Computer Science is related to these fundamental methods of formalization, but such an argument annoys me. Instead, put yourself in the shoes of a second-year CS grad with a background in Electrical Engineering. It took me a couple of days to realize that the "U" in that paper was "Until" and not "Union." It was dire. It was not good. I was going to fail.

And so, that first time we met, he stood at a whiteboard and described the main points of Linear Temporal Logic. He spoke deliberately and quietly, with a slight Southern accent. I was in love, but it took me two more years to tell him so. Weeks later, I was presenting the paper like a pro, thanks in part to that lovely man.

It is very likely that no other person in this week's research meeting found my boyfriend's presentation romantic, but it really was.

Race from Asia Ending with Tulips

My old 14-inch Apple laptop is sitting on a shelf in my basement; a basement which I'm now calling the "Laptop Morgue." It's 12-inch replacement arrived today, having been shipped from China just yesterday. I'm slightly amused by the fact that my laptop arriving from China beat my boyfriend arriving from Japan today. It's a strangely contrived race, since my laptop had an Army of people in China, Alaska, and GradShitTownVille. The boyfriend has to carry his own luggage onto the plane. Unfair, I know. Who said life is....

Mom? No, that's my own voice. Sometimes my voice box gets stuck in a certain tone and I swear my mother is talking in my ear. Really it's the sound of my own voice.

fair. And so the Army sent my new laptop to me and the kind gentleman in a purple shirt who brought it to my door woke me up today. Since grad school, "THE CRACK OF DAWN" shifted from 5:30 am--the time I used to get up to go to the gym in North Portland--to 8:30 am.

I don't even exercise in the morning anymore. I swim in the evening.

And I swam last night, but stop interrupting me Ms. Italics! The man in a purple shirt--which makes me think of Tom Hanks' "The Man With One Red Shoe"--woke me from a dream that actually didn't involve people trying to kill me. I dreamt of the garden I'd planted at my mother's third husband's house. In reality, he lived on half an acre, and while I lived there, my mother and I filled as much as I could with gladiolas, lilies, columbine, and tulips. It was theraputic. It was over 10 years ago. In the dream, the garden had become wild and overrun with tulips. I sat in the backseat of a car, and as the car drove slowly past Battlecreek Road, I could see the tulips. It was the scene from Logan's Run, except replace the White House with my ex-step father's house and replace the ivy with tulips.

But Logan's Run is a really cheesie movie.

I agree. Which is why I must find it for next Cheesie Chick Flick Night.