P & P

I had a pelvis exam today. My preliminary exam is tomorrow. It seemed appropriate for me to schedule them in the same week. Really, a preliminary exam is like a pelvis exam. It's something I dread, it's an uncomfortable process, but I'll most likely pass.

I wonder how far I can take this metaphor? How similar are gonorrhea and proposed work?


Stay tuned.

Theme Song

From the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After winter, must come spring
Change, it comes eventually

I wrote these words for everyone
Who struggles in their youth
Who wont accept deception
Instead of what is truth
It seems we lose the game,
Before we even start to play
Who made these rules?
We're so confused
Easily led astray
Let me tell ya that
Everything is everything
Everything is everything
After winter, must come spring
Everything is everything

Sometimes it seems
We'll touch that dream
But things come slow or not at all
And the ones on top, wont make it stop
So convinced that they might fall
Lets love ourselves then we cant fail
To make a better situation
Tomorrow, our seeds will grow
All we need is dedication

Because it seems wrong to feel hopeless 6 days before my 31st birthday.

Bad Mood

Three scenes indicating that I'm very angry.

Scene 1: I created the following "Prelim Playlist."




* * *

Scene 2: I'm talking to the boyfriend, telling him about my terrible day.

Me: I yelled at Jenny today during our meeting. I feel terrible.
Him: Jenny? Jenny? That's like yelling at a nice, happy puppy.
Me: I know [hanging head]

* * *

Scene 3: I hurt my hand on the dryer, and then cry uncontrollably for 30 minutes. The boyfriend walks in,


Him: What's wrong?
Me: Lots of things.

* * *

I know exactly why I'm so angry. What's strange is that it's because of something that happened six months ago. I usually don't hold onto anger this way. I'm like a firework. I explode immediately; it dissapates and I usually forget why I was angry. This anger is different; it has turned into firey stones that I carry in my shoulders, brain, and belly.

Scene 0: I'm talking to my advisor about my preliminary exam.


Me: I think it's time for me to prelim. I've published another paper, and we agreed that after I published another paper, it would be time.

Adv: You aren't ready. Let's say this, you can prelim when your boyfriend prelims.

Me: Um... What? I don't think that's appropriate. I mean, we aren't married or anything...

Adv: Why not! Why aren't you married yet?! [20 minute lecture on marriage and children ensues].

* * *

I'm really tired of this hell. I'm really tired of being slapped in the face for having tits. I need to get out of here before all this anger does permanent damage.

I think I'll get back to work on that prelim.

Leaking is Bad.

I went home last week to attend a wedding. It was a fantastically-timed trip. I had just submitted two papers in two weeks, and I was finishing up a camera-ready version of a third. For a few days, the panic attacks subsided. At the wedding, I saw some old friends, including one civil engineer who was very excited to hear that I was living in GradShitTownVille,

"Do you know that GradShitTownVille is the leader...THE LEADER...in landfill liners?!"

I didn't.

I also got to go camping.

Signs from an Overcast Sky

The advisor speaks,

You have made great progress on [ponies in edifices] and published accordingly. I would suggest you starting to prepare your prelim based on your current and planned publications

"I Just Knew"

I see this in movies all the time:

Scene: A 110 pound daughter and her equally thin mother, probably played by Diane Keaton, are rummaging in the attic when they come across the mother's wedding dress.

[Daughter]: "Mom, how did you know dad was the one?"
[D.K.]: "I just knew"

Or it's like in Sleepless in Seattle,

[Mrs. Reed]: "It was like magic."

In movie life, and sometimes in real life, there is this "just know" part of people's brains. They know how to jump to the next step in life: husbands, wives, new jobs, kids, cross-country moves, trips to Hawaii.

It's similar to the "always know" group or the "since I was little" group.

I always knew that I wanted to jump out of a plane while eating peanut butter so I could break the world record in tryptophan consumption at 5000 feet.

Ever since I was a little girl, I knew that I wanted to get married the same hilltop as my grammy Ada.

* * *

I have no "just know" ability. I have no idea how to move into the next phase of life. I slept on my college futon until this year. I was with a guy for five years, but never got married. I think the only time I ever "just knew" was when I picked up my dog 8 years ago from the Humane Society.

This is realy bugging me right now because I'm trying to figure out when to graduate. May? Next December? Next May? Many of my friends, also sixth year graduate students, are getting their C.V.'s and teaching statements ready to apply to academic jobs in the next few months. They seem quite confident that they will be done by May. But since I have no "just know" gene, or brain cells, or whatever, I ask this of the blogosphere: How do you know when you are done?

Batting Average

Taken from Wikipedia:

In modern times, a season batting average higher than .300 is considered to be excellent, and an average higher than .400 a nearly unachievable goal. The last player to do so, with enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting championship, was Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, who hit .406 in 1941, though the best modern players either threaten to or actually do achieve it occasionally, if only for brief periods of time.

Spring 2007. Three papers submitted. One paper accepted. My batting average: 0.333. Not much worse than Babe Ruth, so I'm feeling okay.

Unleash

A full confession: I went on a rare beauty product shopping spree last week. For $30.53, I bought three hair products, a round hair brush, and mascara. Now I have moisturized, glossy, kinky hair, stylized with the round hair brush. The topaz mascara makes my blue eyes "pop:" so says the packaging.

Last night's spree was a desperate rebellion against my own rules of conduct. Since 1994, I've coped with being in a male-dominated field by disguising my femininity. Since coming to GradShitTowneVille, I've been more extreme in my covert acts. I say the f-word four times a day. I talk about changing my break pads. I talk like a big dog. I wear pants, never shorts; skirts are reserved for 101 degrees F.

Just last week, I was marvelling at how much ass I kick. Wearing an old pair of my dad's overalls, sweating in 90 degree heat, I was fighting the grass with my vintage push reel mower. After two hours of pulling and panting, battling the weed eater, and admiring my developing biceps (thank you weight-lifting), I had a front yard that could be a decent backdrop for a live local news broadcast.

Broadcaster: I'm standing in a North GradShitTownVille neighborhood where we are getting reports of a young graduate student who is holding her advisor hostage in her attic. Sir, can you tell us about the events taking place this explosive Friday afternoon?

Yeah. Like that.

But that's not the frustrating thing. That's not what I'm rebelling against. I'm fantastic at being masculine. I'm great at doing "guy" things. I'm horrible at giving myself permission to be a woman.

Ideally, I'd live in a world where there aren't "girl things" and "guy things." I would live where there are just "people things," and people do what they like. None of these other graduate students who tell me I should have a baby or ask me how my boyfriend's research is going. None of these predatorial professors who waaaaay overstep boundaries. Just me. Just "cs grad student" instead of "female cs grad student."

But after so many years of pants, what used to be a tiny inkling of femininity has lately turned into the rioting oppressed. She is demanding to be unleashed.

I don't know how this will resolve itself. Other women I know have different ways of being in this place:

"Emma's" voice drops a half-octave whenever there are men in the room, including her husband. I'm not sure if she knows that she does this.

"Jenna" takes charge of the room. She says she's more apt to be her bossy self with men present. She wears a t-shirt and jeans most days.

"Tina" replies to most comments or explanations with an uninterested "sure." She paints her fingernails and wears heels to class.

"Claudia" just acts like herself. She's cutesy and fun in her skirts and Keenes, proclaiming her love of graph theory in front of a class of 28 guys.

Lots of approaches, but I'm still not sure what's right for me. How do I assume my role as a woman in science, rather than a woman-in-disguise in science? I don't know. For now, I'll keep wearing pants, but with topaz mascara.

Ovary Twitch

My friend Cheryl taught me the phrase, "My ovaries are twitching." We'd be in a park, walking the dog, and we'd see some super cute kids who want to play with the dog. They'd be polite, and sweet, and fun. For a brief moment, the ovaries would twitch, and we'd want to have kids. Of course, we'd quickly recall the pain of childbirth, or realize that neither of us have husbands. The twitching would stop.

Wait a minute, Cheryl got married last weekend.

That's not really the point of the story, is it?

My neighbors have been in the process of moving. For the past few days, they've dropped off their 2 year old son at my place for an hour or two, so they can move heavy furniture or clean the house. I don't really have any toys at my house, so the first day, I took him down into the basement to play with nuts and bolts and measuring tapes. He's just learning how to categorize things, so it's fun to sort the big bolts from the small nuts. It's funny how boring things can become toys.

When I was little, my favorite toy was a washrag.

The next day, we were coloring in the front room, when he proclaimed,

"I want coffee."
"What? Coffee?"
"Yes. Coffee. Let's go coffee!"
"Coffee?"

Keep in mind that this kid speaks three languages, and he's not great at always speaking the one I know. So I figured "coffee" was some Chinese word that I didn't know. It just happened to sound like coffee.

He grabbed my hand and lead me into the kitchen. Then down to the basement. And back to where we had been playing. And I realized he had been putting nuts and bolts into a big plastic coffee cup.

Smart kid.

So, yeah, my ovaries are twitching.

Oh shit.

The Neat Thing That Happened While I Was Gone

The bathroom on the floor in my building on campus has "feminine hygiene" wastebaskets in all the bathroom stalls. Yay!!!! I don't have to tote a balled-up fist of toilet paper and tampon around the bathroom anymore!

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.

Family Statistics

1. Number of songs my dad whistled while we drove to Albany to play miniature golf: 3.


2. Their titles:
   
   
   
   • The Little Drummer Boy.
   
   
   • The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow (from Annie).
   
   
   • The Brady Bunch Theme Song.
   
   
   
   


3. The Golf Game Score: Me-56. Dad-48.


4. Number of pans of clam roll ups my mom made for dinner: 4.


5. Number of boxes of raisinettes my brother bought me for the 10:15 am Harry Potter showing: 2.

Vacation Panic

It's 1:30 in the morning. I just finished eating peanut butter out of the jar in the dark kitchen of my father's house, hoping the tryptophan might alleviate my inability to sleep. I've reached that point in my vacation where I've turned it into an optimality problem. How do I schedule my time so that I can appropriately balance it among all of the people I want to see in the Northwest, while at the same time finding time for myself to relax?

Over the years, I've gotten better at vacationing at home. I think my first visit home after going to graduate school, I had everything scheduled in 30 minute blocks. Five years later, I try to force myself to be more relaxed and fluid, but there is still a little choke of panic here and there.


* * *


So far, here are the vacation highlights:

In which I realize that my favorite yogurt costs $3.19 in Seattle. It costs $5 in GradShitTownVille!

In which I go to the Bellevue farmer's market and enjoy strawberries, raspberries, rainier cherries, and baby carrots.

In which I go on a four hour hike with my boyfriend, and he doesn't mind that I insist on taking 6 liters of water.

In which I buy my first digital camera as a gift to myself for submitting three papers in one semester.

In which I go on two bicycle rides with my father on the rural roads of Lebanon, OR.

In which I get an update from a friend back in GradShitTownVille that my dog is getting several man hours of attention every day.

In which, hopefully, I fall asleep tonight before an important meeting with a liberal arts university professor to discuss job search advice.

In which, hopefully, I don't screw it up.

No really, good things happen in GradShitTownVille

I ordered two bras online. They were both on sale. They both fit.

What do you want to hear first?

The good news? Or the bad news?

Good news

The grant that I wrote for my advisor was accepted. That's right, rather than spending time actually relaxing over Winter break, I was a stress-case about an NSF proposal. Fortunately, it paid off. Now I can relax a little more during my god-damned-well-deserved summer break in July.

Bad news

I got a paper rejection last week. One of the reviewers gave the classic 4 line,

"This paper is inadequate. It is only a survey. It's not awesome enough for the awesome journal of awesomeness. I do not recommend it for publication."

Where do people learn how to write these reviews?

As a result, I'm feeling a little stuck. I don't feel inspired to work on my paper due in September. I don't feel inspired to rework this rejected paper and resubmit it. I'm not inspired at all.

Given such lack of inspiration, instead of working on research today, I spent five hours installing track lighting at the community radio station. Turns out, being the daughter of an electrician, I'm one of the most highly skilled volunteers at that place. At one point, someone asked,

"Could I have the wire cutters?"

I replied, "You mean the diags or the Kleins?"

Confused look.

At least I have another fall-back if this PhD doesn't work out.

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.

Dilbert-Style Management

I was in industry for a handful of years. Back then, I didn't read Dilbert for the same reason I don't read the Ph.D. comics today. These comics that others find so funny, I find utterly depressing. They just reflect things in my life that I find miserable. I had the pointy-haired boss. I was Alice, always trying to manage my temper. Now I have the demanding advisor. I watch people piss away several years trying to graduate. Why sit and read a comic about my own pathetic life? I'd rather spend my time trying make change.

In this place, I still see pointy-haired bosses. Advisors manage their groups using the same management style that I saw in my first job after graduating in 1998. I quit that job after two years.

Consider a small subsidiary of a huge company. The small subsidiary has to make enough money to be viable, otherwise, the huge company will close the subsidiary. Cut its losses. Hand out the pink slips. Reduction in force, or RIF, is what they called it at my subsidiary. I think they call it "denied tenure" here. Worse, my subsidiary had to suffer the decisions of the huge company, and yet we had to make money based on those decisions. Their decisions pitted us against Intel.

Question: How much money does a subsidiary of 45 second-rate engineers and 5 good ones make when competing against Intel?
Answer: $27.50.

Whenever we got a customer (which was once every three months or so), we had to completely reorient all our goals. Qualcomm signed a contract, so suddenly everything we did was about cellphones. I started work on a soundcard driver. Then Wacom, and everything was about tablets. That only lasted a couple of weeks, then they cancelled the order. Then Nintendo gave us a look, just a look, and we were immediately simulating Mario Bros games on our hardware. I worked on a flash memory driver.

I never finished a project at that company to any successful degree. Admittedly, the soundcard driver limped along, and I could at least read and write to flash memory. I was miserable. I had four bosses. People asked me "howseitgoing?!" all the time. I got in trouble once for yelling at one of my bosses.

"ASKING ME HOWSEITGOING EVERY HALF HOUR DOES NOT MAKE ME WORK FASTER!"

Got a letter in the file for that one.

Like I said, I quit after two years. Then I worked for the best place in the world: Dragonfly Consulting. That Dragonfly Consulting doesn't exist anymore. In the wild, dragonflies only live about four months. In a capitalist economy, it's five years.

I miss that job. Had it not been bought by an evil corporation, I might still be sitting in my little cube, working happily on hardware. I worked on small focused projects until I got them done. I learned a lot. I wrote software that brought a computer to the C-prompt: TLB handlers, boot loaders, memory partitions. I could read Assembler as fast as I could read English. I could debug anything with just two LEDs. I worked with five very smart people. It was the perfect combination of great pay with a grad-school-style working environment. Except that they insisted nobody work more than 40 hours a week. West Coast hippies.

Eight years later, history repeats itself. Again, I am suffering from the "1-big customer" management style. Again, I am miserable with meaningless work that changes faster than I change air filters in the furnace.

Except this isn't a job I can quit.

Let's just hope I can catch another Dragonfly.

Walker Percy and His Moviegoer

Last time I was this bored, I ended up dyeing my hair orange.

These days, I am a moviegoer. Ticket stubs litter my wallet. Away from Her. Mr. Brooks. Oceans 13. I try to draw lines around what I won't see. I divide the garbage from the acceptable mediocrity. Then a day comes when I am especially bored and I have to renegotiate. Hence, "Oceans 13." I hope that I can hold out against Shrek 3.

Typically, I like summers in GradShitTownVille because it's so desolate. The thousands of undergraduates have gone home. The coffee shop isn't packed with laptop surfers. Not every night is douche-bag night. But there is a price. Summer is also the time that friends typically go on internning adventures or take their final bow. My boyfriend is at Microsoft until August. My favorite movie buddy has graduated and left town. I'm left trying to figure out which of my remaining friends will put up with me. Trying to figure out if I should make new ones, or just build a hermitage.

Boredom doesn't mean a lack of work. There's plenty to do. I have two more papers planned for a September deadline. Boredom means a lack of engaging human contact. A lack of new things to see. Even when I dyed my hair orange two years ago, I had a friend to keep me company in the bathroom. She's in Chicago, wondering when I will tear myself away from work to come visit. Part of me wants to. Part of me wants to graduate as soon as fucking possible.

I bought myself a half-dozen roses tonight at the 24 hour grocery. I wasn't cheery enough for my favorite Gerber Daisies. The roses seemed elegant, dark and somber, a nice complement to my movie-going self.

Agenda

Taken from "Affectionate Technology" by Philip Agre

On a humorous, but nevertheless significant note: A friend of mine created a computer "character" that you could converse with in written English. One of the things he found that was crucial to making it seem human was that it not listen to you very carefully. It had its own agenda and invariably it would bring the conversation around to, say, its sick grandmother living in Arkansas. No matter what you talked about, eventually the grandmother that lived in Arkansas came up. It is rare that computer scientists have not-listening as a design goal--but it is a human characteristic.

Letting Go

I went on a little adventure to a nearby city last weekend, taking the opportunity to listen to the old cassettes that haunt my glove box. The pick of the drive was Tina Turner's 1983 release, "Private Dancer" which won the Album of the Year award in 1985.

I noticed the cassette cover art was essentially a thumbnail of the vinyl album artwork pasted into the top two-thirds of the cassette. Despite the cassette being rectangular in shape, the graphic artist could not let go of the square form factor of the original album. Even today, with iTunes cover art, one sees the same artificial form factor. There is nothing particularly "square" about an mp3, and yet that is how iTunes cover art is displayed:



Stepping away from that artificial form factor proved fruitful for Stefan Sagmeister who won a grammy for the design of the Talking Heads Once in a Lifetime Boxed Set.

In fact, stepping away from the artificial structures is how a lot of effective research can be done in many subfields of computer science. Because software isn't bound by the rules of physics, or materials science, or practical cost--because one can do "anything" in software--computer scientists have to create their own artificial structures in order to make sense of things. There's no real reason that there are seven layers in the networking stack, somebody just made that up.

These are my approaches to research: to examine those artificial structures with a skeptical eye, to redesign them in the context of a specific domain, or to throw them out completely. I believe I'm good at this because I've always been good at letting go of material goods. I bought a new car. Hated it. Sold it. Bought a sensible used one in its place. I bought a house. I was accepted into graduate school in another state. Sold it. No big deal.

I was at the nursery on Friday looking for some perennials for my shade garden. I considered buying some annuals, but I caught myself thinking, "I'll get them next year when I sell the house." Already pushing myself to get out of here. Already getting reading to let go of the material goods that have accumulated in my stay in GradShitTownVille...

...and I still haven't prelim'ed yet.

Fuckers.