Daily Struggles
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2010Female Science Professor has posted a checklist - "Kind of like Sexism Bingo, but in list form." - and asked for additions.
I was going to offer a few additions, but I thought "all that crap happened a thousand years ago, when I was an undergrad/grad student. I'll just read this list of new stuff to see what teh wimminz are whining about these days." Because things are getting better all the time.
Alyssa at 6/17/2010 10:03:00 AM said:
Someone asks why you bothered getting a PhD if you're "just going to have children"
and DRo at 6/17/2010 10:36:00 AM said:
You are told that you won't…
thusspakezuska | June 18, 2010First post in this series can be found here.
The third and final post in this series can be found here.
ScientistMother really wants DrugMonkey to step up to the plate already. She says that DM laid out his own responsibility to deal, on-blog, with work-life balance issues and to share the details of how it goes down at his own home. Find the full quote in the comments at her post or here in Doc Free-Ride's post.
As is generally the case, I have a few things to say about this.
For starters, I do not agree with ScientistMother's interpretation of that quote. I have no idea what…
thusspakezuska | June 11, 2010A friend of mine (maybe YOU are that friend?) will be soon be leaving a job at Wackaloon Scientific Enterprises where said friend is supervised by sadistic micromanaging douchebags from hell with poor reading comprehension skills.
How best to spend the remaining time my friend must clock at WSE?
I suggest devoting large chunks of it to rearranging pipet tips in their boxes while singing some version of this song.
Oh it was sad,
Oh it was sad,
It was sad when the research went down to the journal.
All the postdocs and techs.
Little grad students lost their lives.
It was sad when the…
thusspakezuska | April 30, 2010From the Philadelphia Daily News (the same paper which recently brought a Pulitzer Prize to Philadelphia for amazing investigative reporting by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman):
HOW WELL can a family of four eat on just $68.88 a week? For more than 38 million Americans, it's more than a matter of conjecture...To find out how well you can eat on food stamps, we asked two chefs and a magazine food editor to plan seven days of meals for a family of four using that budget: $68.88.
I like best the solutions proposed by Jose Garces, who went 66 cents over budget, and explains his solutions thus:…
thusspakezuska | April 28, 2010A reader sent me a link to this d00dly graph, What The Force Would Be Used For If It Actually Existed. If you don't want to bother to click through, the answer is: greater than 50%, pulling the remote to you because it is too far away; insignificant percentage, actually making a difference in the universe; all the remaining percentage, persuading women to undress. Wait, I can't keep typing because I'm laughing so, so much. Oh, those clever d00ds.
My correspondent wrote:
This is rather disturbing if you think about it. Using coercion to "persuade" a woman to undress: shades of rape…
thusspakezuska | February 10, 2010Arborvitae. It is snowing. Again. Snow, then freezing rain, then more snow with a vengeance that promises to keep on all day through to midnight. This is on top of the batch we got last Saturday. Philadelphia got 28.5 inches though round these parts it seems we "only" got about 17. It was enough to give the arborvitae quite a beating, even though we brushed and shook the snow off them as soon as possible. That snow last Saturday was light and fluffy. This batch is wet and heavy and the arborvitae are sad, sad, sad.
Arborvitae, you will recall, are supposed to be upright, hedge-like…
thusspakezuska | February 1, 2010You, my dear friend, have been EXCEEDINGLY ill for weeks, but still making sure everything at work gets covered, via arrangements with colleagues and telecommuting despite being on strict bed rest orders from your doctor. You're getting slowly better and we, your friends, rejoice at this news. Your douchey boss, however, is hacked off about your "poor planning".
Hmm. I would like to help my husband plan for a bout of a devastating pulmonary illness that leaves him wracked with coughing, weak, housebound, etc. Or some other illness, parameters to be specified in the future (e.g., time of…
thusspakezuska | January 12, 2010I'm speaking from experience, people, having had most of these lobbed at me one time or another. Please feel free to add to the list in the comments section.
1. "When is the baby due?"
I'm not pregnant, you douchebag. I'm fat. If I were pregnant, I'd probably be prancing around telling everyone and her goddamn sister about it because that's what we do in our society. Or, if I were pregnant, and afraid I might lose the baby, maybe I wouldn't want to talk about it. In any case, if I were pregnant, and you haven't heard about it yet, wait for me to talk to you about it. Otherwise, STFU…
thusspakezuska | January 9, 2010My fitness program the last 3-4 months - or reasonable facsimile thereof...
Monday: go to gym, half hour on elliptical, half hour doing weights routine picked up at last stint at physical therapy for excruciating neck pain developed over several years due to chronic migraines.
Tuesday: spend day writing bills for mom, wrangling with health insurance company and/or health care providers over some mix-up regarding payment for service provided six months to a year ago.
Tuesday evening: receive phone call about new urgent health care crisis for mom. Spend rest of evening phone conferencing and…
thusspakezuska | November 23, 2009It's that time of year again - the time when I begin to contemplate swimsuits, and curse under my breath.
You see, the last several years, Mr. Z and I have sworn off birthday, anniversary, and Christmas gifts for each other in lieu of saving our cash for a week-long escape to a sunny, sandy locale sometime in December.
It's the perfect time to go. The leaves have been wind-torn off the trees and dutifully raked up into a pile for composting. Nothing's left of November but bare branches, gray skies, and the grim march of five weeks of holiday-themed commercials on t.v. and radio. Some…
thusspakezuska | November 11, 2009I spent part of today visiting with an elderly relative who fought in the Korean War. That time in his life was clearly on his mind, as, when I stopped in to see him, he had been looking over some old photos from that era, including some of him in uniform.
He recounted some of his experiences to me. One near-death experience came about as a result of him being assigned to be the driver for an officer, "the worst job in the world" according to him. He said that although he had been driving all sorts of vehicles all over the place ever since he'd been in the Army, including tanks, he was…
thusspakezuska | November 10, 2009I have an acquaintance who works in what some of you professorial types jokingly refer to as the dark side - administration. Ha ha ha. Yeah, I was an administrator in academia myself, you know, and let me tell you, you should be grateful to your administrators, if only for the fact that if they didn't spend their days attending all those meetings, you'd have to do it yourself. Somebody's gotta do that administrative crap while you're out there doing the whizbang gollygee fun stuff in the labs.
My acquaintance knows both sides of the story, for she herself is a tenured full professor in…
thusspakezuska | October 30, 2009The whole month of October has gone by, and none of the things I promised myself I would finally get around to writing about this month have appeared on my blog. They haven't even made it out of my cranium into rough draft form on my computer. I didn't even manage to get a post up exhorting you all to open your wallets for the good cause of DonorsChoose 2009 Social Media Challenge (though there's still one day left should you be so inspired!) I managed somehow to get my giving page set up (and a few of you stumbled across it and donated, with absolutely no help from me - bless your hearts…
thusspakezuska | May 30, 2009Scientiae wants to know what keeps us moving forward in our science, work, and life. I am not a practicing scientist right now, and I don't have a job, so I guess this will have to focus on life.
Perhaps it's not surprising that not working makes me feel, quite often, like I'm standing still, or marking time, while life marches by. Of course that's not true. I'd just become so used to understanding my life as paced and marked by the rhythms of work that even after all these years, it is still disorienting not to have a job.
Moving forward, I think, is a concept that belongs more…
thusspakezuska | May 24, 2009Longtime Zuskateers know that one of the reasons I am feel able to speak so freely is that I am not currently employed. Thus, I do not fear an employer's displeasure with what I might have to say about the sorry state of affairs for women in science and engineering in educational, academic, and workplace settings.
But now and then I do wonder...one of these days I suppose I will be in a position to go back to work. Though I blog as Zuska, my real name is right up there at the top of the page for anyone to see. To re-enter the workforce, I'll be a position of supplication, and any…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2009In response to my recent post on being mauled by the PA at my annual gyn exam, reader Danimal was moved by my saying this
I say if it hurts, you should feel free to yelp. And no doctor or PA should be shushing you. I am ashamed to say that when my PA shushed me, I let her make me feel embarrassed, and I actually apologized to her. That is just messed up.
to comment thusly:
You disappoint me Zuska. On the bloggesphere you have no problem barfing over someones shoes, usually when appropriate, including mine. Yet here it was entirely appropriate, yet you did not. Come on, you can do better.…
thusspakezuska | February 23, 2009The Feb. 20th Chronicle Review has a set of articles about grad school life. The statistics on how grad school cultivates and enhances depression and mental illness are, well, depressing. But if you are or ever have been a graduate student, you knew that already.
Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide…
thusspakezuska | February 16, 2009Whenever I go back home to see my mom, I usually spend some time visiting with her cousin D., who lives in the house across the street from my mother's house. D. has spent a good many years taking care of his elderly mother, my great-aunt. I have known D. all my life. As a child growing up, he was one of my elders. As a young adult, coming back home now and then for visits, I often didn't know what to say to him when our paths would cross, thinking I didn't have much in common with him. Now we are both intimately involved with the care of our elderly mothers and this brings us a…
thusspakezuska | February 9, 2009In my last post, I wrote
Me, personally, I'd like to see a lot more chicks in touch with their Inner Pissed-Off Woman, spouting off, making people uncomfortable. It's good for all of us.
I received an email in response from Anonymous Reader:
I...liked [your] post about sometimes you just have to show your anger. I understand and sympathize, but am not sure it is always the greatest strategy in academia. If you do it very often, you then become tiresome even for fellow travelers and are seen only as the strident pain in the ass by the old white guy establishment. At least for administrators, I…
thusspakezuska | February 8, 2009Here's the story:
Samia was hacked off about something.
I know I recommended white science bloggers link to other bloggers in a show of link-lovin, but some of the stuff I see just seems tokenizing/LOOK AT ME I'M OPENMINDED! Ew. Fuck a bunch of wannabes.
This kinda got Isis hacked off.
What the fuck??? No, I mean seriously. What the fuck?...
...So what has you upset Samia? Is it a particular incident or the blogosphere in general. Either way, you've got to offer more guidance than today's brief blog-lashing. You've established yourself as an advocate for diversity and as someone who is…