Daily Struggles
thusspakezuska | January 29, 2009A week or so ago I finally gave in and allowed my friends to convince me that I really, really needed to go on Facebook. It has been fun - I've gotten back in touch with some old friends I'd lost track of; I've enjoyed reading tidbits about the daily goings-on of my friends' lives; I've tried to figure out what the heck L'il Green Patch is all about.
Yet it also seems to me, in some ways, like a nightmare. With email, I log on, read messages, respond, delete, I'm done. With blogging, I log on, write a blog post, post it, check comments to see if anything is languishing in moderation, I'm…
thusspakezuska | January 21, 2009As if the world needed another example of how the American health insurance system is completely insane, maddening, inefficient...I mean, we've all seen Sicko, right? But let me just share the private hell I've been through recently. I'd like to tell you what happened yesterday, but to do that, I have to go back a month or two.
In November my mother was hospitalized, and then spent time in a rehab hospital. During that time, she had a CT scan that diagnosed blood clots in her lungs. Medicare had approved my mother's stay in the rehab hospital and, presumably, the treatments and…
thusspakezuska | December 27, 2008It drives me nuts that there are so many great articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education - behind a paywall, where you can't see them unless you have a subscription. The December 19th issue had a great essay, In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas. If you have a subscription, that link will be useful for you. If not, try to rustle up a print copy somewhere on your campus.
The author, Robert L. Hampel, talked about how one selects a Good Topic for Future Research (GTFR). He came to question the advice he'd been giving to first year PhD students:
Fill a gap in the…
thusspakezuska | December 23, 2008Last winter it was not uncommon for me to go to bed wearing two flannel nightgowns. I would hunker down under our thickest comforter, pressed up against Mr. Zuska for warmth. Mr. Zuska, like many men, is an astonishing heat source, for which I have been grateful on many a chilly night.
This winter, things are different. I wear a short-sleeved t-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts to bed. We haven't broken out the heavy comforter. Sometimes I can't tolerate being too close to Mr. Zuska's blast furnace body.
What changed? It's menopause!
The mid-forties seem a little young to me for…
thusspakezuska | November 25, 2008Mr. Z and I went to see "Quantum of Solace" last Friday night. The cineplex was packed and teeming with Twi-hards. I went into the bathroom and found three of them before the mirror, primping and fixing their carefully coiffed hairdos.
And what hair they had! Long hair, thick hair, shiny hair, healthy hair. It was almost painful for me to watch them, knowing full well how they must take for granted their luxurious heads of hair. Because it never occurred to me in the past that my hair would change in any substantive manner - at least not until I got really old and gray.
When I was…
thusspakezuska | November 14, 2008Though university administrators seem to be widely reviled among faculty members, one of the best jobs I ever had was in administration. Many wonderful opportunities came my way; possibly the most mind-stretching, exhilarating, and rewarding of these was the chance to spend four weeks attending the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration, held at Bryn Mawr College. Just imagine spending four weeks with several dozen intelligent, interesting women from colleges and universities all over the U.S., from a range of administrative areas (including faculty members looking to…
thusspakezuska | November 11, 2008Late last month the Chronicle ran a neat piece in its Careers section, titled Mothers in the Field. It's not behind a paywall - yay! Joan Ramage Macdonald, assistant professor of geology at Lehigh University, and Maura E. Sullivan, PhD candidate in ecology at the same university, write about their experiences taking their young children with them into the field.
And I do mean into the field! Joan took her infant with her into the Yukon Territory to do her research on the evolving snowpack. Maura does research in permanently saturated wetland environments, and first took her daughter with…
thusspakezuska | October 14, 2008Janet at Adventures in Ethics and Science writes about prizes for women:
2008 is the tenth year of the L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year's award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with…
thusspakezuska | October 3, 2008When this first came up, I thought it was really outside the scope of my blog. But then I thought about all those stories you hear about women on tech campuses getting "glommed" by clueless nerd boys. I remembered dating catastrophes and tragicomedies from my own undergraduate days, a hundred years ago. And I thought, well, maybe there is a place for at least some brief commentary on this topic.
In the comments to this blog post, Anonymouse asked
Granted, a lot of the behaviors described elsewhere (tit-grazing, eg) are very much not appropriate, but how exactly DOES one go about the…
thusspakezuska | August 14, 2008Via the AWIS Washington Wire, this news of interest to young black academics:
In The Black-American's Guide for Winning Tenure - Without Losing Your Soul, authors Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy provide dos, don'ts, advice and support. One of the tips in the Q&A with Rockquemore includes being proactive rather than reactive in creating a professional network of support. She emphasizes the importance of knowing the institution's exact promotion and tenure process, as well as unwritten rules from department-specific norms to whether race can be explicitly discussed. Once the…
thusspakezuska | August 4, 2008Jenny F. Scientist reports the following:
Recently, three women joined my lab, more than doubling the female population. (Just in time for me to leave.) There was instant bonding, which I had only seen before among married postdocs or among single grad students. But it is lovely to have other women about. We go to lunch together; every couple weeks we all go out together for drinks or dinner. (Which I love, by the way.) Every so often one of the men comes along- we are outnumbered about 3:1- but mostly, not.
Dr. S argues that this is discriminatory of me. What if the poor dears fell left out…
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2008I've been sorting through books lately, in an effort to cull and control my ever-burgeoning collection, and of course I have to browse through each book to decide if I want to keep it. It's a slow, but rewarding process. This evening I was wandering through Migraine: The Complete Guide, when I happened across this delightful anecdote from a fellow migraineur:
Many migraine patients feel that emergency departments treat them with disrespect and with disregard for the seriousness of their condition. Emergency-room personnel, they say, do not consider severe migraine a true emergency.…
thusspakezuska | June 23, 2008After my last post, Magetoo asks why do I blog? Poor Alison does not understand why I blog at all, being as I am so very bitter and angry, which I suppose we can classify under #8 in my newly numbered list of reasons why I shouldn't blog, with a dollop of #7 and #9.
Anyway, why not talk about why I do blog?
I will say first and foremost that I blame it all on my good friend Cindy, who nagged me incessantly until I finally agreed to begin blogging just about three years ago. (July 13 is the actual anniversary of the first "hello" post on the old site.) At the time, my friend had…
thusspakezuska | June 9, 2008Because we can't keep our mouths shut forever, nor can we always stay locked safely within our homes, it is inevitable that we must interact with and speak to other human beings. And because of this, it is (nearly) inevitable that we will, at one time or another, say or do something that someone else interprets as offensive.
You know what I mean. You're nattering blithely along, everything's good, we're all happy - except, suddenly, some of us aren't. And you don't understand why. You are a good person. You are not a sexist, you are not a racist, you are not a homophobe. You are an…
thusspakezuska | April 30, 2008Yesterday I attended a talk on gender and science. It was a very frustrating experience, because I had been looking forward to the talk. But the speaker, a senior administrator who should know better, made it a difficult and trying experience. About a third of the slides in the talk were dense data tables scanned from publications. Projected on the screen, the type was so tiny you could not read a thing on them, at least from where I was sitting in the audience. The speaker kept saying, "Well, you can't read this, but it doesn't matter, because all you need to know is..." All I need to…
thusspakezuska | March 31, 2008Pseudonymous blogging - and commenting - is common. Some like it, some don't; some see the need for it, some don't. Whatever side you're on, you might be interested in these two recent columns from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Against pseudonymous writing
For pseudonymous writing
thusspakezuska | March 27, 2008Writer's block sucks. So I did what I often do when I'm faced with a problem I need to solve: I bought a book. The book in this instance, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, was originally published in 1934 and was out of print for some time until a recent reissue. It is a charming read. I can't tell you yet if it's going to cure all my writing problems, but I did want to share this quote with you:
It is unfortunate, but the unimaginative citizen finds something exquisitely funny about the idea that one aspires to make a name and a living by any such process as "stringing words together…
thusspakezuska | March 4, 2008Janet Stemwedel has a lengthy, informative, interesting post on that eternally troublesome question: When in my graduate career should I have a baby? After reading it, I am put in mind of that New Yorker cartoon with the guy on the phone, looking at a datebook on his desk, saying "How about never? Is never good for you?"
The Chronicle news blog reports on a former professor at U. of Georgia with a "long record of sexual harassment." What's a university to do when one of its professors is found to be in violation of the sexual harassment policy? Why, pass him along to another university…
thusspakezuska | February 29, 2008There's been some quite lively blogging recently over at Abel Pharmboy's pad. Of particular note was the live-blogged vasectomy:
Anyway, as a medical blogger, I will try to liveblog the process from my Palm Treo 700p at the Hospital-That-Tobacco-Built. While I hope it will distract me and relieve some of my anxiety, I'd like to post it on blog as a public service to other men who want to be selfish and make their wives have tubal ligation after the mother of their children suffered through birth(s). (I've blogged on PharmGirl's complicated C-section experience and having my scrotum hacked…
thusspakezuska | February 28, 2008Skookumchick wants me to talk about renewal for the March Scientiae. I will try, though I'm sure this would be much easier for me if I had already undergone some form of said renewal.
What do I find compelling about the work I do? What do I hope for?
I would say I hope for a day when I have no reason to continue writing this blog. I'm not expecting that to happen anytime soon, however. So, instead I will hope for the strength to continue writing. You can't believe how enervating it is sometimes to think about gender and science on a sustained basis. I think I said on this blog…