confabulation

a personal, often rambling and generic conversation

[she-confabulates-blog]

Academia needs to change

As one of the last un-unionized workplaces, academia abuses it’s graduate students and un-tenured faculty. Instead of having a union and HR to protect individuals from ungodly hours, no breaks, and verbal or sexual abuse, we just eventually have tenure. The protection you get occurs when you are in your 40s or 50s and already have worked in the field for 20-30 years. That is 20-30 years of 60+ hours a week working and any workplace study will tell you that productivity drops extremely after 40 hours so it’s just LOOKING like you’re doing work as opposed to actually accomplishing much. But because they pay you a “salary”, they don’t care that you only accomplish an actual hour of work in the 20 hours you went overtime... because that’s an hour of work that wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t!

When you don’t fill your schedule with work, you get berated for not trying hard enough and not being cut out for it. Bosses speak in hyperboles saying that research is their entire lives and they would choose it before their own families (uh dude I know that’s a lie). A boss has told me that when he can’t sleep, he gets up and does work until he passes out on the couch. Maybe you did that once, that’s believable. But saying that’s what you do every time you can’t sleep would mean that you probably would have died by now. 

These academics treat grad students like children. When you present your progress and roadblocks, they look at you like your parents did when you said you brushed your teeth already. They constantly say that research is about failing repeatedly before finding the right method and “that’s what science is about” but if you meet weekly and don’t have progress that, in their opinion, reflects 60 hours of work and if your figures aren’t perfect or your word choice isn’t technical enough, you are exposed to a 20 minute rant about quality. If your boss berates you for a draft and you say “I’m not ready, I’m still working on it” and they say “I don’t care! I just wanna see a draft! No big deal!” surely enough you will sent it and then get a meeting yelling at you for the flaws of the draft. Are... you... familiar... with.... the.... term..... draft???

This is just a teaspoon of what is wrong with academia. There are entire blogs dedicated to it. And some people, like my godmother’s ex-cop brother, will say “you will be treated badly anywhere! Suck it up!”, but I promise you, the only other places that this treatment is allowed is in the military and the likes. And I didn’t sign up to be a soldier for science. This isn’t a life or death situation. It’s. Just. Science. So I quit. 

[she-confabulates-blog]

MRI machines make me cringe

Only because they will rip out metal from your body and I have collected quite a bit of piercings. And the number grows as I keep putting off a tattoo since drawing is hard. I'm actually listing this in order of pain level. 

First lobes (+2): I was barely 2 years old when my mom took my sister in to get her ears pierced. I didn't really speak until I was 4, so I was tugging on my ears going "eeeeeehhhh" and pointing to express that I wanted to get pierced. My mom said I was too young and her and the piercer assumed that when I saw my sister freak out, I would lose interest. Nope. Melody was bawling her eyes out and screaming and I was still tugging at my ears. And that's how I got my first piercings. My mom claims that I didn't cry at all, I just wanted to look in the mirror. But considering that I was the one that got potty trained early so I could wear "pretty undies" while my sister still wanted to be in diapers, and I would take my sister's sippy cup and she's want my bottle, it fits with the narrative. The pain level is pretty much N/A since I literally don't remember. 

Second lobes (+2): I actually remember that this was MLK weekend in the 6th grade so I was 11 and not responsible enough. They told me to wait 4-6 weeks and I had them out at 4 weeks and they never healed properly. I spent years not wearing earrings in them because as soon as I did they would goo up and itch. I also don't remember this very well but I do remember convincing my friends that it doesn't hurt because it just feels like "a short bee sting that stops hurting right after." 

 Nose (+1): I actually got this almost 2 weeks ago! This has been the lowest maintenance piercing I have ever had. While it initially bled the most out of any of them, it doesn't really ooze at all and I only clean it in the shower when I'm washing my face. My piercer was very amiable. I wouldn't say it really hurt, but I did have a singular tear run down my face after it happened. I think adrenaline really has a lot to do with things not hurting a lot. 

Cartilage (+1): I got this one in the 7th grade. My friends were surprised to hear that this one hurt more than my nose but I think the huge difference was it was done with a gun. Guns are not as good because they push the flesh to the side, which causes more irritation and inflammation. The needle carves out the flesh. My best friend has two in her cartilage, one was a gun and the other a needle, and she says the needle was so much better and it healed better. 

Navel (+1): Another one that my friends were surprised to hear was so high on the pain scale and I'm pretty sure I know why. I was 18 and at senior week, so I got it done on the boardwalk. Every other body piercing I have was done by a super pierced and tatted up person, but this was done by some middle age dude without a single body mod on him who probably took a minimum training class. Let's start off with him marking where the piercing was gonna be: shit was hella off-sided. Like not even "oops" but "dude were you even looking." And then when it actually happened, it was SLOW. So yeah, exactly the reason why it hurt.

Nipples (+2): Duh. Everyone will tell you that the 2nd one hurts more than the 1st and IT'S TRUE. Once again, I think it has to do with the adrenaline. You lose it after the first piercing so then you actually feel the pain more. And the 1st one, I got a back spasm but I still say the 2nd one hurts more. I got this one done in June of 2014 and I LOOOOOVE them. 

I will only take my future children to a proper piercer and not the mall or the boardwalk. Really look into yelp reviews AND DON'T USE A GUN. 

[she-confabulates-blog]

Walkee on a Hill

Tonight I'll be dressing up like a 15 year old for a friend's birthday party theme. Tomorrow is Galentines day, which is going to involve a lot of alcohol and fun. A huge theme of what I've written and my daily life is ~The Power of Female Friendship~, which has greatly changed who I am compared to my 15 year old self. Actually I'm not sure if the way I behaved has changed, or just the way I see things.

I turned 15 during the lacrosse season of my freshman year of high school. During that time I became best friends with a girl named Brittany Walker. This past January was the three year anniversary of her death. Brittany was the cute girl that wasn't even 5 feet tall, perfected the white girl bun and was really popular. So basically everything we all wanted to be. I don't remember a time that she fell out of favor, she moved too quickly between friendships for that to happen. When she died, I was really conflicted. I was a sophomore in college and still jaded about our best-friendship ending twice in high school; both times left me high and dry wondering what the hell happened because it literally flipped from one day to the next. Since the end of our friendship was our junior year of high school, I really hadn't spoken to her in ages and there were whispers at her funeral from my old lacrosse teammates wondering what the hell I was doing there. The day that she died, I tried to convince myself that I didn't care and I kept the plans I had for that night. That was a mistake because I ended up crying with vomit down the front of my shirt and I still have a huge aversion to rum from that night. It turns out that I cared a lot, and I'm really glad that past Julia made the right decision to go to the funeral. 

I learned a lot when I finally reflected on our friendship during the time between her death and her funeral, at her funeral, and the weeks following. I realized that I gained a lot more from her friendship than I lost whenever that friendship ended. Going to the funeral and being told that my presence wasn't received well from the other girls made me realize that in all of the time that Brittany and I weren't friends, she was one of the very few people who never fake whispered around me so I would know that I was being talked about. Obviously I don't know if she ever talked poorly about me, but even if she did, she had the decency to not do it so I could overhear. That type of stuff happened a lot in high school and was a huge proponent of my anxiety and unhappiness. While she was one of the few people who didn't do that, she was literally the only person who ever told someone to shut up when we could hear them talking shit about me. 

I realized that just because a friendship ended, doesn't mean that that person was a bad friend or that the friendship was pointless. I was too young and insecure to really grow at the time from my friendship with Brittany Walker, but if I was a little more like who I am now, Brittany would have given me the bravery to be the one telling others to shut their mouths when they were talking shit. It was a rare thing for people to openly defend each other in high school, or even defend themselves, because we were all trying to evade the wrath that came with popularity hierarchies. While I am very much against purifying the dead and putting them on a pedestal, I stand by my belief that not only was Brittany a great friend, she was also a really great ex-friend. And I think that is a very overlooked aspect in a person's character. 

[she-confabulates-blog]

Jaded JClubs

My lab is a part of a 3-lab journal club. Today during our singular lab meeting, this jclub came up when talking about gender differences in the primate physiology community. My boss, A, does a really great job with gender balance. We are 50/50 for men/women for grad student and post doc positions. The other two labs a part of this journal club are all dudes. Ridiculous bro fests of grunting and teeth baring. 

We talked about how none of us girls want to go to these journal clubs because it's just a toxic environment. The guys will be straight up rude to each other and this is a greater trend in the primate physiology "community." I wanted to stress that, at least for me and probably for other people, it's not that I can't take criticism, it's more that I know I'm inherently noticed more for being one of the only women and if I were to say something dumb, that impression sticks for a lot longer. The reaction to this was annoying because A and the male post doc had been more understanding of "I just don't want to be around rudeness" but then when I mentioned that I knew I could make a bad impression that would last longer, my boss said "why should you care what people think?" Why should I care how they act if they're rude either? Why should people care about anything? Why is the sky blue? Asking "but why should you care what people think" is not an empowering statement at all, especially as a grown man about to get tenure asking a first year female engineering graduate student. Good empathy there, boss. 

I brought up an anecdote about my first internship that [BK lab] would skype with [JD lab] and mute it to talk about how the other lab is filled with dumbasses and that they're idiots. Then this male postdoc who had been defending the usefulness of jclub the entire time said "oh that's different, that's BK, what do you expect" meanwhile Kristin (senior graduate student kick ass queen) says at the exact same time "it's the community." And since it is a problem across the board, I turned to male post doc and said "It's different shades of the same thing. It's all disrespectful and unprofessional."

But then I had to leave for class. And I wish I could have fully expressed more. If it ever comes up with A again, I'm going to be real that he's a part of a toxic legacy. He's done such a good job at creating a nurturing lab but he has aligned himself with two labs that just seem to be filled with assholes. And his angle that jclub is helping us prepare for what's ~out there~ is pretty misguided since this jclub is literally perpetuating the crap that is wrong in the scientific community. I don't want to be a part of something that seems like you have to be a total dickhead to succeed. The jclub-superfan-postdoc is "good" at this jclub, but I have heard a complete stranger on the bus talking about how he is an arrogant asshole. One of the outside people that A mentioned was getting really good at jclub is quite blatantly a huge asshole. This is not the company I want to keep. And this trio of PIs have enough influence that they could be changing the attitude of primate physiology labs. If they actually cared. If A actually spoke up to the other two about the benefits of a nurturing lab instead of a cutthroat one, and then all three could create something magnificent here that would grow throughout the university and across their outside connections. It would be a huge chain reaction.

Or they'll just keep grunting and baring their teeth at each other in the name of science... 

[she-confabulates-blog]

My friend Brandon

I say this all the time, but the most interesting thing about me is the people I know. And the theme of this is Transformation Tuesday.

So I went to a predominantly black high school and a regular event was me sitting with other white athletes and hearing a lot of racist shit disguised as patriotism (did I mention we were on a military base?). Girls and boys tilting their head back chuckling, "oh yeah, my parents are totally racist." Uhm? Not something to be proud about there, bud. One of these people is my friend Brandon. Probably the only person I have consistently hung out with since high school and someone I always had a soft spot for. Mixed up with his "I know black people so I can totally say what I want about them" mindset was also a "wtf why is there a spanish glossary in the back of our ENGLISH textbooks, amirite?" So wait, why was I sympathetic towards him? Oh right, Brandon was gay and also had A LOT of internalized homophobia. He literally didn't believe in gay marriage. I hope you're catching on that a lot of this is in the past tense. 

Brandon lived in a very Christian household and his parents fundamentally looked down on an inherent part of him. His environment encouraged him to look down on gay people, minorities, and poor people. In between boyfriends, he had girlfriends to try to be straight. I guess I was one-and-a-half of those attempts to be straight. Our freshman year, I got a phone call at midnight from his boyfriend sobbing. It was incoherent in the beginning. This boyfriend was a senior and I 100% look back and say that he was a manipulative piece of shit. I also had one of those, but another story another time. My recollection is fuzzy but I think they either got in a fight or broke up so this 18 year old dude called up Brandon's parents and outted his 15 year old boyfriend. What. The. Fuck. I don't remember this specific fallout, it may have been one of the times that his parents looked away and convinced themselves that the phone call was a vicious lie. Eventually, they stopped ignoring it. 

After years of Christian therapy and many fights, Brandon packed up his stuff and shouted "I'm gay!" and drove to the regular host mom for foreign exchange students. This wasn't the end of his liberation and I don't think it really started until he went to college. He regularly hung out at the gay bar, befriended all the drag queens, and had a black female roommate. Brandon was the first person who was very publicly out at our high school and definitely felt some backlash from specific classmates: the drug dealing hickish white male athletes. He was chased out of a party threatened to be stabbed or shot. In freshman year of college, we grew distant because I had too much pride to maintain the friendship if my free-spirited and spontaneous friend/prom date/ex couldn't plan time for me. Sophomore year, one of our mutual ex best friends died. It's really conflicting when an ex best friend dies, you assume you'll be fine until you've drank too much rum and you have vomit down the front of you while you're sobbing in front of people you barely know. Yeah, I still can't drink rum. After she was lowered to the ground, Brandon and I held each other, sobbing and apologizing despite never actually fighting. It was a Cold War and the Berlin Wall just fell down. 

The following summer I had an internship an hour away from him and I spent most weekends there. We got his older boyfriends to buy us shots at the bar and snuck them in dark corners. Other times we would drive to the lakes and float a cooler out to a rock and spend the whole day there. When I swam to other rocks to drunkenly explore, he would leave his friends to follow me and make sure I didn't get hurt. We have a lot of love in our friendship and even if we don't constantly talk due to his never changing spontaneous nature, it is now understood that we care deeply. 

I missed the intermediate stages of his transition. But DAMN has my hugely conservative Republican friend completely changed to a liberal that publicly advocates for minorities, women, gay people, and the poor. During most of his time at college, he was disowned by his parents and actually wasn't *in* college because he couldn't afford it. He couldn't afford much, really. He is a very complex person, and trying to reduce him to one succinct post is impossible. But I find that comparing 16 year old Brandon to 23 year old Brandon shows a drastic and beautiful growth involving self-love, open-mindedness, and empathy for all people.

I wonder if I'll get hate messages for this,

Julia

[she-confabulates-blog]

Friendship of the Sexes

In process of “breaking up” with a boy today, I continue to gain some insight on why my relationship/mindset/trust for female and male friendships are SO different. 

For those who don’t know, I am the epitome of girl power and strong female friendships saving the day. All of my male friendships end up in the trash because it is eventually revealed that they always and only wanted to have sex with me and/or they never really respected me (usually because I have sex). So my patience for dudes continues to wane, and it’s gotten to the point where it’s one strike and you’re out. Or they just bore me. 

However I do have a few guy friends that I trust and respect, and the feeling is mutual. A few of them are gay and I’ve known them forever, and one other is an ex. Our friendship has gone from hell to back and in the process he has changed a lot. He is quite the feminist now and *gasp* knows how to respect me as a woman. While thinking about this, I realized I have a past with all my guy friends and I KNOW I have a future with my girl friends. It usually takes a lot of turmoil to overcome for me to having a lasting male friendship. Another hetero male friend (this one I never dated) and I stopped talking for a year and we only resolved our shit because someone important to both of us died. No wonder I can’t keep up a romantic relationship. However, I can’t ever get to “friend” status with someone I am attracted to because I have a really good talent at quickly having something non-platonic with someone I want to smush faces with. 

Now my girl friends? Shiiiiiiit, I know so many of my girl friends are 5ever. Even if it isn’t easily maintained, I know we can pick up right where we left off. I rarely have passive aggressive bullshit with them, and when we get snippy with each other we literally know “ah she’s just not in a good place right now, I’m gonna hang out with someone else until she’s simmered down.” I had one girl friend start to do the frenemy shit, and I bowed out. When I think that someone doesn’t like me, I don’t try to appeal to them, I just leave. And she saw that and I think she realized she would rather buck up and stop being passive aggressive rather than not have me as a friend ever. 

I’m happy enough with my lady friends that I’m not going to die over my lack of male friendships but yeah I would like the dichotomy to chill. I was talking to That Ex today and I told him that guys my age don’t respect me and it takes a lot of work to get them to. Which he agreed with since he was one of those people that required A LOT of work. The only male interaction that works for me right now is mentor-mentee, and I have played both mentor and mentee. Probably because both my mentors or mentees realize it’s very inappropriate to say sexist things in that relationship, now all I have to do is get my peers to realize that it’s still inappropriate to say that sexist shit to me as a friend.

tldr: girls rule and boys drool

Only yours if you’re a lady,

Julia

[she-confabulates-blog]

why is julia so tired?

bottom tldr

I have been back in my city for two weeks and it has been a whirlwind. My best friend from Maryland came back with me to spend New Years here and we had a rock and roll time. She's gained a repertoire with my new people and will hopefully find a job here after she finishes her master's back home. But with all that fun of going to house parties, bars, and drunk brunch, I kept forgetting to take my antidepressants (I think it's a biochemical thing for me more than it is situational(?) depression). The skipping hits me all at once and I spent essentially an absurd amount of time sleeping on Monday and Tuesday while my meds leveled back out. 

One of my two classes is a systems neurobiology class which means I am memorizing every bump and squiggle on the brain (and will soon be memorizing every blood vessel too). To stress: I AM FROM A MECHANICAL ENGINEERING BACKGROUND... WTF THIS IS INTIMIDATING. I am taking this class with a handful of people I know, but one peer and I have grown distant. I don't think he respects me and I am tired of trying to prove to him that I deserve my success. So I stopped actively interacting with him. Low and behold, he's acting sweet as a peach again and is not noticeably looking down on me! Honestly, that pisses me off more because now I know he can be nice. 

To end the work/school week... I got my roommate's boss trashed. Oops. Brent is known to "encourage" people to keep drinking and gets everyone a round at the same time. I flipped the script on him and drunk me kept giving him shit when I was finishing my CIDER faster than he was finishing his MIXED DRINK. So he would catch up. This huge man ended up being trashed and stumbling by the time he turned 40 at midnight. Naturally, I popped two ibuprofen before going to bed and hit drunk brunch in the morning with my roommate and Jessi. 

Thrown in to all of this being physically exhausted, mentally strained, and liver-ly stressed, I have a boy that keeps vying for my attention and I just want to scream "YOU HAVE OTHER FRIENDS." But that's not even the problem, really! Every time he texts me, he does so in such a way that it's clear that he wants to talk to me, but he is making me carry the conversation by asking me questions. I am exhausted and I don't want to think goddamit. imo, initiate conversations with topics that remind us of each other or just go straight into venting about your day at least. If I had wanted to tell you about my day, I would have done so already. 

So why is Julia so tired?

1. My body went biochemically haywire due to irresponsibly forgetting meds.

2. I am completely out of my academic comfort zone by taking a neuroscience class WHERE I LITERALLY MEMORIZE THE WHOLE BRAIN.

3. I have a shitty peer who looks down on me so I got distant and now he's being nice again?

4. I drank a lot. I might actually wait to drink until the weekend. That's like a month in grad school time. 

5. I always end up getting stressed by the expectation to be in constant communication with someone I'm having sex with and I'm probably going to end up shutting him out if he doesn't back off.

Peace, Love and Rest Discord, Disdain and Coffee,

Julia

[she-confabulates-blog]

new years dissolutions

bolded tldr at the bottom!

I violently abhor New Years Resolutions. Due to my weakened vocabulary after a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, I had to hit the dictionary app for my catchy title. "What sounds like the opposite of resolutions? Is dissolutions a word?" It's not exactly the pure opposite of resolutions, but it does mean the dismissal of an assembly OR MORE IMPORTANTLY DEBAUCHED LIVING. 

1. Dismissal of an assembly: My anti-NYR mindset has to do with how heavy they are linked with self-loathing, as well as setting lofty goals that result in guilt (a useless emotion). This mindset came as a packaged deal with dismissing counting calories and trying to lose weight. After compulsively attempting weight loss from ages 12-20, developing disordered eating habits along the way, and hating myself throughout it all.. I decided to stop. It was strange how it came to an abrupt halt after being my focus for nearly a decade. Despite the appropriate outrage to All About that Bass measuring body positivity by what straight males like, that is where my own body positivity had started. Boys still found me sexy no matter how much I hated myself, so why waste the energy? It has naturally evolved since then, and I believe it has spread to the ladies I am closest too. Or they coincidentally grew independent of our friendship and I'm just a narcissist. Equally likely imo. 

Once again, starting graduate school has made me reflect on my undergrad growths because they're being challenged. Due to a series of unique events, I had an unprecedented weight gain before starting grad school. My body positivity hasn't regressed too much, but I have legitimately considered starting to count calories even though I know it's a triggering behavior for me and I slip into dangerous habits. And Amanda, who I may arrogantly believe that I've helped with body positivity, has flipped the script and come to my aid. It's hard but I have to keep reminding myself that my body knows how to level itself out and if I resume the lifestyle I had pre-gains, I will almost certainly feel better about my body. My new friend/surrogate older sister, Jessi, set her NYR to stop talking about weight loss as much in order to stop thinking about it as much and she did source me as a positive influence in that. So clearly I still have enough body positivity going on, right?

2. Debauched living aka words that can be used to describe my life. When NYRs aren't about our society's unhealthy obsession about perceived health, they're about containing yourself more. In addition to wanting to make my body smaller, I spent many years trying to make my personality smaller. FUCK THAT NOISE. Yeah that's not being challenged in grad school, thankfully. I have great friends here who love that I am unabashedly myself. A part of that is being open about my indulgences; my goal is to encourage people to let go and feel like they can be themselves through leading by example. My greatest concern is: are you kind? And when you aren't kind, is it because you are standing up for yourself? If something that is perceived as bad isn't hurting anyone, how bad can it actually be? My little family has embodied these things. I mean they're still making those dratted NYRs, measuring their value as a person by how much time they spend on facebook or by acquiring a new skill. And I'm not saying that having goals are bad things, but I have found that when you allow yourself to indulge in "bad" things, it increases our indulgences in "good" things... and you might find that your no-longer-a-chore-good-things end up displacing those "bad" things but you didn't hate yourself in the process.

-Julia

[she-confabulates-blog]

day one

(there's a bolded tldr paragraph at the bottom)

Naturally the simple urls of "confabulation" or "confabulations" were taken by people who posted once in 2009 or something. But stumbling on to the combination of she-confabulates still resonates with me because my other internet presences also highlight on my womanhood, which is very important to me. And I have other social media with a variation of confabulation so hey consistency. I managed to choose a url that combined my anonymous and public personas: I accidentally chose something that is meaningful to how I have grown over the years. 

My anon presence grew from frustration of being a woman in engineering. It was a hostile environment that I didn't have the experience or eloquence to stand up against, so I took to the internet to vent my frustrations, which then led to meeting so many other ladies in the same position as me and getting comfort from not being alone. 

Then I gained different strengths. I am now really good at shutting that shit down. As a result, I think my twitter account is a lot less funny because I have much less to vent about. But I'm happier and less stressed and that is obviously what is more important (except I feel less connected to my followers and that makes me sad because it was once a dynamic that was the only thing I had so it is very important to me). 

As far as confabulations? Well I have a lot to fucking say. And not all of it is easily themed or necessarily meaningful. I know I want to write about important memories and failures that I have learned from. Which is funny because the third definition for confabulations is when you fabricate memories accidentally and you don't think you are lying. And considering that we were all insecure little shits in high school, I can put money down that I remember things differently than they actually happened. 

And making this a blog? Well this is my first year of grad school and I just feel like it's going to be important and deserves to be documented. I would like something to look back on and something to reflect with. I had pondered just having a handwritten diary because those are nice too, but 1. I am always on tumblr so this will be easier to maintain and 2. I literally just shut down a sexist email (from another woman!) and one friend said that it was more eloquent than anything she could have said and then my roommate said that if the science thing doesn't work out, I could make a career out of being eloquent. That pushed me over the edge of finally making something I had been mulling over for days. 

Starting my life "over" for grad school has brought up a lot of things for me concerning how I've grown. I finally got myself in a good, strong place for undergrad to only have it taken all away and I have to weed out the same crap I did before. And I'm tired of it. I would love to communicate through my twitter as I did before, but I am a different person and want to try something different. I'm still down to vent on twitter, but I want to reflect here. 

I'M ALSO GOING TO TALK ABOUT COOL THINGS LIKE SEX, DRUGS AND ROCK AND ROLL (okay, more like sex, alcohol and probs Blank Space by Taylor Swift).

Nice to meet you,

Julia