"... and so I asked [boss], 'What if I walk in one day and my hair is blue?' And he was like '...is it a tasteful blue?'"
"AHAHAHA, oh my god, what is a tasteful blue?"
"I know, right?"
"Like, I'm pretty sure this shade of blue is the same kind of outrageous as this shade of blue. Or, like, this one?"
"Like maybe there's a dirty blue."
"A vulgar blue."
"What even is a distasteful blue?"
"Like I'm pretty sure all of the colors in that cat picture over there are equally tasteful."
"But, like, maybe there's a hooker blue?"
"Dead person blue."
"Blue job."
So, TJ and I are dealing with data from an experiment that was supposed to give us something good but didn't. In our spreadsheet, we have columns for verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and there are some pretty hilarious mistakes. "detectives" was marked as an adjective, for example.
We're texting.
me: "planetary is a verb now"
TJ: "um truly I think we all planetary"
Then I had this wonderful chain of association:
not all men
Planetary Georg, who lives in space & planetaries himself over 10,000 times each day
PLANETARY GEORG omg, URANUS
And then I laughed for at least a minute, and not just because "Uranus" is funny-sounding.
It took a lot of explaining because she does not know any of these memes. Any of them.
rivercityrabbits tagged me for 5 things I like about myself
1. my hands. well, like, my forearms, except for my right wrist when it decides to misbehave. but I like how they look, I like how they can do things, I like the freckles and moles and mottle and lines, I like my oddly-shaped pointer fingernails, I like my scars. I like my tiny hands. I like that the left one has a larger span than the right because I worked to stretch myself, to reach that so-important fourth fret on my electric bass.
2. my occasional ability to write a really gorgeous line. it comes from hard work and practice and purposeful, intent focus on translating between senses. it comes from reading and taking notes, it comes from a lot of introspection about how I'm feeling something and what exactly is going on in it, because I used to have a lot more trouble articulating or even expressing my feelings. so I suppose I also like that I try to do this, as well as the fact that it sometimes results in something I'm proud of.
3. relatedly, my parallel-drawing, casting-shadows-onto, this-is-like-but-not-like function. I wouldn't call it an ability, because sometimes I do it automatically and sometimes it just won't work. I like that I can make connections: one of the mundane ways it works well is when I connect people who have interests or work in sort-of-similar things, and that's a role I've tried to actively be in my current work. TJ told me she was talking with another grad student who said I was scary-connected, intimidating. I felt proud, because my packratting, magpie-eyeing, has real utility. that moment in Iron Man where Tony Stark layers the sketches over each other and then smooths them out all at once so that the layers overlap and the Mark I emerges? that moment. moments like that are what I live for, what I collect for, what I research for, what I teach for.
4. how deeply I care about people and things and how that translates into action for me. I had a talk with Good Boss Lady today about some of my hurdles (agh, finally) and she said, again, that she thinks my great strength is that I care so hard. (this feels like a really weird thing to say here, because, like, how many of you have seen me care so hard? but I take my causes into my identity, for better and frequently worse) I don't care about everything, but when I do, I have existential crises over it, but this was supposed to be a good-toned entry so I'll try it like this: there's a bit in Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice where she cites, as potential data for a new way of conceiving of normative ethics, a woman's answer to "what makes something a moral issue?": "...when I am dealing with moral issues, I am sort of saying to myself constantly, are you taking care of all the things that you think are important and in what ways are you wasting yourself and wasting those issues?" and that resonated with me, I hadn't seen what I do so succinctly put, and I just, I don't know, I'm proud of it.
5. uh... I seem to be pretty good at small talk now! yesterday someone called me from Nielsen ratings and I got her into a four-minute conversation about snow and ice and roads and I made her laugh before we got anywhere near the reason why she called. i can be an awkward little shit but I have learned (apparently through trial and error!) how to keep up a kind of chatter in those everyday "why are we in this small space together how long until I can leave" situations.
tagging (as a suggestion) bronzewords, sonicscribblings, shyote, serenadesha, astarrypineapple, wolveroonie, looseferrets, luckyfilbert, bienfilatre, -- it just occurred to me recently that I have ~45 people who looked at my blog and said "yes, that one. i will follow that one." and a healthy dozen or so who interact with me semi-regularly, even in just a ships-passing-in-the-early-AM way, and also I have had beer so I'm going to mostly-gleefully disregard whatever the social norm is for this meme, at least until tomorrow
also, rivercityrabbits, you cheated.
10: If you could relive one day from 2014, which day would you choose and why?
Oh wow. Um, I have a couple of front-runners?
1: Araluen? It was gorgeous there, wow-panorama, and I felt like I was doing something, and there was both companionship and quiet solitude, and it was somewhere near the middle so I had good times before and ahead, it was just a really good day. I ate fresh figs for the first time there. I think it was your birthday? I almost chose the day of roasting things at your parents’ house because that is such a nice memory, with the cow-snot passionfruit pavlova. But, not the day we came back up the valley, where it started with a brief rainstorm and we sort-of-snoozed in the car. The full day.2: the day I broke up with the rexbf. I just feel like I could have done that so much better. And possibly earlier, so maybe instead that day.3: I’ve had a couple of really nice I-feel-like-a-part-of-something-bigger days and they were all this summer so I’d choose one of those, for the companionship and the optimism
14: Who were the most meaningful people in your life this past year?
You, jerk! The way you can both poke me and let me sit quiet, you’re a touchstone too many miles away, and I hope you always make this list because I hope I keep tied up in the threads we’ve run between us. You’ve always offered a home away from home, half-joking but totally real. I always want to be worthy of the effort you put into me.
TJ and Field were bright sparks for different but similar reasons; bonding with TJ over similar experiences was super super helpful to me, and just having her companionship for being kind of silly and very done with things was nice. Field is someone I look up to and respect and pity and like, and I feel like I did him a little wrong this year and like I’m discovering more about him every time we talk even though we’ve known each other for a while. I miss Mace a great deal; he showed me a slightly different way to live, challenged me; I couldn’t be his twin sun all the time, I’d burn myself up, but we were powerful. Bones has been here for me even when I haven’t been… here. Good Boss Lady has saved me — future-me, in a way. Boris and Natasha have had a huge impact on me even though they are shit. Is fandom a person? Fandom can be a person. And the little tiny interactions that I have here and on AO3 with people have been so impactful; it’s asynchronous and without much expectation. It’s nice.
My philosophy professor? She saw me, she heard me, she encouraged me, and she kind of helped me recover some of the things I used to like about classes and study. Also, the DM and the Stanalike of my students this summer — DM was my friend and the Stanalike I barely interacted with but he made this incredible heartfelt speech at the end that made me think “We did it.”
I’m… kind of wary of the way I want to phrase these? Because my people are my people and not just what they’ve done for me, not just what I can see and how i see it. So, like, I want to make sure that even if someone could recognize themselves here, that I try to be respectful of the things that they are and do that aren’t for me and never were.
37: What’s the bravest thing you did in 2014?
I should probably have done some thinking to prepare for these? I’m going to say, moving out. I have long been terrified of living on my own, for what I thought I would become and fail to be. And it involved finally breaking up with my boyfriend, and you know just how big that was even if it was a foregone conclusion — it faced a complex net of fears that weren’t similar but were tangled in each other, and, well, I did it. Some of my fears were baseless and some were realized and some I fight still.
Aw, you gave me my favorite present ever: talking about myself!
Equal parts UGH and YAY -- massive, half-conversational life update
This post is actually a shit-sandwich! Just, things in the order in which I remember them, I guess.
I went out Friday! A small group of us went to a local pizza place and then to a pool place. We kind-of-sort-of updated the last person in the group to know about my horrible trouble with people I have previously referred to on this blog as either Ross and Rachel or Boris and Natasha. He was surprised and horrified, as is usual. We didn't give him the details, and tried to make it clear that this was my story and not anything in particular about TJ (I accidentally backed into the conversation with a remark that, if TJ took what looked like the best of the job offers she has, she wouldn't be getting away from our mutual horrible problems with these people -- I phrased it as "He wouldn't leave her alone." and last-dude (Mic, though I don't think he'll show up in my updates all that often) caught it and wondered. Mix (new tag; he's the one who gave me the sours mix recipe) reminded me that we couldn't speak for TJ and so I said "well we can still talk about what he does to me". Pretty sure the thing that Mic picked up from it was that Boris does not do science properly (which, yes, but also: he's an entrenched manipulative shit) and he let us know he's going to write a letter to… someone, I dunno… about someone else he thinks is a science-fraud. But anyway, I didn't give detail, because it was mine to give but I still don't feel that safe about it, so Mic only knows that there is sexual harassment of some form, "manipulation", and bad science)
So, since that parenthetical got away from me --
After, we went to the pool place that my recently-ex-boyfriend was always trying to get me to come to with his lab group. I shook hands and made conversations with strangers and re-met someone I'd known in undergrad and caused the barstaff to give me a weird look when I asked for something apparently odd but really not too far off from a shandy. And anyway, Mic was complaining about the bad mix of the well drinks. All the other people there were Mix's coworkers, and I think I made a friend but who knows. We talked about gin. I was at some point rather drunk and decided that that was the time to keep patting Mork on the shoulder and tell him things that were supposed to be validation but were probably received as more of that thing where when Gravy is drunk she tells everyone she loves them. I am actually shit at pool but made some good shots, especially after Mix kindly helped me understand the physics of holding and aiming the cue. Fun observation: I lost the ability (or motivation) to think in terms of more than one bounce off of the… rims… of the table (what are they called) after a while and my shots suffered a little. But at one point rather early I did sink two balls at once so that was awesome.
There was a chalkboard in the restroom (presumably to stop graffiti, but hahaha) so I drew on it.
My parents want me to come home for Thanksgiving Break but I've been hesitant about packing up the cat again for what amounts to four days. That and Mix invited me to do pre-Thanksgiving (apparently there will be crab), other-Thanksgiving, and steaksgiving with him and Mic and presumably Mork (Mix and Mic are friends from the same undergrad; Mork is Mix's roommate; it amuses me to give them alliterative nyms because in many ways they're a package and in many other ways they're like oil and water and some other thing that doesn't go well. Something something vinaigrette metaphor). Last year we did pre-Thanksgiving with Mic's incredible pasta, and other-Thanksgiving with three generations of K's family, and I was like whoa I have friends.
I dunno, I guess I was a little distant on the phone with my parents but whatever.
TJ and I have been having text-conversation about our mutual horrible people horrible problems and it just, it makes me angry. I'd love to catalogue everything so that it's somewhere, but there's very little evidence that can't be interpreted another way.
There were a lot of details that were going to go in this post but I got nervous about them, even 'anonymized' as they were.
There's just… so much more. But I've gotten tired of wading through the shit again, so I'm going to stop here. But: this isn't the "usual" graduate student angst (and I don't know why I'm so insistent about establishing that for myself, because the usual is also hard and unfair); this dude casually gaslights, isolates, manipulates, and imposes. He uses silence and ambiguity, and I'm just being nice and the veneer of scientific rationality, and I couldn't tell you whether it would be more or less comforting to know, once and for all, whether he is actually conscious of and deliberate about it.
I keep getting hit with a kind of paralysis about what to do. I want to get him punished for this shit but there's very little unambiguous evidence; I want to fire him as a mentor but that actually causes more problems; I want to confide in Good Boss Lady but I don't know what she'll be able to do or even if she'll be on "my side"; I want to get out of this situation in just about any way I can but, like, professionally, my opportunities haven't looked better, so quitting altogether is actually not smart and taking a leave of absence would raise questions; I want to put my head down and just get through this so I can graduate, but I'm not guaranteed any kind of cooperation on this plan (although: Field just worked a minor miracle by having a productive conversation that led to some of our almost-secret, wishful-thinking ideas being given a go-ahead, and I'll be excited about that probably sometime soon) especially if this asshole is going to hold my progress hostage or be a huge interference.
My dad, who did grad school himself, thinks I should just switch programs -- bite the bullets that are curriculum changes, awkward questions, and a complete topic switch, and just go. But there are a few things I don't want to give up for good reasons (dammit, I used to be excited about my topic) and for bad (I really, really do not want to field any questions ever about why I switched, and here I can't go into exactly why switching programs makes me feel like everything I've said about this program and about how research in this field should be approached would become bullshit because I couldn't back it up like I said I would -- and yes, I'd have to switch programs if I dumped this asshole).
And I keep wondering if part of my hesitation about going forward is actually that I have to go forward, whether I'm having the other troubel or not. Or, well: over the years I've gotten good at doing this thing that I am currently doing, and now it's time to move into a new phase and I am actually scared of that phase! And would moving to solve this horrible-people-horrible-problems thing actually just delay me engaging with the monster I have to fight anyway? Probably yes! But would having this problem solved make it easier to engage? Probably also yes!
I got to spend a lot of time with Good Boss Lady by pure good luck (well, and she keeps sending/bringing me to things that will advance me professionally, and keeps briefing me on why she's doing it, and I'm so happy to have that because it tells me Look This Is An Opportunity, Take It.) and some things she said made me realize that my inner life has taken a direction I don't want to be going in. I have become a bundle of negatively-defined impulses (I don't want to go to class, leave me alone all of you, I don't want to talk to you, I don't want to think about this because it's hard or scary) with no particular positively-defined motivation. And I used to have that. And it's kind of dangerous for me not to have that because I'll keep taking local steps to make things easier in the short term, and without these positive goals in front of me (or even easy to reach for) there isn't any strategy to them. So I might miss the things that I used to want and probably still want though they're currently being drowned out by nooooooooooo. So that's why I was entertaining the idea of a real leave of absence. But I'm not as sure anymore that that'd do the trick.
But: I cleaned my kitchen again! Sort of. Did a lot of dishes and cleaned out my fridge and put more things in my fridge that I will actually eat! And I'm kind of excited about it! I had planned on cleaning more things but that didn't happen.
Also, for the first time in a long while, I have been able to spend whole days with my cat! She seems to be happier about it, tough I'm not sure she trusts it, exactly: whenever I change rooms for even five minutes, she wakes up and follows me, and chirps, and settles down six feet away. It's kind of adorable and clingy. I am so happy to have this little monster in my life.
Also, I half-decided that I'm going to go to a local comic store, because I've been reading things on the Comixology app but I kind of want to read more, and also to purchase an actual physical comic so that I can determine which experience I like better. I loved being able to read Young Avengers on my phone when I was traveling the other week, and the Guided View thing is really neat, though there was one page layout where I thought it didn't work as well. But I also love physical media, especially being able to stare at it from like two inches away if it's that beautiful. And there's something still satisfying about owning a physically-embodied thing, and being able to loan it to people. That's one thing I'd like to see more of -- Kindle has a loan program for some of its titles, and even though I haven't had a successful loan opportunity yet (one friend lives on another continent, so market restrictions, and another one is too busy to remember to open the books) I think it's a really cool thing, because there aren't great avenues to recommend digital media that aren't wholesale sharing and for various reasons not all media can be freely shared.
What sparked the decision is that I decided I wanted to read about Isaiah Bradley and I couldn't find a digital copy of Truth: Red, White, & Black or any of the issues it collects, and all of the physical copies I could find (yup, part of the problem is definitely that I don't know where to look) are, uh, out of my price range. My school's library has access to dissertations about the book, and they might have comics because I swear I saw Field check some out once, but I'm going to have to go physically look. And the public libraries might but I can't navigate their search to my satisfaction, so I'll have to go in, sometime. And, comic book store maybe, because I do kind of want to go browse and see what other art styles or stories jump out at me, but I also checked out the website of the one near me and the people who own it seem nice, friendly, enthusiastic, so since I have half a taste already established I might get some recs.
