in a second

I think that for the duration of the camping trip I miraculously turned into a badass. I'm not normally as awesome as all that, and now that I'm back the effect has worn off. I'm not a martial arts master, and lack of sleep catches up with me just like any other person. But man, this weekend was different. I kicked ass and took names.

And why is it that all I want to eat this week is rice?

every single molecule is right

That camping trip that I've been setting up all week starts today. This is a relief, as is the end of any period where you have to plan a 48-hour thing for 13 people. Yesterday I pre-chopped all the vegetables and bought a very impressive cooler, and now all that's left is to take some things out of the dryer and hope the teaching goes as well as the camping will.

Another thing that is nearing completion is my thesis. I gave that to the publication department - those people who check for grammar and formatting - yesterday afternoon. Within two weeks I fully expect to turn it in. Holy shit.

I've been trying to understand why I get so worked up about women-politics in particular. It's not like general politics affect me any less. But they don't get me into the kind of towering rage that things like anti-abortion wackos do. I mean, corruption? Gerrymandering? Dismantling social security and nominating assholes? Those things are pretty bad. But mention pharmacists and I fly off the handle.

tomorrow's lunch today

I have noticed that if I eat out less I get skinnier. This is nice, except it means I have to pack a lunch. It used to mean that, anyway. These days I can go to the food co-op (which is a block away from work) and buy cheese, bread, vegetables, whatever. I don't have a knife, though, so I have to eat them all separately, in torn-off chunks. I don't mind.

I am going to finish this edit of my thesis this week, I say. That gives me 2 weeks for formatting-type revisions and everything.

mighty, fallen, etc etc

The Riviera was a lot more impressive in the old version of Ocean's Eleven - where it really was the most sophisticated thing on the street - than it is up close & in person in the present day. Maybe I'm just not all that into the flashing-lights and things-made-of-gold scene. Other hotels have cool gimmicks - they are pyramid-shaped or New York-shaped, or they have Cirque du Soleil shows or rollercoasters. This one has a casino, a bunch of dancing-girl boob shows (3 or 4 simultaneously!), and a pool which is closed because it's not warm enough. It's got all these pamphlets that bill it as "the grown-up option." Yeah right. More like the "everyone who does government technological research is a man" option.

p.s. the time stamp is in Las Vegas time!

he might replace the earth with the moon

(if I had written it that's what it would be.)

Matt's had 154 in the car for the past few days, and up until now I didn't realize what a difference the CD makes. I've heard a lot of these songs before, but they were on tapes or mp3 or a few years ago, and they are different now. I drove a block: "Self, is this Wire?"

I've been meeting with T. and B. a lot to talk about a camp we're setting up for kuk sool - it was originally just a camping trip, but we have all these ideas, and it's turned into an all-day seminar. Exciting. They're talking about how we're going to try to change how ksw practices are run after I promote, and I'm happy about that too. Our old teacher rarely even had a lesson plan, and I don't understand how he could just wing it all the time. We're talking about meeting weekly, having goals for the class... refreshing! I wish we could expect people to at least work out a little on their own, though. I'd love to spend class time on making people better at kuk sool instead of just making them feel less guilty for eating.

Have I mentioned that before? I feel like a lot of people use practices as a time to make up for any pie they had over winter break. I have more than one problem with this:

1. Making up for pie in that fashion points to them having some weird attitudes about themselves, food, and fitness that I don't want to be part of.
   
2. If they were paying attention, martial arts would teach them not to eat too much pie in the first place.
3. They are in kuk sool to get badass, not to get skinny.
4. Workouts take away from practice time, and the curriculum moves way too fast as it is.

That last point is a result of a larger problem - at least, I view it as a problem: people want to have black belts before they graduate. Now, it is possible to get to that level in that amount of time. But people come in as white belts and they specifically want a particular color at a particular time. If they think they can't do that, a lot of them will quit because they "won't have gotten anywhere." So the class has to go at a particular speed because ksw introduced some artificial milestones. I want to make testing more optional - we should discuss students' progress with them and let them know before testing comes around whether they should bother with it or not. Then we can stop promoting people prematurely without so many hard feelings.

I'm going to visit my parents tomorrow. It's too bad they're not into roast leg of lamb, because that would make a great Easter dinner. I'm not so much into the eggs & chocolate event anymore, but I will take any excuse to make an impressive dinner.

np: Matt's mix that has "You Can Make Me Feel Bad" and "As You Do" on it

Iron Chef Urbana

Recently I've been consumed by a fit of cooking (and eating), brought on by my memory of the Clarkston Union's macaroni and cheese and fueled by my recent viewing of Steven Chow's God of Cookery. My weekly half-day of baking hasn't been enough, and I've been having adventures.

First, I dressed up my best chicken recipe for dinner with my brother when he was visiting. I served it with clever artichokes (we had two - there were four people - artichokes look awesome cut in half the long way - clever) and some squishy co-op cheese, and everyone was impressed.

Later on, after a couple of weeks of careful consideration, I determined that the secret ingredient in the aforementioned macaroni (besides the overt but delicious breadcrumb topping and ham chunks) must be parmesan cheese. The sauce was just mysteriously tangy. I was proved right with the aid of a little extra pepper.

Friday I watched God of Cookery with B., P., K., and Matt. Awesome.

Then I went to a wedding, which had good food, and a party that also had good food. But yesterday was the best adventure yet - I made a deliciously seasonal stuffed leg of lamb with all kinds of planty-tasting herbs and vegetables in it. I've never been so impressed by fennel. C. came over and had some, and we gave him some to take home to M. - I hope she liked it.

The combination of my culinary adventures and having seen that movie led B. to suggest a God of Cookery - themed party/potluck, in which everone is flamboyant and chefy. We'd offer a prize or something for Best Dish. But not everyone has seen this movie, and not everyone wants to cook like that. If they hadn't seen it, how would they know what to bring? We couldn't even accomplish that by showing it at the party, because then when would they have time to cook something suitable? But if we could work something out, it'd be the best meal most of us have ever had.

qualified

Is it Tuesday?

I think it is beer Tuesday.

Judgment

Today's the day. I'll let you know.

I am a great fan of triangles

My brother is visiting the university this weekend, since the college of engineering is having an open house. It's kind of like a science fair, and he's staying with me. I'm not sure what to do with him.

See, K. seems content to stay home most of the time. I asked him what he'd do if he lived here, and he told me "Oh, study, do homework, play D&D." Maybe I am out of touch with what he likes. But if he's going to move out of a Detroit suburb (even he admits there is nothing to do there) to a town that reguarly has concerts, plays, events, cool workshops, and all that, I think he ought to take advantage of it. I want him to realize the opportunity he has in going away to school - to try everything out and not just do engineering and sit in the basement. How do I get that across? I want him to treat engineering like his day job, and make sure that he tries out everything he can in his off-time.

One of my friends works at a jewelry counter these days, and I got something for my mom there (making sure I get mother's day under control). But I might go back and get this other thing that I saw, for myself. I'm very impulsive, but only around tax-refund time.

CELEBRATOR DOPPELBOCK

I took the qualifying exam Saturday, and I might have passed it. There were some problems I thought were really bad, but it seemed like everyone else who did those problems agreed. I figure I'm okay, then, because they can't just fail all the electromagnetics students.

Several of my friends (and Matt) went out with me to my local afterward, and I had some very nice new kinds of beer. Particularly noteworthy were Great Divide Wild Raspberry Ale and Celebrator Doppelbock. Also I've been buying indulgent things on ebay.

I can play video games again, and I've got Pikmin (1 followed by 2), Prince of Persia, and Sly 2 for that purpose. Those will probably help me hold on while I pray for the game types to hurry up with Final Fantasy 12 or the new Zelda or something.

"in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude"

I've been following that Larry Summers thing the way other people watch a train wreck. So today I was idly following links, and I found out that in the mid-90s MIT realized it didn't have very many women faculty either. Heavens! What to do? Since doing studies is one of their strengths, they did a study.

Interestingly, it turns out that women don't begin their careers disillusioned, but they slowly become that way:

The Committee discovered that junior women faculty feel well supported within their departments and most do not believe that gender bias will impact their careers. Junior women faculty believe, however, that family-work conflicts may impact their careers differently from those of their male colleagues. In contrast to junior women, many tenured women faculty feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments. Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers at MIT.

One compelling piece of data was this graph of the percentage of MIT's faculty who were women from 1985-1994:

I saw that and I was speechless for about five minutes.

Apparently, women tended to begin their careers thinking the problem of discrimination had already been solved, and then mistrust the conclusions they drew from their own experiences.


An important finding to emerge from the interviews was that the difference in the perception of junior and senior women faculty about the impact of gender on their careers is a difference that repeats itself over generations. Each generation of young women, including those who are currently senior faculty, began by believing that gender discrimination was "solved" in the previous generation and would not touch them. Gradually however, their eyes were opened to the realization that the playing field is not level after all, and that they had paid a high price both personally and professionally as a result.

From the letter written by the women Science faculty members that started the study:

We believe that discriminatory attitudes operate at the time of hiring junior faculty and influence the experiences of the women who are hired. Most discrimination at MIT, whether practiced by men or women, is largely unconscious. Often it is difficult to establish discrimination as a factor because any one case, no matter how disturbing or aberrant, can usually be ascribed to its special circumstances... Thus, we need to develop safeguards to prevent, detect, and promptly correct the experiences that together constitute gender discrimination...

The article also had some powerful insights about what constitutes discrimination in our times, which they called the "post-Civil-Rights era."


How else might we explain what happened to the senior women faculty in Science? While the reasons for discrimination are complex, a critical part of the explanation lies in our collective ignorance. We must accept that what happened to the tenured women faculty in the School of Science is what discrimination is. It defines discrimination in the period from the 1970s up till today. But we, including for a long time the women faculty themselves, were slow to recognize and understand this for several reasons. First, it did not look like what we thought discrimination looked like. Most of us thought that the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action had solved gender "discrimination". But gender discrimination turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize. Women faculty who lived the experience came to see the pattern of difference in how their male and female colleagues were treated and gradually they realized that this was discrimination. But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its "special circumstances". Only when the women came together and shared their knowledge, only when the data were looked at through this knowledge and across departments, were the patterns irrefutable.

The tenured women faculty, acting as a group through the Committee, together with the Dean, made a discovery. They identified the forms that gender "discrimination" takes in this post-Civil-Rights era. They found that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty even in the light of obvious good will.

I'm impressed that they did the study, and doubly impressed that they took its results seriously and made policy changes in response. And the changes have made a difference - in 1999 the School of Science's faculty was more than 10% women for the first time ever. But even that is depressing: 10% is an improvement? We're starting from so far behind.

This is an important initiative since, even with continued effort of this magnitude, the inclusion of substantial numbers of women on the Science and Engineering faculties of MIT will probably not occur during the professional lives of our current undergraduate students.

Damn. Probably not during the professional lives of current undergrads. Damn.

radio urbana free library

Urbana had a primary yesterday, including one for (democrat) mayor. I voted in it! Urbana's crappy current mayor lost, and a way more progressive person will probably take his place (Urbana isn't going to elect a republican mayor - I don't even know if one will run). Also it'll be our first-ever female mayor. Bonus!

And so at 10:30 yesterday morning I was just walking out of the voting building when my phone rang. I figured it was Matt or my mom or something, but when I answered it turned out to be a phone interview in disguise! Okay, not in disguise. But I didn't know it was coming.

1. See, they emailed me the Wednesday before last, said they'd be doing interviews "shortly," and asked for some times that would be all right to call me. Not sure how long shortly is, I said "Friday or Tuesday during the day, or Wednesday before 3 pm." I assumed they would tell me when they planned to do it.
   
2. Not so! I didn't hear anything from them for a week. Still assuming they'd tell me before they called (so I wasn't, y'know, busy voting or getting a haircut) , I just did whatever I felt like yesterday morning.
3. What to do? I was in the middle of the street trying to get an internship from an antenna engineer. At a loss, I turned around and went back in the voting building. I was sitting in this auxiliary-church-building cafeteria, the place empty except for me and the janitor, talking about phased arrays and how I really liked my radio circuits class.
   

It sounds like a cool job. I don't have a lot of hands-on experience - all my serious work so far has been pretty analytical, and I hope they don't mind that. But I think other than my lack of experience in that regard the interview went all right.

Then I walked the rest of the way to campus and got a haircut, which was basically the best ever. The stylist was this awesome girl who pretty clearly likes bands, and she knew what I meant to describe, haircut-wise, and did all my favorite razory things. It helped that I brought a picture. Everyone should definitely bring a picture when they get a new haircut. And she talks a lot, which is awesome.

I finally put slsk on my computer - I hadn't before because it's a laptop so a lot of the time it's not on or plugged in. But I figured that leaving my computer on at night is a small price to pay for all that awesome. So what should I listen to now?

I'm not so afraid of the qualifying exam anymore. First I wasn't, then I wasted a lot of study-time by studying the same thing for too long. Then I was worried I didn't have enough time left to get ready. But in the past few days I've managed to sufficiently study acoustics in not very much time. So maybe I can pull it off for other things (remote sensing, lasers, semiconductors, DSP) too, in the two weeks I have left.

secretly, between the shadow and the soul

I've recently taken up baking, for the food co-op. I hang out there with one of the taiji guys on Monday mornings, just cooking. And yesterday was a Monday, so I was there (a little late because I missed the usual bus). But it was also Valentine's Day, so we made some of the loaves heart-shaped. At least, we thought we did.

I couldn't stay until the bread came out of the oven - I never can - because I have classes in the afternoon and I feel like I ought to make an appearance at work, at least. So when I came back around 7 to get some bread for myself, imagine my surprise. The hearts had big cracks down the middle. Maybe it was because I'd poked a couple of them to give better definition to the lobes of the heart-shapes. Something happened, anyway, and S. had renamed it "oh go ahead and break my heart" bread.

Apparently the broken hearts sold pretty well - by the time I got there only one was left, and it kind of looked like a butt. I took that one, because my heart isn't broken but everyone likes butts.

np: Arthur Russell - "You Can Make Me Feel Bad"

best use of the same lyric for more than 1 continuous minute

Ted Leo & the Pharmacists : "Little Dawn"

a telephone conversation with my dad and what matt thought I was talking about

Me: You hit a wall?
Matt: Her dad was in a car crash! Oh no!
Me: You broke it?
Matt: He has a broken bone (oh no) but is otherwise okay.
Me: Can you get a new one?
Matt: Oh, actually he broke a piece of the car, then.
Me: Did you win?
Matt: What the hell?
Me: I guess that makes sense. Of course he beat you if you had a broken racquet.
Matt: Does tennis have walls?



Actually he was playing racquetball.

you don't have to go to college

A lot of things have been going on.

1. I am probably going to New Mexico this summer for an internship at Sandia National Lab.

2. I just recently heard about Camp Wellstone and associated projects, and I want to do something related to that.

3. Last night I saw Moolaade, and then I talked about it in mixed (male/female) company. I came out of the film angry - angry that tradition sometimes has more weight than the real harm it does to real people. I was angry that every step on the way to making women count as much as men has been a fight. I generalized this one extreme example of subjugation to the entire struggle. And when I talked about that with this group, some of them commented that I shouldn't judge other cultures, that maybe traditions ought to be respected. But for me, when women's humanity is abridged, negated, ignored, or conveniently forgotten it's personal. I don't have to be there and have it happen to me - I am a woman, and I feel it. Some women don't have that reaction. Like men, they're free to talk about respecting traditions. I can't do that, because when I think about what happens to women in the name of tradition I feel as though I have been attacked and my country is under siege. I'm not ready to hold a reasoned discussion about respecting diverse cultures, I'm ready to bite and scratch like an animal. Maybe that's wrong and we ought to humor people who think women don't deserve to be counted as half of humanity. I don't care.

There are a lot of other things that make this list. People who think women are the property of their husbands, who punish women for the sexual response that men have to them, who keep women under house arrest as a matter of course, who want to limit contraception and abortion in order to remove any control women have over their own bodies - I won't accept that this kind of bigotry deserves a reasoned response.

I had a similar reaction when in November all those states passed anti-gay amendments. I've got a bisexual friend who's practically part of my family, and I spent quite a while with an itchy punching-hand. That's my friend, my household, that they're saying isn't capable of the same kind of love as everyone else. Punch punch punch.

4. Square envelopes require an extra 12 cents of postage.

5. I like giving out presents but I don't like the commercialization of this holiday. But I like its decorations, food, and rituals at the same time as I don't care for the tradition it stands for. I like having something pretty and celebratory to look at and do in the winter, because winter is cold and depressing. Celebrations really need a group of people to agree that there is a substantial reason to celebrate, though, or they flop. I'm one of the people that would contribute to such a flop. I think New Year's is much more worthy of celebration. But everyone celebrates Christmas - if I want to see my family, that's the party I have to go to. I can't just invent my own holiday, because of the celebration-requires-people rule. But I don't feel honest participating in this one, since I was one of those kids for whome the pledge of allegiance went "one nation, under hmmm." I am conflicted about Christmas.

6. Recently I've been tempted to go hang out with Unitarians, except that they seem to require that you think spirituality is important and good for you, and spirituality may or may not mean belief in something that is outside of what science can ever tell us about the world. Seems like a lot of the time they do think there's some sort of driving force to the universe, and we ought to do something like worship about it, and I don't think that. But I like their politics, I like to sing songs, and I like having friends. I like learning about religions, but I certainly don't like learning about them with the assumption that eventually I'll get one, and I'm afraid that Unitarians think I ought to have some Beliefs. I don't want Beliefs, I just want to hang out with a community that maybe sometimes talks about their values (and whose values are kind of similar to mine).

7. Finals week ended. I am going to clean off my desk, finish my thesis, and study for the qual during winter break.

8. What can I do as a volunteer now to get moderate-liberal ideas a foothold in mainstream people? Everyone's talking about 2006, but between now and then we need to convince people that Social Security is not broken, that people deserve old age and unemployment insurance, that the minimum wage should be raised . . . . that the platform we're going to run on in 2006 has merit and they should vote for it. How do I do that? How do I make myself an example, a missionary of progressivism?

9. I like cooking and I like vegetables. What's the best vegetarian cookbook ever?

10. Oh, a while ago we had Thanksgiving at my house. It was nice, there was a lot of food and everybody liked it. Matt's family and mine hung out for a while, and we were all social. This is nicer than traveling to someone else's party.

who knows, who knows (maybe I'll return)

I saw Arun's new band, the Opportunists, play last night. It was apparently their second show ever, and it is going to be cool to have this band in town. At the same show I saw Boy Skout, who are fron San Francisco. I think I want their lead singer's haircut, and besides that they played some good songs. I wrote my email address on a signup thing for the Women's Booking Collective, which I guess does what the Fanclub Collective does in Ithaca except with more focus on girl bands (Boy Skout was all girls), and without guys in the membership (which I don't think I'm in favor of, but that's the j.c thing all over again). Maybe they ought to be more like the League of Women Voters.

I am looking forward to it, but I wonder if I am radical enough to hang with all these rail-thin, wild-haired, ambiguously oriented, painfully hip chicks. When it comes to music I'm not terribly DIY-oriented - I still can't even play one song on a guitar passably and I'm shy when it comes to hanging out with people who can.

I need some cabinet-level advisors, for real

What should I get from Amazon?

what's been up.

Ever lie down for a nap and then wake up a little later with your heart beating extra loudly? That happens to me sometimes - maybe I dream about running, or rollercoasters, or bike crashes. I never remember it, but I can tell Matt does it too.

I've been getting political as a way of procrastinating. I wrote a letter to Dick Durbin on Monday, because he made some remarks about opposing the FMA without actually opposing the substance of the law. Yeah, it's a political election-year distraction and that's disrespectful to the Constitution. But most importantly it's an attempt to write discrimination into the Constitution and permanently limit one group's rights but not another's. Durbin actually implies that, if some court tried to force states to recognize other states' gay marriages, he might support an amendment like this. Not cool.

Also I learned to knit on Tuesday. Made a washcloth/pot-holder with bumpy stripes for practice. Now I'm making another one, which has bumpy squares. It's silly to pick up such a time-consming hobby when I have so little time, I know. But the bumpy squares one looks really cool.

Lastly, I'm reading part of A People's History of the United States, because P. had it and wasn't reading it. I'm only reading part because I started in the middle - I'm mostly curious about the political history of the 20th century.