Ex-scientist

this rough magic
I here abjure; ...I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

So as of today I am an ex-physicist. I went into the lab for the last time to hand in my dosimeter and my badge. (The sweet receptionist asked if I was quitting physics to become a model. Now, people with family resemblances or ulterior motives will go so far as to say that, in dim light and with selective camera angles, I'm passable, so this is a bit of a surprise. She herself is quite lovely and is always very carefully dressed and made-up, so I wonder if her suggestion reflects her own secret desire?) It feels good to finally be able to let go of this part of my life. I'm sad that people won't say "wow" when I tell them what I do--"nuclear astrophysicist" is a very cool job title--and I'm still feeling apprehensive about having people laugh when I tell them that I'm working at Starbucks--but this is what my life is like right now. This is what I'm doing for myself. I'm not doing work that makes me miserable. I'm asserting that I don't have to be extraordinary in order to have the right to exist. I'm just doing an ordinary job, living an ordinary life--and that will be enough.

I got a right
I got a right
I got a right, Lord, to the tree of life.

Moving day

Here is a picture of my new home:



This is a picture I took last week, the first time I saw the place. (Note the flawless blue sky, most unusual for Yorkshire.) My room is hidden by the trees on the left. It's in one of the old stables, overlooking a cobblestone courtyard.
I'm still settling in. I've met most of my flatmates. They're from all over, and among them is a Chinese monk. How cool is that?
This is a very different Buddhist tradition than I'm used to, and I feel rather like a Lutheran in a Russian Orthodox church. The chanting sessions in particular will take me a while to get used to. Nevertheless, whee! This is exactly where I want to be.

Can't talk. Crocheting.

I'd love to give all y'all an update on the past 3-plus months. Unfortunately, I can't seem to put down the crochet hook for more than five minutes at a time. (I'm making a baby blanket for a new young friend who is due to enter the world in a few weeks, and I'm discovering that crocheting is more addictive even than Sudoku.) You can get the broad outline from my Flickr page, which is linked in the sidebar. I'm too lazy to link to it again.

Making progress
Originally uploaded by MomLes.

press release

I've been quiet recently. It's gotten to the point that even the people who are closest to me have said things like "You're going WHERE for three months?" or "You're bringing WHO home for Christmas?" So here's a run-down of what's been happening for me and what's going to happen in the next while.

This summer I finished writing my dissertation and worked on experiments at a lab in Vancouver.

Over the past week I've done a lot of travelling. I spent last weekend in Ottawa with my baby brother (who is 28 and a homeowner) and his friends. It was my birthday on Sunday and we all went out for drinks. My brother's friends were the sweetest. One of them was charmingly astonished that I was actually turning 31. "I wouldn't have put you at more than ... (long pause) ... 30." Riiiiight.

As a birthday/graduation present, my parents gave me a stethescope--because how can I be a Doctor without one? I put it to good use when I finally met my long-time internet buddy Corey.



We are soooo cool--rockin' out in the Rideau Centre food court.



Travelling TO Ottawa was somewhat...problematic. The night before, my otherwise-lovely boyfriend tried to poison me. I'm not sure exactly how much I had to drink, but I learned yet again that any drink that includes both vodka and cranberry juice should be handled with extreme care because of the way that the cranberry masks the alcohol. About all I can say for myself on the plane trip to Ottawa the next day is that I didn't actually vomit into the first-class drinks cart while squeezing past it on my way up from the "Hospitality" cabin to the first-class bathroom. We of the Hospitalitariat have to line up for two little bathrooms while the first-class overlords have a bathroom all to themselves. Using their bathroom was a big enough act of class warfare in itself that I thought it was redundant to escalate hostilities by vomiting on anyone.

I got to spend a couple of days in New York after Ottawa, visiting with T-regina (whose birthday falls on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, yaarrrrrr) and with my friend Willem, his wife Debbie, and their new family member Isaac. His 84th-day birthday is today. When I told them my retreat is going to be 84 days long, they had a really visceral (literally!) appreciation of exactly how long that is.

At the moment I'm back in New Haven, sitting at my old desk in my old office. I got back here to find that someone had used the printer in the outer office to print out the results of a Google image search for "porn" with (get this) the Safe Search on. The results included things like images from the Muppet movie, for some reason. I'm hoping that this was a joke, because surely no physics grad student can be that stupid, but fearing that it really was just someone being dumb.

I'm packing up my stuff for my retreat. I'm leaving tomorrow and getting back on Dec. 16th. Lots of sweaters are going into my bags. (Also my wikkid-cool meditation cushion, which takes up a good chunk of space by itself.) Before I go, I'm going to hand in my thesis to the graduate school, and while I'm gone I'll be officially doctor-ified.

(And yes, the last paragraph does mean that I'm going to be out of contact until Dec. 16th. If I'm not commenting on your blog during this time, I'm not snubbing you. I'll catch up with you when I get back.)

I'm cramming for my retreat by listening to Leigh Brasington's Jhana talks. He just shared a brilliant quote: "You can't have a belief system without BS." har har har

After my retreat, I'm heading over to the UK to start my new job. I'll be working as a post-doc at the University of York. Before I start that, I'm taking a trip to Turkey to visit my parents, who are settling in nicely there.

So that's my life. Between that and my flickr updates, you know everything. Doesn't that feel better?

it just occurred to me...

...that if my name were Katrina I'd be royally pissed at all the headlines about how Katrina is the worst disaster in the history of the US.

Also, everyone has to go read Waiter Rant's latest. Sample:

God suffers with us. He shares in our pain. If you’ve ever been to a child’s funeral you know the only thing you can do is cry. God is like that person weeping in the funeral parlor. It was God who was pulverized when the Towers fell, it was God who burned in the Nazis' ovens, and it was God who drowned in that nursing home in New Orleans.

Contrast this with Pat Robertson's usual pronouncements, and ask yourself which one of them should be talking theology in public.

(Don't even bother going to look at what godhatesfags.com has to say about the storm. It's revolting, as usual.)

(Oh, and my favourite bit of Pat Robertson? His "biblical" justification for why you shouldn't get a tattoo. "The Bible does talk about scarring and marring of the body and cutting the body. These are pagan customs, and the Bible condemns it. All these scars, you look in pagan cultures, they cut themselves. They leave great scars in their bodies. And usually it was a scarring to indicate their allegiance to some pagan deity. So that’s what tattoos are all about. Plus the fact, they’re ugly.")

This is what the era of small government looks like

An online acquaintance of mine bragged yesterday that he had given "$250 EACH to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army". I had to step away from the computer and take a few deep breaths after I read that. This is someone who, like 16% of eligible American voters, voted for Bush, and who has made the argument that charity is "more meaningful" when the donors get to decide how to allocate their money.

To that latter contention, all I can say is: people are dying because of your sentimentality.

If you fight tooth and nail to cut the revenue of the federal government by cutting taxes, thereby undermining the kinds of services that could have saved thousands of lives this week in New Orleans, you are NOT the good guy when you donate money to the relief organizations. That money should have been contributed in the form of taxes and used to reinforce the levees. But as long as individuals, and not the government, get to choose which "charity" projects they're going to support, the projects that will actually save and improve lives will always be underfunded. For example: me. I give money to the Nature Conservancy, Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders...um, I'm missing a few, but one thing you'll notice is that there's not a single civil engineering project or water purifying plant in the list of the Causes I sponsor. People will donate to libraries and schools (both vitally important) before they'll donate to the things that actually make life in the developed world possible.

This somehow is connected in my mind to Salon's review of "The Dukes of Hazzard". It's been bothering me for weeks now.

The press notes for "Dukes of Hazzard" feature a quote from producer Bill Gerber: "I was searching for a project that really captured the American spirit," he begins. "The heart of 'The Dukes of Hazzard' is family and protecting what you love."

Is that really the "American spirit"--to fight for the people you are genetically related to, and to say to heck with the rest? Another name for that "spirit" is "tribalism". It's the system that the most regressive Muslim states effectively operate under; heck, it's the spirit that most social animals operate under. Is that really what America has come to? What happened to "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses"? Has that spirit really been replaced by greed, racism, and xenophobia? If they haven't, what explains the fact that some of the busses to evacuate the people without their own cars STILL haven't arrived--instead of having arrived in the days before the hurricane struck? Why have so many of America's own poor, tired, huddled masses essentially been left to drown?

I forgot one of my charities: Plan International (a.k.a. Childreach). It runs projects in developing countries where the governments don't have the money for social services because of corruption (giving tax breaks to the friends of the leaders for example) or because there's no money (in some cases because the entire budget goes to the military). Right now I have a sponsored child in Indonesia and one in Thailand. I wonder if they'll let me sponsor a child in New Orleans.

I've got money in my pocket
I like the colour of my hair
I've got a friend who loves me
Got a house, got a car
I've got a good mother...

Canadians might recognize that bit of Jann Arden--Americans, think low-budget Melissa Etheridge. Anyway, that's the song that's been in my head today. I finally do have money in my pocket. It took close on two weeks, but my new boss figured out how to get me my paycheque to Canada from the UK. To celebrate, I paid off my Visa bill. I swear, any day now the "Girls Gone Wild" camera crew is going to start following me around.
I do also, as it happens, like the colour of the hair, but since I've never dyed it that's entirely fortuitous.
I have the use of both a house and a car, which strikes me as unutterably luxurious, most days.
My good mother celebrated her 59th birthday in Turkey on Sunday. Go wish her happy birthday.
My friend is about to cook some halibut for me, so I'd better cut this short and go try to convince him that he does in fact like beets. (He's skeptical, but keeping an open mind.)

even more updates

Things are good here.





...oh, you expected more detail? okay. Right now I'm watching someone make brownies, shirtless. He knows I'm watching, so he's pausing to flex from time to time. It's a good sight.

Earlier today I was laughing so hard I was crying at silly stories my new boss was telling. She plus her grad student plus me make a coven. The boys in the lab are a little bit overawed.

The harbour is glassy as we get closer to sunset. The adorkable little "water taxis" are making their adorkable little way back and forth across False Creek.

At lunch I went for a walk in the woods and stuffed myself on blackberries and thimbleberries. The brambleberries aren't quite ready yet, which is good: they'll come along right after I've eaten all the blackberries.

My dissertation defence has been firmly scheduled and my committee all have copies of my dissertation.

The cats that live at the place where I'm staying like to sit on my lap.

The experiment has finally started working, AND I don't have any more night shifts.

Next weekend I might be going paragliding (parasailing? whatever). After all this experimenting I deserve a weekend off.

it is finished

Yeah, you heard it. I finished my dissertation.

...for some value of finished. I still have to upload it to the web so the long-suffering departmental secretary can print out copies for my committee (I'll send the link if you're interested in reading it...ha ha), and of course my defence isn't for six weeks yet...and after the defence there's sure to be changes to make before I actually submit it to the grad school. Still. Finished, even only approximately, feels...good. Very good.
...particularly after this weekend. It was a long weekend of frantic writing. Today my supervisor was literally standing over me in the control room where I was writing while I kept eye on the experiment. (Today it came in handy that I don't really know the set-up yet: when things went wrong I was able to claim ignorance and get someone else to do the debugging.)

I celebrated by buying myself flowers. They don't look like they'll last long, but for now they're making my room smell nice.

Other general updates:
I'm settled into Vancouver for now, after a weekend of enjoying being "of no fixed address". I have a cell phone that works nicely for short local calls, and I'm looking into Skype for long distance chatting.
I still haven't heard anything about the "real job" that I've applied for, but the more I hear about that department the less I want to work there anyway. They sound disorganized at best and possibly passive-aggressive.
I may start getting paid sometime soon. By my employer, I mean. My grad-school supervisor hasn't cut me loose yet, so I won't starve, but it's taking a while to figure out which hoops I have to jump through to get paid by the university in the UK. Apparently they want to deposit my cheques into a UK bank account, and I have yet to find a UK bank that will let me open an account from Canada. We'll see how that all works out....

I'm too sleepy now to tell you about my parents' adventures in Turkey. Maybe next time.

May 12, 1967

Oscar Wilde is appalled by people who wash their clean laundry in public. Nevertheless, I have to take a moment to brag about my parents.

Thirty-eight years ago today, they got married. They were barely into their twenties (they'd just graduated from university, having started it early as precocious youngsters). It being 1967, the bride wore a yellow hand-crocheted dress, and the wedding photos were taken on the lawn of the Unitarian church they'd found for the occasion. They were still just kids. They freely admit that they had absolutely no idea what they were getting into.

They've kept the promises that they made that day.



...I'm trying to think of something to add to that statement. It stands by itself. It's utterly staggering.

Two things come immediately mind when I try to talk about their relationship. One is a line Mom used in one of her sermons, about how human love exists to give us a foretaste of God's love, and how she experiences God's love in her own life by means of the tender, steadfast love of her husband. (That one still makes me a little teary.) The other is Dad's habit of kissing Mom the moment he came in the door when he got home from work. I can't remember a single time, through a long career that often made him compare himself wistfully to Count Belisarius, when he let himself get too preoccupied to greet her properly.

When I start counting my blessings, sometimes it seems redundant to list anything except my parents. I didn't do anything to deserve to be born to people who would model for me whole-hearted ethical compassion, and who would show me how love can be used as the organizing principle of a life--one's own life, the life of a family, and the life of a community.

Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad.


family, 1975

DIY rituals

A couple of weekends ago I went for a walk up East Rock, trying to clear my head after a misunderstanding with a friend. All the way up to the summit I was disturbed and upset by my obsessive thoughts. Finally, as I started heading back down, I picked up a smallish, irregularly shaped stone from the side of the path. All the way back down I held it tight in one hand: "tighter, don't relax, don't let it go, you have to hang on, you have to keep this as close as possible; it doesn't matter how much it's hurting, how the edges are digging into your hand, how stiff your fingers are getting, or how much easier these steep steps would be with two hands free to balance; you've got to hang on tight tight tight."

On the bridge at the bottom of the hill I stood for several minutes, letting the sunlight warm and soften the hard knot between my shoulder blades. I held the stone in my open hands, thinking about all of the things I've been holding onto--this fear, this grudge, that desire, that image--and finally brought the stone close to my face to whisper to it, "goodbye, stone."

I threw it into the river and watched its ripples fade.

As I walked home, I picked handfuls of the flowers that had begun to bloom along my path.

Many years ago one of my piano students entered a cross-country ski race--the Silver Spoon, for any Deep-River-ites out there. Even in her age group (7 years) there were some mad keen skiers who zoomed through the course in no time flat. Chrissy, on the other hand, was in no hurry...she'd pause to adjust her toque, look at the nifty bird in that tree over there, wave at one of her friends on the sidelines--so she came thirtieth in the race, out of thirty.

Her mother, who is on the competitive side, assumed that Chrissy would be upset about losing the race, and so was surprised to see her looking so cheerful. She asked her, "Aren't you disappointed that you came last?" Chrissy answered, "Well, I may have come last out of the people who entered--but just think about all the people who didn't enter!"

Chrissy came to mind yesterday when I was giving myself a hard time about my work. Yes, it is true that many people I know could do this stuff better and faster and with less effort than it's costing me--but it's also true that many people's heads would explode at the very thought of attempting what I'm doing.

I'm declaring today to be National Self-Gratulation Day (for two reasons: one, that I suspect that I'm not the only human being who habitually gives herself too hard a time; two, that it's a really cool word that hasn't been used much by anyone since Jane Austen). I invite you as you read this to pause and congratulate yourself for something--anything. Just getting out of bed this morning is something to be proud of: there are people out there who didn't do even that.

update

in the cemetary
magnolia buds are swelling

There but for the grace of god...

A couple of years ago I looked into management consulting. I went to a couple of information sessions, I almost filled out an application for McKinsey; the career-type counsellor person at the grad school here said that I'd have a good shot at getting a job if I did apply. While I was considering this option, I kept getting messages from the universe that said "DON'T DO IT, GIRL!"--I remember this one newspaper headline, in particular, about how management consultants are destroying the world by replacing story-based local ways of doing things with quantitative analyses. I finally took the hint and threw out the application.

Anyway, this article from Salon is a review of a book written by a former management consultant about what a demoralizing and pointless job it is.

The funny thing is, I still sometimes find myself thinking about it as if it were something I'd consider doing, whereas in reality it's absolutely the opposite of everything I'm looking for in a career...except for the part about the six-figure starting salary. More money is always better than less money; but on the other hand if that's the only attraction of the job there's just no point.

The article makes the comparison with prostitution. I don't think I could actually do thatjob either, but I do think that it would be fun to be a stripper. Think about it--after a couple of years as a stripper, you've got flat abs and some fabulous stories to tell and you know you've brought joy into people's lives, whereas after a couple of years as a management consultant, you've got...a lot of frequent flier points and no self-respect.

east rock, sunset

the glow fades
the rock remains

Some time ago--it must be several years ago, now--on one of those days when my lungs were rebelling at the very idea of being forced to continue to draw breath (you know the kind of day I mean--don't pretend that you don't) I went and hid in the bathroom in the basement. There I saw the following message:




At the time it made me laugh and cry and feel grateful that even inanimate objects were lining up to give me advice. Lately, though, I've been feeling like I've had enough of pushing. I'd rather take a different piece of advice from the same source.





Just rest.

walk

Yesterday morning I went for a walk up East Rock.




It's still very much an Easter Saturday time of year. You have to look very closely to see any sign of buds on the trees. And yet I never doubt that someday--someday soon--the trees will be green again. Why then do I doubt that my heart will find peace?

eek!

Now this feels like stepping into the void. I just registered for this fall's three-month retreat at the IMS. Yes sirree. Eighty-four days of silence. I knew I had to look into it more seriously when I was describing it to D the other day and realized that I was all but jumping up and down with excitement. (I've written earlier about one of my previous experiences there.)

Of course, this may not be the year I get to do this. I've applied for a job in Vancouver, and if I do get that I'll have to start in September. In that case I'll go to IMS for a week or two in the summer--but I must go. That much is non-negotiable.

I can't decide whether this is a smart thing to be doing or not. As Spinal Tap reminds us, "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever." Either this is bad juju because it's telling the universe that I'm not 100% committed to the idea of being a professor and taking this job, or by making this plan I'm inviting the universe to continue to thwart my plans--and of course the most efficient way for the universe to thwart this particular plan would be to get me the job. --See? Either very, very clever, or very, very stupid.

mantra

My Inner Nag was having an energetic day today. The only way to keep her in line was to use what I call the STFU technique, as follows:

You should be writing right now.
Shut the fuck up.
No really, you should at least be doing that figure that you've been putting off for a month now--how big a deal can it be? You should have finished it ages ago.
Shut. the fuck. up.
Okay then, you should be worrying about this relationship, or that other one, or hey, how about that one over there. If they're not what you think they should be, that means you're a bad person.
STFU.
Wow, you're looking dowdy today.
Fuck you.
This all shouldn't be this hard. If you're finding it difficult to finish this dissertation, that means you're stupid and incompetent and clearly have no future in the only field in which you're qualified, and of course you have no qualifications to do anything else.
Did I mention "Fuck you"?

It's days like this when I want to invoke Palden Lhamo. She vowed to establish Buddhism in Sri Lanka, where she was the queen. When her husband wouldn't change his pagan/cannibalistic ways, she killed their son, ate his flesh, and took the king's best horse and rode to Siberia. Not a woman to be messed with. Today that's the level of fierceness I need just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I'm sitting at my computer wrapped in an afghan made for me by my dear late great-aunt Margaret, wearing a sweater made by my grandmother, socks made for me by my mother, a shirt that was a gift from T-Regina, a skirt that used to belong to Elisa, and underwear that...uh, let's not go there.

In the most simplistic and literal-minded way possible, I am enveloped from head to toe in love.