Summer Reading

All the plane time has given me a bit of time for some reading. Getting lost in a book has always been a favorite activity of mine and while I don't do it as often as I wish, I recently have put aside the knitting needles in favor of of good tale. Most recently, I read a really good one so I thought that I would share.

(click for book's webpage)

I've always been fascinated with Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, and I'm a huge fan of historical fiction so this caught my eye. Fallingwater is one of the most beautiful and peaceful places I have ever visited. To me, he is one of the few people who successfully merged form and function and in doing so he appeals to my inner engineer and my crafty side. I also love historical fiction, so I picked this book up why wandering through the local bookstore in Boulder, which by the way, is a fabulous store if you're ever there: Boulder Books, it's on Pearl Street. I've been eating much to much fast food and I hate eating out sit down restaurants by myself, but I can accomplish that with a book in hand.

While I knew about his architecture, his legendary strive for perfection, and his art, I didn't know about his love or personal life. The book, is centered around his affair with Mamah Cheney, which is also quite legendary, and horribly tragic. More than the love, however, the book is about the woman herself, a woman I fell in love with. One of the blurbs on the back of the book says she is "everywomen" and I found that to be true. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating affairs, marriage vows are sacred and should be honored. But we do live in a social structure very different from Mamah's, not only do we now consider it acceptable for women to vote, but it is generally assumed that we are also allowed to choose our mates, and our careers, and a whole lot of other things. Anyways, I'm not going to get all uppity feminist on this one. Just go read the book, it's a good story.

In which things go AwREE and then get better again

I have this friend who is an avid reader, and one day he was late for something and he explained by saying everything went "awwwreee", we all looked at him funny until we realized he meant awry. He said he had read it in a book, and couldn't wait to use it! Now we always say "aw-ree" instead of "a-rye", one of those internal jokes that has spread and sometimes I'm worried I'm going to say it to someone whose not in on the joke....

Anyways, How's this for things gong awry:

In just over one week:
On the way to the airport for the trip to go look for a house we got into a car accident. My poor rabbit :(
Said accident caused us to miss our flight.
We managed to get another flight, to another city ~1hour from the original destination.
We go home, get the other car, drive to the airport, check-in go through security and realize that we no longer have the car keys. They cannot be found.
We do not find a house.
We fly halfway home, get to our connecting destination to find out the flight was canceled.
8 hours later, we are finally "home", with no keys.
3 hours and some quality nephew time later we are home for real.
10 hours later, my next flight takes off with me on it for another conference.
On conference excursion, the bus breaks down, and I sit on said bus for 1.5 hours with the only other native english speakers being the crazy tour guide and the bus driver.

There are so many funny blog posts that could have come out of this week that the summary is just going to have to do. Right now, I'm you guessed it, in an airport, with a flight home. I just received a phone call letting me know that our July field campaign is cancelled meaning I don't have to get on another plane for a whole two months!!!!!!!

There are not enough exclamation points to express that excitement. When things go awry they always realign, it just takes some time.

Phew what a week.

just checking in

I'm on the road again. Home for two days between a conference in Sweden and house hunting near the new University. Then two more weeks of conferences. Posting will be sporadic. But I'm alive. Jet-lagged but alive. :)

At an impass

I've had one of those "work" weeks that was just so bad it sucks everything out of you. I've been dwelling on a particular incident for a few days and I've been through all of the stages of emotions that come with the event: anger, exhaustion, denial, anger, and the process of rationalizing it. I wasn't going to blog about it. I was planning to do my best to just let it go, but then this morning I read this, which led me to this and this and the awful comments that followed it and I once again felt that I wasn't so alone and maybe my experience should be out there for the world to know.

First let me say something about the original article: I entirely agree with it. I have been facing this issue, and I've blogged about it before. Getting an academic job these days requires years of post docing and moving all over the place. The decision to do so is much more difficult for a women. I believe this is due to a factor outside of all the regular discrimination women feel in academia, but because of the fact that the post doc phase corresponds to the period in a woman's life when they are biologically forced to make the decision whether or not to have a a family. It is not that a career and a family are not compatible, it's that a one year post-doc is not a career and moving every year for another one and a family are not compatible. (Most post-docs don't come with vacation time, formalized sick leave, or maternity leave, so finding the time to actually give birth would be a small feat) For men, the decision is easier, they can sacrifice it all for there career, force the family to follow, or have kids with a younger women when they are 50+ years old. I'm not speaking of every man here, but all but one man in my department has chosen one of these options to get to where they are in there careers, the one who hasn't is in danger of not getting his tenure. Just my observations.

Anyways, as usual I digress. All that shit is there, in the background, for a woman, all the time. Which is why and incident of blatent discrimination is all that much worse. I have been working on a grant proposal with a colleague for over year. About six months ago, we decided that we needed some additional expertise and asked another colleague from another university to join us. We are very close to submittal and have reached the part were we are putting together our budgets, and reviewing the final draft. Colleague #2, put all of the measurement equipment necessary for my part of the project in his budget, also took all of my experimental design out of the proposal. When we asked what was going on, and requested that we split the equipment between the two universities, he said that he wouldn't trust me to do ANYTHING because I wasn't smart enough, that I shouldn't be a PI (but he was going to let that slide) and a I was just a student so he was senior and it was his decision. Colleague #1 and I were appalled. I was greatly offended. I had suspected for awhile that he felt this way about me because I was a woman, but I was doing my best to work with him, but in my mind this crossed a line.

I thought about it for awhile, let the emotion go away and got to a rational place, and wrote a professional email "to address his concerns", I explained I wasn't a student, outlined my experience, etc. I ended by saying I hoped we could move past this unfortunate incident and finish the proposal. He responded by saying I was wasting his time, he didn't know how the phone conversation became about "personal issues" and he didn't need a lecture from me. Essentially it was a vague and extremely qualified apology. Knowing I couldn't really expect anything better and going tit for tat is useless, I let it go. I said what I needed to say and I could sleep with myself. His behavior since has improved, although only slightly. There has been an unintended consequence, however. My advisor, who has been aware of all of this, has not spoken to me since. I suppose it's possible that in his mind I crossed a line by asserting myself, but I really can't speculate on his feelings, I just know that he is not happy with me.

The whole thing has really been weighing on my mind, and while I know that the situation is the best it can be under the circumstances, I'm still quite bothered by it. It seems to me that colleague #2 was content to keep my name on the grant, knowing that a female PI will increase the chances of funding (which is a whole other can of worms), but that in his mind, a female was unqualified to do anything, so it was in name only. I think he was operating under the assumption that everyone felt this way, and therefore was quite taken aback when we insisted that I was actually responsible for part of the project. So, essentially, until I said something, I was allowing myself to be used merely because of my sex. We have not nice words for that, and the idea of it makes my skin crawl.

So now I'm in a pickle, the silent treatment is clearly my punishment. But, for what? Standing up for myself? Demanding a minimum level of respect as a human being? What were my other options? Letting him bully me? Pulling out to make my point, hurting the chances of the third person involved and walking away from nearly a year of hard work? Continuing to work with someone who clearly shows me no respect for me and comprising my own moral compass? What is my option to make it better? A rock and hard place.

And we wonder why women leave academia.