Fight to the death: Feminism vs Zitizen

A Photo of Traffic, by Fermi I was inspired by booton's engagement photo. (below)

At first I didn't even know that was you!

Every once in awhile I decide that I want to become famous on the internet. Then I try to become famous, and I don't actually make it. Now is one of those times. I should be smarter than this. Fame is so shallow. It doesn't matter. My real personal relationships matter, exercising matters, dogs matter. Ugh. Maybe it was the Immatrex I took this morning for my migraine. Those always put me in a crappy mood. Or maybe because my face is breaking out: I have two "problems." Probably from eating nothing but pizza for the past 3 days. Anyway, normally I look in the mirror and think "I am gorgeous!" But when I have a "bad face day" I CANNOT handle it. I CANNOT. I feel like a second class citizen. A zitizen if you will.

Changing the subject now... AHEM.
One of my favorite blogs is A Prolific Squalor. Every weekday you get a snippet of an IM conversation. Kind of like being in high school. Sometimes I wish I had cool IM conversations like that. All of mine go like this:

Me: When do you want to leave work today?
Jips: I don't know.
Me: How about 8
Jips: Okay see you then.
Me: bye
Jips: bye

Pretty Dull.
I found out about Prolific Squalor from another blog: Bitch PhD. I pretty much find out about everything cool from her. A recent post by M. Leblanc is about menstruating. It has a link to a photographer's site. Anyway they are pretty much all about feminism over there. Feminism is a topic I have been thinking more about lately. Mostly because of Women In Chemistry (WIC) I guess. I was doing a Google search for women chemists with PhDs who took years off of work to be stay at home moms while their children were small. I didn't find any... but I found bitch's blog.

As Co-Chair of WIC it is my job to get speakers to come have lunch with our group. Most speakers are really hard-core work-a-holic types who don't spend much time with their children. And the topic "work life balance" always comes up. The funny thing is that all of the speakers (the successful, established Women Chemists) all basically say that work-life-balance is good, but that they didn't have any.

We have yet to find a woman with a PhD in Chemistry who was a stay at home mom for several years and then went back to work. It will be very difficult to get a job after being out of the workforce for 5 or 7 years while your kids are small. We know that. We want to hear how it is done.

After my Oral Exam I went to Barns and Nobles to get a book to read "for fun." That is one of the things I miss the most: reading for fun. I just read so much for work now, and additional reading is less important than walking the dogs or cleaning up the kitchen. I didn't see anything great fiction-wise (I will take recommendations) but I did see this book: The Female Brain. It has mixed reviews on Amazon, and I stopped before I read about menopause, etc. But it was interesting. It had this part about some parents who were careful to get trans-gender toys for their daughter. One of them was a big red firetruck. And the dad walked up once and saw the girl holding the firetruck wrapped in a blanket like a baby talking to it. The point being that the girl formed a relationship with the firetruck because girls are biologically more into relationships than boys. Cute, huh?

It is easy to argue against [anything]/[all of what is] written in the Female Brain simply because looking at females as different biological beings than males is still new. And behavioral studies take a long time to do. Whatever. It is an interesting read. At least the first couple of chapters. Then it gets a bit repetitive.

The End.