50 shades of embarrassment

I have not read any of the books.  I hear the writing style is poor.

My favorite part of the 50 shades of grey phenomenon is that sometimes I am lucky enough to watch strangers buy the book.  The first time I was in an airport in line to check out, at one of those books and snacks stores, and the middle aged (mid 50s) white guy in front of me was getting a newspaper and 50 shades of grey.  He presented his items to the cashier with the newspaper wrapped around the book.  She opened the newspaper, and scanned each item.  Then he re-wrapped the book in the paper.

The second time, I was at a grocery store with my husband.
There was a black woman (early 40s) with her hair in dreads and a pony-tail standing in front of us.  She was wearing workout clothes.  She had the book* on the moving conveyor belt covered mostly by a magazine.  You could see handcuffs on the cover.

J and I walked out with our groceries and he said to me, "I don't know why she was so embarrassed about that book.  Its OK black woman, you can read your books about slavery."

J thought it was about African-american historical-slavery.  :)

Embarrassment is interesting to watch.  Especially when people are embarrassed about something that I don't place a value judgement on, like sexuality.

*maybe it is a different book in the series than the 1st one?

hen

I am currently reading The Ten Year Nap which was recommended to me by a professor at a near-by girls college. It has 3/5 stars on Amazon so I would not have picked it up had it not been about mothers who had stopped working to raise children-- a topic that I am interested in.

One of the reviewers on amazon said that the book is just all of these women complaining about their lives, but not changing their lives. And reading it, I find that it is a *depressing state* book. I mean that all of the characters in the book are living a life that I do not care to emulate. In short, it makes me want to return to work shortly after my kids can walk.

I was reading the book this morning, and one line in particular caught my attention-- it was something about how now that this woman character was married with kids she didn't stay out all night anymore like she did when she was single. A similar statement has been said to me by many of the women who come talk to my Women's group- except that our speakers say they don't spend all of their time working like they used to- now they lead more balanced lives.

Then I think of my life where I am young and already I have to work on leading a balanced life. If I am already working on adapting now, how will I adapt in the future? This is my handicap- the fact that I get so stressed out about life in general... Cardiovascular exercise is supposed to help with that- and it might help me some- except that thinking about doing cardio also stresses me out. That's where Yoga comes in. For the first time I am able to really relax, and I don't anxiously anticipate Yoga the way I do other activities. Yoga could be the solution to my headaches.

the floor is made of lava

toothpastefordinner.com

How Babies Are Made 10/30/08 is a blog post by Natalie Dee that has significantly influenced my life. Hopefully the link gets you there. If not, I believe I have provided enough information for you to find it.

How Babies Are Made has cured me of my "baby wanting" for the time being. This is good, because the idea of babies seems very appealing when compared with the drudgery of my graduate program-- however, the Hell written about in How Babies Are Made is significantly worse than grad school.

In other news, Tino has requested that I post some pics of the pups. Previously, I have refrained from posting any photos of my dogs because it could be incriminating evidence of my true identity. But now, I say: Bah! I am taking the risk.

The first photo is of Herman; I have titled it: The Floor Is Made of Lava, because he is walking from the chair to the couch as a kid would if they were playing the game.

The next photo is of Diego. He is our little Red Headed Step Child.

And finally, we have them both together on the couch in Together On The Couch.


Training Success: A Review, Days 1-5

The book says that we are supposed to do 2 training sessions a day of 20 repetitions of click and treat for 3 days. That didn't quite happen. I do think that my dogs get the idea of their current training sessions now, though. Here is a review of our progress:

Wed (day 1): 1 session PM
Thurs (day 2): 2 total sessions: AM and PM
Friday (3): 1 session AM
Saturday (4): 1 session AM
Sunday (5, today): 1 session AM

Today I actually have time to do more sessions with them but I am going to try to move on at this point. So far we have had 6 sessions which is the same number we would have had in 3 days of twice a day.

In Chicken Liver news, I have decided to trash the remaining livers. The livers have a grainy texture that fragments in my fingers as I try to feed them to Diego. On top of that they smell horrible. Chicken Livers have been the bane of my training existence.

I am also looking forward to moving on to the next training exercise because Diego has a problem of being over-zealous about food so that he scrapes my fingers with his teeth every time I try to put a treat in his mouth. I have cut up longer strips of centimeter cheese to help with this, but the box game that comes next will solve the teeth scrape problem.

Getting it out one word at a time

I haven't written anything on here in a week. I have wanted to write about things I cannot tell, and beyond that my thoughts are scattered.

A list of my scattered thoughts:

1. McCain looks like he has had plastic surgery. His face is creepy when he smiles, as if he has already spent a lifetime of not smiling, so that he needed plastic surgery to smile again.

2. I need to do cardio more than once a week.

3. I made a foolish promise to relearn organic chemistry-my weakest chemistry knowledge- and now I have to study all the time. I crave girl time-just to ride around in the car shopping for records-but I have to study now.

4. Jips and I realized something that I have known in my soul for a lifetime: I don't like "dinner" foods. This may have something to do with why I am comforted by grocery stores.

5. Football season makes me happy.

6. I wish my house was clean.

7. Insurance companies are the devil.

8. I want to bake cake. Lots of cake. I want to eat cake. Cake cake CAKE.

9. I want to be a better mom to my dogs. I love my dogs.

10. Political speeches are lame. People that cheer at them need to be introduced to football.

11. Every night in my dreams I am aggressive and fighting. Sometimes physically fighting, mostly arguing and yelling. I am either fighting people I dislike in my department at school or black girls that are cashiers.

12. I wonder what my boss would look like if he got plastic surgery like McCain. My boss is the most negative person I have ever met.

13. I am in a graduate women's therapy group. Things that go on in group live in my mind but I cannot tell them. I want to take one of the girls home with me and make her my best friend. As if we had time for that.

14. I read Opting Out? Why women really quit careers and head home, and it made me depressed. I have enough mental notes for a whole blog post about this. It was an excellent book, just too much reality for me. I have to remind myself that I am just going to do the best I can in the world I currently live in.

15. When will the economy turn around?

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

The night before I left for my grandparent's house, I went to B&N to pick up a book for the trip. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill jumped into my hands mainly because it is the "Bookies' Favourite" (for the Man Booker Prize 2008.) I must admit that I was hesitant to purchase it. I read a few reviews and thought that it would be a book about Cricket (the sport.) But far from my expectations this is a novel of perception: Hans' perception of Cricket and everything else. The sentences are beautiful. I cannot remember the last time I found this much serene pleasure in reading a book. A few of my book-marked quotes follow:

Perhaps the relevant truth--and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me--is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

She has accused me of exoticizing Chuck Ramkissoon, of giving him a pass, of failing to grant him a respectful measure of distrust, of perpetrating a white man's infantilizing elevation of a black man.

I don't remember anyone in New York talking about his vacation for longer than a minute. ... But in London, it must be recognized, escape--to the country, to warmer climes, to the pub--is a great, bittersweet theme.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

A book like The White Tiger comes around only once a generation in the jungle. Last time it was The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This time it is The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. My aunt recommended the book to me, and I picked it up from The Noble with a birthday gift-card. I didn't find this out until later, but The White Tiger is suddenly getting more press because it made the Man Booker Prize Longlist.

I loved the book because it is about slavery, manipulation (especially of the familial sort,) and individuality. If you read the reviews on Amazon you won't find the mention of slavery. The novel takes place in a (realistically portrayed) corrupt India. In this world, the rich have enough money to live as human beings, and the poor barely exist.

The best thing I found on the internet about this book was an interview with the Author. In the interview we find this quote:

Actually, my background as a business journalist made me realize that most of what's written about in business magazines is bullshit, and I don't take business or corporate literature seriously at all.

That sums up the feel of the novel. I love it because I feel the same way. Maybe not about business magazines, but certainly about Academia. Additionally I like the book because of the (lack of) morality of the protagonist, Balram. "Survival Before Morality" is his unofficial motto.

My favorite quote of the novel:

These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things they have no say in. (p.82)

Finally, other bloggers who have read The White Tiger:
The Kingfisher Scrapbook
Redhead Ramble
The Complete Booker
The Mooske and the Gripes
Always Listen To Your Pig Puppet
Books for Breakfast

Writing about Writing

This post is inspired by Tino's Book Talk.

Thinking about writing a book is an interesting thing to do. Of course, if I were to write a book I would want it to be a good book, one that I would enjoy reading. So what makes a book a good book? My requirements are:

1) Good character development. I think I could handle this if I wrote about people I know... Or base characters off of people that I have known well and find interesting. Or mesh the people I have met into someone wonderful!

2) No Excess Words. That means that everything written must be written for a reason. The best books give you hints and details along the way that you only fully understand at a later part in the book when things start to click. So maybe if I was writing I would go back through once I had a draft and indicate the usefulness of each paragraph. You've got to be able to kill your babies they say. X everything that doesn't help the story.

3) Plot (Action). Maybe even a Plot Map. Something has to happen, and since life doesn't happen in a vacuum, there are sub-plots woven into the big plot. I guess if I were doing this I would come up with the BIG PLOT and work the sub-plots into it by working outward from the center.

I guess that is it. I bet I would need a million drafts to get a good final copy.
Also it seems that it would be easiest to start by writing about something I know very well. I do think I understand people, so I bet I could do the whole character thing... Just how to communicate what I know in words on a page? Communicating takes some effort. I know lots of things but generally I don't care if other people know them or not, and this makes me a poor communicator.

Oh yeah. So since I don't know how I would write the book I would try to write the same story from the first person and from the third person and with mostly all dialog and without much or any dialog and all of these different ways. I bet then I would have a better grasp on the story and I could pick the version that was the best.

Finally, I like well written books. What the fuck does that mean? The sentences must be enjoyable to me. I know I don't write like that personally, but maybe I can go look back at some stuff I like and reevaluate the beautiful sentences.

All of this from a non-writer.

All Hail Snail Mail!

Once every five years our department goes under the scrutiny of the External Review Committee. This is a group of professors from other universities, six to be exact, three of which were from schools in California. Anyway, they come to our school for 3 days and talk to everyone from undergrads to accounting for our department. Basically, they talk to everyone and write up a report of suggestions to make our department better. It seems like a good system to me.

Anyway, I was asked to be part of the graduate student group. So I talked to these professors for an hour on Wednesday... And on Friday I wrote each of them a thank-you note on cards depicting my school's seal or an artist's rendition of a landmark associated with my school. I mailed them on Friday, too. That is a fast turn-around time for me, and I am proud of it.


One of the things I learned in my Women's group is that people love getting hand-written thank you notes. Especially if they are a professor that you just met and talked to a little bit. They probably thought nothing of the encounter when it happened, and then magically they get this nice hand-written note in the mail! And suddenly you become their new favorite person. So I get a big check mark this week under the title: NETWORKING.

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Therapy ended. I knew this was coming, I just didn't know how abruptly it would happen. Actually my last visit was April 30th. She told me we had 3 more weeks. But during my session on April 30th, her husband was at work on a 20 foot ladder. And he fell off of the ladder. 20 feet down. He fucked up his back and now he is paralyzed from the waist down. She left work. I was her last client. She hasn't been back in over 2 weeks now. She was getting phone calls during our session about her husband, but at the time she silenced them. It is a little creepy thinking about that now.

I am not taking my "lack of therapy" very well. I feel like I am in mourning. Like I lost one of the best things in my life. I lost my connection with the world beyond grad school. I lost my fake mom. That is why I made my list of positive things, to counteract the negative things in my head. I don't have much motivation. I am beginning to get scared of people. I am making myself start my day with 30 minutes of Elliptical. If I do that I have a good day. If I don't, I have a bad day.

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On a lighter note. My sister's birthday is this month.
I just made my Amazon purchase to be shipped to her house.
Her gift is the following:
1) I like you, by Amy Sedaris
2) Girls of Riyadh, by Rajaa Alsanea

endearing when you're young

Traveling back home, my mom and I sat next to a stranger on the plane.
He asked me: "What motivates you? What drives you? What causes you to get up in the morning and go to work?"

I didn't know. I still don't know.

I am still burnt out from my Oral Exam. I go to work and fiddle around the lab. I am even fixing our water purification system, but my heart isn't in it. At the end of the day I cannot wait to leave. I daydream about reading philosophy and history and behavioral psychology. I daydream about blogging.

I have been thinking about intimacy lately. Novella mentioned that singing is intimate. I started to explore in my mind other intimate but non-sexual things. When I used to babysit I was always amazed at how ready for intimacy the kids are. They would just curl up in my lap ready for a story to be read to them. So lap-sitting and story-reading can be intimate things, although I can imagine situations where they are not so intimate.

So what does it take for something to be intimate? Is it any less intimate when a rock star sings than when I sing? I think so. The rock star has already whored himself out to the world. Maybe doing something for money removes the intimate element.

Looking at someones music collection can be intimate. It can show you pieces of the person that you did not know existed. Maybe intimacy is about knowing and allowing yourself to be known without any ulterior motives. Is intimacy about feeling?

And finally, some nice quotes:

Being a fuck-up with a good heart is endearing when you're young; if you've not changed by the time you hit your late twenties, well, you're probably just pretty much a fuck-up, and eventually, you become annoying.
-Mark Richardson in a review of The Replacements

Sure, religion saves lives. So does tobacco -- ask those GIs for whom tobacco was an even greater comfort than religion during World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.
-Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell

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.