March Madness

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten a blog up with good reason. The last few weeks have been some of my most trying in a long time. Through a combination of accident and well-intentioned-but-poorly-aligned planning, I had an awful lot of deadlines and to-do’s pile up in the second half of March. Add this move back to Atlanta into the mix and the whole thing started to feel perilously like setting off fireworks next to a powder keg. March is over though and I'm starting to decompress.

Months ago, when the only thing I had planned at the end of March was attending the wedding of two close friends, before we were going to be moving to another state, I volunteered to coordinate a “Food Fair.” In both Houston and Atlanta, I have volunteered with food pantries and it has always been a deeply moving experience. It reminds me, on my hardest days, of exactly how much I have to be thankful for. However, it is very difficult for many food pantries to stock fresh fruits and vegetables and other perishables, like milk. The health and safety standards associated with these items are beyond the reach of many smaller pantries. Houston Food Bank’s response to this need is a “Food Fair” where the food bank delivers 10 to 20 pallets of fresh produce to a location with the intent that it will all be distributed in one day. It’s a huge undertaking once you consider getting the word out to people in need, coordinating volunteers to run the event, and finding a place to hold it.

After so many months of planning, I was sick with worry by Friday night. What if no one came? What if the truck was late? What if we didn’t have enough volunteers? What if it rained? (We had only a very loose contingency for this because we didn’t have an indoor venue that would ever have been big enough.) What if we ran out of food before serving everyone that came?

I’m sure I’d worry just as much if I had it all to do again, amazingly, it all went off so smoothly that I spent all of Saturday wandering asking volunteers what I could do. After months of planning, the big day came, and I had little to do besides stand back and watch in wonder. At this point, this whole post may sound disgustingly self-congratulatory, but that really isn’t my intent. However, the back story was needed for the real purpose of this post.

On my umpteenth trip around our “fair ground,” I paused to look around and just watch everything in motion. In that moment, despite all my worries about other things going on in our lives, there was nowhere else that I could imagine wanting to be. I was surrounded by a group of amazing volunteers who all were willing to give up their Saturdays to direct traffic, to cart heavy food around, and to stand on street corners holding signs and directing traffic. I moved around asking people if they wanted a break and was turned down time after time. No one wanted to stop, even for lunch. Despite the heat and, occasionally, the rain, everyone was willing and happy to keep going and it was one of the most amazing, humbling things I have seen. And that was totally worth everything that led up to that moment.

Bad at Failing

I had an art teacher in high school (a hilarious nun who sometimes cursed, was usually improper, and taught me all kinds of things about not needing to conform to expectations) who used to tell us to "have a day." We would ask her if she meant "have a good day" and she would tell us that we could have whatever kind of day we wanted to have. Well, this has been a week. Stick whatever adjective you want in front of "week" and my answer will probably be "yes."

Math and science have always been hard for me. In both high school and college, I was strongly encouraged to pick something else. I was born with a stubborn streak a mile wide though and any suggestion that I couldn't do something generally only provoked me to try harder. (How lucky are my parents? I'm sure they hope I someday have one just like me.) I didn't choose science because it was easy, I chose it because it was hard, because it was a challenge, because I was determined to prove a point. To who (whom?), I have no idea.

I love that research keeps my mind busy and engaged. I love looking for the next project, the next challenge, and the next unknown. That's all well and good but usually science is a lot of days of failing to do something before you figure it out. Sometimes, before you discover you were asking the wrong question all along. Plenty of famous scientists (and less famous ones) offer examples of exactly how failing is intrinsically a part of research. Unfortunately, I am bad at failing. I do not, despite all the well meaning advice to the contrary, look at lines of failed code and think cheerfully "well, now I know that approach doesn't work, I'll just have to try another one!" Instead, I question why I couldn't have picked something else, anything else, to invest myself in as an adult. I hear the voice of a professor, long ago, telling me that I should consider science writing or being a telescope operator because I was not suited for more. If you're not sure, this was very much not a complement.

Usually I am most sure that I will never succeed shortly before I do just that. Often I leave work dispirited about my progress only to get on the highway and come up with a new approach on the way home. Or in the middle of the night. Or while I'm cooking dinner. I'm still not sure if the triumph at the end (however small of an improvement the "end" might be) is worth the struggle along the way. Maybe, someday, I'll get better at failing. Maybe I'll fail with more optimism and less resignation. At the very least, maybe I'll figure out a way to help my students be better at failing than I am. Or maybe being bad at failing is exactly what makes people good at science.

Thirty three hundred miles home

Life often takes a circuitous route that only makes any sense in retrospect. A year ago, we were feeling pretty confident that we would be in Texas for the long haul, or, at the very least, the next 5-10 years. We bought a house, we settled in, and we made it our own. We unpacked all our boxes for the first time in three years. And then we received a call that we never, ever expected.

My husband was being recruited for a job back at Delta. In Atlanta. We agreed it was worth him going through the process but remained unconvinced that anything would come of it. It did though and here we are. We're moving home. We're also leaving home.

It's been a whirlwind of feelings more than activity so far because, in the short term, only my husband is moving. I'm searching for a job but will stay behind at least until we sell the house and probably until I'm gainfully employed in Georgia. So right now, I'm holding my breath, standing on the edge of something big, without anything to distract me from the distinct sensation of holy cow, what are we thinking?

We're going back to people and a place that we both know and love. We're going back to favorite neighborhoods and restaurants and activities. We're leaving all those things too though. It's a feeling that is sometimes joyous and exciting and other times quite the reverse. (It is 100% exhausting, no matter how else I feel about it.) Looming large over all of it though is the worry that things won't be the same. Often, when I leave a place, it becomes frozen in time. I remember it as it was because how else can I remember it? Even now, when we go back to the area of NJ that I grew up in, everything looks achingly familiar and somehow, strangely, alien.

People come and go and we know that, when we move back to Atlanta, we will face the sad reality that some of our close friends have moved away. Places change too and I have to hope that our frequent trips back in the years since we left will prepare me. Most of all though, places change us. It's one of my favorite things about living in new and different places. I always get to come away changed, sometimes in big ways and sometimes in small ones. So a different me will be going back to a different place with some different people. It's the next great adventure and I think it will be pretty cool.

And whatever else may come, I'm really looking forward to night flights over the city again!

Uninvited Persepctive

On the official Coffee Commuting scale, today's commute was at the bottom of the list. (If you're not sure what I'm talking about: http://fifteenhundredmilessouth.blogspot.com/2016/03/coffee-and-commuting.html) I commute on a four lane highway. Three of them were shut down. I left home in the dark and watched the sun rise sitting parked on the highway.

It's incredibly easy for me to get angry when this happens. I'm not a morning person but I drag myself out of bed as close to 5 am as I can manage just to try to get to work before the worst of the traffic. So, when I hit bad traffic anyway, I'm usually tired, frustrated, and mad. It would appear that everyone else is too. It's not a situation that brings out the best in most of us. Let someone in? No way man, this lane is moving very slightly faster! Too frequently, I have been desperate to switch lanes and annoyed that no one wants to let me but recognize that, not even 10 minutes later (or earlier), I am the person who doesn't want to let someone in in front of me. Needless to say, it's a deeply irritating thing to recognize in yourself.

Apart from all that though, there's something even more important going on. (At least, I believe there is.) Three closed lanes on a four lane highway means there's been a major accident. People have gotten hurt. So while I'm sitting there getting angry that my 20 mile commute is going to take over an hour, I have to forcibly remind myself that someone else's morning has gone far, far worse than mine. I choose then to pray, for the people involved, for the first responders, for the hospital staff that will treat them. (Maybe someday I'll manage to skip the anger and frustration and pray first.) It doesn't make me less frustrated, but it does put my day in perspective. It's just not always perspective that I'm thrilled to have.

Double Trouble

Sometimes you make a knee jerk decision to run an extra errand and it has long lasting repercussions. Once I did this and got rear ended. More recently, we ended up with an extra cat out of the deal. Maybe I should stop running errands. I'm pretty sure that's the moral of this story.

Okay, now that you're wondering what I'm rambling about... We adopted a kitten! We'd actually been considering it for months and had been looking through pictures of available kittens. None had quite seemed right though. Then, two weeks before Christmas, I decided to run by the pet store to pick up some extra supplies. It was a shelter adoption day but I wasn't worried because we had gone to tons of those and never found an animal we wanted to take home. (I mean, they're always adorable, but none seemed just right.) I bypassed the adoption event and picked up what I needed. Feeling very on top of my schedule for the day, I decided to swing by for a quick look. And there she was, laying on her back in a cage, frantically trying to bat at the Christmas decorations on the table below the kennels. It was probably all over for me in a heartbeat.

It couldn't have been worse timing with me leaving two days later for a conference and a Christmas trip to FL only days after I returned from the work trip but we decided to take the plunge anyway. A few hours (and no more errands) later, we were home with a new kitten and a very, very pissed off MT (our four year old cat). And thus started a trial run for parenthood that we didn't know we had signed up for.

There are the sleepless nights as the two cats chase each other onto the bed, off the bed, and back onto the bed again. There are the early mornings when Kaylee decides to find her loudest toy and start chasing it around the house. There are the sibling fights (we've given up on breaking most of them up). There are the late night trips to the emergency vet. There are the temper tantrums (because, in cat-speak, throwing up on your bed is the equivalent to a full out toddler melt down).

The phrases No! Don't eat that! and What's in your mouth? Spit it out right now! have become as common in our house as they are in my sister's, which is home to three toddlers. It certainly hasn't been anything like we expected and I'm not sure we'd sign up to do it again but the sweet moments are pretty endearing and the cats are slowly (glacially) warming up to each other. We even got them to hold still for one whole photo...

Old Drafts

I don't blog often about my work or my time as a graduate student, though it's certainly a huge part of my life. Graduate school, especially, is a hard experience to characterize if you haven't been there. And if you have been, then you know. Recently though, blogging about some of my experiences has been on my mind.

More and more, a lot of my work has been focused on students. I've been helping both undergraduates and graduates to develop their research ideas into projects, presentations, and papers. Well, hopefully I've been helping.

There's a seemingly universal experience that I had as a student and that I now see in the faces of my own students. It's the look of disappointment, maybe mixed with a little incredulity, that students have when their edited work is handed back to them. I remember it well and it's discomfiting to see on the faces of my own students. It's the look you give when you are sure you put your absolute best work into something and it comes back dripping with corrections.

As a grad student, I usually handled the disappointment by reading the corrections and then not looking at them for a few days. They never looked as bad as I thought after I gave them some time. Now, seeing that look directed at me, I am often tempted to rush in and start apologizing and reassuring. I'm sorry. It's not that bad. You did good work. It just needs a little polishing.

I have to remind myself that those types of silly reassurances aren't necessary. Review is very much part of the scientific process and learning to handle criticism is crucial. Learning how to do this part, the editing, revising, and growing of research, is at least as important as anything you will learn in a class and, I would argue, possibly more so. So I'm learning to bite my tongue, set a deadline, and invite students to bring me their questions if they have any. Maybe someday I'll stop feeling bad about it too but I doubt that day will be anytime soon.

In the meantime, I look back at my Old Drafts file, the folder of previous drafts I keep for each paper I write. I only start a new draft for major changes, not minor corrections, and each paper has somewhere between 30 and 50 old drafts behind it. I feel a little bit less of an impulse to apologize after that because I know that I've never had a paper revision that didn't make it better.

The Sick kind of Sick Days

There's this commercial that runs here showing a woman calling in for a sick day to marathon a favorite tv show. Whether she's sick or not, she's definitely enjoying streaming her favorite show. Who doesn't want that? Some days I fantasize about all the things I could be getting done at home if I just took a sick day. But I don't. I don't even take sick days when I'm sick. I work from home.

So this past week was unusual. I took sick days from Wednesday to Friday. I had a good reason for it (and if you want to know more about that, send me an email or message) but, in my heart, I was pretty sure it would be unnecessary. I even sketched out a plan for each day, assuming that I would feel up to doing things. It was a good plan.

Of course, that's not how sick days work when you're really sick. Rather than tackling my very reasonable sounding to do list, I spent most of my time sleeping and, when I was awake, I did exciting things like stare at the walls. It's a lot more interesting than it sounds when you're not feeling well. I thought about reading a book or coloring or doing so many other things that seem to take almost no energy but it turns out that they all took just enough energy.

I'm feeling better now and will be back at work tomorrow but the moral of the story is that sick days are a lot less exciting and fun than you'd think when you're actually sick.