Envy Issues.

Precocious Yalie.
Originally uploaded by littlee.

Well thank goodness THAT'S over. Graduation, I mean.

Yeah, yeah, we're all very enthralled by the grand displays of bunting, the constant caroling of bells, the novelty of grown men in velvet robes, lacy collars and muffin hats. In fact, this year marks the 100th anniversary of the first playing of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance as a commencement tune, an event that occurred right here in good old New Haven at Yale's 1905 graduation ceremony. And there is something about the sight of hundreds of people processing through the streets in black gowns, beaming with pride and satisfaction, which makes the heart race and the tears well.

But seriously. Did they really need to blockade College Street between York and Trumball for all of Monday, causing complete traffic mayhem? Does every visiting relative from Kansas have to cram into my favorite coffee shop? And while I'm at it, did they really need to use Ingall's hockey rink, located about 100 feet from my bedroom window, as the location for some DJ'd, wild and whacky dance party for the Class of 2005 on a Thursday night? Did they? Huh?

It occurs to me that one reason all of these small things were so aggravating is that in years past, I’ve had the fortune to vacate the premises over graduation weekend. I have done this somewhat coincidently each time, thinking later that it sure was lucky I managed to be in Vermont/New York/California that weekend, 'cause I bet New Haven is a mad house with all that ceremonial hoopla goin' on! Mad house isn't the word...

Of course, while the novelty of these inconveniences could partially explain my crankiness, the other, far more significant cause for all my bitching and moaning about these totally minor irritations is that I'm really really really jealous of the Class of 2005. Really. The envy-o-meter is pegging off its little half-circle scale, the needle is thwapping against the right hand side.

This all became clear on Saturday when I discovered that I was developing an incapacitating case of envy deep in my joints. As I sat quietly in my apartment analyzing data, I found myself grinding my teeth in anger at the noise coming from the apartments both above and below me. What was all the racket, this clattering ruckus that was interfering with the creation of yet another Excel spreadsheet? More loud music from Kevin and Yuval? More constant Cuisinart blending from Colin and Michael's attic kitchen? No, no. It was the harsh din of families and friends, laughing and congratulating, cooking and toasting, coming and going throughout the day. Curse the happy families!! How dare they encroach upon my drab weekend afternoon of number crunching!

Exacerbating my festering case of envy and self-pity was the realization that I was most likely sitting in much the same place in my living room graphing tiny numbers three years ago when these new graduates arrived at 79 Mansfield to begin studying for their degrees at the business and law schools nearby. How dare they be leaving while I still sat, hunched over my laptop, squinting at the yeast genome? Surely they need to take a few more classes before they can run off and make truckloads of cash!

ARGH!!

Breathe, Eva. Breathe. In and out. Un-furrow and relax. You get to graduate, too. In fact, the consensus seems to be that you're going to graduate pretty soon... maybe even a little too soon. After all, the end of graduate school means the beginning of something else. Teaching? postdoc-ing? Straight into industry to work at some quirky biotech that's engineering fish to produce proteins that make them glow in the dark?

Or perhaps NOTHING. A little break after all this education... that sounds nice. Unfortunately, as appealing as it would be to just head straight back to Hotel 519 to raid the fridge and float in the pool, I don't think that the U.S. taxpayer would appreciate knowing that they'd spent roughly $175,000 on six years of doctoral training so that I could work on my tan.

Snails, Puppy-dog Tails 'n' Stuff

Dr. Michael G. Booth, PhD
Originally uploaded by littlee.

So here's the deal. After a 16-week semester teaching The Biology of Gender and Sexuality and after now eight straight days of grading term papers and final exams, my mind has become entirely saturated with the ins and outs of gender theory. The normally unremarkable things I see during the day, the mindless conversations I have with lab mates and roommates, these things now precipitate small flurries of analysis in the back of my mind:

"When such-and-so said, 'That's such a GUY thing to say/do/think,' what makes is so GUY-ish? And why does that seem like sufficient explanation for his poor behavior?"

or

"Why is it that when I look at Eric's freakishly-clean bench, I think 'neurotic' but when I look at Kim's equally sterile workspace I think 'tidy'?"

Or, when driving home recently I observed the following. A tired-looking mother walked down the sidewalk, several feet ahead of her three children. The gap between them may have been enough so that she could not hear the squeals of her younger son who, trapped in a headlock by his older brother, was being thoroughly nuggied. Walking calmly beside them, their sister looked on with an expression somewhere between horror and distain.

Why do brothers, or any boys for that matter, feel the need to cause each other damage? Why is it so normal and natural seeming for that older brother to torture his younger brother so casually as they walk down Sachem Street behind their mother? Aggressiveness is associated with masculinity but all the gender theory peeps like to blather on about how masculinity and femininity are just social constructions and there's nothing biologically inherent about gender roles... But these boys are so young, too young to do things that aren't in some way hard-wired. Oh rats! I forgot about theory of parental conditioning! These boys have been brainwashed to beat each other up!

And why aren't they beating up their sister? What's up with that?

Or like, when Harvard's president Larry Summers made his tactically unfortunate suggestions about the possible reasons for the paucity of female professors in the physical and life sciences, my brain almost exploded.

I wasn't interested in analyzing the validity of his claims that 1. the 80-hour workweek required of junior faculty is unappealing to women, because they tend to be more family-minded 2. cognitive differences between men and women make men better at science and 3. there may be some issues with gender discrimination. No, I was having too much fun using my new gender theory super powers to hypothesize about why Larry, a smart dude, would feel good saying these things, and why so many smart science dudes and dudettes were lining up militantly to both condemn and support him.

Were the women supporting him showing their normal feminine-associated tendency to prevent boat rocking, live by the rules of the hierarchy and play nice? If so, were the women deriding him in harsh tones in some way being man-ish? Does that make the men who criticized Summers a bunch of ladies? The mind boggles.

Which brings me back to my current project: grading a bazillion term papers on the biological and sociological underpinnings of gender. While reading one paper, I came across what I thought may have been a misuse of the whole 'boys are made of snails and puppy-dog tails' idea. The version of the saying the student had written just didn't seem right so I humbly approached the knower of all things, Google, to settle the matter.

To my great frustration, but perhaps appropriately, I discovered that Google doesn't know what makes a boy, either. According to the first dozen or so Google hits, boys appear to be assembled from any combination of the following: snips, snakes, snails, puppy-dog tails, frogs and slugs - the general consensus being that they are mostly snips, snails and puppy-dog tails. Fine then. If not even Google can find a straightforward answer about the basis of human gender, I may as well stop trying.

I should probably explain the photo up at the top of all my blather then. This image is in no way meant to illustrate any of the points made above. My original intention was to post it as a congratulatory shout-out to my friend and newly minted doctor of philosophy, Michael Booth. This past Thursday, he gave a fantabulous defense of his research on the effects of myccorhizal networks and nutrient sharing on forest plant species diversity. Or, simply put, "Why mushrooms rock."

Unfortunately, when I looked a little closer at the photo of Michael, taken on Thursday afternoon when complete exhaustion had reduced him to rolling around on my living room floor, I realized that this snapshot might be part of the grand theme after all. Please note that Michael is wearing the same clothes he wore to defend his thesis - jeans and a flannel shirt. The flip-flops he was also wearing lay next to him.

Who wears flip-flops to the defense of their doctoral thesis?! Who stands in front of six years of masterful research and their entire department with feet that dirty?! I'll tell you who! Michael does. And he's SUCH a BOY.

"Will the last neuron in Eva's brain please turn out the lights!"

Meatballs = Happiness
Originally uploaded by littlee.

Any one who has had the mildly-to-very unpleasant experience of talking to me on one of my busy days this past semester will attest to the fact that I, uh, overbooked myself this spring term. Tasks like grocery shopping, laundry and cooking "bucket food" have become the recreational activities I long for. My usual love of Fridays has faded as Friday's close affiliation with Saturday and Sunday (ie. the days when I can really get work done without distraction) has made it a day to dread. As I run from home to gym to lab to class, I have been cranky, exhausted, hurried and down-right rude to kind-hearted folks who really just wanted to say hi.

To all of you, I apologize. For what it's worth, I think I have finally been forced to acknowledge that sleep is actually necessary. Not doing errands after work and finding my bed before midnight has done wonders for my attitude, despite the fact that the corresponding increase in laundry hamper mass and decrease in food in the fridge may not be a sustainable long-term.

In addition to heavily investing in sleep time, I am in the process of developing a protocol for increasing my daily rating on the Happy-Eva-o-meter. The hope is that a happier Eva will result in less whining, more smiling and an overall decrease in the amount of time I feel that I spend being Sub-optimal Eva due to Bad Attitude/Why does my life suck-itis. Progress so far has resulted in the following program:

Step 1. Eat more meatballs.

Attempts at successfully completing Step 1 have been made for several months now, thanks entirely to the cooperation of Olivia, pictured above. Olivia is a post-doc in a lab down the hall and when her own, usually unflappable good humor is shaken, I find post-it notes on my desk with the simple message, "Meatballs!!" A time is then set and off to IKEA we go.

Oh, you thought I was MAKING meatballs? With an IKEA within visual range of my lab? No way, man. The only swedish meatballs better than IKEA meatballs are my mom's curly meatballs and those are about 2,799 miles further away. I usually get the 10 meatball plate (they're very small!!) with fries and gravy all over. The lingenberry sauce is killer and a nice wedge of swedish apple cake finishes off the meal and me quite nicely.

The key is to then get back to my desk in lab before what Olivia refers to as "Delayed Action Meatballs," or D.A.M.'s, take effect. D.A.M.'s results in a sudden and incapacitating stupor that takes at least an hour to resolve. Best to be safely at your desk "reading the literature" or "analysing data" when this happens. Try not to snore too loudly.

Step 2. Enjoy the hard stuff.

The requirements of this step are far more difficult to define than Step 1, but the Happy-Eva-o-meter requires a significant boost and you can only eat so many meatballs. So far, I have come up with a few examples of how to implement Step 2 in my daily routine:

Example A. This past Monday at 5 p.m., my students handed in their term papers. On Wednesday at 9 a.m., they took their final exam. Yesterday, I went and collected 42 10-12 page papers and 42 exams from my slot in the WGSS office. When I asked Prof. Summers when he needed the grading done by, he simply replied, "soon."

Looks like I have some grading to do. I don't really know how to grade term papers, though I tried to keep that a secret from my students. My learning curve has been steep and while I think I'm getting the hang of it, it has taken my about three hours this afternoon to grade six papers.

So this is the hard stuff. The 'enjoying' part began to happen while I was reading the fourth straight paper on how to incorporate intersex people into society. It seems that the author of this paper is a huge fan of her thesaurus. Big words abound, words I haven't seen since the S.A.T., almost all of them used correctly. My particular favorite was when she used 'the occident' when refering to Western society. I LOVE verbiage! Yep, that was a good sized spike on the Happy-Eva-o-meter.

Example B. For the past two years, my downstairs neighbors have tormented me with their stereo. They have a woofer, a sub-woofer and a sub-sub-make-your-water-glass-rattle-on-the-table woofer. They like to come home from partying at 2 or 3 a.m. and crank it up. I used to try to knock on their door to get them to turn it down, but after a while I realized that their music was so loud they couldn't hear me knocking. Sad Eva. The last time I went down, my banging did get them to come to the door. In my half-conscious rage, I think I blurted out something about calling the police. They turned it down for about a month and then were back to their normal, ear-splitting musical habits.

In recent weeks, as they're graduation from Yale Law approaches, they have switched from thumping hip-hop to classics they can sing to. And sing they do,

"I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead..."

"I'm buh-buh-buh-bad to the bone... buh-buh-buh-baaaaad..."


So, in keeping with my new plan to just plain change my attitude about things that get me down, I have decided that my neighbors are actually providing me with a valuble service. After all, I don't have a stereo of my own. I have a radio in the kitchen that kind of gets NPR and one Glenn Miller-dominated AM station. Their music is always up loud enough so that I can clearly hear treble, bass and lyric tracks. Maybe I should just slip a request list under their door.

Step 3. Well, rats. There isn't really a Step 3 yet. In my lower moments, I mutter that Step 3 involves graduating right now and getting out of this hell hole, but that sentiment is in direct violation of Step 2, so I'll have to think further.


Now back to work. I've got Cat Stevens kickin' from down below and a paper titled "Androgen-Based Predispositions in Sexual Orientation" to grade.

It doesn't get any better than this!!

Sunday Confusion

e-mail madness
Originally uploaded by littlee.

While crawling into consciousness this morning, listening to the rain drumming against the window next to my bed, I found myself contemplating a very weighty issue:

"What do I wear to Ronin's party?"

Ronin turned five a couple of days ago and I have been invited to his birthday party as the guest of his mom, Olivia. (Each parent is allowed to invite one friend.) At Ronin's choosing, and much to Olivia's chagrin, the party has an army theme and thanks to the marketing geniuses at birthday express.com, the party will be complete with army-themed plates and cups, party favors and party games.

So. What to wear...what to wear? Ronin's invitation requests appropriate, combat-ready attire. The closest I've got to camouflage is khaki capri pants and an olive green t-shirt. Sort of 'Old Navy goes to the Army'. The problem here, the complication that my sleepy brain is trying to work through is that shortly after the conlusion of the birthday party, I am expected at the May Day open house of Kirk and Peter. Kirk, a running group friend, and his partner Peter have been renovating and redecorating for years. And now finally, as the humorous but unsettling invitation suggests, we are all invited for crepes and chablis to celebrate both the end of renovation as well as the end of Kirk and Peter.

Kirk likes to make jokes about how The Wallpaper vs. Paint Standoff and The Hall Carpet Conflict have simply become insurmountable barriers to domestic peace. Really, he insists, we should all just be happy that they haven't scratched the beautifully refinished floors during any of their recent skirmishes. I'm still not sure about how to react to the 'Come celebrate our disfunction' theme but everyone else seems very jolly about it so I will go and be jolly, too. I mean, why NOT celebrate a break-up?

Anway, back to the real issue. Have I made my case?! Do you see my problem with outfit selection? I can't run around playing paratrooper on a muddy mid-spring lawn and then walk directly and elegantly into a swanky catered gig at a big house on St. Ronan Street. Maybe I could change in a phone booth, like Superman. Hmm...

The burden of solving this problem on a rainy Sunday morning in a warm soft bed quickly became overwhelming and I decided that I could delay dealing with the whole issue by eating breakfast and checking my e-mail while still in my pajamas. That seemed like a much more soothing Sunday morning activity.

Or not.

When I opened my inbox, I discovered that even though I had conducted a one day boycott of e-mail yesterday, the students of WGSS355 had not. A small pile of last minute panic e-mails about the final paper due tomorrow and the final exam on Wednesday sat waiting me. All week I have been receiving a steady flow of requests for extensions, clarifications and precise instructions on exactly how to format an html reference in the MLA citation format. (Answer to that last one: "Sorry Katie, I have no idea.") Each day the number of e-mails increases, many trying to sneak in quietly with subject headings like, "Really quick question" or "One last thing." But despite the breezy subject headings, I can tell that the panic is mounting: Brian finally concludes that he needs an extension at 1:45 a.m., Meg has urgent questions about the brain at 3:22 a.m.

All lined up, these messages, with their middle-of-the-night time stamps and and semi-coherent questions, create a palpable sense of jittery, last minute freak-out in my normally peaceful e-mail inbox. These are not the happy Sunday morning messages I was hoping to browse. I'm actually going to have to THINK, and RESPOND and figure out some tactful way to tell Brian to stop asking for extensions without a formal notice from his Dean.

Now the idea of laying in bed debating khaki pants vs. jean skirt seems heavenly. But it's too late. I have seen the e-mails and the guilt of leaving my students' neurotic queries unanswered will find me under my covers and smother me there with a pillow.

"Hi Nora,

With regard to citation format, I have asked that students use endnotes instead of footnotes because..."