The Sooner You Make It Yours

By: | November 11, 2019

This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the distress, not the reason to stick it out, nothing at all has changed.

My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing.  Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What are you reading?” and he’d get a funny look and say, “Oh nothing, just a paper,” meaning a dense, opaque, difficult scientific journal article.  And when I asked him how things were going at school, this normally close-mouthed kid started talking and didn’t stop, and he wasn’t sounding cheery. He wasn’t relaxing, not one bit.

Freeman Dyson wrote:  “The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow-area of specialization. . . . I am personally acquainted with several cases of young people who became mentally deranged, not to speak of many more who became depressed and discouraged, their lives ruined by the tyranny of the Ph.D. system.”

Dyson himself declined to participate in the system and does not have a PhD.  But nowdays, he goes on to point out, not having one means not being a scientist.  Getting one means years of school beyond college, then a couple of years each of one or two or three postdoctoral fellowships before finding a job in which your research is likely to be directed by someone else, or an academic post at which you can begin the years of working toward tenure.  Middle-aged, overspecialized, mentally deranged, depressed and discouraged seems about right.  The system is brutal.

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Lesser Rites

By: | November 8, 2019

My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over.

The road is a lonely straightaway that leads down from the high country and across mesa tops dotted with a few old ranch houses. Cows watch us from half-snowy fields. No cars come by as the tall young man leans on the wrench undoing lug nuts and I position the jack. It’s cold out, ground hard. He’s in a puffy jacket crouched at the back end of the car. I keep fixing him in the frame of my memory, watching him with the old tire in his arms, pulling it off its posts. I don’t know if this is his ritual or mine.

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Ode to materialism

By: | November 7, 2019

When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see all the this-and-thats stacked high against the windows where the curtains didn’t cover, all the way up to a shipstyle porthole on the second floor. The overall impression was that the cabin sloshed nearly to its brims with things.

Her airstream out front was full of dressers and armoires. Her backyard was like a sculpture garden for the partially broken mundane. A trampoline. Odds and ends of lumber. Stacks of salvaged tile. She told me once that she was storing six clawfoot bathtubs. Sometimes, she’d find a dress or a pair of pants she thought would strike my fancy, load it into a salvaged plastic grocery bag, and hang it from my gate latch for me to find when I came home from work.

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The Anarchical Absurdity of Mary Poppins

By: | November 6, 2019

Last week, on a day off from school for teacher planning, or something, I took my daughter to a daytime performance of Mary Poppins. It was the Broadway version and it was the highlight of her fall so far. And mine, let’s just be honest here. I love Mary Poppins. I love her ridiculous hat and I love her aphorisms (“enough is as good as a feast,” “we are not a codfish,” and so forth have been known to spill forth from my own lips) and I love her Firm But Kind style of child-rearing. And my daughter loves her too.

Mary Poppins is super silly. But she also, especially in Julie Andrews’ portrayal, is a serious escape for a kid who really does not like to listen to authority. I wrote about why in this post from last year, and please forgive me for running it again because I am sick and anyway it’s been on my mind.

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Wouldn’t It Be Lice?

By: | November 5, 2019

There were many times when it wasn’t lice. It wasn’t lice that time a neighbor’s kids had lice, and all of our heads started feeling itchy. It wasn’t lice when the preschool had a lice outbreak. It wasn’t lice when our good friends had lice three times in a row. It wasn’t lice when we got the notice from school that a classmate had lice. There were so many notices, year after year, and they all made us itchy, but none of them were lice.

And then there was the time earlier this month, when one kid just kept having an itchy head. He had an itchy head after wearing a helmet—but he was wearing a helmet! He had an itchy head after playing basketball in the playground—but he was sweaty! He had an itchy head for weeks, but we looked at his head, and we saw nothing but hair. So much hair! He kept scratching his head while he slept. He even scratched while he slept through another kid going full Exorcist in a tent in the middle of the night. He was still scratching after that other kid was finally feeling better.

This time, it would be lice.

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My Two-Decade Sunglasses

By: | November 4, 2019

This post originally ran in June 2018. (I still have the sunglasses.)

I’ve been telling myself for a couple of years now that, when my sunglasses turned 20, they were getting their own blog post. Well, that’s sometime around now–my records aren’t too good, but it was definitely 1998 and almost definitely June–so here you go, cheap sunglasses. Thank you for your service. Let’s make it 20 more. 

I used to think of myself as the kind of person who loses things. I still feel guilty about a windbreaker I lost in 10th grade or so.
That's why getting prescription sunglasses always seemed like a bad idea. Sunglasses exist to get lost.
I got by without them when I was doing field work during the summers in college. Botanist is in focus. Rocky mountains are fuzzy.
If I wanted the mountains not to be fuzzy, I went for the double glasses. So uncool. I did this for years.
In June 1998 I saw an ad in the newspaper for cheap prescription sunglasses. I went to the store, tried on the frames - there were only two options - and took the plunge. The saleswoman says "Skikkelig Hollywood!" That means "Totally Hollywood!" I was in Norway.
The glasses stuck with me. 1998, Sightseeing in Turkey. 2002, finally learning how to drive. 2009, Bering Sea ice. 2018, walking to CVS.
I get compliments on them all the time, including this past weekend. My friend says "Nice sunglasses, Helen!" I say "Thanks!" This time it was in English.
So here we are. June of 2018. I've had the lenses swapped a few times but the frames keep going. I guess I was wrong about what kind of person I am.

Art: It’s me. All me.

Auditing Astronomy Class

By: | November 1, 2019

It’s my mom’s birthday today, so I thought I’d revisit this post about a time when she audited an astronomy class. This semester, she’s taking French. Bon anniversaire, maman.

I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken drama and philosophy classes through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley  and audited a history of theater course. She’d heard that this particular astronomy class was aimed at non-science majors, and that the professor, Alex Filippenko, had won all sorts of teaching awards. She emailed him to see if it was okay for her to sit in – it was – and then convinced a few friends to join her.

Maybe what I should say next is that my mom has never been that interested in science. I actually didn’t know how much she didn’t like it until we talked about it recently.  In college, she filled her science requirement with comparative anatomy, a class that required dissecting frogs and cats. “I hated the smell of formaldehyde,” she said. “Dinner was right after that. I just hated it.”

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On Vulnerability

By: | October 31, 2019

This post first ran on June 12, 2018. The need to think about predation and empathy — equal but opposite responses to vulnerability — is alive and kicking. But the online magazine referred to at the end is dead.

Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to watch what they said.

@AnnFinkbeiner: Do NSA people really need that much reminding? They’re not reminded, they run around singing like birds?

@father_kipz:  To be honest, humans are social animals and easy to hack. The constant reminders probably do help a bit.

I have no idea who @father_kipz is and googling doesn’t help, so I don’t know his authority in these matters.  Nevertheless:

@AnnFinkbeiner:  Hackable humans.  I like that.

@father_kipz:   Hackers have a term for the process, social engineering. Basically what Kevin Mitnick was famous for.

@AnnFinkbeiner:   Had to google Mitnick. And here I thought “social engineering” was just sort of overzealous city planning. Hoo boy, that stuff is NASTY.

Kevin Mitnick is a hacker whose methods are apparently based less on cleverness about computers than on his ability to scam people.  From a post at Big Think:  “By the age of 12, he was adept at “social engineering,” which is to human beings as hacking is to computers. You find their vulnerabilities – trust, mainly – and exploit them.”

“Vulnerable” comes from a Latin word that means “to maim, to wound.” So Mitnick’s kind of social engineer exploits the places at which other people can be wounded, in particular, their trust.  Exploiting someone’s trust is as good a working definition of human evil as I’ve seen.  But it’s neither surprising nor unusual, and I’m not talking about fudging on your taxes or lying to the competition or spying on bad guys.  I’m talking about people who look you in the eye and lie and then say, “Well too bad, you trusted me.”  If I were God, I’d consider a nice cleansing flood.

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