Science Married to a Human Dimension

There are a couple things that the readers of this blog may not know about me.

1.     I add “lethal” amounts of cinnamon to everything. PartnerPenguin recently informed me that not everyone buys full spice bottles of cinnamon every 3 months. We’re not talking about cinnamon challenge or anything, I just add an average of 1.5 Tbsp to 2 cups of oatmeal. I think this is reasonable. This conversation occurred when I commented that store bought porridge was under spiced. ::shrug:: #spicewimps

2.     I am extremely adept at skills that require minute fine motor skill manipulation, like braiding, embroidering, thin section production, and untangling knots of any kind know to humankind.

3.     I do not “crash” in any kind of slowly sloping pattern. I exist in one state, I get cranky, I satisfy whatever need I had and I feel 100%. PartnerPenguin said it best:
“If you are tired, you fall asleep. I swear, we’ve passed into a tunnel [as passengers in a car] and you’ve been asleep by the time we came out. One time you did not get enough socialization for a few days and you described an in depth a conversation you struck up with a dog tied outside a store. A dog, Sara.”

Of these things, #3 has been the most important discovery for working on Self Care. Particularly this week, I have been working with what feels like a totally uphill battle to perform adequate self care.

Overall, I have had a pretty fucking badass week. I wore a super pink makeup pallet to a party on Saturday. I made this delicious, nutritious and spectacularly lovely dish with my beloved and my friend the Lioninegrammer on Sunday:

Oh yeah.

And I got tickets to see Hamilton.

Yes. That one. The one I’ve been writing about for a year.

I took a giant risk and actually waited in line at the theatre in Oroenpaz City where the show will be playing for nearly 8 months. I had gone home and eaten a big food and gotten a big coat, then I walked myself to the theatre and settled in for a nice good wait. The powers whom control positive luck were certainly smiling at me this week because I pulled an improbably good haul by waiting. Despite being 7^th from last person in line, I miraculously managed to get 6 seats next to each other for $100 per ticket. For a show that has been sold out in several cities for nearly a year at this point. 0__o I was literally jumping for joy for 10 minutes solid between when the usher let me into the box office foyer and when I made the purchase.

The majority of the rest of my waking hours this week have been spent at the annual conference for geoscientists. On Tuesday I networked, talked and listened for 12 hours straight. I met with past collaborators, managers, student peers, grad mentors and probably some people who didn’t like me but tolerated talking to me.

I owe this experience to someone who is a “new” character to this blog. I will call her ConventionCousin. We met at a geology convention nearly three years ago when she was thinking about coming to Big American University. She has matured so much in the time since then, I am truly honored to know her. ConventionCousin bought me a guest pass to this conference as a birthday present because she’s awesome like that. In thanks for this gift, I got her addicted to sushi burritos. Seems fair.

While a lot of my friends gathered swag and actually attended the scientific part of the conference, I networked my eyeballs out and my throat sore. I have the following observations about being constrained to the exhibition hall of a conference.

•       I was successful at finding academia adjacent companies, as I had hoped. Publishing houses, instrumentation providers, policy informers, and non-profits.
•        Fancy conferences have enough money to do really weird things that I didn’t know were possible, like brewing beer specifically for the social event and padded plush carpets.
•        Carpet outgassing irritates my eyes and makes me sad.
•        Keynote speakers can be REALLY high profile if your convention is deemed important enough by the right people.
•        At an academic context, people are defined by their work. It is acceptable to be entirely defined by your research and the organization you work for.

The last point really bugs me. People kept asking me “What do you do?” I have been working so much on my personal definition for so many months that this question irked me at a fundamental level. To several people who I could tell had a sense of humor I responded, “I respire.” Another level of this question was “What are you?” to which I would respond “A human, unless my permit has expired and I forgot to renew it. Why, do you know where the nearest permitting office is?”

I suppose there are so few contexts where scientists can describe in depth the beauty of their work; this is a somewhat adequate gateway towards meaningful conversation. Personally, I feel like the question “What are you?” makes me feel like I am an object and generates the context that the person asking me this question will view me as a tool. If I am an inefficient tool they will move on to the next person/tool. I understand that there are literally thousands of people at conventions, but I appreciate this as an opportunity to meet people, not tools.

Another question that confused me was “Where are you from?” This question makes a lot more sense in the context that many people travel for the event. However without an official affiliation, replying with my place of residence feels like the wrong answer. Replying with my city of origin feels even more wrong.

I guess I’ve just worked so hard on breaking my personal identity with my student/professional identity I am having trouble code-switching back to that frame of mind. I’m also not sure I want to buy in completely that I have to be defined by my profession and employer affiliation. Sometimes I just want to be a human who respires.

Me, getting ready to go to the conference:

I think the best advice I took with me to this conference was to “take everything with a bucket of salt.” While originally applied to something from Reddit, it is remarkably good advice when people are pedaling their wares at you and you don’t want to buy into what they have to sell. A school tried to encourage me to attend their graduate program because the school had prestige associated with the name. I really wanted to say “Bitch, I don’t care. That’s why I went where I went for undergrad and that was a terrible decision because prestige doesn’t mean shit for personality match.” I didn’t, I just smiled and nodded. I get some things right. I just took it with a bucket of salt.

The event that impacted me personally the most was a keynote speaker. She spoke of the importance of people like me. People who are interested in communicating science to broader communities, who can speak la lingua franca with communities who are “left behind”. The translators who can make complex science digestible to the public. While I felt this call to action was personally very effective, I fear that she politically avoided the issue that you can’t talk sense to crazy. She advocated speaking calm facts to raving talking heads: that might make sense politically, and even in the guarded context of the ivory tower but it is challenging to make a reality. I’m still figuring this out.

To close out the night, I wanted to briefly mention that PartnerPenguin and I attended a benefit concert this week with 2-3 song sets and 16 artists. One hell of a night. From those artists, I wanted to share an artist new to me! So here is Geographer singing “Kites”.