Diversifying the Friend Portfolio

Since this is the boring exposition portion of my time here at The Lab on The Hill (TLoTH), I will take this opportunity to introduce the characters that will likely be important in the coming year. I could be grievously wrong about their importance so we’ll see what happens together!

The following is partially inspired by this brief gem of television history:

Cast List:

Chinese MomBoss

Y’know when you’ve read about a concept and you think you’ve seen it in action but then you see someone who COMPLETELY embodies the concept and you realize how wrong everyone else has been? Chinese MomBoss is like that. She exemplifies what the word “mentor” really means. She is interested in helping all of her students further their careers while taking in feedback about what can be done to help her science. Although she is an infrequent presence in the lab, she is a powerful one and I look forward to learning from her this year.

Midwest MomBoss

Midwest MomBoss is who my aunt would be if she were a scientist. She has adorably quaint sayings and anthropomorphizes everything. She is fastidiously organized and doesn’t believe that time should ever be wasted. Hyacinth (see below) and me spend most of our days with Midwest MomBoss so we get to know her pretty well. She started cross-fit this month, so we’ll see if she hulks up soon.

Africa’s #1 Badass Geologist

As far as badasses go, this dude is tops. I recently told him that he should lecture at universities just so he could verbally whoop those little entitled Freshmen into shape. Africa’s #1 Badass Geologist went through some pretty intense stuff to get where he is, but damn does he deserve the prestige. The thing I like most about him though is that he is completely un-self-involved and wants to know about my life and my research. He’s quick to correct me on mineralogy and make jokes. His office has these vinyl hangings of Nature magazines his work’s been featured in. Dude’s a badass.

Lunch/Office Buddy

My L/O Buddy is pretty swell. She’s super smart in microbiology and chemistry. I feel she has a very healthy work/life balance and I really admire her for that. She shows us videos of her little baby eating solid food for the first time and laughing maniacally at a bottle of ketchup being flipped repeatedly. She thinks I’m well read and I think she’s well travelled. 

The Patron Saint of Rock Climbing

I’m going to assume this dude is a saint because I have literally never seen him get mad. He sits in my office-area when he’s not science-ing on microbial masses that we collectively call “bugs”. The bugs smell bad and he mostly sits in noisy rooms measuring out micrograms of stuff. He’s also got a four-year-old daughter who’s super cute and put their cat on time-out while we visited to pick up some gently used dishware. He gives good insight on what it’s like to be a tech in a world filled with prima donna scientists.

Hyacinth

Hyacinth is my day-in-day-out work buddy. She’s pretty damn cool and I appreciate that her personality is so opposite mine. She is reserved and listens well. She’s got a kickass taste in music so I’m including a song she showed me recently. We do a lot of jobs that require astonishing amounts of cooperation so I appreciate that she puts up with a lot of my bullshit and works with me anyway. We’re identical as far as the higher-ups are concerned so we often get mistaken for each other. She likes hiking and climbing so we eat wraps together and watch the clouds roll in over the Rift Valley when we have training.

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Outside of work, I have been trying really hard to have a different set of friends. I feel like I work best in living situations where my weekend folks aren’t the same as my workday folks. So here’s some of the weekend crew!

The Enforcer

This lady is the one in charge. She is wonderful because she organizes events and ensures consistency. She is merciless at the game Resistance. She is the kind who comes in and cleans your house till it sparkles if you give her permission. She’s a woman of convictions and enormous amounts of love mixed in with the spices of some healthy sarcasm. The Enforcer is going to be the one who makes us all into family, I’m sure of that.

Excitable Business Engineer

There is a time-bomb of when this man will move to the Bay Area. He currently runs the only operational startup in town. He is chill and tries to appease as many people as he can. But he is a practical man and most of his criticisms are about people sitting on their asses and complaining that they have not hiked to the top of a mountain. He lets us use his office as a kind of nerd-community center.

Dori

Like the fish. Only slightly more human-ish. We have the same exact car as her so obviously we invited her into our social group and are now bosom friends. Because that’s how we roll here, a month and a half in.

Needs a Shave and a Haircut

Designed a pretty interesting and involved deck-building-but-also-fighting game. I simultaneously understood it (not a small feat) and was a little bored with how slow it moved. Hopefully the pace picks up as the rules codify. Then I’d be happy to try it again.

The Unselfish Physicist

In an inwardly spiraling circle-jerk of people doing ground-breaking whatnots and whozie-whatsits, it is hard to find real people to talk to. This man, The Unselfish Physicist, is one of those real people. I have been so grateful to talk for drunken hours about silicon tetrahedra because he was generally interested in mineralogy. He stays home with the kids so his wife and sister-in-law can have a night out. He’s just one of those people who has made this place a little better since I got here.

Hilariously Bad Things That Happen Sometimes

This past week sucked. You may or may not have noticed the reverberation of this suck-age by my tardy post. That’s OK if you didn’t. Anyway.

An incident happened last Monday. I had asthma as a kid and I was really scared I’d re-triggered it by moving to a new place with tons of allergens and radioactive waste oozing from the canyon walls. Like any normal person, I ask my doctor about this. She says sure, we’ll get you an asthma test. Great. I go to the test and it seems pretty simple. I blow into a tube, I imbibe some drugs, I blow into the tube again. The trick was with the middle part. As I start the nebulizer the nurse kindly warns me that some people feel shaky as a side effect of this medication. I ask her if it is a similar side effect to pseudoephedrine. 

She says she doesn’t know.

OK, first off…WHAT. This is your job. Your job is to know. She was a nice lady and all, but WHY DON’T KNOW YOU KNOW THIS, IT IS VERY IMPORTANT. The reason why it is very important is that within 10 minutes of leaving the office, I started to have a panic attack. Not a “where the hell did I park the car, what if I can’t find it?!” kind of thing. An honest to blog panic attack. It was damn serious.

And I couldn’t stop it. Because it was chemically triggered.

For five hours.

Fortunately, I already have a group of friends here in the LOtH who took fairly adequate care of me. I kept myself among people so I was safe. But it sucked. Good Panda talked me down some and we worked out which movies to get from library before they closed (Chocolat, Hairspray and Broadway’s Lost Treasures…the one with Angela Lansbury playing Mrs. Lovett and Joel Grey doing Cabert). She also suggested I might be allergic to this medicine and just include it as an allergy from now on. I love her.

I watched Hairspray because “You’re Timeless to Me” as sung by John Travolta to Christopher Walken is one of the best duets in history. But I conveniently forgot the bit where they have a protest, in Baltimore, about race relations. Hahahahahaha.

A couple days later, I had a girls’ night at my place. It was great. I made my famous (infamous?) hot chocolate with Frangelico and other delicious ingredients. We painted our nails with highly toxic polish and talked about sex. Y’know. Girl things. One of my new friend’s in town had recently said, “Now I’m a fluffy girl, but this girl…she was obese” in the context of one of her stores. Naturally, our group has now become

Fluffy Girls’ Cuntlove Club

I am making a banner. The word "fluffy" is going to be made out of soft cottony stuff and I’ve decided anything that alludes to a vagina on my banners from now on is going to be made with mauve silk and stuffed on the inside.

The next day, I saw one of the girls from our club and her nail polish was gone. I was so sad that she didn’t like the color. :< Turns out, the nail color had eaten through the top coat and bled onto her only pair of white sheets. And her face. She, rightly, had removed the polish immediately, but some of the color lurked around the edges of her nailbeds like a tiny little bit of leprosy. Me and my $1.39 nailpolish win again.

Other things that happened this week:

•   I got a vacuum that works. Now I can have people over.
•  I got two bowls carved out of stone. They are pretty!
• Partner Penguin and I saw Avenue Q. This town doesn’t have enough black men to even pretend to have an actor to play Gary Coleman. They also used PhD robes for the wedding scene because people here think that’s proper wedding attire.
•    I have made devious, but not nefarious plans which will soon come to pass.

The end for this week!

The first bite into that big juicy topic of White Male Privilege in American Science

First, let me get this out of the way:

My Personal Privilege Checklist

•       I am white.
•       I graduated with honors from the number one public university in America.
•       I have a wonderful place to live.
•       I am a woman. I am fortunate to live in a world where this does not preclude me from having an amazing career, doing, saying, wearing and being whomever I want to be.
•       I do not have any physical or mental disabilities.
•       Although I am openly bisexual, I am in a committed, heterosexual relationship with a man I love. His name is PartnerPenguin.
•       I am literate.
•       I have a job that pays my bills comfortably and I plan to be student debt free by the end of the year.
•       I am the fifth author of a scientific publication. Coming out of undergrad.
•       I have really good friends who will correct me if I say something inappropriate and make sure I know why it was wrong. But they won’t necessarily stop being my friend because I inadvertently said something wrong.

The things in my life that make me confused

•       2/3 of the adults who raised me were born in Africa. I never asked, but I think at least one of these adults did not consider herself white. I am always concerned if I obtain objects regarding this heritage and put them in my home, I will feel like an imposter and a cultural appropriator.
•       My middle name is Spanish. I speak enough Spanish that little children and very kind adults understand me. I have a Latina booty. I feel comfortable around Latino people, especially because it’s not weird to them that I was raised in a multi-generational household.

I am one privileged woman. But I also know I am. I am terribly conscious of it and I have been living in a community where the consequences of privilege are part of a normal dinner conversation. I was the president of an organization that addressed some of the issues facing women in STEM.

In fact, I have been so thoroughly engrossed in this bubble that a conversation I had this week was literally shocking. But it wasn’t that un-normal of a conversation. We'll get to that later.

This story starts on my first day of hire. I was already grappling with what seemed like gross inefficiency for hiring people in positions like mine. From conversations with scientists outside of my direct supervisors, it seemed like these positions were filled mainly through nepotism and personal connections from 1-3 universities nationwide, per scientist.  I think personal networking is fine and even hiring your children makes some logistical sense. But. If you are a white dude, and you went to school will all white dudes, and they got professorship positions at private ivy-league-type schoolsà how are you possibly going to get a diverse hiring base from that? The women running the hiring orientation took my outrage quite seriously and they suggested I speak with a Diversity Director.

Fast forward to this week. I had told my supervisors about my meeting and actually started some really good conversation about diversity going in our workplace. They shared with me and critically examined post-bac students they’d had in the past. They helped compare and contrast those students to post-doc students. I really admire and respect my team for taking me so seriously.

The meeting with the diversity director himself was excellent. He was totally on the same wavelength as me. In fact, some of the things I was going to suggest, he and his team had already put in place. I connected him with the directors of the program at Big American University who had kept me afloat and successful there. The only topic where he really appreciated my perspective was my commentary on students in post-bac positions.

My stance is thus: If you make an effort to ACTUALLY get diversity at the post baccalaureate level, you will change the face of higher education in this country. Seriously. TLOTH is a national, federal institution. If you hire students, not provide them with an internship (those can be meaningless in some cases), you are doing several things to ensure lasting change. You are providing them with a good job so they can start their careers with less debt. You provide a retirement plan, which is best to start young. Most importantly, you provide research opportunities for students who may not have had an opportunity at their undergrad school. Why is this important? If you want to go to graduate school, you are expected to do research. Moreover, you are expected to come in with enough experience doing research that you can jump right in. If you’ve never done research, how the hell are you supposed to be competitive enough to go to grad school? The director took this perspective and said he’d seriously consider it. They might pivot their focus, which would be great.

I had so much positivity, so much good feedback and so much encouragement regarding this meeting. Then I went back to work and had the following conversation.

::I explain where I’d gone, how great the outcome was::

White male post-doc: “I don’t get why you’re so concerned with this topic. The scientists here do their best when they hire. You’re saying nepotism with such a negative connotation; there is no problem with making sure your kids have a good career. And besides, it’s not anyone here’s fault that positions like this are location dependent. Not everyone is going to be able to know about this lab.”

Ironically, I think he captured in 5 minutes EVERYTHING that’s wrong with diversity here. I think the deepest issue is that no one thinks there is anything wrong. They think this is normal. And it is. For now. But as long as this continues to be status quo, there will never be an opportunity for any other kind of normal. Women make up a good 50% of the population, sometimes more. In physical sciences, in many institutions of higher education and R&D, women can make up as little as 5% of the workforce. I am privileged to be on a team where that is not the case, but I am determined to change the situation for others.

A crow, for some levity. I'll try to get another picture which shows scale better, some other time.

Ow, My Body

It’s hard to move from a Lesbian suburb of a huge city to Smalltown Heteronormativity (SH). Both PartnerPenguin and I have been having a hard time. On my end, I’ve enjoyed going to work, meeting tons of new people, and finding out what kind of science they do. This is great, and it’s exactly what I want.

However, I did not completely plan for something. I’ve been working for Big American University for 2 years. When I went to the HR rep in mid-March to ask her about my final paycheck, she was very kind and told me it would arrive on April 7.  But she wasn’t paying that much attention to our conversation. So to my surprise, April 7 comes and goes without a paycheck. The long of the short of it is that I was down to $17 dollars for nearly a week last week until I finally got the blasted thing on April 22 (over a month after my last work day).

So I was a little on edge.

PartnerPenguin has been having a different but more difficult culture shock. In the City, you couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a brogrammer in jeans and a graphic tee on his (rarely her) merry way to making thrice median income.  Here, in SH, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a PhD. They make better targets because they tend to be less agile.

PartnerPenguin does not have a PhD. The type of programming he’s good at is not relevant to physics simulations on supercomputers. His clients are in the Netherlands, Bangkok and New York. Believe it or not, we do not have Internet at home, yet. So he goes to the library that has decently fast interwebs and does his work remotely. Except for the occasional old dude protesting the injustices incurred by an imaginary slight over library fines, PartnerPenguin doesn’t really have the opportunity to interact with anyone at the library.

So he was feeling very lonely.

On Tuesday night, I found a secret stash of money I’d pulled out for the trip in the event of emergencies. Both of us were pretty sad and grumpy and we had enough food on our plates so I proposed we join the Y with it. BEST. IDEA. EVER.

We joined and immediately started climbing on the rock wall. Fun fact about PartnerPenguin and me, neither of us has the upper body strength sufficient to climb a rock wall! There were two auto-belay lines that are rigged for intermediate paths so we used those. The other occupants of the room were: the staff dude who played the same Bob Marley song 4 times and a clique of Polish climbers who seemed very professional and intimidating. We gave up after about a half an hour and played a Calvinball version of racquetball for the rest of the evening.

The next day, we tried again: this time in the afternoon. The atmosphere was a lot friendlier and encouraging, the room surprisingly populated by mostly high schoolers. A random (qualified) person in the room offered to belay us on the easiest route. When he got bored, the staff person took over so we could both have a go. I say “easiest” but I really mean, “climbs like a ladder until all of a sudden there’s a jut-ty out-ty part which requires all arms and made me want to die.” Then we did those stationary bike things for a while so we got some cardio.

The next day, I biked to work. Actually, that was probably the easiest physically activity I did this week. One of the dudes at work who was helping us move things had a Crossfit shirt so I joked that I was surprised this town was large enough to support such an activity. He replied that he owned the gym with his wife and would my supervisor and I like to come and check it out some time.

So of course on Friday, I check out Crossfit. Compared to the climbing and other stuff I’d done this week, it was actually the most constructive and least painful. The owner of the gym (the guy from work) was one of the best trainers I’ve ever met. He was careful to check my form at every step and talk with me about how to avoid injury/aggravating old injuries.

Well, Saturday I’m sore as a mofo so I go to yoga. Thankfully, a yin-yoga instructor taught it and she was chill as the snow fallin’ outside my window right now. I felt loads better after the class, but then all the exhaustion caught up with me. I think I’ve slept…20 hours out of the past 48? I’m getting better finally. I think learning to balance how much activity I do compared to my current strength, endurance and overall fitness levels is my immediate goal for the next week.

The view from my balcony today.

This is our snow gollum.