to STEM or not to STEM

I am awfully glad that it is Friday night.

One of my facebook friends posted this article a couple of days ago, titled “This is Irrefutable Evidence of the Value of a Humanities Education.”  I do not like this article.

I would like to disclaim, right now, about my dislike.  I am obviously a STEM student (that’s science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  I am sure that there are lots of STEM people who look haughtily down their aquiline noses at humanities peons and laugh about how there aren’t any jobs in their selected fields.

I am not one of these people.  Do what you’re suited for: if you hate math, science, engineering, then don’t do them.  It doesn’t make any sense, and I don’t care much one way or the other.  Although I would like a job, so if chemists could file out and to the left… I’m mostly kidding but let’s be real.  The job market in the hard sciences is often not much more promising than the humanities.  Joke’s on us.

I think there’s very real value in many of the humanities fields, and I would never condemn anyone’s choice to not do science.

But this article starts out with a quote that says “you shouldn’t enter college worried about what you will do when you exit.”  And I just think that’s wrong.  I think that if you’re going to make that substantial financial investment, especially if it’s promising to leave you hopelessly buried in student debt, you should have some sort of exit strategy!  You absolutely should worry about what you will do when you exit.  I suppose you do have four years to figure it out, but I’d think it would be high priority.

And then there’s a list of “10 highly successful people… who prove that humanities majors are anything but useless”, and I’m thinking, hey, great!  We’re going to find logical career trajectories for humanities degrees!  This is nice!

The list comprises a politician, four people in the entertainment industry (two talk show hosts, one writer, one screenwriter), three CEOs, an entrepreneur, and the founder of CNN.

In terms of utility of this list, let’s strike Spielberg, Rowling, Conan and Jon Stewart.  They all made it big.  They made it big with raw talent.  Their degrees probably helped them make it big, but let’s be reasonable: “I’m going to go into the entertainment industry” is just not a recipe for widespread success.  How many liberal arts degrees have failed in the same venture?  (I don’t know, but I’m gonna say a lot – I don’t like those odds).

So we’re down to six.  Well, we can disqualify Romney and Blankfein on the basis of their law degrees, both from Harvard.  Romney also has a business degree from Harvard.  Carly Fiorina has an MBA (UM) and a MS in business (MIT), so we’ll strike her.  Jamie Dimon has an MBA from Harvard, so we’ll strike him.  It’s really not fair to laud the so-called useless degree for these successes.  It is fair and also great to talk about how it sets you up beautifully for the graduate degree, but that’s not what’s happening here…!

And now we’re left with the Flickr co-founder (MPhil), who I would argue definitely counts toward the purpose of the list, and Ted Turner who founded CNN and did it without the graduate degree.

I’m actually not sure what the explicit purpose of the list was.  You can cherry-pick 10 incredibly successful people using any metric you want, probably.  I just don’t think that this was a particularly useful exercise in positive thought for struggling humanities majors.  It would be more reasonable to show some career paths / strategies / trajectories for which the humanities degree is particularly useful and how there’s room to climb the corporate ladder.

At the end of the day, though, there are far too many students majoring in subjects without real future plans or career options, and – this is the kicker – racking up enormous debt to do so.  It seems so futile to me.

And I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with the humanities.  I just think that it, as does anything else, requires some planning in order for it to pay out eventually.  And that you learn some critical skills in humanities classes.

The article still seems really vapid.  When people get defensive about not being in STEM, it makes me feel defensive about being in STEM.  Weird phenomenon.

This has been an exquisitely boring and probably offensive post.

idiomatic

I feel sort of restless today.

I am not entirely sure why I feel restless. I sort of feel like I have a bunch of thread-ends trailing off in various directions, any of which could be tugged on at any moment and I would unravel.

In the somewhat immortal words of Weezer, “if you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away.” Just kidding. Also that’s a funny song when taken at face value. Actually, it’s a totally nonsense song when taken at face value.

Andy emailed the three of us (Kate, Denise, and me) last night after we had all returned to our respective homes and/or lives. He basically told us what we already knew – that a move to Boston is more or less imminent, with special emphasis on the less because he seems desperate to not land a solid blow – and asked in an indirect way for our feelings on the matter. By that I mean he didn’t ask at all, just said “would be happy to hear your thoughts, positive or otherwise.”

I have not told him what my feelings on the matter are, in part because I’m still sorting through my own personal feelings, trying desperately to organize them into little piles with headings like ‘rational’, ‘irrational’, and ‘rational but dismissable’, and in part because he seems anxious for affirmation and most of my feelings on the matter are markedly negative.

I suppose the logistics of moving to Boston are really no more unwieldy than any other move, and a move will be inevitable at some point, and this one will probably be financed by his future employers. Also, Boston is kind of a science hotbed, which can only help my future. I just have a(n extremely) hard time thinking about it.

Denise didn’t respond until later today, either, when he had an opening to prompt her because he had another email to send about a meeting that she and he and another professor+student combination needed to have. “I’m on needles waiting for your thoughts,” he said.

She giddily showed the email to Kate and me, because here in the Phillips group, we’re sharers. Oversharers. “Did you get one, Shannon?”

No, but I suspect it’s because he didn’t have a real, organic (heh heh) opening to prompt me. Kind of like sending too many texts to someone who isn’t responding; you don’t want to appear needy or desperate.

“Isn’t the term ‘pins and needles’?” asked Kate.

“Yeah,” I said, “or ‘on tenterhooks.’” No one knew of that idiom, so I started to doubt myself, but a quick google showed me that I was right. Guess I did too much reading as an adolescent. Just kidding. I did a wonderful amount of reading.

We went to Nica’s for lunch today and brought our haul back to CRB to eat. I got a coffee and a chicken pesto panini, and saved half of the sandwich for dinner. I’m looking forward to eating it tonight in a kind of not really excited way. It’s just convenient.

There was another faculty candidate speaker today, and I understood most of what he was talking about because we covered PACE (phage-assisted continuous evolution) in chemical biology when I took that course, and because it wasn’t covered particularly thoroughly, I spent a lot of time exhaustively poring over it. He also talked very, very quickly. It was actually probably my favorite of the talks so far.

Probably because I didn’t feel like the science was beating me over the head.

adventures in Connecticut

Well, it’s halftime.  SU is playing Wake Forest, and it is one ugly game.  I mean, fouls are absolutely rampant and part of that is the refs not letting them play, but part is just that it’s getting physical.  Probably because everyone is totally missing shots and it makes everyone feel frustrated.

I’ve had hiccups like four times today.  I’m thinking of it now because I have hiccups now and it’s very irritating.  I will try to blog through the annoyance.

So anyway, besides the basketball that is sort of on right now, today was a pretty good day.

We did indeed drive to UConn to see Andy speak.  At the time of departure, only Kate, Denise, and I wanted to go.  We thought it was an interesting development, but it’s very easy to fit three comfortably in a car, so no one pushed the issue.

After group meeting, we headed out and hopped into Kate’s car, which we drove to my parking lot and picked up my car.  Kate’s car is old and has about 300,000 miles on it, and it’s on its last legs.  The check engine light is on, and it has some worrying idiosyncrasies, so I told her I’d drive when she told me that she was worried about taking her car on long drives and would I maybe consider taking us?

We left my parking lot around 3:15 pm and Andy was scheduled to speak at 4:30.  The drive to UConn was about an hour, and the day was sunny enough that I pulled my sunglasses from the compartment on the car ceiling.  We played pop songs on the radio and the day was dry, if cold.  Traffic moved smoothly.

The highways were crowded, but efficient, and we sailed along, warm air on our feet.  We sang to the songs we knew, but we sang in that way that seems sort of calm and also bares some self-consciousness, where we sing quietly and the only way you can tell that the people sharing your space are singing is that the consonant sounds don’t match up exactly.  They sound a little staggered, a little separate from the movie.

Denise paid my parking in the garage (a whopping $2 for two hours… seriously, Yale should do something like that somewhere), and we headed off down the sidewalk toward the chemistry building.  We knew it was the chemistry building because it said CHEMISTRY on it.  It had a really nice café basically at the entrance, and we remarked that we would like to have one of those.

It was easy to find the auditorium, and we sat ourselves toward the back.  Andy was introduced, and then he began his talk.  During his introduction, he caught sight of us and he just couldn’t help himself.  “And I see some of my co-workers back there – it’s nice that they came to see me.”

He gave his talk, and it was interesting to see how our science fit together in his eyes, because in our little-picture windows we often only see ourselves as disjointed entities, operating mainly by running around in circles and flailing our arms.  When he finished his talk and his acknowledgments, he gave us another call-out: “And to my co-workers back there, you’re also brave people – thanks for coming, it’s always nice to have you in the audience.”

We left when the talk was over, feeling awkward about trying to touch base with him, and as we drove back to New Haven, Kate got a text from Andy, indicating that he didn’t feel great about the way the talk had gone and he was thirsty and also getting sick.  This was kind of cute and also it was funny that he sent a text to Kate.

Dropped Denise off and then went for sushi with Kate.  All-in-all, a good night.

Addendum: SU won, so an even better night.  Also, my back feels much better.

status update

My back still hurts today. It’s difficult to say whether it hurts more or less than it did yesterday, but sitting is kind of painful. I brought my hot pack to work today and microwaved it a few times, and it helped a little bit. I am just fine when I am lying down. I suspect it has to do with the pressure of my body weight not being vertically on my spine. Walking isn’t the greatest, but it’s better than sitting. I took some advil and I think it must have worked because I am in less discomfort.

But really, it’s probably all an elaborate controversy orchestrated by whatever muscles are involved to convince me that what I really should do is just stay home and recuperate. I would like to stay home and recuperate, but I think I would be bored. I guess my hours outside of work are more special because of the hours I spend at work.

Syracuse has a game against Wake Forest tomorrow night, and I am hoping that I can watch it on my computer. Pittsburgh lost to Duke last night. I was hoping that that would not be the case, but alas, it was. It’s all right, though. We have to play a game against Duke on Saturday. At least that game will be a home game.

Andy is out of town today, tomorrow, and Thursday. This means that Newhouse has to cover his class tomorrow morning, which we may or may not attend, depending on how busy we feel, or how powerful inertia’s hold on us happens to be. Apparently Andy is giving a lecture at UConn tomorrow afternoon.

None of us have ever heard him speak. There is a plan developing to drive the 45 minutes to UConn and crash his lecture, just to hear him talk about what we’re doing. Hopefully that doesn’t end up being a scary and/or disheartening thing. I think it could be fun to hear Andy give a talk; it was my understanding that he was going to talk at last year’s Chemical Biology symposium, but that did not end up coming to pass.

So, assuming all goes well, we’ll have a little science talk and then we’ll drive back to New Haven. I haven’t had sushi in a while, and Kate is feeling the sushi bug herself, so we have tentative plans to go out for sushi tomorrow night. You know. Just ‘cause. Sometimes you need a little tuna.

Tuna sashimi is so good that I often wonder why people like canned tuna fish. Convenience, I suppose, and when you don’t know what you’re missing, it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to eat. I really like tuna melts… I haven’t thought about tuna melts in years. But I really like them.

I have lacked for focus pretty seriously today. It is something that happens to me pretty regularly. I wonder if I am entering some elusive second stage of senioritis. The problem is that I don’t know that I want to be done… what comes next?!

Stay tuned for status updates on my back. Ha, ha, ha.

muscles are the worst.

Monday has rolled around again.

When I woke up this morning, I felt a familiar tightness at the base of my spine.  I have occasionally been prone to varying degrees of lower back pain, and this is one that I’ve had maybe two times before.

My walk in was a little bit uncomfortable.  I tried to think about relaxing my muscles.  I swung my arms lightly.   I tried to stand straight up, and when I made it to my desk, I attempted to use my chair as a back-cracking aide.  An adjustment, if you will.  I twisted my body and felt a few unsatisfying little pops.

I slid down in my chair, inching my hips forward, and felt some pretty incredible pain.  I couldn’t get that magical crack at the bottom of my spine, and what’s more, I was in some considerable pain.  When 11:30 rolled around, I headed down to Andy’s class with my compatriots, because he was scheduled to cover protecting groups today.

He did cover protecting groups, and the class was more or less unremarkable.  But my walk to class was exquisitely painful as I fought to stand upright and relax my muscles, feeling like my spine was bound up in muscles that just didn’t want to quit.  Everything seemed like it was squeezing painfully, and standing upright made me feel like I had a pronounced arch to my back, like my shoulders were way out in front of my feet.

They weren’t, but it sure felt that way.

I sat uncomfortably in class for the 90 minutes that it took, and then I walked with Denise to the food carts, straight from class.  I picked up tacos over rice and black beans, and we walked back up.  The walk itself seemed to do me a little bit of good, but I still couldn’t get my muscles to relax.  I am wondering if the muscles that I have desperately been trying to speak with today are not muscles that I normally speak to.  Maybe they’re muscles that are just there, maintaining things involuntarily until suddenly they’re not, and I don’t know how or why it went wrong!

I didn’t do anything particularly strenuous over the weekend, nothing that would have let the muscles exit the matrix, so to speak.

When I got back to the office, I asked Kate if I could borrow her massage chair.  She has one of those chairs that you set on another chair and then it just absolutely destroys all of your muscles when you turn it on, with that rotating motion and unforgiving bearings.  It also has a heat function, so that’s nice.

I set it on the lower back setting and turned the heat on, and while it was mostly a little bit too high, it seemed to have helped.  I could stand and walk with slightly less difficulty.

There was another faculty candidate giving seminar today, and I sat through that, feeling the heat seep back out of my muscles and having a fairly discomfort-free (can’t call it comfortable) position.  I managed the walk back to my office, still feeling like I was walking terribly oddly (I wasn’t), and sat back down.

Turned the massage chair back on.

Ow, man.  I think a few hours of massage action may have bruised some things.  My back seems terribly offended.

Maybe I’ll see if Yale insurance covers chiropractics.

school of management

Today was another unremarkable day.

We did have some momentary excitement today, as the new school of management building is up and the general Yale public was permitted to tour it.  It's been under construction since I arrived - and since the fourth years arrived, too.  So around 3:45, we started getting a little angsty, our curiosity tugging at our wanderer's hearts.

The tours were from 3 to 5 or so, and we decided to head down around 4:00 to accommodate Denise's schedule.  At 3:50, Ben looked down at his phone and had just received the dreaded email from Andy.  "Come find me," it said.  He sighed.

"I'll try to keep it as short as possible," he said, and headed out while we set our coats back down and waited.  It was actually only about 25 minutes later that Ben returned, having had a discussion with Andy about computers (he's the resident IT guy, given that we don't actually have an IT guy, and he's more than passably good at it).

We put our scarves and coats and gloves back on and made the short trip across Whitney to see the finally completed school of management.  It's really a gigantic building, probably 80-90% glass, and it's quite striking.  Puffing and red-cheeked from the cold, we trotted ourselves through the doors and came face-to-face with a sort of panel of official-looking people and neon-clad security.

There were several awkward moments while we stood there and didn't quite make eye contact with the people hanging around at the table at the entrance.  It's the kind of situation that makes me feel exceptionally uncomfortable, where none of us are quite sure whether or not we're actually allowed to be there.

When no one made any attempt to greet us or send us away, we moved uncomfortably toward the openness of the building.

It's hard to explain how much glass there is in this building.  There's a courtyard (called the "dining terrace" on a placard) that is pretty huge - takes a big old chunk out of what would belong to the building, and we walked around it, basically seeing the perimeter of the building.

Some refreshment tables were set up, but there wasn't much of interest on them.  Kate, Diane and I mixed raspberry water and pineapple water, which was kind of nice.  Ben and Denise made tea (the coffee was temporarily out) and Ben took a few minutes insisting that he had to steep it while standing at the table.

It's an interesting building.  Acoustically, it seems like it's going to be very loud in general, but we walked around talking in hushed tones, feeling like we were tiptoeing through a library.  There's a huge auditorium with Yale-blue chairs, very steeply inclined.  There are many meeting rooms, all with at least one glass wall.

The classroom were, to me, the weirdest part of all.  They are detached cylinders, these bizarre circular rooms that you can walk all the way around on the outside.  I think there were 12 total, 6 on each of the upper floors.  Their outsides were blanketed in these sort of waxy blue panels, and the insides were all different, but quite attractive.  They had microphones at all of the student desks.  Myself, I figure learning how to project builds character.

And after we were done, we just walked back to our lab space, sat down, and I personally felt more comfortable here at "home".  It was a mildly interesting adventure, though!  I'm just sad to have lost the post office that was in the old school of management, a five minute walk from my workplace.

grr. argh.

Been thinking for a while about what to post.  Mostly because the vast majority of today was just mind-numbingly boring.  I suppose I can cast about for a couple of minor things that have been happening.

Michal has a gum-chewing habit.  It’s bad enough that she runs out and comes looking for gum in other bays.  In the past I’ve had some gum, and I don’t mind sharing it with her.  When I have gum, it’s usually the product of a moment of weakness and/or a moment of madness, and I thought it would be a good idea.

I mean, it’s nice and all, to be able to chew gum and keep your breath smelling fresh and minty, but I drink enough water that I’m usually completely unconcerned with the fragrance of my breath.  Chewing gum makes my jaw ache, sometimes makes my teeth feel shifty, and it often seems to culminate in a headache.  So I don’t mind getting rid of it when the opportunity arises.

I didn’t have any the other day, though, and Michal looked equal parts sheepish and crestfallen.  “Oh, okay,” she said, sadly, but then perked up: “if I brought some gum in, would you keep it for me?”

“Uhhh,” I said.

“I’ll eat it slower because I’ll be too embarrassed to come here for it more than once or twice a day!” she insisted.  So I agreed, and she has since brought some gum in that we keep on my desk.  I dated it today, so that we’d know how long it lasted, and she showed up three times.  The third time, she looked terribly sheepish and said, “today’s an exception!  I’m having a hard day!”  Of course I didn’t mind – it wasn’t my gum.

Today there was also a speaker, another faculty candidate who hailed from Boston.  He is and has been affiliated with the top tier institutions, but one never knows how that will manifest itself in the talk.  We filed in with our cookies and coffee, and he began.

Now that, my friends, was a fantastic talk.  Almost exactly 50 minutes long, no irritating nervous ticks, clearly impeccably prepared, clear speaking voice, impressive science.  I figure if Yale doesn’t give him an offer, they’re crazy.  I also figure he’s interviewing at all the top tier institutions, so it’s hard to say where he’ll end up.  But he gave a great talk and handled questions beautifully.  I suspect he was the candidate who had a recommendation from Andy.

We got back to the office after the talk, and I was still feeling really impressed.  I had focused almost the entire time, even though I didn’t understand a lot of it.  Sometimes seminar is like sitting on the beach and letting the tide come in.  You just get absolutely bashed upside the head with waves of SCIENCE.

Denise turned around and looked at me.  “I did not like that guy,” she said.

WHAT.  “Really?” I asked.  “I thought he was great.”

She wrinkled her nose and said, “I don’t think he’d be a good fit here.  He seemed too snobbish to me.”

I basically let the conversation drop there, not wanting to tell her that I thought that she was conflating snobbery with access to tons of jaw-dropping scientific institutions, instruments and technology and that the fact that he gave a professional-level talk that didn’t sound at all like a job talk didn’t make him uppity.

What’s the point arguing, though, really.  So I just told Kate how I’d felt (she didn’t go).  I hope Denise doesn’t mention her feelings to Andy.  Ha ha.

group meetings

Wednesday has become our new group meeting day.  It moves around an awful lot because Andy’s schedule has been so unpredictable that we meet when we can.

Last semester we met on Fridays, partly because Andy could usually be around for them but also in part because there was a bit of a kerfuffle, shall we say, with the solar group, who didn’t book the room.  When Kate booked it (apparently out from under them, because they had always been there) due to Andy’s availability, solar group was very angry.

They took it very personally.

The whole situation spun out in emails while we were at a symposium out at West Campus.  Someone was speaking about something or other and not sticking to his or her allotted time because scientists never do (this phenomenon is probably not unique to scientists) when Kate leaned over, the dimmed screen of her phone in her hand, gave me a meaningful look and then handed me the phone.

It turned out that the graduate student who ought to have booked the room didn’t realize that she had to book it, thought they could just have it on ceremony.  When they showed up to have their meeting and discovered the room occupied, she stewed about it for a while, and then sent a saccharin email to the woman who manages the booking schedule.

Of course, it didn’t paint us as a group in a particularly positive light, but Karen forwarded the email on to Kate and asked Kate if she wouldn’t consider switching our group meeting time.  After reading the caustic forwarded email, Kate didn’t want to switch the times at all.  She composed a response and showed it to me.

‘I dunno,’ I whispered there in the back of the dark auditorium, ‘might be better to just forward the whole exchange to Andy.’  And that is what we did.

A few moments later, she stifled laughter and handed me her phone again.  Andy had laid down the law with an email that made me realize that people who weren’t under his protection weren’t unreasonable to be intimidated by him.  There were several comments to the effect that one ought to be more genial in an email that one is releasing out into the wild.

We kept the room.

But since then, we’ve moved to Wednesdays.  Today, after Andy’s class, he arrived to group meeting.  “I’m short on time, so I’m going to keep myself to no comments.”  Of course he didn’t, but group meeting went reasonably well.  He continued with “But I’ve been getting these spam emails… has anyone else been getting spam?”

Confused, we waited for elaboration.

“They’re from [wife’s name].  But you know how I know it’s not her?  It said ‘you’re awesome.’”

Everyone kind of ‘oooo’d at that, which was funny, and Steve turned around and said, “What, she’s never told you you’re awesome?”  And then we ‘oooo’d some more.

Diane presented first, and suggested a new route to an intermediate, involving some “old-school Phillips lab chemistry.” 

“I’m going to stop you right there,” said Andy, “you’re making me feel old.”

“That was TEN YEARS ago,” Kate said, grinning wickedly, and Andy looked over at her.

“You’re making it worse.”

“Andy,” said Denise, “You’re AWESOME.”  The room dissolved into laughter.  “Did that make you feel better?”

“If it wasn’t for legal trouble,” said Andy, turning with arms outstretched, “I’d hug you.”

snow, snow, snow!

In Andy time, ten minutes can be anywhere from two minutes to two and a half hours.

Today, Steve had a "ten minute" meeting with Andy.  Andy announced this to the inhabitants of the 201 office this morning at 10:00, when we numbered two, Kate and I at our desks.  He arrived with bombast, having acquired himself some bubble wrap and popping it gleefully, forcefully, as soon as he had the door open.

A few moments later, he was standing in the middle of the office, looking very pleased with himself.  “I made an entrance,” he said, and then, “Shannon, I have a meeting with Steve now.  Can you join us in ten minutes?”

So in ten minutes, I dutifully made my way down to his office.  Andy launched into a sort of grandiose plan, and this plan lasted about an hour and a half for me.  When I was dismissed, Steve was asked to hang back and spent another 10 minutes with Andy before his own dismissal.  As per our usual, Steve wasn’t free to go because they were done, but because Andy had another meeting at noon.  Faculty candidates.

In the meantime, I’d been wondering whether or not to go collect myself some lunch, because I was supposed to hang back and discuss some chemistry with Steve.  Kate was all ready to pick up tacos from the top tier Mexican cart (Poblano Dos) for me, but then everyone ran into Steve, and Steve was down for lunch.

So we all had lunch together, and the cupcake truck even showed up down at the carts, so lunch was a merry affair, complete with “chocolate covered strawberry” cupcakes which I have to admit were pretty delectable.

Then I pow-wowed with Steve about chemistry, which was pretty fun because Steve is just a really fun dude.  He says lots of very British things like “that’s cheap as chips” and “this is piss-easy to make” (sorry, Mom… language is as language does!).  The chemistry talk went well.

As we were talking about chemistry and planning things out and formatting them in various structure-drawing programs, it began to snow in New Haven.  At first it was the unpleasant snow – the tiny spicules that fall more or less like rain – but as the day went on, the snow on the ground started to stick, and the snow transitioned from tiny particles to huge fluffy flakes.  My favorite kind of snow.

And the snow kept up.  I finally left around 7:50pm, and as I stepped outside of the building, I planted my foot squarely into a mound of sparkling, fluffy snow.  Looking down the path to the street, it was obvious that no plowing was happening, and I was thankful that I live close enough to school to walk.  The sidewalks weren’t in great shape, either, and I found myself wishing I’d worn boots this morning, when the walk was dry and sunny.

It was cold; my fingers got really painfully cold and unwieldy before I had the sense to put on my gloves, which was a considerably more difficult task after losing all of my dexterity.  My new sneakers seemed to be holding up well, and were pretty lovely against the snow.  Black shoes, white snow!

As I passed the entrance to the divinity school, a lone figure approached the doors and gave them a tug.  “Oh, no,” she said, audibly, “I can’t believe it’s locked.”

“Hey!” she called to me, apologetically, “Do you have a key?”  She saw me hesitate and said “it’s okay if you don’t.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I have an ID but I’m not a div student.  I can give it a try.”  And, lo and behold, my ID granted her access to the building.  She thanked me, and then I went sliding off down the rest of the hill, home to my apartment.

basketball season

In my Word of the Day email this morning, the word was ‘perspicuous’.  It means ‘clearly expressed or presented; lucid’, but the second definition is the very similar apparently synonym ‘perspicacious’.  And that just seems a little excessive to me.

I have a more mellow station on Spotify for days when I’m not feeling like pumping it up.  There are some songs that, in my life, I have found myself strongly identifying with.  Naturally, a few years later, in a new stage of life, I come back to them and the song feels empty or insipid or maudlin: high school, undergrad, graduate school, any of the years in between with their growth through learning curves, and I’m not talking about school learning but the kind of learning curves that tell you something about yourself that you may not have known.

And you go through phases.  In my senior year of high school, I loved Mondays because I loved school.  I mean, I LOVED school.  Blessed with good friends in my classes, blessed with teachers and mentors who seemed, at the very least, amused and tolerant.  Since then, I haven’t had the same eagerness for the weekend to draw to a close, and I guess that’s normal.  Enjoy the weekends, man.  I haven’t had Sunday night anxiety in a while – I’m mostly indifferent about Mondays now.  I like to complain about them in a tongue-in-cheek way when something goes wrong.  It’s one of those human things.

I’ve always felt like Billy Joel is saying something that I understand in the song Vienna.  I’m not really a child anymore, but I still feel like one more often than not.  I’m growing less and less convinced that you ever actually learn how to become an adult.  There’s always something new.  I managed to get my car insurance into order last year, and this year I need to figure out how to do my taxes.  There is always something new.

The Syracuse-Pittsburgh game was this weekend.  It was Saturday afternoon at 4:00pm, and I watched it on my computer through the ESPN website.  I was really nervous about it.

Each year I take another little step up.  I caught the bug (predictably) in 2003, when our orange-jerseyed boys won the national championship and we sent Carmelo Anthony off to the NBA.  Since then, I have grown fonder and fonder of Syracuse basketball, keeping up a little bit better each year with my team.  Lately I’ve been reading about them on various websites, and I get a little more depth of knowledge (as you do when you read about anything!).

Pitt was supposed to be a tough opponent, and it was indeed a close game.  Sitting in my apartment and watching the game, I sometimes felt ready to explode because of the tense matchup!  I bet my neighbors have an idea that I might have been watching sports.  But close games are the most exciting to watch – especially when your team wins.

My favorite bit was probably Jim Boeheim’s quote, which I heard while getting ready to exit out of the browser and move on to whatever new thing I was going to do with my Saturday.  “This was a Big East game, that’s all this was.  Forget about ACC, it was a war down there.”

Get it, boys!  18-0.  In the past five years, our total record for our first 18 games of each season is 88-2.  Now those are some numbers that I like.

snacks and advisors

So the rolo-pretzel sandwiches were a huge success.  Kinda figures, you know?  I guess the deal is kind of that people like things that are familiar.  People seemed impressed, and I guess I will admit that I am pretty good at matching the pretzel edges up to make a very aesthetically pleasing sandwich.

Denise seemed especially pleased.  That’s fair, since she did supply me with the candies.  Honestly, the worst part was probably the bit where I had to unwrap 50 little foil covered rolos.  The rest was pretty fun.  Tedious, but fun.  There’s a kind of satisfaction to be had in squishing melty rolos with a pretzel and watching the chocolate ooze up inside the spaces.

I arrived at school at probably 8:55 this morning, which explains why Denise was surprised to see me.  Andy wasn’t in his office at 9:15, but I caught him around 9:30 by practicing constant vigilance and checking his office every five minutes or so.  When he had returned, I knocked softly on his door and he told me to come in.

He had to finish writing an email to Karen – the department secretary – about printing notes for his class.  “Can you please print 21-“ he looked up from pecking away at the keys during this dictation to look at me and asked if I was going to come to class today.  I said yes.  “Twenty-TWO copies…”

Eventually we talked about science, and this time I think we actually covered some ground, which left me feeling fairly optimistic.  It’s nice to feel like you have a little traction.  I have some goals, and hopefully I will be able to work toward some of them without feeling very lost and confused.

At one point, he was talking about how he wanted to meet with me and Steve, a post-doc who works out at West Campus.  We like Steve a lot.  He is South African but did his PhD at Oxford, I believe, and has a great accent.  Andy wrote his own initials, AJP, and then S for Shannon, paused, and asked, “What’s your middle initial?”

“R,” I said, immediately, but then remembered an instance where I’d been teased about not having a middle name that begins with J (Andy does, Steve does, Kate does, Diane does, etc.) and said, “Wait, I’m just kidding, it’s J.”

He looked up at me.

“Nah, it’s R.  I just feel left out of the J middle name club.”

“You can’t joke like that, Shannon,” Andy said, very seriously.  “When I started dating Gill, she told me that her birthday was May 13.  It’s May 11, but it’s taken me 20 years and this-“ he indicated his phone, “to figure out that it’s not May 13.  And I can’t use my phone to tell me your middle initial.”

Andy is a character.  His class was pretty good, although it seems more and more to be a kind of redux of his Natural Products course that I took in spring 2012.  Not a bad thing, it’s good material, but it is what it is.

tasks in the tasty sciences and the hard sciences

Tonight, I have been tasked with making those pretzel-rolo sandwiches. You know the ones. You take a pretzel, balance a rolo on it, bake it for just long enough to melt the rolo a little, and then slam another pretzel on top while it’s warm, gooey, and impressionable.

That I’ve been drafted for such a task is hilarious to me. I honestly can’t think of an easier dessert-snack to make. No, seriously. I am trying to think of something easier and I got nothing. I don’t really understand why this has fallen to me, but I guess I’m up for it. I mean, I have like a billion pretzels at home and Denise thrust this bag of rolos upon me.

I guess it will be a nice easy task to take care of when I get home for the night.

Today I was supposed to talk to Andy. This is kind of a theme in my life. He canceled on me around 12:30 today, saying we could meet tomorrow morning at 9:15.

This fills me with hope because it is the first time he’s given me a time. I think it will work out. It just means that I need to actually haul myself out of bed tomorrow morning. It won’t be that difficult. It will be a Friday, and Fridays fill me with goodwill. Also, SU is playing a home game against Pittsburgh on Saturday and I am equal parts excited and nervous. I guess if anyone were to topple our undefeated status, it would be another former Big East team.

Last night I was sitting in the office by myself. I was casually browsing through a bunch of basketball forums, reading up on whatever struck my fancy (usually something involving Syracuse). It was about 7:50, so everyone else had cleared out. I had some productive looking documents up on my second monitor that I picked away at, and because of the motion sensors, the lights in the lab proper had gone out.

When the lights go out, it makes this awful constant beeping, like a hood flow alarm, only we know it’s not a hood alarm. We’ve tried everything. So it was beeping, and I had one earbud in my ear (the left one – the right one has lost some but not all of its volume and I have this thing about mismatched earbuds where it bothers me less if I don’t wear the offending one), and then the lights were tripped as the door opened.

It’s funny. You can tell who it is by footsteps. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s Andy, but when it’s actually Andy, I always know. I knew last night, and then he popped in, cell phone in hand, eyes on his cell phone.

“Hello, Shannon,” he said, without looking up, “How are you?”

“Ah, I’m okay,” I said, and waited.

“I want to talk to you, but not now.” I breathed a sigh of relief. Andy talks can take anywhere from 10 minutes to two and a half hours, and 8:00pm is not the time. Of course, he still wanted to talk, just not about science. So we settled on science-talk for then-tomorrow, today-today.

Then we talked about faculty applicants (280 applied for 2 positions, 12 are being exhaustively interviewed). “He won’t get any offers at all if he keeps giving 33 minute talks, but I suspect that was his first.” And top-tier-tenured-chemistry-professor-problems. “[famous chemistry guy] won’t talk to me anymore, now that I turned down [job offer].” And then he excused himself at a paltry quarter past 8, and I also headed home.

I sometimes worry that I put too much information on here, so I am desperately hoping I haven’t written anything that could get me in trouble in that last paragraph!

Edited: names removed to protect the innocent.  I'm the innocent.  Just in case you didn't get that.