I'm at a conference, my third in two weeks, so I'm starting to get a little burned out on sitting in windowless rooms with ugly carpets. today during the first session, while some important people were talking about earth systems, my phone started buzzing in the pocket of my jeans. I pulled it out, saw that it was my dad, and tried to slide it back into my pocket. in the process of doing that I somehow hit the speakerphone button and suddenly my father was addressing the whole room: "rabi? rabi?" so I hung up on him. number one daughter!
(actually he thought it was pretty funny when I called back later. but that's a good indication of how slick I tend to be in these professional environments. as in, not at all. it's a good thing I'm usually likeable in the long run.)
[ 30.3.08] · [ ]
we sort of skipped easter around here, due to a confluence of things going not-according-to-plan, and instead spent the day at home watching movies in between bouts of schoolwork (me) and housework (tom, who is currently vacuuming the empty seed hulls out from under the birdcages). it's not a big deal, I guess, since the whole resurrection thing is definitely the part of the jesus story that makes the least sense to me, and eschewing eggs takes most of the art-project-fun out of the holiday. unfortunately my tonsils have taken it upon themselves to compensate by doing their best egg impression -- swollen to the point that I don't particularly want to talk -- but otherwise it's been rather nice.
this morning tom made us some purple farina (with blueberries) and fried ham for breakfast, and after he went out to do some work at school, he brought back a sandwich from 'snice for us to share. (somehow this has been my third 'snice meal in five days after not having been there since early last summer, but I'm not complaining!) so we split some edamame and sesame peanut seitan during part one of our science fiction triple-feature. we had to turn the tv up extra loud while the birds had their afternoon twitter. I suppose this post doesn't have much of a point except to record the fact that today was a nice day, and we were both here in it together to make it nice. and now tom is coming over to enlist my help in replacing the mop head, so therefore, this is enough of a recording. happy easter.
[ 23.3.08] · [ ]
I'm on spring break this week, which is weird for me because it's been three years since the last time I got one, thanks to the complete lack of synchronization between teachers college and the department of education. I finished up the work I had been doing in school classrooms at the beginning of march, handed off an overstuffed binder to the PI last week, and now have nothing to do. except to write my damn dissertation proposal already.
I've been doing a really excellent job of avoiding the writing aspect of that task so far. since the beginning of the fall semester I've made huge amounts of progress in my thinking and my planning, but not so much in committing anything to paragraph form. I have pages and pages of flowcharts and concept maps, a sprawling diagram taped in pieces to my office wall, and enough outlines to fill an entire book with bullet points. when I try to write about any of those things I quite reliably end up with, truly, a bunch of nonsense. clarity, structure, flow, style: all absent. it's pretty unusual for me to struggle so much with the writing process and for a long time I didn't know how to deal with it. I finally decided that part of the problem was not knowing what the end -- the third chapter, the methods chapter -- was going to say. so that's my job for this break: figuring out exactly what my options are and laying them all out so I can make a decision. in outline form, of course.
so far I've done at least as much thinking about food as I have about science education. I spent almost one hundred dollars on groceries over the weekend because I'm so excited about having the time to actually cook dinner every night. normally there are at least two or three weeknights when I have to eat my dinner out of a tupperware container, so the prospect of five evenings in my own kitchen had me wandering around the supermarket in a happy delirium of meal planning. last night we had fajitas with chocolate mole and lemon-cilantro cashew cream, followed by homemade pineapple sorbet. for saint patrick's day tonight we'll have colcannon with skillet cabbage and carrots. (apparently, since boiled dinner is out of the question, I've decided to celebrate my irish heritage with the letter c?)
in a strange fit of spring cleaning -- usually my seasonal possession-purging happens in the fall, when I'm annoyed that my clothes are suddenly taking up so much more space in my drawers -- I decided to get rid of some old college notebooks that had been cluttering up the office. I had been keeping a fat little journal tucked into the back of one of my desk drawers, full of the stray thoughts I had written down during my second and third semesters at college. I was more than a little surprised to see that, aside from frequent lamentations about the pain of doing physics homework, my eighteen-year-old self spent a lot of time obsessing over food. there was page after page covered with plans for what I was going to eat in the coming day. it was pretty depressing because the lists were full of things like "bagel with hummus" and "peanut noodles" and "banana with honey." did I really go four years in which the only green things I ate were salads and steamed broccoli? no wonder I was so cranky about it.
so, what I've learned from my spring break so far: being preoccupied with food is fun when you are in control of your own consumption, but is a recipe for psychosis when you're at the mercy of even a decent dining hall. note the total lack of anything related to psychometrics or statistics. this is just one of the reasons that I think devoting a whole year to writing my dissertation is likely to end badly, in spite of what my adviser thinks. I can't even handle four days of vacation without getting woefully off track.
[ 16.3.08] · [ ]
living in the anthropocene
want to see something that blew my mind recently?
this is part of a figure from a cover article in gsa today, exploring the question of whether humanity has made a big enough impact on the earth to constitute a new geological epoch, something that could be identified and distinguished in the geologic record. the part that blows my mind is the skyrocketing anthropogenic denudation rate. I'm so used to thinking about how we've sent our carbon dioxide emissions off the charts -- to the point that it was actually funny when I saw a lecture in which the classic graph showing the near-vertical spike in atmospheric CO2 was editorialized by the climatologist with a little note: what have we done!? -- that the sheer magnitude of it has ceased to impress me. but here, the rate at which we're stripping the planet is shown to be even more starkly exponential. and beneath that, a pretty clear indication of the driving force behind that increase. (zero population growth, anyone?)
but that, alone, isn't what made my jaw drop. after all, if you've ever seen pictures of open-pit mining, you know that we humans are not shy about cutting huge chunks out of our planet. and it stands to reason that more humans would take more, bigger, deeper chunks.
I just didn't fully grasp what more and bigger meant.
an order of magnitude. that's the point where, if I were a cartoon character, my eyes would have popped out of my head and splattered against the computer screen.
you know, I'm not always able to convince myself that there's a reason to believe we live in a particularly sensitive or special point in human history. people have always been on the lookout for the coming apocalypse, right? yet, so far, nothing has happened that's big enough to seriously disrupt the upward swoop of that population curve. but living through the immediate aftermath of a transition to a new geologic age? that feels a lot more significant to me than being here to see the turn of the millennium. not to mention a lot scarier.
[both the figure and the text in this post were taken, and slightly modified, from Zalasiewicz et al., 2008, linked in the first paragraph.]
[ 8.3.08] · [ ]
apparently I have turned my website into a photoblog, I have lots of things to write about but it seems I would rather spend my time making cupcakes edition.
[ 3.3.08] · [ ]
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