Barely tenured

Losing bets

Talked to an old, old friend yesterday. We hadn't spoken for years.

I told her: how we're cycling again, how it's eating all my free time and lots of what should be work time too, how I'm glad that there is an end in sight, how frustrating it is that that end just got moved by several months.

She told me: what she paid for a McMansion (her word!) on the outskirts of an interior city, what the mortgage balance is, how much lower than that the current offering price is, and what the impact on her personal and professional life will be if (when) it doesn't sell.

Linkorama

So the Times alerted me to an utterly awful piece in Time. By a "doctor."

Susan had chosen me because she had researched my education, read a paper I had written, determined my university affiliation and knew where I lived. It was a little too much — as if she knew how stinky and snorey I was last Sunday morning. Yes, she was simply researching important aspects of her own health care. Yes, who your surgeon is certainly affects what your surgeon does. But I was unnerved by how she brandished her information, too personal and just too rude on our first meeting.

Every doctor knows patients like this. They're called "brainsuckers." By the time they come in, they've visited many other docs already — somehow unable to stick with any of them. They have many complaints, which rarely translate to hard findings on any objective tests. They talk a lot. I often wonder, while waiting for them to pause, if there are patients like this in poor, war-torn countries where the need for doctors is more dire.

Let me ask: is this really about Google, or about annoying hypochondriac patients? Sure, I can believe that easier availability of information makes those who misuse it harder to deal with. But I also can't imagine what it must have been like to do an IVF cycle in, like, 1990—to take that huge leap, make that huge monetary bet, inject those drugs and cry those tears—without knowing what it had been like, what it is like, for other people going through it. Do I ask my doctors more questions because of what I read on line? You bet. And that's how it should be.

What's really ugly about the article is the open contempt for patients. Sure, he changed "Susan"'s name—but I'm shocked the author left his own on the article.

Meanwhile, there's a James Lang First Person column that I—gasp!— sort of agree with. I'm using Blackboard for the first time this semester too, so far just for doing things I used to hard code on my own page, and it just isn't all bad. Some of the committees I'm also use it for distributing documents, and I'm trying to convince my department to do the same. (We're, um, not meeting enough this semester. No, really, we're not, and it's a problem, and having another forum for group discussions would, I think, be helpful.)

Metaphor seeking target

This morning there was frost across the fields as I walked to my office^*. There's a huge specimen oak i the middle of campus which still has its leaves^*. It's symmetric and full, with no branches below maybe 15 feet off the ground.

Beneath those branches, all the way out to the dripline, the grass was still green. Sheltered ever so slightly by the tree through the night.

^* Elided: How much I hate leaving for work before Miss T. wakes up. Weather ≠ climate.

Continuing the procrastination theme

... Like Jody (? I think? I'm assuming based on her links?) I'm going try to pull of this NaNoBloMo thing. But, I'm not going to "join," and I'm going to let myself post to either the knitblog or the regular blog to satisfy the daily requirement.

(And to let myself pile up entries in advance, too, including this one. Bwa ha ha. That feature was the real reason I upgraded from Typepad's el cheapo service -- was it free? I can't even remember -- waaaaaaaaaaay back in the day.)

In other news

I. Friday morning, our second car -- the one I was supposed to use to drive myself to the airport -- wouldn't start. Beaker cajoled it into motion half an hour after I left to teach. But, I have exactly zero desire to be stuck at the airport on Sunday night, so I'm making him drive me up and back. Miss T. will be strapped in the back seat, of course. Fun!

II. Thursday I managed to finally get the giant bump on the back of my head removed. It had taken me years to admit there was a problem, and months to get an appointment with a dermatologist who was willing to operate (the first one I went to just wanted to recruit me for his psoriasis study, no, really, it was very odd), and damnit, I kept the appointment. Sadly the dermatologist was two hours late, so I missed everything else I was supposed to do in that afternoon.

III. Friday morning between classes, I noticed that the scalp incision felt damp. Moving my face pulls on my scalp, and apparently I overemoted badly enough at the end of lecture that I popped the scab open. Wheeeee! I asked a secretary to check that I didn't have a river of blood dripping through my hair and down my back, and went to my second class.

IV. For a few moments last week, it seemed like I might be able to get the Cornell-kickoff day 3 bloodwork done at Cornell live. So I called up and told them, and got a call back from Dr. Data himself. Of course that cycle ended up being short again, too short for me to double-purpose my trip -- but now there's a list of testing for me to do locally, and a plan to go for it in January.

An oddly disconcerting thing: so, since 2004 they've gotten a new building. Lots of new staff. A new area code, even. But the hold music on the voice mail system is still the same.

Afterwards

I. The Yarn Harlot has gone to New Orleans. I'm not entirely sure why her post seems so worth reading that I'm linking from here, not the knitting side. Perhaps because so much of what we hear about New Orleans now is quasi-technical: it's about the specifics of the aftermath, what have the insurance companies failed to do, how many people have left, what does pundit x think should have been done differently by agencies y and z and what they should do differently in the future. This is just a Canadian with a camera going there on book tour, but she gives a little bit of the big picture, somehow.

II. We have a famous emeritus visiting us from New York. Giving talks about the days when giants walked the earth (at least in Los Alamos and Princeton). He's old enough that he came here from Europe, as a schoolboy, in the aftermath of World War II. Turns out we went to the same high school in the city, as have some of his grand-nieces and -nephews. But as soon as the name of the school was mentioned, he started talking about what the students, including his relatives, had gone through, had seen and heard, on September 11.

This year we collectively seem to have become sort of embarrassed about remembering. How big should commemorations be? Isn't it awful how every blogger under the sun needs to tell you where they were, and what they felt, on that day? But I was struck by how the topic had come up so naturally, so inevitably, for someone who had lived through some of the epic horriblenesses of the twentieth century. He lives in Manhattan, and he's watched his relatives grow up there. Perhaps he worries about how they'll be remembering their youth?

(Perhaps I'm just oversensitized; I'm coming up to the end of The Emperor's Children, and various crucially important events are all planned for September 10 through 13, 2001. Don't tell me anything. Please.)

But what about the archives?

I am sad about TimesSelect going away.

Let me explain. For many years I've been paying for Nanna's Sunday Times subscription. For most of those years home delivery wasn't available in Granolaton. Every month my credit card statement would have a little reminder of just how far out in the boonies I'm living. Yes, I can read it online (and I do), but it's not the same as having an actual paper along with my coffee in the morning.

Then Times Select came along. I got access to it for free, thanks to the paper subscription that I paid for (and that up until then had just been making me bitterer and bitterer). And sure, the columnists, whatever. But, the ARCHIVES! The search tools really sucked, but still. No nickel-and-diming per article. Just click right on through. Oh, I loved that access. From my point of view: I never had to send in money I wasn't going to spend anyway, and I was suddenly able to read all sorts of stuff that had been behind a paywall before.

Now I can get the Sunday paper delivered to my door. I'm less angsty about giving the company money overall. But the new system for the website? Only opens the archives back to 1987. Which SUCKS!

UPDATE: Jody went and actually read the fine print; see her comment below. Those of us who send them money for the dead tree version still get our 100 archive articles per month, it turns out. YAY!

Strangely, I got a piece of junk mail from the Times this morning, the paper kind of junk mail, addressing me as "Dear Former Subscriber" and outlining the new set of paper-subscriber online benefits... the New Yorker has been good about applying discount offers to extend our current subscription, but I fear that the Times will start sending two papers, and double-billing, if I try to sign up for this $3.25 per week for 6 months offer.

You go, girls!

Has it really been 33 days? I'd say I'm sorry, but, um, I was awfully busy. Semester screeching to a halt (with extra disciplinary hearings—I got to be accuser and arbiter, at different times of course, but never, thank goodness, the accused). Miss T. adjusting to the Toddler Room—anyone want to guess the first new word she learned from hanging out with a bunch of nearly-three-year-olds? Negotiating summer travel plans with collaborators, spouses, bosses, relatives, friends, and of course the child. Et cetera.

I've been reading more than I should, though. Check out the lovely takedowns of The Dangerous Book for Boys and its mommyblog proponents (oh Moxie! You too?) by Jody and Phantom Scribbler and by Jody again. Wheeeeee!

I feel guilty that I am linking favorably to posts by people who I think haven't read the book, and negatively to someone who has. But: I don't think anyone is saying that they think certain types of "old-fashioned" games are bad, or that the "technical" content of the book is inappropriate. It's all about the box it came packaged in. Can boys only become boys by excluding girls? Is excluding girls all that boys really want to do? Do adults playing in to such assumptions end up making them true?

Noted

You've seen this study discussed, I'm sure. Children who spend more than 10 hours per week in daycare for a year before kindergarten are more likely to be "disruptive" in elementary school. Miss T.? Forty, forty-five hours. A-yup. I could go look the real thing up, see how many variables they looked at to find one with significance to trumpet, but no.

And it turns out that the median income of white families raising a toddler in Manhattan right now is $284,208. Of course it's a self-selected group—those who have chosen to stay, who can afford the space in particular—but still, it's an astonishing figure. A sharp reminder that for academics, there are some benefits to living out in the boonies after ll.

EDITED TO ADD: In a comment, Meg suggested Emily Bazelon's Slate piece, which both references the original study (I could just click for the full pdf, but I might have Granolan to thank for that) and gives further information on the study and the instruments it used.

Still, the study's results, properly explained, do not suggest that kids who spent a year or two in day care when they are 3 and 4—or, in my opinion at least, kids who go to excellent day care for longer periods—will talk back to their teachers and throw more than their share of spitballs when they get older. These kids will behave themselves just fine. As long as their parents don't screw them up.

I would say that this comes as a relief, since each of my own two sons spent (or in 4-year-old Simon's case is spending) four years in day care before kindergarten. Except that I stopped taking the bad rap on day care personally a long time ago.

I've noticed that I only feel, hmmm, safe reading a lot of this mommy-wars crap when the author displays her or his ''street cred" somewhere along the way, as Bazelon does above. Not good.

A rhetorical question...

... at least for those of us out in the boonies:

Trader Joe's, or Whole Foods?