Barely promoted

So tired

I watched the debate tonight in a room full of dedicated get-out-the-vote volunteers.

I sat on the floor and squirmed. Cringed away from the family dog. Picked odd berries out of my clog soles (I'd apparently walked on them on the way over, and they were picking up dog hair—ick!) Braided and unbraided my bangs. I was as tense as I am, say, when waiting to get the results of mysterious medical tests that can bring bad news.

So, there's the whole future of our country in the balance and all. I should be nervous. But this nervous?

See, the effort to listen on behalf of everyone else was just too much. I was trying to figure out why all the well-meaning citizens in the room were snickering at different things than I was. But I was also trying to listen on behalf of fundamentalists living in mobile homes in Alabama. On behalf of college students. Citizens whose first vote was for F.D.R. and who lived through WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Newly naturalized citizens. Soccer moms. Appalachian union members. Exurban insurance agents with three kids and no pension plan. Crazy people living on disability. Soldiers. Soldiers' wives. Soldiers' parents. Marxist faculty members. Lazy journalists. Opposition researchers.

People talk about how we're getting past irony now. Can we also try to get past all the meta-analysis? I just want to listen as me.

Micro-stalked

There are several bad habits I've picked up blogging and shifted into "real life." The worst, though, is obsession with site stats. Having a counter visible on one's institutional home page is just tacky. But Statcounter allows a free invisible counter—invisible to anyone who doesn't read the source, at least, and how many people do that?

However, now I know that there's someone at a midwestern Catholic university who checks my page, oh, every other day. Hits it about 4 times each visit. Sometimes does Google image searches my name.

I've gone through the ergonomics department web page there pretty carefully. It's a department devoted to God and to their own teaching, but very little else. No one I know. If I had to guess, no one who knows anyone I know, either. No one who works in my subfield, or anywhere close to it. Heck, most of the faculty appear to be nuns or priests or lost lonely souls who got their masters from that department and then never got their PhD's, but also never left.

This is far freakier than the Macintosh in another midwestern state that Googles "maple granolan" once every three days. That Mac appears to be a bot of some kind; always the same search, same time, same single hit. My mystery reader at the Catholic school is human: he or she tries different searches and sometimes even looks at different pages. Today he or she started looking at my course pages, not just the front.

But: I only know about this because I went looking for trouble. And, if he or she liked the old photo of me better than the new one, well, maybe I'm better off not having to hear about it. And yes, it really is about time I got some new preprints up.

Dangerous realizations

So, not much is happening, but not nothing, either. The necessary paperwork for sperm transfer has already gone through. The vials can't actually be shipped until after October 13, but we can at least move on to consent forms and arranging an LN2 tank.

Also, my last non-medically-molested cycle before the IVF itself has started. Late next cycle will be when I get my co-culture biospy and start on (presumably) Lupron—no birth control pills this time.

Thinking ahead: what if I'm cycling for real during Thanksgiving? If I'm on the schedule I think I'm on, I'll be like mid-stim. Location isn't the problem: I mean, thanks to the geographic coincidences it'd even be quite feasible to pull off the daily monitoring (yay Cornell). But, I don't know if I can compartmentalize that fucking hard. (Or if I can lie well enough to manage to not visit my family^* this year.) Perhaps I need to hope for a repeat of the cow-like blissed-out vacant state (when supermarket tabloids seemed really interesting) that synchronized with very high E2 levels during my other two cycles?

Another ghastly realization: if I'm on the schedule I think I'm on, we'll know what happened well before Christmas.

^*Every year we go to Weatherwood for Thanksgiving and to Beaker's family for Christmas. Every year, both families complain. We look them all straight in the eyes and tell them it's only fair. And (with 11 years of precedent backing us up) that this is the way it's always been. But I know it's not fair. I'm the one who insists on this arrangement. Because I want to be content, at least, at Christmas, and contentment requires not seeing my relatives.

Even at the end

From today's giant and heartrending Times article on family conflict over end-of-life care:

Family conflicts over end-of-life decisions are more likely to be personal than philosophical, doctors, nurses and social workers say. They can reflect fault lines between relatives or emotions long buried.

Many practitioners who deal with such families have noticed a curious pattern: The relative most distant or estranged from the patient is often the one most reluctant to let the patient die.

"Often the family members who are taking care of that person can see the deterioration that's taken place day by day," said John F. Linder, a clinical social worker at the University of California Davis Cancer Center. "People coming from a distance might say: 'Well, Mom was fine when I was talking to her three weeks ago. Let's do everything we can.' They may feel guilty and also powerless."

Emotional distance can aggravate things even more than physical distance.

"People who have been long estranged from others, when they're at death's door, want to come in and rescue them," said Dr. David Kaufman, chief of critical care medicine at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Mass

[...]

Dr. Diane Meier, director of the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, said family conflicts frequently erupted from hidden dysfunction. Dr. Meier said people who had been abused by the dying person might find it overwhelming to let their abuser die because "it feels as if the person is dying because of their anger and desire to kill them."

Blood and water

Here's a bittersweet piece from the Observer: a daughter writing about her biological father and her stepfather, the roles they've ended up playing in her life, and how much credit they deserve.

Do stories like this counterweight the rage of adopted, or donor, children who miss their connections to their "real" parents? I don't know—and I've never idealized my absent parent (or the present one). But knowing nothing is very different from having been disappointed.

The professorette brown bags it

Choose one from each category:

• • A brown paper bag.

  • A blue nylon bag, shaped like a paper bag, monogrammed in white.

  • An organic cotton tote bag.

• • Sliced muenster on whole wheat bread in a store-brand Ziploc bag.

  • Manchego, heirloom tomatoes marinated in balsamic vinegar, mesclun, and organic mayonnaise on home-baked whole wheat bread, constructed at the seminar table.

  • Cauliflower, lamb, and chutney on a bed of basmati rice, all in a lovely glass bowl.

• • A large Tupperware container of plain tortilla chips.

  • A container of Yoplait.

  • A mango-strawberry smoothie from the student snack bar.

• • An insulated plastic mug of tap water.

  • A bottle of purified water.

  • A bottle of never-frozen never-concentrated orange juice.

Don't hate me because I'm on sabbatical

Today, I answered e-mail from a student for the first time since September 3.

It was the first affirmative answer ("Yes, I can do that," rather than "No, I'm on leave,") to a student since June 16.

Now, if only my record with college administrators were similar.

Noted with little comment

Well, "little" compared with how wildly I could flame on either subject below, if I tried even a little...

ITEM ONE: New Kid linked to an article by Greg Easterbrook (whose opinions I generally love to hate) on whether we should care so much about getting into the right school, to which his answer is, overall, "no." However:

There is one group of students that even Krueger and Dale found benefited significantly from attending elite schools: those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Kids from poor families seem to profit from exposure to Amherst or Northwestern much more than kids from well-off families. Why? One possible answer is that they learn sociological cues and customs to which they have not been exposed before. In his 2003 book, Limbo, Alfred Lubrano, the son of a bricklayer, analyzed what happens when people from working-class backgrounds enter the white-collar culture. Part of their socialization, Lubrano wrote, is learning to act dispassionate and outwardly composed at all times, regardless of how they might feel inside. Students from well-off communities generally arrive at college already trained to masquerade as calm. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds may benefit from exposure to this way of carrying oneself—a trait that may be particularly in evidence at the top colleges.

Am I from a disadvantaged background? Maybe (insanity wreaks havoc with one's finances and social class, but my grandparents, who made it from the Midwest to leafy suburban Weatherwood, did a lot more to raise me than my mother ever did). Did Impressive do a lot for me? Oh yeah. More than for a typical kid from Weatherwood? Oh yeah. But, when I went to college, I didn't need to learn how to act all calm in public. I needed to learn how to stop being angry, and I mean angry all the time, at rich people. Which I did mostly in huge fights with a boyfriend, one whose immigrant parents had made out well and who saw no need to apologize for their good fortune.

Too large a topic to tackle now: is teaching at a selective institution something that makes the world a better place? I do wonder, sometimes.

See the comments on New Kid's entry, too.

ITEM TWO: When I was in college was when a lot of the big child molestation trials were going on; I suppose by the late 80's it was all about recovered memories. I felt like the fact of my foster father having molested me was something that had to be a huge deal; something that had formed my identity. I weepily told my closest frieds, who were suitably horrified.

But, you know, it actually wasn't a big deal for me. There are a lot of reasons for that: how many other things went wrong (e.g., overall, Ray's alcoholism was a lot scarier—and that's not even getting into the whole Annajane situation), that the child protection system did succeed in protecting me eventually, that there was no violence, no terror, but rather mosly confusion. That Ray's believing in my abilities was what allowed me to escape the cyclone of my blood relatives.

However, it was simply true that I'd never forgotten what happened. So, I was perplexed by the whole recovered memories thing, and ended up with a low-grade fascination with studies showing how easily testimony, or even memories themselves, can be manipulated.

This article, though, isn't some study convincing little children that they'd gotten a hand caught in a mousetrap. No, it's about the aftermath for some children (by now, adults) who lied, and whose testimony sent people to jail.

Linda Starr, the legal director of the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law, which represented Stoll in his hearing this year, is a former sex-crimes prosecutor and was surprised to see how much the events of 20 years ago had affected the children. ''Before I met them, I didn't appreciate that these kids, who had not been sexually abused, would have experienced trauma comparable to kids who had been,'' Starr says.

In part, Sampley, now 28 and a worker for a commercial-sign maker, is haunted by his own role. ''Why couldn't I withstand the pressure?'' he says. ''I didn't smoke when I was pressured by my friends. But when I was pressured by the investigators, I broke down. I still search for that moment I gave in.'' He is also haunted by how the investigation distorted his trust. Several years ago, he realized that each time his stepdaughter, then 6, invited friends to the house, he shut himself in his bedroom; he didn't want to play with strangers' kids or even be around them. For a year, he also wouldn't give his own daughter, now 3, a bath. ''I'm afraid of somebody saying something that isn't true.'' A child or an angry ex-girlfriend might twist the truth into a lie. A tickle becomes molestation; a hug is lechery. He knows firsthand that children do lie.

That last line cuts like a knife, doesn't it?

Immature sperm crossing state lines

Friday was andrology day around here: how do we get the four vials remaining from Beaker's testicular biopsy to New York? I've had visions of driving from Ohindinois to New York with a liquid nitrogen tank in my trunk. I started by calling Cornell's andrology lab.

"First you need to ask your old andrologist whether they have a New York State provisional tissue bank license."

"I bet they don't. It's a small facility that mostly just serves the local fertility clinic."

"If they don't, then there will be a lot more paperwork to do. My supervisor will have to... [fill in many steps, including approval by some state governmental agency]... so, you really should check. If they've ever had to ship anything to New York before, it'll be fine. Maybe you're not the first patient to switch to Cornell?"

I call my old clinic's andrologist (who is perhaps the nicest person at the clinic). No license. Of course.

So I start on a ferocious round of getting the two labs to exchange fax numbers, et cetera. It'll take a few weeks to push the paper through. And, this being Cornell, the andrology department has its own periods of several weeks when nothing can happen—especially accepting shipments of frozen sperm. What with the November co-culture biopsy forcing the IVF cycle quite far into the future, though, we do have some time. Both labs have assured me that the actual shipping will be simple, once I give my credit card number to some appropriate third party tank-rental place. And once Beaker signs some consent forms and gets them notarized.

But but but: as I heard about this massive round of paperwork I hadn't expected, my heart sank. It was the first time I sincerely wondered, do I have what it takes to pull this cycle off? Am I actually an organized enough person to coordinate everything?

'Cause there's finding the old records, getting the biopsy, arranging the sperm shipment, setting up a phone orientation, making the travel arrangements—and that's not all. There's going to have to be some backup donor sperm around, too, in case of, say, a horrible thaw accident. I know, I read some books and talked all cute about having to pick a donor months ago. And it likely won't even be wasted effort to choose one; if this cycle fails, as it probably will (Doctor Data wouldn't go over about 40% probability, given our two prior failures, and I think that was with perhaps overly positive assumptions about our old embryos), we'll go on to donor IUIs right afterwards.

But it's just all so much.

Fashion?!

Isn't it a little weird that this ended up in Sunday Styles?

Or, perhaps it's a perfectly appropriate placement, and one that says something profound about what the bases for all kinds of medical decisions often are...

Also: you have read Middlesex, haven't you? You must.