Barely promoted

Speaking up

I just spoke at a faculty meeting for the first time. (This is my ninth year at Granolan.)

My point was politely ignored, and I was on the losing side of the ensuing vote, but a crusty near-emeritus introduced himself and shook my hand heartily—"That's what we meant!"—on the way out.

The world's not that small

So today I was planning to make a passing reference during class to this whole six-degrees-of-whatever phenomenon. (Isn't it sad that these folks have only raised $200K or so, after the amount of spam they sent out on Kevin's behalf? And sixdegrees.com has evaporated into a placeholder.)

I figured I should look up the original Milgram paper. Well, Travers and Milgram, actually.

And for a moment, when the Google list first came up, I misread Travers as Trivers. Both at Harvard in the 60's, right? which made it seem extra not-implausible. Boy, would those have been some late-night discussions, huh?

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Noted on Trivers's website, in a description of preliminary results on a study of bodily symmetry:

... Jamiacan children resemble British adults: women tend to cradle their babies on the left side if their ears are more symmetrical (but not other body parts) while men show no cradlng bias.

Too weird! I've always held Miss T. on the right, which is really sort of inconvenient, since I'm right-handed. And my ears are significantly asymmetric, enough so that it matters for fitting my glasses.

Returning to chaos

Beaker and Miss T. and I spent Christmas, and then some time after that, far away from the confines of Granolaton. First a week with the in-laws out in the country, then a week visiting Dr. Wow at his fancy-schmancy corporate consulting gig, then a couple of days visiting with friends. The social stuff was pleasant but tiring, and the work was bracing and difficult, and it was good to get back home.

But everything is such a mess here! My department's offices were vandalized while I was getting lost in twisty hallways full of overpaid Dockers-clad thirty-somethings. My office, my computer, may have been particular targets. We are putting the pieces together, we are assisting the investigations, and I am full of righteous indignation.

Except that when I sit down at my desk, with a list of crucial e-mails to write, or when I try to pull my wits about me and get back to the damn manuscript, I am overcome by tiredness. We'll never know for sure who did it, they'll never get punished, and the underlying security flaws are not going to get addressed by anyone, ever. Can I just catch up on my sleep now, please?

What not to say at an interview

"So, why are you applying for our crappy little one-semester temp job?"

"Because my advisor thinks I can't get a Research I job and should find out what it's like at a liberal arts school. Oh, and he's cutting off my funding next semester, too. Can I get health insurance here?"

Note: this is our only applicant.

Reducing my productivity

Yesterday was my last day of pumping. Today I packed up the pump.

Should I try to pass it on to a friend who's due in February? I feel like I need to ignore the possibility that I might ever need it again, myself. I've been very suspcious that way, ever since I ogled the Japanese Weekend website during my first (ha!) two-week-wait. That failure felt like a punishment for hope.

Will we cycle again? We can't really afford it, of course, especially not with our other crippling hobby of home renovation. I'm getting older, and I don't have the time; even my summer schedule is filling up (uh, thanks, uh, Dr. Wow). Beaker is of course a little sicker than he was and hence afraid that a second baby would kill him.

And, although I've weaned myself off the damn machine, Miss T. likes her num-nums very much, thank you, and substantiallly no progress has been made on cutting down direct nursing. Here I am, 15 months out, with not even the slightest hint of ovulation, let alone the two post-lactation "normal" cycles Cornell wants to see.

But! But! But! There's still surgically extracted sperm in a freezer in New York! How could we not try?

In case of injury

The Professorette has three pieces of advice for the academic suddenly deprived of the services of his or her dominant upper extremity:

1. This sling. In tasteful yet comfortable black spandex.

2. One can write on the board with one's non-dominant hand. Go slowly and carefully. Switching from a blackboard to a whiteboard (or vice versa?) might be helpful.

3. In OS X: sticky keys mode.

And the consequences were

Last semester, I took a bunch of shortcuts in my teaching—for reasons which should be obvious. I didn't read my student evaluations until today. So:

Reducing my office hours, from the four to six per week typical in my department to just three, in time slots carefully chosen so as to maximize likelihood of student utilization (hint: the day before homework is due), was fine. They still thought I was "extremely" available.

Now, that reduction needs to be put into context (and all you folks at research universities can just start snickering now): I announce the time of the next few office hours at the beginning of every class, and give at least a week's warning of any cancellations. I add an extra two hours the week of an exam. And I also had regular IM hours, which were much beloved by the few students who took advantage of them. Note: on the internet, no one can tell you're nursing.

(I should write a real entry on how to do the IM hours right, actually; the Chronicle piece last year was such unnecessary scaremongering.)

On the other hand, they were unhappy about the grading of non-exam work. Which, for the first time, I had allowed to be done entirely by people other than me.

Also, some of the responses to "difficulty," "enthusiasm," and "organization" questions show they knew I was less engaged. Which wasn't so much that I was putting in fewer hours, but that I was recycling as many course materials as possible. Sometimes the lectures recyled from spring '04 didn't quite match the projects from fall '03 or the exams from spring '02.

Overall: my numbers didn't go up, but they didn't go down either. And I've been here long enough, and taught all of last semester's courses enough times, that there wasn't anything shocking on the evaluations (yes, I should have given them more time for that project assignment, yes, my voice can be too quiet, but my enthusiasm for the subject is deep and, on good days, contagious, yes, you would have learned more if you hadn't fallen asleep in class, and thanks for saying so). I can remember the traumas of my first few semesters of evaluations so vividly; I feel old just getting useful feedback from them. It's just part of the job, now.

The professorette has some bad news

—First off, please observe this summer's required shoe for the early-mid-career academic mommy picking up her infant at daycare:

Yes, you should cry. (The professorette is.)

—Tight ragged jeans are never appropriate for the post-doc attending a conference, no matter how expensive they are. They may be acceptable for a graduate student, but only if she's (a) giving a plenary address or (b) spending the entire meeting standing at the back of talks giggling with her friends.

—The young Turk sitting next to the professorette, the one with his legs spread so wide he took up nearly three little folding chairs? The one with a tense woman of higher academic rank than his on either side, legs compactly crossed? The one making the back row of the talk as welcoming to women as a typical three-quarters-full number 7 train on its way to Flushing? Yeah, him. He was wearing a Daily Kos T-shirt.

Chaos

So, just some orientation: my semester is over. My grades are in. It's less than three weeks to the workshop based on the joint book project and I am going apeshit. As are my coauthors.

Also, Miss T. is well past 8 months. We had our first parent-teacher conference yesterday and, well, I'm kind of appalled that she got her first report card of sorts. Verdict: normal on all aspects except gross motor. More to follow, I suspect; much to process for mama and dada.

My hallway is getting renovated this summer. As I try desperately to keep up with the e-mail from Dr. Wow—every hour, he's got a newly superlative subject line: "What is urgent!" then "Must work on!" then "TODAY!!!"—my colleagues are happily packing and kibbitzing. Stealing books out of each other's piles of discards when no one's looking.

I made a little chart on the last page of my to-do notebook. BOXES PACKED, SHELVES CLEARED, INBOX SIZE. Friday I filled out the first row: 2, 4, 1257. Yes, more shelves cleared than boxes packed—I discarded with abandon on Friday.

Then I lost the notebook. This morning the inbox is up to 1320.

Today Cary Tennis linked to Children of Hoarders. I'm not that bad. Beaker's not that bad. Even his mother isn't that bad (although she's closer).

But I wonder: will there be support groups for children of renovators who can't ever finish the job? (At least, for the survivors, the ones who didn't find the bleach in the cabinet that never had its historically-authentic lock installed.)

Risking avalanche

Each morning, my first step in preparing for class is mounting a search for my notes from last lecture.

Two days ago, two days ago, people, and I know they're on my desk, and still it takes a good 10 minutes to find them.