Assorted evidence of insanity

I woke up at 5am on Tuesday, and as I rolled over to drift back to sleep, a little voice reminded me that my grant proposal needs to be submitted a week before its official deadline.  And then I started counting backwards from the official deadline, and jumped out of bed.  It's due at the end of this week.  Not next week.  Stupid, stupid voice in my head.  So I spent the next two hours writing.  And guess what I'm doing tomorrow morning?  

Speaking of writing, I have far too many writing projects looming over me, and I don't seem to be able to finish any of them.  All those projects are really stressing out that same little voice in my head -- the one in charge of keeping things organized and running on time.  It can't keep track of what needs to be done and when, and it is lashing out against me in its frustration.  I'm not quite sure what to do with it.  To make things worse, the writing projects themselves keep bothering me, too.  They all clamor for my attention, and when they don't get it, they pile on the guilt -- at least the work projects do.  The fiction projects don't just pile on guilt.  They scream at me to do something about them.  And unlike the work projects, which stay down when I tell them to except for a whimper of guilt, the fiction ones climb after me, and attack when my guard is down, such as when I'm drifting off to sleep, or walking over to work.  If I were this single minded about work projects, I'd be winning my Nobel prize.

Jonathan needed a Wednesday after school program.  So I volunteered.  I offered to run a math program for kids, grades 3 through 6.  I have taught it three times so far.  There are too many kids.  There are so many kids that even the simplest example takes forever to explain.  And every kid has an idea for an answer to every question.  Or if they don't have an idea, at least they have something else that they really really need to share.  And if I don't have a question for them to answer?  Then they have one for me!  They talk on top of each other and on top of me.  And they generate random, unexpected answers that I have to think about, and that I have to ask everyone else to think about, but it's hard to think when you really really need me to call on you.  Oh!  Oh!  Please!  Please let me spew something random!  Me, I come home totally wiped out.  But I don't think there is anything I can do about it.  How could I justify squelching such enthusiasm, especially for math, of all things?  

Today I forgot my keys.  I biked to school in the rain, and then went to lock up my bike and found my keys were not in my pocket.  So I looked at my watch.  I had to teach class in eight minutes.  Home was a 15 minute bike ride in the wrong direction.  So I wheeled my bike up to my department office, begged to borrow the master key, let myself into my office and parked my bike behind my desk, and ran off to do my teaching.  Later in the day, someone saw me wheeling my bike out of my office, and said I was very smart to have brought it in out of the rain.  Except that I felt like a complete idiot for having forgotten to bring my keys.  

I think I'd better stop.  I am coming up with too many items that point to my insanity, and I can't afford the time to see a therapist.  Must write....  Aaah!  

Gender bias

Soon after my birthday, I read a couple of articles that I found extremely depressing:

From Scientific American:  Study shows gender bias in science is real.  And from Inside Higher Ed:  Study shows scientists are biased against women.

I read the Inside Higher Ed article first.  The article depressing in and of itself:  Scientists were given identical resumes for hypothetical students, with just the names changed.  One name obviously female, one obviously male, and asked to rate the students.

... [T]he scientists were asked to rate the students' competence on a 5-point scale. Male faculty rated the male student 4.01 and the female student 3.33. Female scientists rated the male student 4.10 and the female student 3.32. On salary, the gaps were also notable. The average salary suggested by male scientists for the male student was $30,520; for the female student, it was $27,111. Female scientists recommended, on average, a salary of $29,333 for the male student and $25,000 for the female student.

That's bad. The scientists didn't think they were being sexist. They just honestly thought that Jane wasn't as competent as the identical John.  Which makes me wonder (a) do I do this?  I hope I do not.  I must be vigilant and try to make sure I do not.  And (b) am I a victim of this?  Would I ever know if so?  Is my work valued less because I have a very distinctly feminine name?  (I have wondered in the past, but what can you possibly do?)

The most depressing thing about the article, however, was the comments.  The blog from Scientific America summed it up best:

[M]ost people who read this will have one of four reactions:

1) This is not surprising, but I’m glad we have something concrete to show what we’ve known all along.

2) This is surprising and disturbing.

3) Figure 2 is misleading because the y-axis does not start at zero. Therefore, I will reject everything else exposed by this study.

4) Equally qualified women should be discriminated against, because they could go off and get pregnant. 

On the Inside Higher Ed blog, which is supposedly of interest to my academic colleagues, there seemed to be a huge number of comments #4.  And also comments along the line of "The women are rating the female students just as badly as the men, so it can't really be sexism."  And "Yeah but maybe the women looked the same on paper, but they wouldn't be as good later in life because women never are the best of the best.  Those are the men."

These are comments from educated people, the educators of America.  Sometimes America sucks.

You know what, American educators?  (1) It's none of your business if they go off and get pregnant.  And the fact that they might doesn't make them less effective workers and poorer scientists.  (2) Women can also be sexist to women.  In fact, historically women have been our own worst enemies (see for example women's suffrage).  (3) Studies show over and over that it isn't the gender that's holding the women back from performing at the top.  It's the culture.  A relatively recent study published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, for example, showed that we Americans are hurting both our men and our women in science by our cultural attitudes.  Sure math is great later in life, but you're a loser if you're good at it as a kid.  The peak performers in the highest tier math competitions in high school and college are both male and female, but they're coming from other countries where kids and adults value math as much as basketball.

As I have mused about this in the past, the advice I receive is along the lines of, "just put your head down and do the best work you can and don't worry about it."  Which is excellent advice, and how I've lived my life.  But sometimes things need to be worried about.  But I'm not big enough to do all the worrying on my own.

Reader, please go worry for me.  Thanks.  That's much better.

Birthday

Today it is my birthday, the first day of fall, and the birthday of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins.  I am reclining on my couch with a stack of papers, which I graded earlier today in orange ink.  I used the orange pen because it is my favorite, and it is my birthday.  On one's birthday, one should grade only with one's favorite pen.  Also, orange is a good color for the first day of fall.

For my birthday, I purchased myself a pair of black platform heels.  I have never owned a pair of high heeled shoes in my life, because I am already almost six feet tall, and it's already hard to hear the conversations way down there when you're so tall.  Why add three inches?  But recently I decided that I'm old and deaf enough now that I'm not going to hear the conversations anyway.  So I would buy a pair of heels.  And then I decided that if I were going to increase my height some, why not increase it as much as possible?  Hence the platform heels.  They add 5 inches to my stature.  When I put them on, I am nearly a whole head taller than Tim.  I can't wait to wear them to church.  They will go really well with my short black skirt and my orange striped tights.

In other news, I am still on the mailing list for Bosinver Farm Cottages, in Cornwall, England.  I received their fall mailer yesterday.  "Have you ever thought about coming to Cornwall to celebrate Christmas or New Year?"  Hmm....  Thinking about it now.  Stormy seas below wind swept cliffs.  Green moors and gray skies.  Warm fire in my farm cottage and a stack of novels to read.  Christmas here is nice, with family and maybe snow and a library card.  But Christmas in Cornwall sounds perfect.

I would even leave my orange pen behind.

But maybe I'd bring the platform heels in case I want to go anywhere posh.

Parenting

Today, I am feeling super skilled at this parenting thing.  This was a star-on-the-forehead kind of parenting kind of day, so I have decided to write it all here and publish it to the world so that you, World, can go home and put a little checkmark by the box that says:  Artax is a good parent.  For today.

First, I walked Jonathan and his friend over to school.  Star for walking over in the morning.

Second, I was two minutes early to pick him up.  Star for timeliness.  And I brought a popsicle for him to eat on the way home.

On the way home, I gave him math puzzles to solve in his head while we walked.  And he thought about them and asked for more.

When we got home, I asked Jonathan if while he was outside, he would please pick some grapes for dinner, and I handed him bowl and scissors.  He went out and made a huge amount of noise with the whistle he picked up at scouts (come on scout masters, a whistle?), but eventually he did return with the bowl completely full of grapes.

After dinner, I told him if he would please do the dishes for me, we could watch TWO episodes of Avatar: the Last Airbender on Netflix.  He did the dishes.

So I sent him off to get the TV ready to go.  He called me when it was ready.  And then when TV was over, he ran and got his jammies on and brushed his teeth and read for a while, until my bedtime alarm went off, and then he packed himself off to bed with a good night kiss.

What a charming child.  I must be a really good parent, right?  Go mark that little box that says "Artax is a good parent."  Go do it now, today, before we all go to sleep and wake up with a completely new day tomorrow and I lose my temper and forget to do the laundry and have a nervous breakdown and my child turns back into a regular child again instead of a mythical purple unicorn.

I sure love my purple unicorn.  I even love him when he is a multi-headed hydra, or when I am a multi-headed hydra.  Sometimes it's hard to know the difference.

Have you marked that box yet?

New Office

I moved into a new office yesterday, just next door to my old office.  With the help of a couple of student employees from the department office, I got all my stuff ported and adjusted within about ... three hours.

One reason it took so long is that I took my furniture with me.  And we had to figure out how to get my L-shaped desk appropriately situated.  The window is in the opposite corner in this new office, so the computer couldn't go there.  And if it went in the other corner it would block the whiteboard.  And in either of the other two corners it would block the door.  So I put a leg of the L jutting out into the room, and the other leg near the window, but with enough space that I can still stand by the window when I need some natural light.

It is unfortunate that it took so long to move.  And the other negative thing about the new office is that two of the four walls are wood paneled, which means the room looks dark and cave-like.  But otherwise, it is great.  The window looks east, across the library, to the wall of mountains that holds the university on one side.  I can already watch autumn creeping down into the valley.

And space-wise?  The new office is 25% bigger than the old one.  With that extra space, and my L-shaped desk jutting into the middle of the room, there is a place against a far wall to put a couch.  That, my friends, is all I have ever wanted in a job since I was in grad school:  an office large enough to fit a couch.

Of course, it will have to be a small couch -- less than 70 inches long.  And it shouldn't have any arms, because those waste space.  So I've been looking at options.

Here is one from Ikea:

Nice, eh?  But pricey.  And I would have to buy a new cover, because white isn't really going to work long term with dust from the whiteboard flying around in a small space.

I like this option for a cover:

Casual, yet durable, in light gray.  But it would cost an extra $320, on top of the pricey sofa.  I don't think that's in my budget.  Because I don't actually have a couch budget.

So then I started looking around even more, and found true love:

Perfect!  Arm-free, not too white, but not too dark.  It would add lovely color to a gloomy space.  It's a little short:  just 40 inches, which means only a couple of people could sit on it comfortably at a time.  But the price is awesome:  on sale for just $215 (plus shipping).  And I can buy a matching chair for $139.  Although I don't know where I would put that matching chair.

Actually, maybe I'll move them both into our spare room downstairs.

First days of school

Jonathan went back to school one week ago.  We bought new notebooks, colored pencils, crayons, scissors, rulers, and pencil boxes.  

I went back to school yesterday, for my first day. 

Out in the back yard, the bind weed has been growing.  It grows up and over the other plants, wrapping around them and burying them in a pile of green leaves, white flowers.  I got behind on the weeding sometime in late June, which was really only a few weeks ago.  I stopped trying to catch up sometime in early August, which was just the other day.  During the past couple of evenings, when Jonathan has needed to be away from glowing screens, we've been in the back yard and I've been exploring the hidden territory under the bind weed.  When I pull it back, I find that the pretty ground cover with the yellow flowers has been spreading, along with the wild strawberries.  Did you know that gardens could grow under all those weeds?

Jonathan has been pulling the summer bind weed from his brain.  Multiplication.  Spelling.  French.  It seems that it doesn't take more than a few nights of weeding to find all that knowledge buried underneath the weed growth.  All that information is still there where we left it at the end of third grade, late May.  

I feel like I've been pulling bind weed from my brain, too.  I kept changing my mind on how I wanted to teach my new course up until just a couple of days before the class began.  And then I rearranged the schedule the day after we met the first time.  But I'm not as scared as I was last weekend.  Having met my students, and having spent an hour in front of them, I feel like we will be friends.  Or at least reasonably polite fellow travelers in our semester long journey.  I'm so glad it's only a semester.  Wish we were on quarters.

On writing. (Not scholarly.)

About a year ago, I told you I finished writing a novel.  It was something that had been in my head for a while, and totally different from my day job.  In my day job, everything is logical and cold.  I wrote a story about magic and emotions.  Probably a balance thing.  Part of my brain felt heavy, so I wrote something to put the other part back into whack.  And then after I finished the writing, the responsible part of my brain had to put it all aside for months when my day job got too busy.  (The academic year started up.)

I pulled out my novel again several months ago on an airplane, and I really liked it.  I polished up some parts.  I figured out how to twist the tone of the ending to be the conclusion I really wanted, and felt super proud about that.  I let a few family members read the book, and they also (said they) liked it and gave me some helpful suggestions.  I know Deborah liked it -- she read it twice for me, and spent hours on the phone with me talking about it.  Tim read it twice, too.  He has been really encouraging.

So now the next step.  I'd like to publish it, I think.  The next step is to attract the interest of a busy literary agent with a very brief email message.  I've written a draft of the very brief letter.  I've made a spreadsheet of ten agents who have sold books similar to mine that I have read and liked.  Only eight of them are accepting queries, and only four of them take email queries, which makes my list very very small.  So now the real step is to send the queries out and pull in the four rejections.  I wanted to do this before the school year started.  But the school year is upon us.

So why hold back?  Why not just send?

I asked a friend, Norma to read the book -- the first non-family member I have asked.  She read it quickly, and said she liked the first 2/3 of the book, but then three things happened that didn't make any sense to her.  She told me what they were, and all three are important to the story.  I've been mulling over in my head how to fix them -- how to add a few sentences here and there so that they don't catch any other poor unsuspecting reader by surprise.  And I'm feeling kind of discouraged, I guess.  Lazy, maybe.  That was the word that Norma used (there is a reason I asked her to please read it).  She said it seemed like I got lazy 2/3 of the way into the book and I didn't prepare her well enough for those three things.

I get papers rejected all the time in my day job.  I make mistakes.  Sometimes I make big mistakes.  I pick myself up off the floor and get back to work.

Why has it been so hard for me to send the emails to those four people?

I'm scared of them.

Also, I guess I don't want to send the queries out until the book is the very best that I can make it.  And it won't be the best that I can make it until I fix Norma's three things.  And the second one of them should be fixed with a few sentences in a particular scene, and the third will take more fixes in more scenes, but will follow if I can explain to the reader exponential growth (still promise it's nothing like my day job).  But I don't know how to fix the first.

And now that the academic year is upon us again, and I have to teach a class on some of that cold logical-ness on Monday morning at 9:00 am, and I haven't even printed up the syllabus yet.  I am out of time again, and totally terrified of my Monday 9am students, whoever they may be.

Reader, are the things that seem most important to you also things of fear?