Heal the world.

On my drive home every day, I pass a stately old American Baptist church that sits in the center of town. There is always some sort of religiously related message (the sermon topic?) on the board our front. For the past two weeks, it has said, "Being different isn't the same as making a difference."

What??

What on Earth is that supposed to mean? Is being different bad? Do only conformists really make a difference? Do those kids who always try too hard to be different really think they are making a difference?

This is one of my (sometimes numerous) issues with organized religion. In an effort to say something profound, they've put out this muddled, potentially dangerous message. The only meaning I can take from it is: Being different is bad and doesn't change anything in the world, so you should just be like everyone else and concentrate on making a difference.

Yikes!

Why can't you be different and make a difference? In fact, I think that with so many things wrong today. With this whole culture where it's cool to be rude and nasty and not care about anyone or anything, maybe the way to make a difference is exactly the opposite of this church's message: Be different from everyone else. Don't be like everyone around you. Care about things. Respect people. Think. Then you can make a difference.

In need of a Berlitz course

After nearly one year of marriage, which was preceded by two years of living together and one year of dating long distance before that, I'm realizing that my husband and I speak different languages.

This morning, I found myself wandering the grounds of the area's largest and oldest drag racing facility (shouldn't every neighborhood have one?) surrounded by car guys and car parts and a surprising number of objects that I forgot existed outside of Kentucky.

For him, it was a tiny piece of home in the middle of a land that still seems too unfamiliar and harsh. For me, it was a journey back into the foreign world that I had forgotten about. Standing at that car show, I was reminded of how strange it felt when I first moved to Kentucky. There was an entire world about which I knew nothing.

My husband is fluent in the language of this world. He is constantly trying to explain to me the purpose of a cold air intake or why the position of this or that little hunk of metal means that a car probably won't run.

I have no idea what he is talking about.

I only recently found out that cars don't have carburetors any more.

I still don't have a clue why it's cool to have a loud car.

What I know is that this little world makes him happy. He enjoys talking to people who are impressed that he owns a '66 Mustang. He likes criticizing other people's shoddy repair jobs and telling me why they aren't the best solution.

He complains that the guys on Car Talk spend too much time being entertaining and not enough time diagnosing cars.

I assume this is how he feels when I try to explain science to him.

A tribute

A grad school friend fowarded me an email this afternoon informing me that our department's graduate secretary had passed away from complications following a hip replacement.

Anyone who hasn't been to graduate school probably fails to appreciate the importance of a graduate secretary in the lives of graduate students. And Dorie was one of the best.

Dorie was the keeper of all of the information in our program. She knew what forms had to be filled out and where they had to go when they were done. She knew who needed reminding three or four times and who could be counted on to be early with everything.

She was in charge of welcoming candidates to their interviews and welcoming them again as new graduate students. She could tell which nervous student needed reassurance and which one needed to be left alone. She always knew who was on the verge of tears and just how to stop it.

Part of her job was to hand back exams. She always knew when it had been a tough one. She was always ready with a comforting word. Plenty of tears were shed in her office and that was okay.

Dorie was always ready to listen to a stressed student or share in an unexpected joy. She was a warm smile first thing in the morning and reminder that there were plenty of students who had been through exactly what you had and everyone had come out okay in the end.

Students were always making her promise not to retire until after they graduated. She had finally gotten to the point where she had stopped making those promises and started counting down the days. There were only two or three years left.

Dorie was the spirit and heart of our department and she probably had a greater impact on the future of science than some Nobel Laureates. She will be missed, but she will live forever in the hearts and minds of the students who never would have made it through without her.

A world gone mad

What is going on in the world? First, that guy at Virginia Tech, and now this. I have two questions (okay, maybe more):
a) Is all this still not enough of a case for tighter gun control in this country?
b) Has NASA's psychological screening process completely fallen apart?

I'll start with the first one. If Charlton Heston and his friends were really in favor of responsible gun ownership, wouldn't they welcome tighter regulation on who can buy what type of gun? Wouldn't they want to make sure that there were fewer incidents like these that turn people against all gun ownership even though there are plenty of perfectly responsible sport-shooting fans out there?

My own husband owns a gun and wants to teach our (future) children to target shoot like his dad taught him. But learning to shoot at a range comes with learning about being responsible and locking guns up and never, ever pointing a loaded weapon at anything you don't intend to shoot and never firing a gun in anger.

On to the second one. NASA has a pretty thorough psychological and security screening process for its employees. I work at a major company and I know how tight our security is and how hard it is for a non-employee to even get into the parking lot, let alone the building. I highly doubt our nation's space agency is less secure than the research facility of a major consumer products manufacturer. That leaves the only possibility as that this was yet another NASA employee snapping (recall the diaper wearing, stalking astronaut...).

I think I need to go look up the signs of the apocalypse now...

Boredom

I know that it's stupid to complain about this when people have lost everything to this storm, but it has left me bored out of my mind.

I'm learning that I am not cut out for a life of leisure.

Our entire town completely escaped damage more severe than blown over roadside signs, but just north of us the rivers and creeks are raging. Most importantly, the Raritan River crested somewhere around ten feet above flood stage.

My work is just across the street from the Raritan and right now access to the building is spotty. One of the major highways leading there remains completely under water, and, as best I can tell, the last thing the state police need are several hundred employees trying to get through.

For two days in a row now, I have been halfway to work when it occurs to me to call the weather hotline. This means that I learn that I don't have work at the worst possible time. I'm up. I'm dressed. And I have nowhere to go.

There is only so much I can do online. There is only so much bad daytime TV I can watch. Now, I'm just hoping the waters recede tomorrow so I can go to work.

And then the rains came

I was foolish to think that the trip home would be any less exciting than the trip to Cincinnati.

We knew when we left that there was talk of a Nor'easter moving in while we were away. I kept hoping it would go away.

All weekend, all of the easterners were discussing the weather. But still I held out hope.

I held out until Sunday morning when we called the airline and learned that our flight had been canceled. It was worse. From the size of the storm, we weren't getting out until Tuesday or so.

I have traveled enough to know that once you're booked on another flight and at the airport, you end up parked in the terminal camped out hoping to be selected for a flight. I had visions of a painful 48 hours ahead.

We had one hope left. Several of our training partners from Jersey had driven out. They were planning to leave on Monday. Maybe they had room for us. We waited anxiously to meet up with them.

It turned out that they only had room for one person. This was a problem. But one with a potential solution. Two other guys were on their way out of town at that very moment and there were just the two of them in a Ford Taurus.

Someone got the driver on the phone. He hadn't left yet. Even better, he was not just willing to come by and get us and bring us to the airport where our car was, he would wait until we finished training for the morning.

We ended up spending our entire Sunday in a car (only one stop!) driving into increasingly worse weather. But we got home.

And I learned something. Never sit in the seat behind the smoker. You end up getting ash all over your jeans.

Travel adventures

The husband and I went off to Cincinnati, Ohio this weekend for an aikido seminar. Specifically, we were both going to take black belt tests (my first, his third). We were already stressed out, so of course the trip would not be an uneventful one. I'm breaking this into two posts because they are unrelated adventures.

We flew out of teeny tiny Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, PA. From now on, I only travel out of teeny tiny regional airports. The parking was close and cheap. The security line was short. The people were friendly. And the wi-fi access was free.

The plane we took from Allentown to Philadelphia was so small they practically had to wind the propellor with a rubber band. It was a bouncy, noisy 14 minutes spent soaring through the center of a thick cloud, but we landed uneventfully.

Our second flight boarded and took off close to on time from Philadelphia. We'd been in the air about 20 minutes and I was fast asleep when I was awakened by a very unfamiliar feeling. I sat bolt upright as the man across the aisle from me called out, "What the f***!?" We were very quickly descending. There was no warning and we were clearly nowhere near our destination.

In the end, it turned out to be an air traffic control decision to move us away from some other nearby aircraft. But, um...thanks for the warning. And the lesson in what sheer terror feels like.

Why do we do this to ourselves?

...or, I go off on a self-indulgent rant.


A friend and I at work have recently found ourselves comparing notes on our respective graduate school experiences. Neither of us had a very good time. Hers was significantly worse.

Another friend, who is still in school calls me regularly with tales of how she isn't sure she can do it any more.

People I started school with eight years ago are still struggling to find some way to finish.

There is a comic strip that highlights the suffering of graduate students.

An old friend, a brilliant graduate student in astrophysics, had his funding destroyed and can't afford the equipment upgrades he would need to finish his thesis. He's been a grad student so long that he actually took a sabbatical.

I know of at least three marriages that fell apart while one partner was in grad school. I know of a handful of developed or near drinking problems. I know of a half dozen or so people who found themselves medicated for a variety of stress-related illnesses. Still more people ended up in therapy for at least a little while.

And yet, we still find ourselves telling others that getting a graduate degree is worth it in the end. We don't look back on our days in grad school with any fondness, but we value the knowledge we gained.

I think it's telling, though, that I don't have any friends from graduate school who took positions in which they themselves oversee graduate students. We work in industrial research or at government institutions or in administrative positions at hospitals or at small liberal arts colleges.

Stories of the kind of suffering I have heard seem to be much more rare among the older generations of Ph.D's. The system is broken. There is something inherently wrong with a process that seeks to destroy the very people it thrives on.

Grandma

I only ever knew one grandparent, my mother's mother, and it seems like she was sick for my entire life. Now, I know on an intellectual level this wasn't true. I have clear memories of afternoons spent at the playground with her and weekends when my sisters and I stayed at her apartment, and sick people don't do well chasing three little girls around.

But, from the time I was about seven, my grandmother was in and out of the hospital. First it was her gall bladder. Then it was breast cancer. Then the cancer came back. Then it spread. Then she had Alzheimer's that might have been masking cancer in her brain. Then, she went into the hospital on my sixteenth birthday and, while my mother was frantically trying to get her into a nursing home, she died.

As a result of all this, my memories of the eleventh grade are largely frantic.

My first clear memory that something was wrong was as my grandmother was getting sicker. She had a home nurse at the time and had taken to wandering away when she was alone. She disappeared once in a driving snow storm and just as my father and sister were about to get in the car and drive to Brooklyn to file a police report, a nice young man returned her home. She had wandered to the temple and this man wouldn't let her walk home alone in the snow.

Around this time, I was making plans to go away to the camp for the summer. My mother sat me down and asked if I wanted to even know if my grandmother passed away while I was at camp. I would be several hours away and, because Jewish funerals have to be performed fairly soon after death, there would probably not be time to get me. Plus, it was an academic program and nothing was more important to my family than academics. Did I want to potentially miss three days of a class that was only three weeks long? To this day, I appreciate that my parents respected me enough to make it my decisions. I told them I didn't want to know. But in the back of my mind I wondered how they would manage to not let me know.

The whole discussion became irrelevant on the weekend of my sixteenth birthday. My older sister had gotten my father and me tickets to a play as a birthday present. But my grandmother's sister called that morning to say that Grandma had fallen out of bed and they couldn't get her up. My aunt and uncle refused to call the ambulance themselves, so my father and I would have to detour into Brooklyn before we went to Greenwich Village for the show.

The first half of my birthday was spent in the emergency room of Coney Island hospital standing by a weak, shrunken version of my once strong grandmother. This stranger in the bed didn't even know who I was. I was terrified for the first time in my life.

Two weeks later, my mother asked my sisters and I if we wanted to visit our grandmother one last time. As the only one who had seen her recently, I was the first to say no. That woman in the hospital wasn't my grandmother any more. It was too late to say goodbye to my grandmother. She was long gone.