What's inspiring me right now (no particular reason, just got to thinking about things this morning as I was riding to work).

-The return of good seasonal food. I can't stop eating asparagus and strawberries, and got some lovely fresh lettuce at the farmer's market yesterday.

-Cycling as my main mode of transportation: Faster than walking, handier (and often faster) than the bus, don't have to pay for parking, get to park 10 feet from the entrance of wherever I am, getting plenty of exercise even though I'm sitting in front of a computer all day and night. On my way home yesterday I picked up some dry-cleaning and happened upon the Tuesday farmer's market, which I'd forgotten about because of the long weekend. It's so freeing. I found a local map of good cycling routes, and have been finding tons of lovely, quiet, and convenient paths. And I'm getting noticably faster; I got to work in less than 25 minutes today, going at a relaxed pace, when previously it took me 30 if I pushed hard the whole way.

-Very subtle color shifts. I've been spindle-spinning some yarn for some felted slippers. I just finished some 3-ply yarn, using two shades of brown: one ply was brown fiber #1, the second ply was brown fiber #2, and for the third ply, I just spun in random lengths of #1 or 2 until I'd spun enough. I can barely see the different colors except under good light, but I can't stop looking at it, I love it. I'm thinking that I'll do this again for a larger project in the future.

-Greens and browns together. That's what will be going on with the rest of the slipper.

-Guess-the-birthday-and-gender office pools. Because I have a tendency to win.

Last year I got a bit obsessed with bento. It didn't last long, mostly because I'm cheap and didn't want to buy a fancy box. But I remembered about them recently, and got to looking at the LJ bento-themed community, which looks to be mostly people in the States, using containers that I might actually be able to find around. So, I got inspired. First, J and I had a bentoish-themed dinner on Sunday. There was asparagus-tofu stirfry, miso soup, eggrolls that are still in the freezer because I forgot about them, and onigiri:



There's a story behind this guy, of course. If you read J's blog, you know that he's a little into Naruto right now. They had a bit on an episode we were watching recently where there was an onigiri shaped like Naruto's head (can't find a pic, but it looked like pineapple for the hair). So, we were joking about us-shaped onigiri, and he said if I made one of him I'd need to add the headband the characters wear, with the little symbol on it.

Amazingly enough, I managed to cut out a reasonably good image of one on the first try. J's sideburns aren't quite so prominent right now, and I got so excited about getting the leaf right that I completely forgot about his glasses, but it amused him, which was my goal.

But that didn't get the bento urge out of my system, so I made a bento-ish lunch for myself:



Snow peas and pita on the left side, strawberry skewer, salad, hummus, and cubes of cheese on the right. I also had some juice and yogurt.

One of the things that bothered me, looking through a lot of bento pictures, was how much junk there was in a lot of them. People are buying cupcake foil liners, sushi grass, paper umbrellas, and single-serve wrapped things like cheese or tiny puddings. I'd much rather use the same type of techniques to *reduce* the amount of waste I'm making, by, say, having a cute little refillable cup to put yogurt in, so I can get a big tub of yogurt and put a little in the cup each day. So I got to thinking about how to visually separate things, without needing all that extra paper and plastic. The only thing that was a bit of a waste was the skewer for the strawberries, but we've had 90% of the skewer package for two years now, so I'd rather get rid of them at this point. I've seen some people use a lettuce leaf in the same way you'd use a cupcake liner, which is another good idea.

It was fun to poke through the fridge to make something pretty that filled up the container--I made it up last night, so I had plenty of time to goof around. It was a great way to get rid of bits of food hanging around that I might've forgotten about otherwise--the salad, in particular, was the last of the bag and pretty close to death. The strawberries were from dinner (waffles with strawberries and cream), the pita was getting lonely in the freezer, and the snowpeas were starting to look a little peaked. Separate from the food being fun and cute, reducing wasted leftovers is a good reason for me to do this once in a while. I'll have to try it again soon.

Related to nothing except that I was following some capoeira angola-related links: An NPR story about Joao Grande, a pretty famous mestre in angola. It gives a good amount of layperson background.

One of these days I need to take some pictures at a roda. They've been pretty small lately so I haven't been comfortable with walking out of the circle to get a camera or whatever. We're doing a demonstration at one of the smaller farmer's markets in town this weekend, though, which should be fun.

I've just barely had the time to go practice at all, so I'm *just* managing to keep my skills level. I can't wait to have a slightly more stable schedule--I'd go to every class, if I could. One thing I've been looking at, when I think about different jobs I've been applying for, is if there are any capoeira angola schools nearby. Regional, a different style that's much more widely seen in the states, looks fun, but angola is really where my heart is. It seems like there's at least a small school in most of the urban areas I've been looking, though.

Just had an interesting conversation with a colleague about the under-representation of women and minorities in the sciences (particularly when you get to academia in big research-focused schools). The woman I was speaking to is 15-20 years older than me, and was saying that she had this feeling at school that she was going to be the beginning of this huge wave of women, but that wave never happened.

We both talked around it a bit, since we're both exceptions, having stayed with science to a fairly high level. But in my opinion it comes down to two main things:

1) Women my age know they *can* do science, but they don't necessarily *want* to.

Science is hard. When I was at Ithaca, I remember looking at the course requirements for various majors, and math, chemistry, physics, and biochemistry had a much higher course load than any other "single-topic" major. (I'm leaving off things like Chemistry Education, which were like double majors smooshed into a single one.) If you know you can do anything, you may want to try several things first, and that's all but impossible to do with the sciences. I did it--I started as a chemistry major my second semester. But that involved taking the second half of a class I hadn't taken the first half of, then taking the first half at the same time I took the sophomore-level classes. Liberal arts classes aren't usually so linear. I would have liked to have had a minor, but I had too high of a course load to manage it, just getting through my requirements.

I think women tend to explore their options more, early on--and it's not so crazy for this to be a direct offshoot of the women's movement in the 70's. Our ability to do anything a man can do has been emphasized, but there aren't generations of regular women behind us to tell us what worked for them when *they* had all these choices. Why *not* try several things, to find what we're best at, what we enjoy?

Ironically, because the sciences are so structured, the exploration that allows us to choose a path removes a path from consideration. It would have been so, so easy for me to become a psychology major as late as my junior year, and still have plenty of time to complete requirements, while starting my chemistry major in the second half of my freshman year was almost too late. It pushes people with wide-ranging interests *away* from the hard sciences.

And that trend continues after high school and college. Someone that wants to be a professor has to have really, really wanted it for a long time, with little to no deviation from that path.

2)Laws of averages.

On average, women are more likely to partner with someone equal to or above their social status, as roughly estimated from her education and salary (I'm looking for articles, but not finding them--sorry, lazy day). So a woman with a Ph.D. in the sciences, on average, will be with someone who is also well-educated and driven, while the same is not necessarily true for a man with his Ph.D. This increases the likelihood that a male professor has someone less career driven and more flexible at home to take care of things when a grant deadline comes up. At the same time, an average woman in my position, say, who knows that she's doing way less than half of the house stuff right now while she does a final push to finish graduate school, is putting a heavy but temporary burden on her egalitarian relationship. Being a prof at a big place would be like doing what I'm doing right now every day for the rest of my life. I'd *hate* that--I'm stressed to death as it is, even with the promise of it all being better in a few months. There's no way it would be feasable long-term, and so when I'm looking for jobs my main criteria is "not a professorship at a big research place". Everything else is fair game, because nothing else eats up so much of someone's life.

And at least in the small sample of women I know, that's not an unusual point of view.

Anyways, just something I got thinking about.

Nerds, geeks, feebs, losers.

Last week, I went to a show--Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm. It was terrific fun. I don't think I stopped smiling or dancing at any point, and J and I have been humming a lot of the songs we heard. And I really liked the crowd--Emmacrew described his show in Seattle as "the gathering of the tribes of Dork Nation", and that was just as true here. I wore my "Dorkiest Girl Alive" t-shirt, and about 10% of the audience had had similar ideas. They were wearing shirts I recognized from ThinkGeek. There was a guy with a t-shirt that had the main screen from Donkey Kong, which I liked. There was a woman had a bag labeled "Bag of Holding", which J had to explain to me, that being his fandom, not mine.

Besides enjoying the music, the feeling was not unlike the feeling I get going to the Willy St. Fair--glorying in being the middle of the bell curve, for once, feeling so loved and comfortable, and wondering if normal people feel like this all the time.

Growing up, I could feel like that with my family (who knew I was wacky, so it was okay), but never with peer groups. I was just too far out there, when really, I'm *not that far out there*. I had this good friend in high school, who told me this story about when he was in college and showed people the picture of us from prom. He had fluorescent green hair, with a white dinner jacket and a red bow tie (and a dyed-green flower, which I got from a lovely, sympathetic florist). I had no hair dye, and a very plain black dress.

"SHE hung out with YOU?!?" they asked, shocked. She looks so *normal*.

"Oh, all her normalness is on the outside," was his response.

Which is right.

The thing with kids who grew up as nerds, or freaks, or whatever, is that a lot of us could have managed to fit in. We could have worn contacts, makeup, expensive clothes. We could have played dumb in school, and used our intelligence to access booze for parties and climb the social ladder. We could have gone out for sports, and made fun of the kids in the Science Olympiad.

But even that young, we liked who we were more than we liked popularity. We suffered--or, I did. Of course, we wanted to be well-liked, and not shoved, or teased, or any of that. But we chose not to change, which I think demonstrates a lot of maturity at a pretty young age.

What happens when that maturity is given a wider world in which it can be demonstrated? Nerds succeed. Since we're not willing to play by the rules that make high school popularity, we find the game with rules we like, and do well in that. We end up with a worldful of people from which friends can be chosen, and a worldful of space with which to avoid the asses we grew up with.

I think, sometimes, of the really popular kids I went to elementary and high school with. They were good-looking, the best in the school at football or whatever, could date whoever they wanted, and on and on. What happened to them when they left school and stopped being famous? What is it like to have the best years of your life be over before you can vote? Although I'm curious, I still doubt that their lives are *interesting*. I mean, I could find out in a few months at my 10th high school reunion, and chances are I can't be bothered. (Unless I happen to end up living right in the area, then we'll see. It's not worth a plane ticket or more than two hours of driving on Thanksgiving Weekend, in any case.)

All the people I know that grew up outcasts *are* interesting. They're in grad school, or writing books, or discovering fascinating little nooks and crannies in the world, or making things happen, or traveling. And some have long-term relationships with other funny nerds, but they all have friends, and lovely lives they wouldn't give up for anything.

Since living well is the best revenge, I suppose that's the ultimate revenge of the nerds.

So, that second-worst intersection I was talking about a few days ago? The one where the guy got run over? Very nearly happened to me today, at the exact same freaking intersection, for the exact same freaking reason--the guy was looking down the one-way street to see if he could turn. We didn't even touch, but both my brakes and the driver's made some noise.

Why I didn't get run over, besides luck:

--guy was in a car, so he could see me easily.

--I was already slowing down because I hadn't made eye contact with him; if he had gunned it, he *might* have tapped my front wheel, but probably not, since I was already braking.

Why things were as close as they were:

-I was stupid and literally thought to myself "the same stupid thing can't happen at the same intersection within a week." Didn't slow down as much as I normally would have.

-I also didn't slow down as much as I normally would have because I was annoyed, and running late; I had gone to get wrapping paper for a baby shower I needed to get a ride to in less than an hour, and realized partway there that in my haste I hadn't brought my wallet. So I was busy cursing myself out.

As it stands, of course, things are fine--the driver gave an "oops" wave, I gave him the stinkeye, and got my wallet, and got to my friend's house in plenty of time with a wrapped present and no further problems. But last week's accident did flash before my eyes.

Once I got to the shower, I took these off my hands.


(the bright sun seems to have played havoc with the camera's interpretation of these colors, even after I played with the pic, turning the saturation way down. The orange fish don't do...that thing they do in this picture. The other colors are about right though.)

This was the project that caused so much hassle last week, flipped right-side out. The interior of the hem was what that in-progress shot showed, and it says "2007 Baby [lastname]".

It's my own pattern, with Dale Baby Ull. The non-blue yarn was from the stash. The design started out WAY more complicated--the mama's a biologist, and I was thinking that it would amuse her to have a hat with sharks and jellyfish, little fish getting eaten by larger fish, coral, etc, etc. Part of the reason things got simpler is that even at 8 stitches per inch, it would have been hard to get the level of detail I wanted. And then, as I started knitting it, I really liked the look of the first two rows of fish, and decided at that point to simplify it way, way down. I think it was the right choice--there's a lot of visual interest, with the fish swimming different ways, the bigger fish on the earflaps (yellow on one side, orange on the other) and the different sizes and colors of fish going around. But it's got enough of the traditional left--wider bands separated by smaller, limited color scheme--that it doesn't feel completely out there.

It's interesting to me, how far the original pattern idea varied from the final product, and how a lot of those design decisions were made while I was knitting. I guess it's that I didn't have a whole lot of time to agonize over possibilities. Since I'm so happy with the end result, perhaps I should learn a lesson from this.

(I didn't talk about the mittens at all, did I? They're pretty basic, though they employ my current favorite alternating-between stockinette-and-reverse-stockinette edging, which I'd use on everything if I could.)

This guy's head was run over by a truck nearly shouting distance from my house.

He didn't even need to stay overnight at the hospital, because of his helmet. Check out the picture of the helmet, it's pretty amazing.

Wear a goddamn helmet if you're riding your bike.

(Incidentally, that's the second-worst intersection I regularly pass in town, though it doesn't look particularly busy, which is part of the danger. The particular combination of one- and two-way streets will cause a non-attentive driver turning right to only look left before turning. However, the bike path runs parallel to the street, to the *right* side of the cars. A cyclist going straight on the path during a green light, can get hit by someone turning right, looking left.

The worst intersection I regularly pass is possibly the worst intersection in town for any moving creature--a 5-way intersection for bikes, pedestrians, and cars, right in the most heavily biked area of town, where a good number of cars are coming off of highway-like conditions and haven't gotten back to city style driving just yet. I'm usually in a similar situation to the one just described--going straight, to the right of drivers turning right, looking left. Fortunately it's such a mess that everyone *has* to be careful, but I always make sure I've made eye contact with my car-neighbor before crossing, so they know I'm there. If I can't catch their eye, I get off the bike and walk it across the pedestrian crossing. My safety's not worth the 10 seconds saved.)

A sign of my own inability to communicate recently: the entry below *really* sounds as if I'm hinting about myself, which I didn't notice until it was pointed out to me. I added a note.

No babies here, none at all. It's for one of my friends--the last name is on there, but of course I hid it because of privacy stuff, and,...well. I was being coy about the present, for my work friend, who could be reading behind my back, and because I want to do a nice writeup about the project, maybe with a pattern, but I'm not being coy about the babies, because they don't reside in or anywhere near me.

Did I mention the no babies here? Not that I don't like babies, just... gah. My *family* reads this, and no one needs to be getting any ideas about non-existent babies, and if they do get ideas now, it's entirely my fault.

It's a sign of how far I am from thinking about actual babies, that I didn't notice how it could be read.

To conclude: No babies.

Perhaps I should wait until I finish my data analysis before I write again. *falls over ded*

I do actually still make things, although it's been a while since I've finished much. There's most of a sock, somewhere. I plied up two bobbins' worth of Shetland that's going to be part of a sweater this weekend, though the skeins aren't washed or measured.

I seem to be avoiding both the boring worky parts and the fun interesting parts of craftwork, right now. Which leaves stockinette stitch and a bit of spinning on particularly lazy weekends (Where "lazy"="I only worked half a day today." Funny how definitions depend on current conditions.)

Incredibly, I do actually have one thing going on that's a bit interesting*, but it'll have to wait a bit longer for its debut. Here's a semi-mysterious in-progress shot:



* For my FRIEND, whose name I didn't mention because I don't tend to mention names here.

If J and I get traditional with the gifts for our upcoming anniversary, one of us would undoubtedly get wood.

.....What?

Yesterday was J's sister's birthday, today is *my* sister's birthday.



She's bigger than this now. :)

*comes up for air*

*gasps a bit*

*looks around*

I've been analyzing my own lab tendencies over the last month or so.

It's funny, but when I'm super busy with experiments, I practically go pre-verbal--I'm just living in the data, thinking numbers and pictures. When I'm writing 10 hours a day, I take breaks by writing here--writing about something else--and I get home and won't shut up. That's what was going on last month when I was talking about vegetarianism, I was knocking those posts out in about 20 minutes in between writing science.

Writing this little "I'm okay" note takes a while, and even then, I've been meaning to get to it for a few days. But it's hard to write when you've lost the ability to use words.

I can bake pretty well, but can't quite remember the easy familiarity of cooking--looking in the fridge and making useful food seems unreasonably complex. I can scan in pictures just fine, and do detective work on them, but I can't arrange them into any sort of order for a nice post.

I was completely losing track of time last week; being hungry for lunch at 9:30am, missing meetings. My email box is a terrible mess.

I'm okay, though. Another two weeks of this and I'll be writing in earnest, at which point I'll surely kill everyone's eyes with hyper-verbiality.

*dives back in*