Things that make me sad

I know several professional women or female Phd candidates who keep making decisions to put their career behind that of their husband's, behind the perceived needs of the family. I don't think I can name a single case (in my small and biased sample) where the woman isn't convinced, or has eventually convinced herself that she is happy with her decision.

I can't sit easy with their comfort, because more women make the choice to prioritise their own career behind their partners and families than men do. Furthermore, fewer women make these choices in this country, where the last few decades has seen a lot of discussion about the importance of women not only in the workplace, but in highly demanding fields, than they did 50 years ago before this public discussion, or in other parts of the world where this discussion has yet to happen or take effect. I doubt there is anything fundamental about the womanness of my foremothers, nor of the womanness of my cohort abroad causing this difference.

It makes me think of the times when friends or family have been singled out by the police, or gotten rude service from a take out counter that is normally very good. It raises the question of whether the other person was having a bad day, or did they see something in the skin color? It is impossible to tell whether each interaction is a draw from the bad day distribution, or from the racist distribution. The only things that people who study these these things have been able to measure is that certain people get bad draws more often, and those people tend to belong to various minorities.

The public discussion about women's roles in the workplace has changed the underlying population distribution to less women being willing to sacrifice their careers for the needs of the family and to more men being willing to do the same. But the choice profiles for the two genders aren't even close. Each woman I know who leaves her professional job, or chooses not to finish her PhD, or makes decisions (with her family) that she should bear more of the burden for the family, is a draw from a distribution that isn't where I think it should be. I have no idea whether I can be truly happy for my friends' decisions, even if they seem happy with them, because I don't know where they stand in the distribution. This makes me sad.

Little things: Techincal difficulties

I was having a conversation about my brother earlier this week. My commute schedule, where I'm in My City from Tuesday to Friday, and in His Town Saturday-Monday came up.

"Oh, a four day week. Nice."

Well not really, I almost said. But my brother is in a lab science, so it is really hard for him to take work with him while travelling regularly. Then I almost said, actually, it's been more like a 1 day week: Monday. The paperwork involved to get things set up here has been overwhelming, as it is whenever changing countries. It was late Thursday morning when I finally got my computer set up enough, and all the governmental/HR bureaucratic duties out of the way enough to sit down to work. Except....

I find out Thursday afternoon about more paperwork I need to wait in line for an hour to fill out, and that I probably want to change my bank account. I still can't get my laptop to interface with the campus network properly, which isn't necessary for work, just useful. Then I find out this afternoon that for some reason, my webcam won't work on the office computer - which runs the same build of Ubuntu that my laptop does, where it works. I try fiddling around, crash Ubuntu (talented, aren't I?), restart the computer, and now it won't let me log in.

Yes, I retreat to my apartment where I have working internet and a working webcam so I can skype with Epsilon tonight (and write this post), and add a long list of things that need to happen next week, which is going to be a short week in My City due to conference schedules. GRAH!

This is what America looks like

I've been listening to selected speeches from the DNC off of Politico's website all day. It struck me that there seem to be an overwhelming number of women and minorities speaking. So I decided to count.

I took my list of speakers from here. Not counting the Presentation of Colors, Pledge of Allegiance, or the videos, and counting the Hispanic Caucus and the Women of the House of Representatives as one speaker each, I counted 54 separate speakers. Of which, 20 were female, 11 were African American, 13 were Asian, Hispanic or other, and 17 were white male.

So, actually, there were 37% female speakers (as opposed to 51% in the population), 20% African American (as opposed to 13 % nation wide), 24% Hispanic/Asian/Other (as opposed to 24.4% nationwide) and 31% white non-hispanic male (as opposed to 31.9% nation wide.) I'm not doing a count of gay speakers because that takes more effort than simple google searches of the names.

Wow. Okay, so women are a bit under represented and African Americans a bit over represented. But in general, this is what America looks like. A whole lot of women and minorities. Not so many white dudes. If every TV show and movie and book I read had a cast of characters that looked like this, I wouldn't feel like I somehow didn't belong in America. My darkness doesn't stand out in the crowd of speakers up there. Neither do my breasts.

This is not the Vagina Monologues. This is America. A representative sample. This is how (threateningly? joyously?) diverse we look like if we all stand up and get counted visibly. I feel like for the first time in my life I am actually seeing it in front of me. It makes me so happy, and almost proud.

I was going to write about the genderness of some of the speaches, and complain about why female speakers feel like they must identify with their roles as mothers/grandmothers/care-takers. On the flip side, I was going to laud Polis for opening with his role as a father. But you know... this realization has taken the wind out of whatever complaints I may have. I am going to bed a happy woman today.

I feel like such a cad

I was getting on a bus at a decent sized bus depot yesterday in My City. I think I must have been the last person in line. As I'm boarding, a blind man bumps into me.

"Qerdf  spet linwer elst?" he asks. I don't speak the local language, so that's about what it sounds like to me.

I struggle to figure out how much I owe the driver for my ticket, and the gentleman keeps repeating the question to my back. After the third repetition, I gather that he is asking me what bus this is, but I don't know enough numbers to tell him.

I slink off to find a seat, and the bus driver gives him the information he wants. I am so ashamed of myself.

Conference City 2, where we were a few months ago, speaks the same language, and I had a similar experience. Epsilon wanted his own seat on the subway, so he was sitting next to me. An older woman came by and said

"Wer inetr skdong alking lsets. Gtin  klnigs eknoge."

By the time she'd repeated herself 2-3 times, I figured out that she was asking if she could sit in one of our spots, but the woman and daughter sitting across from me got up to let her sit. We rode on, facing each other in awkward silence, until she had the grace to try to talk to Epsilon. At this point it becomes clear that we share limited words in each other's languages and a few smiles break out. I wish her good day at my stop and head back to my hotel, wanting to hide from my shame under the piles of pillows they provide.

I clearly need a better solution to my linguistic difficulties. I'm taking suggestions.

The little things : different levels of trust

There are several little things that my partner and I have noticed over the last few weeks that my partner is expressing as different levels of trust in different countries*. For instance, in his town, near University E, to get a shopping cart, one inserts a coin to unlock a shopping cart. The coin is returned when the cart is returned and locked. This gets rid of the need for the poor souls that roam the parking lots of grocery stores in the US, collecting shopping carts left by people bringing things to their cars. But it demands that the shopper have the correct coin in his/her wallet. I don't know if this practice means that people walk off with fewer shopping carts.

No one wants to take our US credit cards in either his town or my city, because US credit cards don't have a built in security chip. Every ATM we visit has a screen reminding the user to shield our pin from possibly prying eyes when we type it in. Getting a rail card bus pass, or entering Epsilon into daycare requires a series of passport photos. For the first time, I need to pass a background check to hold a university job (not that they can get their hands on any US criminal record I may have.)

While the left talks about surveillance state in the US, everywhere I go in his town, I see signs telling me that I am being videoed.

None of these are big things, and I will probably forget that they are different in a few months, but this level of extra scrutiny does strike my American eyes as odd.

*Perhaps some would call what I am perceiving a heightened sense of security. I am writing this post with the premise that unless there is a clear threat, the flip side of imposing extra security is an implicit lack of trust in the average person.

The little things: gastronomic edition

"It's often the little things that make all the difference in whether or not one is happy when moving to a new country." I explain to a grad student after she tells me that, yes, one can get good American style coffee around University F. The more I think about that statement, the more it rings true to me. Especially in the area of food.

Moving from college to the country of my parents origin, I rejoiced in the freshness of the produce available. I didn't understand why anyone would ever want a fridge instead of going to the market every day. I'd never SEEN eggplant so firm and tasty! On the other hand I missed bread with a good crust, and don't even get me started on what passes for cheese over there. Every June found me dreaming of strawberries, and July was spent obsessing over taste of peach juice and the fuzzy texture of peach skin.

When I left to get a degree in economics, I entered a country with a rich cheese history, and I was in heaven. I remember getting to the train station on my way to my new college town, and immediately buying a cheese sandwich from one of nothing special shops at the food court. I think it involved Brie. I still remember the ecstasy. But the people in this country didn't know how to spice their food. I was (still am) convinced that even the black pepper in the condiment packets were less spicy than those sold in the states.

Coming to grad school city, back in the States, I missed the variety of cheeses available in the grocery deli, but thrilled in the fresh peaches available at the farmer's market. This was also where I discovered the wonderful world of heirloom tomatoes and the breadth of mushroom varieties. I even found a woman who grew and sold every dried herb you could think of, and then some. Herbal remedies be damned, I entered a world of taste experimentation. My partner's extensive caffeinated tea selection and my herbal tea collection occupied an entire shelf of the pantry.

The farmer's market in postdoc city (the first move listed so far that does not involve changing countries) is the only place I've ever seen that puts the marketing experience in my parent's country to shame. The heirloom tomatoes were a disappointment, but the corn and lettuce... I did not find a replacement for my herb seller, but we had a wonderful coffee shop in our neighborhood that introduced us to the wonders of different beans from different parts of the world.

So now that it is hard to get a farmer's market near University E, or American style coffee at a coffee shop, I've decided to cut fruit out of my diet in grief and be grumpy about the coffee for part of my week. This weekend, I found a man who sells seedling of every herb you've ever heard of, and then some. He must have had at least a dozen types of thyme for sale. It'll be more work and less variety than opening up and smelling jars of multi colored leaves in Jenn's stall, but pulling flowers and leaves from my garden for me tea will definitely be more fun. Now I just need to find more planters!

Falling in love

University F feels like a real city, or at least the area around University F does. Walking down the streets to various meetings with HR and banks and IT and whatnot, I pass small boutique shops, bars and restaurants with outdoor seating, used bookstores at the "garden" level with bikeshops and musical instrument shops above them. There's a group of women walking in front of me exchanging stories and laughing as they return from their lunch break. Its been a long time since I've been able to wander streets like this freely. I've missed it. I think I've developed a crush on this city.

Getting 12 hours of sleep last night, along with blackout curtains and a beautiful sunny morning hasn't hurt, of course. Nor has the fact that my office has floor to ceiling east facing windows. It's clouded over now, but I still find a part of me wishing that I could stay and explore this city, language barrier be damned, and get to know it.

Then again, I fall in love with cities with the same bad habits of a chain monogamist. I have a completely irrational need to love where I live, to feel like I belong there. Up until arriving here, I was determined not to love where I live, not to learn the language, not to enjoy any aspect of my stay here except my work. Now, I find myself looking for running trails near campus, and making note places that look interesting to go for dinner, and checking out book stores to see if they have an interesting English language collection, wondering if I should invest in language learning tools.

I shouldn't I know. These are bad habits that will only lead to heartbreak when it is time to leave. It seems these are bad habits I cannot be happy without. I can always hope that my city crush will keep the misery of leaving my partner and Epsilon every week at bay for a while.