What a difference a year makes

Last year, on this date, I wrote that I had just accepted my current position. I am still trying to see if language like that referred to in that post is just a sign of how things are done here, with no unconscious sexist overtones. My efforts in cultural understanding are not being helped by the grad student down the hall who is also having a hard time adjusting culturally, and keeps telling me about the insults she has borne from the men she meets.

A year ago Friday, my partner left for University E. I was not a happy camper, though comparing it with the giddyness of today/last night the Gibran quote about joy and sorry being closely linked seems more apt now.

It helps that my partner and I are much better poised in terms of our research. It helps that Epsilon is older, and therefore easier to single parent. It helps that the commutes keep shrinking, and now it only involves several long train rides. It helps that we don't have to worry about money any more.

I have not accepted as yet. I am waiting for a response to one e-mail I sent last night. I think I know what the e-mail will say. And then I get to think about visas. I have never been so happy to worry about immigration issues.

JOB!!!!!

It's a post-doc. The PI's seems to be a guy I get along with. The project is exciting, new, and definitely diversifying my portfolio. I've been wanting to work on a project like this for 9 months now, long before I saw the ad for this position. It is located such that we could decide to keep having two households, but only a 3.5 hour commute each way (I could be home for dinner on Fridays!!!!!), or one household, and work heavily from home.

There are cons as well. I won't go into them now. I just spent the last couple hours digesting this news on the phone with my partner. But for now:

I have a job
A jobby jobby jo-o-ob.
I have a job
A jobby jobby job!

More digestion of my job hunting process, the pros and cons of this versus other positions, and 2 body problem musings to follow over the next few days.

But I have a job!
I get to live closer to my kid!
I can has family dinner on Mondays AND Fridays!
WOOOOOOTT!!!!

Be the change you want

This has nothing to do with the US election.

Last year, when on the job market, and looking up random people's websites at schools interesting looking department, I noticed that when a department had lots of pictures of young fathers with pictures of their children on their website, it made me feel like that might be a department I would be comfortable in, were I to work there. Then I noticed that there were no women, in any departments who had pictures of their children on their front page, and I wondered whether I should put up a picture of myself with Epsilon on my webpage.

I'm still on the job market. I'm at a new place, so my webpage needed to be brought over. I've decided to come out as a parent.

Yes, I know, in some ways, this is a stupid move. But moving here has made me mad. These last few months, I find myself living in possibly the most sexists environment that I have encountered in the developed world*. For the first time in my career, I feel like I have no role models near me, and I hear much more about the paucity of role models from the grad students down the hall than I ever did in the US. So, yeah. I'm mad. And anger leads me to do stupid things. Maybe this will effect me poorly. Maybe it won't. I'll probably never know. But I feel like someone has to step up to the plate.






*Visits to my family, who, as all diaspora do, still think they are living in the old county of 45 years ago, is not being counted for this analysis. 

Keyless

A friend of mine once said that he hated having too many keys on his keyring. Each key represented a responsibility to him. He couldn't drop them and go travelling whenever the urge took him.

I was 19 and the idea of travelling was appealing. Three years later, when I graduated from college and changed continents for the first time, I found myself keyless for several month. I flipped out. For me, it would seem, a house key represents stability and community.


I am currently in the middle of my fourth transcontinental move, and my unease at not having house keys has only diminished a little. This is not an unusual situation for academics, and PLS and Dr. Becca have talked about their feelings on this recently.

I'm trying to put a positive spin on things right now, so I won't focus on the fact that I miss hanging out with Epsilon's friends' parents, or the problem of being science lonely, or the difficulty meeting people without a cohort of gradstudents.

Our last major move (to First Postdoc Town) was when Epsilon was -.25 years old. As my partner pointed out, it is a lot easier to meet neighbors with a 2.75 year old than with a -.25 year old.

My partner's department has a lot more people with kids Epsilon's age than my postdoc department did. This means there is a real chance of making friends with people with whom we share more in common than our kids.

One of my partner's colleagues is a friend of his from grad school. He has been in this department for longer, and is a very social person. He's taken it upon himself to drag my partner out to meet people. As a result, we have a bit of a social network set up near University E already.

When I move to University F, while I'll have linguistic difficulties in meeting people outside the department, I've heard rumors that it is a very friendly and social department. This means that there is some hope that I can knock on office neighbors' doors and grab people for lunch. If the main social activity for the department is drinks/dinner after speakers, Epsilon's sunrise wakeups won't keep me from attending.

Its a plan. Not a great one, but a plan. A friend of mine wrote me when I was complaining about this move

Moving only sucks for a few weeks! You've had an amazing adventure with your family that most people in the world would never be able to have!!

She dreams of picking up her family and going backpacking through Europe. I dream of PTA meetings and watching Epsilon's friends grow up. She's right of course, about the adventure and the privileged position we are in. I'll feel better once I have two sets of house keys in my hand.

From the other side of the fence

"Collin came home yesterday, and I think I spent an hour talking to him about dog food and grocery store aisles. I open my mouth and these words come out, and I don't know who it is that is talking," Selene told me as Collin buckled their twins into the car after a play date with Epsilon. "I envy your travelling around for the summer. I wish I could put on my backpack again and hitch hike around Europe."

My protestations of rootlessness and loss of friends all seemed empty in the face of Selene's frustration at being bound to one place for so many years. In spite of the fact that we'll be making a significant move in June to start new positions in September, the fact of the matter is, three conferences relatively close to each other, with a week's down time between each means that our family will have a chance to travel significantly, with a sort of subsidy. The number of stamps in Epsilon's passport embarrasses me when talking to my friends, who, for one reason or another cannot travel so much.

In some cases, it's a class thing. In others it's a job thing. Travelling is one of the perks that keeps me in this line of work. Taking my mother abroad to stay at a fancy conference hotel (and watch Epsilon) where 20 years ago she would take me is a cherished pleasure. Each year, my flight to a different tourist city for a conference, is one more than I could make in a different line of work.

I hear the envy for this lifestyle in Selene's voice. I share her periodic feelings of restlessness and sense of being tied down by family. As the kids wave goodbye to each other, I know she mirrors my sadness in knowing that their remaining play dates are numbered. We both say our goodbyes, longing for the parts of the other's life that we don't have.

I am trying to convince myself that it is not just that the grass is greener on the other side. I am trying to remember why I chose this career.

A gift from my father's side

After dinner, my father used to sit in his easy chair and listen to music and watch TV while we kids played in the living room. "Barefoot," he'd regularly call. "Come pluck out my white hairs." I'd run over to him, and he'd move to a position where I could reach better. As the years rolled on, he realized that he was fighting a loosing battle. A decade later, a few of the cousins, with goading from the aunts got his brothers and him to dye their hair. But at this point, all the men in my father's side of the family would do as well to have their few remaining dark hairs pulled out to leave a full field of snow on their heads.

I thought of this sequence of events as I stared, flabbergasted, at four white hair front and center on my head.

"How old are you?" He asked. Shocked, I could not find the wits to politely tell him That should be irrelevant. "28." I answered. "Huh. People often don't want to take post docs who are over 30." Back in the visitor's office, his grad student assured me that he was just trying to be fatherly, and that this mindset was true in his home country.

It doesn't matter I tell myself, staring at the white cluster. I'll be moving to his home country in September, 5 years after that conversation. I put my date of birth in the application, and I got the post doc.

Shocked choruses of "you're old," and "I would have guessed you are much younger" from colleagues who, never deviating from the academic path, entered graduate school at 22 and post docs at 27 fill my head. I respond with a memory of walking home from a friend's house when I lived abroad after college. I was giddy with the realization that I was finally living in a society where my age and waistline did not anti correlate with my desirability in society. At 23, I was devastatingly young, to young to be deemed able to do anything. At 40 a man comes into his own, and stops being one of the younger generation.

Which of these would I give up, I ask myself. The fifth year of undergrad to complete my second major? My years abroad? My year studying something completely different? None of these are worth the possibility of tenure before 40, of being rid of my student status before the greys appear. No, I've made the right decisions. These few years are just a rough patch. Once I am through this, I will wear my experience and my hair proudly.

Grad student life style

I've packed my partner and Epsilon off to my in laws yesterday, and I find that I've already slipped back into my gradstudent lifestyle.

I stayed at work until my brain was full last night. Came home to a dinner of ramen and vegetables over a paper on a new subject I am trying to learn. When I got stuck, I got ready for bed, thinking about the problem. To keep my mind for fretting while trying to sleep, I went to bed with a novel, and read into the early am.

This morning, I turned the alarm to radio, and drifted in and out for a while listening to the morning's news. When I finally stumbled out of bed, I settled down to a cup of coffee and last night's paper. More coffee, and I packed lunch and reviewed my lecture notes for my morning class before heading out the door. I used to keep interesting papers on my bedside table, in case there was a morning I didn't feel like getting out of bed. I'm considering this luxury for the weekend.

Tonight, I even have an evening engagement!

None of these things could I do if they were around. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed this lifestyle. This is almost enough for me to look forward to being apart from them again in September!

Culture clash

I just accepted the position at University F. I got a warm "We're so glad" e-mail back with a question about how we resolved our 2-body problem, and an assumption that Epsilon would live with me. (I had spoken to them about my 2 body problem, during the decision phase.)

These two lines jumped out the the e-mail and punched me in the nose. My immediate reaction was that "I've made a decision, how and why I came to that decision is none of your business," even more so if you are going to assume that Epsilon is going to live with me.

In short, the questions rang my "possible sexism alert" alarm bells. Then I realized that I'm changing countries, and I no longer have the protections and benefits afforded me by a generation of anti-discrimination activists, lobbyists, policy makers, laws and best practices. I am lucky to be living in a country that realizes, at least on some level, that human beings have flaws, however conscious one tries to be of one's biases, they play a role in hiring decisions and in how we treat others. To avoid this problem of accidentally denying someone a job because of these biases, we as a society, or at least our HR overlords, have decided that we cannot ask certain questions. I think this self censoring has slipped in a little into how we interact with people beyond the hiring decision, and questions like these are less likely to be asked.

I am moving to a country that is not as open in its discussion about discrimination as the US, and will likely face more awkward moments like this in the months to come. (I had a similar experience when talking to a professor about advice applying to post-docs, and he asked me my age. These things are just not done in the US, but is common practice from his context.)

These questions were probably asked by someone attempting to be friendly and welcoming. But it was a wake-up call to the fact that I will be emigrating, and thus not only living in a completely different social culture, but a different work culture as well.