In the last twenty years, I have worked as:
chemistry lab assistant, mathematics tutor,
electronics store salesperson, bank teller, lawnmower,
geology lab assistant, babysitter, inorganic chemistry tutor, computer lab assistant,
geology research assistant, geologist intern, geology teaching assistant,
geological engineering / virtual reality research assistant,
virtual reality center coordinator, web designer, Indian languages advisor,
geologist, geophysicist, krewe accountant,
geospatial & engineering services technologist, tech blogger
What jobs (and other unpaid responsibilities) have you had?
* If you don’t get the title reference, you Must Watch This (and, no, it’s not that stupid South Park “Jarbs” episode).
A guy I knew ages ago had me read a short story he penned called The Futility Of Being A Gopher. If I remember correctly, it’s all about a gopher who goes about its business in a hobbity burrow. Once you start to feel for this gopher, by sheer virtue of having spent five valuable minutes of your life reading about it, and again if I remember correctly, an alien spaceship crashlands into Earth, said portion of Earth including the gopher. Gopher is teats up, or teats flattened given a spaceship is on top of it. The End.
I was 19 at the time and had no use for such pointless bilge. The gopher was to start its epic journey towards Z’ha’dum or Mount Doom or something that rhymes with Oom and save the planet from a threat we were blissfully unaware of, thus shedding a limited gopher-shaped body to transform into something bigger and more heroic. Super Kryptonite Investi-Gopher or Gophero, the sworn enemy of mutant carrots everywhere. Now that I am in my 30s and think back on that story, my friend may have been onto something. I’m sure there were some other clever, post-modern metaphors in there, but the most obvious one stands out: Life is out of your control, and crap happens when you dream about the great plans you just made. Or that the gopher was doing it all wrong and could be Herr Commandant of the Underground Resistance if it had simply armed itself. The futility of being a pacifist country gopher, as it were.
Chippy The Attack Gopher (don't ask)
All of this is to say that I’m terribly frustrated today. I was supposed to be in New Orleans tonight, but will not leave Ohio until early Sunday. See this horrible monster in the Southeast that doesn’t even have the common decency to dress in complementary colors? Thanks to it, I will putz about my house – rearranging the folded clothes and plowing my driveway yet another time – for an extra 36 hours and lose an important day of Carnival. Even more irritating is that I haven’t spent any meaningful time with D in three weeks and he has been down there waiting for me. I really don’t know how much longer we can handle this financially- and emotionally-burdensome business travel lifestyle. Something has to give.
Could be worse, could be gopher pancake under an alien spaceship.
Sat up in bed early this morning, a Sunday morning, knowing this would happen. Changed into my Ashley shirt at halftime. I knew they’d win, but didn’t know how or by how many points. Three good dead-on Hartley field goals. Then, the Tracy Porter interception and runback. I have never been more certain of victory.
At this moment in time and history, I sit shaking in utter disbelief. But why? I knew all along. Still, like Cade, I took the above picture and am posting it here, so that when I look at this blog tomorrow, I will know it’s not just a dream. Thank you, Drew Brees. We deserve this, New Orleans. You deserve this, lifelong Saints fans. A team that plays with so much heart had to have destiny on their side.
WHO DAT! WHO DAT! WHO DAT SAY DEY GONNA BEAT DEM SAINTS? NO ONE.
I haven’t read much of Zinn’s work, but this essay for The Nation meant a lot to me during the dark days of the Bush II administration. It still does.
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
… An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
If we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. I hope President Obama and congressional Democrats are listening.
This morning, I opened the front door to another fresh, breathtaking blanket of snow. Figures, the last holdout of ice from previous storms had just melted and all was clean and visible once again.
Sitting in the utter, enveloping whiteness of snow-covered everything is like being in your own personal limitless isolation tank. Thoughts come and go, some settling like the snow into the furrows of a glove. Only this is important, not your worries, not what lies ahead. For what is ahead or behind in this colorless, dimensionless universe, at the interface of billions of years of earth and the atmosphere rushing into your face? To know this beauty, to be a part of something so big and small that it makes scale immaterial.
And then to rise and acknowledge that which lies beyond this moment. The walk. Through the snow and through life, with a resolution to keep this feeling in the back of your head. Good luck with that. Brimful and I are in the same orbit today, at least when it comes to snow and metaphorical snow, although we ramped into it from different perspectives. I will let her finish.
You could meditate on such things when enveloped in a cloud of snow, in the blanket of white that makes everything look clean, pristine, untouched once again. It’s a blank slate, a slate wiped clean. You can take it as a sign and forge a path.
Or you can just take a deep breath of the fresh mountain air and behold the beauty of the temporary. Because you have been here before. You know it won’t last. Remember that this slate is really just covered, not clean. You know what lies beneath. But that doesn’t make you jaded. It makes you more aware of how precious, how amazing. So look at the impossibly blue sky and feel the biting wind from the lake, and let your eyes burn from the blinding reflection of the white.
It’s hard work, walking through a snow drift. And once you’re in deep, once you are in the heart of the forest, it’s like so many other difficult journeys- you must finish, simply because you have no other recourse, no other options that require less of you. It’s exhausting and after a while, you feel as though you simply can’t continue. But you stop, and take it all in, embrace the moment, and then you start again. And you keep going until you reach the end. And when you reach the end, it feels such a relief, it feels as though you will never feel so happy to be on pavement.
But the next day, you do it all again.
In A Rant About Women, Clay Shirky observes that women do not mimic specific bombastic aspects of their male counterparts in order to get ahead. This isn’t about female diffidence, Shirky argues, but the apparent inability of many of us to be self-promoting assholes.
And it looks to me like women in general, and the women whose educations I am responsible for in particular, are often lousy at those kinds of behaviors, even when the situation calls for it. They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so. Whatever bad things you can say about those behaviors, you can’t say they are underrepresented among people who have changed the world.
Now this is asking women to behave more like men, but so what?
The whole article is worth reading in its entirety, but its bottom line is captured in the quoted portion above. It would be easy to negate Shirky with some hocus-pocus female social psychology. Half-heartedly mumble something about women being honest, forthright, social, parallel-thinking, consequence-foretelling creatures who like to maintain equality and peace and move on, right? Wrong. Women can and want to get ahead just as much as men do, and are equally cut-throat if not more devious in some situations, but this is about unabashed self-promotion and the social perception of such behavior.
Three things came to mind and stuck as I read this article:
1. When advising them on their resumes, I tell other women to go for the moon, hell go for the next galaxy! Sell, sell, sell, sell everything you have and more because you know you can get there once you have the job. I cannot for the life of me do this with my own resume. This is very telling.
2. The Girl Who Conned The Ivy League and how proud, not scornful, I am of her.
3. How my mother and I worked our tails off and have often cavalierly stuck our neck out there in selling ourselves, how this has worked with disastrous and stupendous results, and how we deal every single day with who we have become in the process.
This third and last thought is what I want to explore some more in responding to Shirky’s post.
When young scientists, my mother and I just did science – we studied hard, aced our tests, spent inordinate amounts of time in laboratories doing more than we were asked to do, raised our hands to ask pertinent and impertinent questions, graduated with honors, entered competitive graduate programs, published papers – and expected that the rewards would come automatically. Not so. As Richard Hamming from Bell Labs said in his You And Your Research talk, “The fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you’ve done, read it, and come back and say, ‘Yes, that was good.’” Fair enough. Mom and I took our loud chutzpah and pitched our work. I am the best representative of a certain department or for a certain conference for these reasons, mine is the ideal method to move this project forward and here’s why, I am the best-suited actor, play director or accountant because of this. This energy worked wonders in getting ahead but, simultaneously, that’s when things started to fall apart in the interpersonal relations department. Other people, men, women and bosses included, began to see us not as team players, but uppity blowhards because we knew we were better at something and chose to push ourselves ahead of the proverbial herd. When guys in our peer groups did the same thing, but with lots less qualifications backing them, they were just being guys. I tell you, Hell is other people.
Shirky addresses the Other People problem in his rant and advises, “The fact that [they] get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.” True, but then he starts the next paragraph with “Not caring works surprisingly well.” Actually, it does and it doesn’t. “Not caring” is often a lonely place to be. But that’s not the point here, either. I’ll bet you lunch that the reality is that we women sometimes do nothing and other times do something and don’t at all care about the reaction, popularity be damned. The real predicament lies not in not doing or not caring, it’s in whether our behavior meets expectation at any given time.
Some examples: I used a certain tone and sales pitch to land a job once. When I employed a similar optimistic level of enthusiasm on another project with the same manager, I was yelled at and sent back to my office. A few months later, I was given a promotion but also told that I kept my head down too much. In another job, one for which I was hired to be smart, a big criticism of me was that I talked too smart. I would love to know how many guys are told these same things; I’ll bet you another lunch that that number is minuscule in comparison. In effect, career women are expected to be assertive to get ahead but, when we are, it’s looked on as insubordination or cockiness. Whether it occurs knowingly or not, a woman not caring about her self-aggrandizing behavior does have very real consequences on her job reviews and satisfaction and, ultimately, her job itself. So, women do desire getting ahead as much as men, and in the process undergo some stress-filled, uncertain days nervously wondering if and when the axe is going to fall because we tapped our inner nutsack. That’s a huge surcharge.
Especially in this economy, cross-disciplinary innovation is key and college degrees do not guarantee career success. I’ve taken risks and gone from biology to geology to 3d modeling to geophysics to project management to physics to geospatial technology to get where I am today, and I still don’t know where that is, but I get paid to be a scientist and invent technologies, it’s fun and I’m learning a lot. So, I encourage everyone, not just women, to follow Shirky’s advice and take “opportunities which [we] might in fact fuck up if [we] try to take them on, and then try to take them on.” This comes naturally to assertive, confident, social people who want to change the world.
But, once a woman is on that journey, channeling that aggressive behavior into immodesty to get ahead happens at great personal risk. The weird, complex ecosystem of workplace expectations and interactions makes sure that she is rewarded rather capriciously, a lot more so than men in the same situation. This deters some women and only makes others fight more and harder. You want obnoxious car saleswomen? Fine. Then, this culture, this moody bigotry of “you’ll get ahead if you’re more assertive but to a point or only on the days when society is feeling particularly advanced” has to stop. Asking women to change their behaviors, while excusing the fickleness of workplace responses as a given which we have to fight against, is a horrible double standard.
As hard as it is even for highly-educated, self-assured women of my generation, it’s not. Consider my mother: A twiggy 24-year-old Indian woman in a sari and bindi in early-1960s Kuwait, leading a part-competitive, part-lazy horde of Arab nutritionists in the fight against the awful food choices of an increasingly oil-wealthy populace. We have money, let’s eat Burger King, all the time! So that her workers would understand her and each other and to keep them from plotting behind her back, Mom learned seven different dialects of Arabic and translated and placated over and above her actual work. Volatile meetings, backstabs, obscene anonymous phone calls, death threats sent to the house, she withstood all of that, but what I think cut her the most was having to hand over credit for her work to Kuwaitis. No way they were going to let a brown woman take bows on behalf of The Emirate.
America used to be like this, but it changed. It has evolved to where someone like me has worked with and for black, Asian-American, Hispanic and white women in a traditionally-male-dominated oil industry. It has transformed into older men working for younger women, a lot of ceilings removed. There is a great power struggle yet among bosses, workers and colleagues, and this can never be taken as a given. Ten or twenty or even a hundred years from now, no woman should have to say, “I guess I am used to temperamental, latent and unconscious bigotry, so I just work around it.” Working around something is oceans away from being an arrogant, self-promoting jerk and getting rewarded for it. I can behave like a man with the best of them. The question is: Are they willing always to treat me like a man when I do?
