Earth rocks, rock ‘n’ roll, on the rocks. All Rock Spoken Here.

.@maitri is on UR this week! We talk #womenintech, Gutenberg, and exploration. Listen in: https://t.co/45sTSxvG4D pic.twitter.com/O5PeWjlTQZ

” Undersampled Radio (@undrsmpldrdio) July 25, 2016

Matt Hall and Graham Ganssle had me on as their guest on Episode 17 of Undersampled Radio. In Rock Women Rock!, we talked about the future of energy and the exploration industry, women in geophysics and public domain publishing. Next month, I will be on a podcast on women in applied geophysics with Andrew Geary of the SEG.

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The Society of Exploration Geophysicists 2017 Election is underway with two accomplished female presidential candidates: Anna Shaughnessy and Nancy House. But, wait, there’s more: Manika Prasad is running for vice president! Anna, Manika and Nancy are my friends, mentors and advisors on the SEG Women’s Network Committee. SEG members, please don’t forget to vote before July 31st!

A good year for women in the leadership of the Geophysical Society of Houston as well. The wonderful Amy Rhodes is now President, with Lisa Buckner as 1st vice president, Neda Bundolo as Secretary, Edith Miller as Treasurer and Katherine Pittman as 2nd Vice President Elect. I’ve known Lisa and Edith for years in various SEG capacities and glad they now have an opportunity to lead in the societies they helped build. Good luck to all!

The aforementioned surgery and recovery went well, and I am now part-cyborg (Achievement Unlocked). It’s slowly starting to sink in that arthritis and I are friends for life, and we’re trying to figure out the right combination of anti-inflammatory, corticosteroid and natural treatment, which will change in time. What a drag, I know. Life’s not short, as my new favorite show says, but so long. “The only way to go is to just go on.”

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The work of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) Women’s Network has been progressing nicely. Here are a couple of The Leading Edge articles I’ve recently authored, highlighting the value of inclusiveness and intra-society collaboration.

• How the WNC transformed SEG’s approach to the advancement of women in only 5 years
• Raising the science to greater heights through collaboration

Our committee also answered the call to create an anti-harassment policy applicable to SEG members, which was just adopted by the SEG Board. The policy will soon be available on our network page. We encourage other scientific and technical societies to create such a policy and use ours as a resource.

Another effort in the works is to simplify SEG membership levels to ensure that more than 29% of all members and 37% of paid members can vote in Society elections and assume leadership roles. Changing times and demographics call for changing rules. As I say in support of simpler membership requirements, “SEG is rapidly changing into a younger, more global, and more vocationally diverse organization with responsibilities being taken on and decisions being made earlier in career and internationally. The best way for us as a Society to capture long-term interest and memberships is through encouraging and rewarding this level of participation with voting rights.” Read more about it here.

135 BAEAF @tmbg photos @StubbsAustin via @jamesdickey @g_ack @fridayafternoon @wgtabletop @maitri @chadlyconqueso https://t.co/XPayTlnToI

” CrowdAlbum (@CrowdAlbum) April 9, 2016

When I was two, my parents dropped me off with my grandparents in India and took my older brother on a tour of the United States and that other nation-state known as Disneyland. I had a wonderful time with my Thatha and Patti, visiting old temples all over South India and being treated like mini-royalty by all of their friends and relatives. At the end of the summer, our little family reunited in Kuwait and my parents invited a few friends over to look at slideshows and film reels from their trip. As the pictures flipped across our off-white living room wall, I could not help but notice that I was not in a single one of them. Adventureland? No. Tomorrowland. No. Mickey Mouse’s 50^th birthday? Nope nope nope. In fact, Mom told me I was inconsolable and demanded to know my whereabouts in each and every image. How could I – the most important person in my world and the baby of my family – not have been with said family during a really important trip to a very important place? Foreseeing that “You spent a great time with your grandparents, remember?” wasn’t going to cut it, the folks quickly decided to act on my memory loss. They told me that, in each photograph, I was standing in the back behind them / Donald Duck / bushes / statue / water cooler. “You’re back there.”

In those years, Dad would feed me meals as much as he could. Days after the Disneyland show ‘n’ tell, I would receive spoonfuls of food and ask him details of what We did on Our trip to Disneyland. And he told me about the Jungle Safari Ride, except the animals in his version were alive. Lions, crocodiles, hippopotamuses, wonderful wild LIVE animals surrounded the boat! And then, in a singular stroke of genius, he concocted the story of my bravery in the face of these creatures: I stood at the front of the boat and yelled at each of the animals, and they feared me. “Get away, Lion!” “Get away, Crocodile!” “Get away, Hippopotamus!” And I gobbled it all up, along with the food Dad was trying to make me ingest.

Desperate father + gullible toddler = epic life stories. I was two. I wanted to belong to my family. I wanted to be there with them.

This Lundi Gras, I sit in an armchair that is not located in the city of New Orleans, dictating these words into a microphone (and correcting the tool when it doesn’t understand words like “Thatha” and “Lundi Gras”). At the end of last year, I was diagnosed with acute disc herniation at three cervical (neck) levels, with disc degenerative disease, stenosis and osteoarthritis at the C6-C7 level. An anterior cervical discectomy and fusion has been scheduled for two weeks by now followed by rest and physical therapy. Will I have a cadaver bone, titanium plate, and screws placed in the space where my disc material once was, remain home-bound for almost two weeks after, and have problems swallowing and speaking for months after surgery? Yes. Do I want to go through with this and actually look forward to surgery? Most definitely.

Let me yell as if I were at an animatronic crocodile: MOST DEFINITELY.

Chronic pain is real. As it worsens, the impact that it has on the body’s ability to do even the simplest things, much less travel, exercise, sleep and take on other forms of medical treatment, is immeasurable. But, we don’t necessarily feel it: Humans are historically bad at acknowledging what we can’t see. The body adjusts, it bargains, wheedles and shifts, and then pain becomes the new normal. Until it realizes for a small instant in time what it was once like not to live with pain. A cortisone shot administered a few weeks back did its job for 36 hours – a glorious day and a half in which I thought I was rescued and all was possible. It made me see that it wasn’t just the last couple of months, but almost two years that I’ve lived like this, slowly degenerating into pain, electrical shocks down my arm, inflammation, loss of feeling and muscle weakness, all from a seemingly trivial bicycle accident. For a brief dexamethasone-filled moment, the world wasn’t such a bleak place. Those of you who know me know that I’m an anxious person, but depression? That was a completely alien beast till now. Yeah, The Pain makes you sad, grouchy, reclusive and a whole bunch of other miserable things that you don’t understand because you don’t know that it is The Pain and, even if you do, you are stronger than The Pain and just need to power through it. Even the malaise I can handle, but The Pain began to impact my ability to think clearly and make decisions and to perform work at the high standards to which I hold myself. When I stop functioning as me (and start referring to it as The Pain), it’s time.

I decorated the house, watched the Krewe du Vieux and Krewe Delusion parades for a change and pretended to make a mask before it was time to throw in the towel (with the good arm). The Mardi Gras Mathematics was inscrutable: Neck cannot hold more than one strand of good beads, left arm cannot go over head for more than four seconds, I wince when anything/anyone even grazes my left arm, a nap is all I want and, most importantly, NO NEW MASK and NO CLEVER COSTUME. Oh, and did I mention no anti-inflammatories and painkillers until after the surgery? Therefore, Mardi Gras 2016. To make me feel better, a friend in New Orleans offered, “It will be here next year, some other time.” That’s just it. Will it? New Orleans is a lot like life: high highs, low lows and absolutely not guaranteed at all. Have we forgotten already? Don’t we remember ten years ago when we kissed the freshly-drained parade routes? It is our privilege to be there.

In a recent fit of self-pity, I snarled at D not to send me any pictures from New Orleans. “I don’t want to see any of them because I won’t be in any.” D smiled and said: “Oh, come on, it’ll be like Disneyland. You’ll be in the back!”

So, I close my eyes and make believe I am in New Orleans, all dressed up on the parade route and screaming, “Get away, drunk tourist! Get away, smelly hipster! Get away, neutral-ground-hogging Chad!” I am a New Orleanian. I want to belong to my family. I want to be there with them.