Quirk

Hello, and welcome, whoever you are.

If you would like to read this blog, please do so, and I'd appreciate a comment so I know you're here. I use it for musings of sporadic sorts, and for keeping in touch with friends, though right now most of them are reading and commenting on the carbon-copied version of my entries over at Livejournal (may they move soon!). Many of my entries are locked, so if you want access and have an (old kind of) OpenID, ask me for access. I also have an opt-in "cat" filter that I don't use much, and a "rants" filter for when I'm just full of rage (though I have rarely needed that either, recently).

Ursula K. Le Guin has a blog, on which she invokes her freedom not to interact with readers. I think that's wonderful, but then I love so many things about her writing, I'm content to admire her from afar.

She did reply to a struggling grad student though, saying "grad school is a very dangerous place", even comparing its stress levels and mental health risk to Afghanistan. I think that's not an appropriate comparison to toss off without an argument, but I would say that grad school is dangerous. Not less so for me than that student, having constantly delegitimized my own depression and isolation, because after all it's a huge privilege to be in a PhD program with funding.

I would tell people I care about: don't do it because you're ambitious, or not do it because you feel inadequate. Don't even do it because you might regret missing the opportunity. Maybe do it if you love the subject itself so much, that you want to take a chance to be trained in it more deeply, that you'd want the learning even if there were no degree at the end. If you love the craft so much that you are willing to put up with a dysfunctional apprentice system. If you go down this road, make sure you have the strength it takes, or the support it takes, not to lose track of yourself, your priorities, and your mental health, in case things get hard. Make sure you are dreaming of multiple futures.

I don't think I regret doing grad school; I've always loved math, and I have learned so much, and have enjoyed being so sharp and curious. I really am excited to see where else my analytical skills take me. And when I talk about the things I really want to do, rather than dismiss them as too hard to bring about, it makes me energetic and creative rather than depressed and overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, I might wish to go back and tell myself to quit after my third year, that once that loss happens that makes me know my personal life is more important than anything else to me, I won't get over it. That is, I won't go on just as before. I won't be able to have as many joyful moments of immersion in math, although I will be able to make something I am proud of. I will meet the love of my life as I know it, and that will give me this strange feeling that now there is no ideal time in my life to look back to, that choosing one would always mean giving up some joy and light.

I'm defending my thesis on Wednesday. I have the summer to add more to the draft I sent to my committee last week. Last Tuesday evening, I finally filled in the last link in the chain for my main theorem, and stopped being afraid that it would all fall apart. At long last the prospect of writing more is not panic-inducing or overwhelming, and is a project I can handle. And the idea of co-writing a paper even after (or while) graduating, is also exciting.

There is a professor coming to speak tomorrow, whom I haven't seen since he visited Harvard in 2007, because he's been in England. He taught me freshman math major stuff including differential forms, and then taught me basic topology. Six years later, having finally figured out what subfield of math I wanted to do, I looked up what he does now, and it turns out he's in the same field! (Actually it seems he has one foot in symplectic and the other in algebraic geometry, but many symplectic people have another foot in something.) I can't help wondering if his way of approaching things was really so influential and appealing to me, that I kept looking until I found something like it. It is that specific part of the world of ideas, that I will miss.

I'm looking forward to seeing Tom tomorrow. He and his wife did advise me to make my decisions based on how much I loved math or didn't, not on how good or not I thought I was. So it will be strange to tell him I'm done with academia, and that I don't quite know what happens next. Strange, but all right, I think.

My friend Tiara posted this status today. It seems all my friends in Boston are physically okay, but this made me think and be scared about friends who might indeed suffer from social backlash. I consider it part of supporting this friend to share the status and ask that others do so, or find other ways to convey similar ideas to anyone you think you can reach.

"Any sort of speculation is just going to be playing into the dangerous hands of bigotry - even when it's "this has the hallmarks of Group XYZ" (which sounds scientific but is just as baseless as anything else). Whether you think it's Al-Qaeda or the Tea Party or North Korea or anarchists or pranksters or whoever, we don't have the information any which way, and we're not in a position to really ever know.

Far more important than wondering who did it is to protect those that are going to be negatively impacted by the speculation - for example, people of color in the US who already are in danger from being assumed to be terrorists even when there isn't a related incident - as well as supporting those who were directly affected however we can (sometimes this does mean staying put). Protecting civil liberties is especially important now because incidents like these end up being excuses for the stifling thereof - look at how the Patriot Act came out of 9/11.

Look out for each other; let's not find ways to make anyone else the Other even if out of "safety".

(I'm making this public; please feel free to share.)"

Who is harmed by a real names policy: I found this article excellently comprehensive.

A photo from 1965 alongside a photo from last night's Brooklyn protests. Showing how little has changed.

Speaking of visceral demonstrations of bad history and the present that sometimes re-enacts it, this blackface montage (blackface, cartoons and other portrayals of black people) from Spike Lee's Bamboozled. I don't know about the film in general, people seem to think it's supposed to be satirical, but the music suggests deep sadness. I wonder who to even show this clip to. I am glad I watched it, it was an injection of so much context that makes blackface never okay. But it would also be needlessly horrifying and upsetting to anyone who already understood this intuitively.

I accomplished a life goal on Tuesday that I didn't know I had until recently: got Julia Serano to come speak at Stanford.

Her talk was deliberately accessible, a version of "putting the femme back in feminism", but the event was called "what we think of blue and pink" due to the freshman (Zoey) I was planning with. Serano seemed to like that theme, she played it up a bit, so Zoey was happy.

There's really been a lot of stress leading up to this, wanting to get good funding, and good publicity. I did most of the work, though supported by two others; but then at the end, several people pitched in, gave opinions, added things, did publicity, and so the event just went *way* better than it should have. I was also glad at the number of people who came, demonstrating that (gasp) you don't need to be trans or interested in trans feminism to get that Serano's work is important! Though, some of the trans students who did come were pleasantly surprised to see each other, and to see the size of the audience.

Maybe I'll write something more concrete about what I got out of the talk. It solidified things I already knew, and made them much easier to understand. It was funny, especially the part about frivolous masculine clothing, "baseball caps and jerseys with things on them that don't do anything!". It...I dunno, during the talk itself I was disappointed that there weren't big new lightbulbs, but I haven't got over how well it was presented. And I realized there were ideas that slid so neatly into my brain I thought I had always known them. I also had forgotten that it was Whipping Girl that taught me about traits being "marked" vs the default, and the effects of that--a big reason why I started using "cis". I had forgotten what it felt like to have confusing seemingly contradictory chunks of information, awareness, and stories, all tied together with their differences used to more clearly illustrate a picture.

We also got to have dinner with her. I did not act all fangirlish. A couple others did, not that I blame them. For me, doing that makes it harder to have a real interaction with someone, and I'm interested in hearing bits of the real person if they're willing to share, or I guess, making them comfortable.

Was talking to a friend this morning about the two-sided tactic of humanizing oppressors, and trying to see oneself as "a good person" while ignoring how one participates in oppression. It was more specific than that, but.

It shouldn't work. "They are oppressing people" shouldn't mean "I don't recognize their humanity". "I am a participant in oppression" doesn't mean "I don't deserve to live" and shouldn't invite useless self-hatred. Similarly, "they are nice people" should not be taken to mean "they are not hurting anybody", and "I am a nice person" does not mean "I am not hurting anybody". (I remember gaudior writing about this too.)

It makes me hate activist communities sometimes, because I see the same self-righteousness cfishy warned me about, and they think of themselves as "better" morally. But that's actually a gross caricature, I just hate it a lot when the grain of truth shows. I think that I too often come across as extremely self-righteous, which I am not trying to be most of the time: I get angry sometimes, but often I just want to talk reasonably about how things could be better, and expect thoughts in return, but find people won't listen or don't have thoughts. Or are tired, that too.

You can understand someone's situation, and limited choices, and maybe their thinking, while also understanding where the wrong is and thinking about how you push them to do better, how can do better yourself and make harder choices. Why is this hard: why is it hard to simultaneously relate to someone's humanity, and criticize their actions? I feel like it isn't, but it has been for me sometimes.

Do we just have that strong an instinct to try to divide things into "good" and "evil"? Is it exacerbated by cultures of individualism that translate to drawing lines between categories, between people? Is that connected to an emphasis on security and safety and sameness and building and 'progress', that translate to violent forms of control? How much is it about the settler colonial legacy of the US, how much does everyone do it through their own frameworks, how much can it be changed?

(In other news, no matter how my thoughts develop, I guess life will always be something of a logic puzzle to me.)

I'm not super friendly to the idea that people can give any single evolutionary theory for how gender and sexuality work. Many people have demonstrated how culture factors in, and many have also ignored this. Many* have also pointed out that sexual behaviors in humans have multiple purposes, not only mating. The best hypotheses for the biological component of sexuality and gender I've seen involve natural variation in hormones at different stages of development. Those have some evidence under tests, I think, but they don't usually claim to explain all of it.

There are also many supposed evolutionary reasons for our variations in sexuality and gender, though one of them is that "evolution is messy". Selection may work differently for those who are XX vs XY and who reproduce. But for example, a tendency toward "more testosterone at life** stage Z than usual" in an XY parent can be passed down to an XX child, and behavioral tendencies can also be passed by meme or by gene to children not of the same karyotype; and then the selection on the same trait works differently for parent and child. And that has to incorporate how selection works on people according to the way they negotiate gender with their societies (some of which, it bears repeating at the risk of a total derail, have codified roles for more than 2 genders, and some of which like ours try to enforce binary gender but give flexible roles). It's complicated.

But too often people's thoughts on the subject divide us into Normals and Queers: the former have passed examination already and the latter are curious zoo creatures. Tell me why I exist, again? Tell me why you think your nature-interacting-with-nurture is independent of mine?

*most recently, the post that inspired this. Not attacking that if you've seen it, there was a lot of useful thought in that about various behaviors, and I know its author has reason to think in a way counter to usual social bias. But pointing out issues that can come up with a larger discourse. I do feel prompted to share words on a subject I've put a lot of reading/thought into but am usually not happy to talk about.

**I mean that life begins at conception. Independent life (i.e. not symbiotic with other humans) usually begins at birth. Personhood is full of questionmarks.

for Americans, whatever that means, Native and not: How do we put the giving back in Thanksgiving?

What is a good way for non-natives to honor Native Americans without adding insult to injury? Should we take the day as a reminder that systems of inequality are still robbing many Natives of their health and well being, depending on their situation? Should we also give money to Native organizations working to improve that problem (or in my case ask well off family members to do so)? I do not find "leave the country I was raised in to live in one I wasn't" to be a fair answer though I would be interested to hear discussion about that too.

(on a totally different subject for those of you who have opted into the "rants" filter I will put something up later that may be interesting ideas on why some of us have different perspectives.)

Something I think I should say, that has been prompted by recent conversations: I'm not a liberal, and neither do I particularly like liberalism. When I've said I was a "social liberal", it was either because that was a phase, or because I didn't have the vocabulary to say otherwise. I have recently come to understand what "liberalism" really looks like most of the time, and to realize that my current way of thinking is only superficially, or one-dimensionally, compatible with it. (My current way of acting? I just hope to work on it.)

( this is not actually that long )

or suburban neighborhoods thereof. In the autumn:

2004 Boston
2005 Boston
2006 Boston
2007 Boston
2008 Philly
2010 SF
2011 SF
2012 SF

Of these 8 autumns, FIVE OF THEM have featured the local baseball team winning the World Series.

And no, I can't name a single player on any of those 3 teams. I like baseball more than football, but not much.

(Other autumns I spent in Princeton or Palo Alto. Not close enough to cities, or perhaps to be safe, since Palo Alto styles itself a city, I should say "not within a few miles of a baseball stadium for an important team").