Anyhow, I still feel spastic today, but totally killed it at work.  I got so much done.  And now?  Now we are going to the county fair!  To watch a goat milking competition.  No shit.  So, obviously, that means I will have things to put on the ol’ blog later.  But for now, a story from yesterday….

***

Right so when I got my coffee yesterday, a hilarious thing happened.  This dude had been tailgating me for maybe 5 or 10 miles of my commute.  This is a small town, and the traffic is generally all headed to the same place – the lab – so tailgating seems pretty dumb, to me.  I mean, traffic moves god-awful slow, but come on…  not smart.  So he’s tailgating me, even though I’m going 5 over as much as traffic permits.  Then I get to the coffee joint and start to move into the turn lane (using my signal, of course!).  He WHIPS around me, accelerates into the turn lane and speeds into the parking lot.  I mosey in (elevated heart rate and all), and walk casually in the door after him.  He looks all agitated, so of course (OF COURSE) I say something.  “Sucks when the person you’ve been pointlessly tailgating for 10 minutes is going the same place as you, huh?”

He responds with “Learn how to drive, bitch!”, at which I laugh.

So then we proceed to hang out next to each other in line for 10 minutes (rush hour at a coffee joint!).  Here’s the rest of our conversation:

“What would you have had me do differently?  You know, to drive better?”

(sputtering) “You were going 10 under the speed limit!”

“No, I was going 40, except when pulling into red lights.  Then, you know, I slowed down, as one does…”

“There was too much space between you and the cars in front of you”

“Oh, you mean the ones that were stopped?  At the red lights?”

“Whatever bitch, learn how to drive”

“I hope you wreck you car.  Have a lovely day!”

*

*

*

I do love awkward.  I also love how this was probably the funniest thing that has happened to me in a month, and it likely ruined his day (and I maintain that he would have been totally aggro even if I hadn’t said anything to him).  My karma might have suffered, but I’m not sure.

It just seems so fraught to tailgate, or be rage-y in public in a town this small.  The walls have ears, here.  The person at whom you choose to direct your ire?  She works at the lab, in a senior position.  He’s the husband / brother / son of one of your co-workers.  She lives down the street.  Small town.  Don’t be dumb!

***

Ok, ok – I made friends, I play frisbee, I’m busy, things are good.  Things are really good.  I can go days without GA memories.  The memories, and the whole, well – it’s like getting punched, when I think about it.  About the lovely humans I don’t get to talk to everyday, the people whose lives I’m not a daily part of.  But on some level, I’ve been so surprised and so lucky to see how the distance doesn’t matter as much as I thought it would.  When I see my old friends, when I talk to them – it just doesn’t matter.

Ok enough of that sugar for now…

Let’s just do a high/low, eh?

High: figuring out some calculus.  I still got it!

Low: drinking 3 cups of coffee absent-mindedly, and subsequently feeling on the verge of passing out all day.  WwwooooowoOoOO.  Dizzy.

+++

On what are you most often complimented?

Physically, I receive a lot of compliments about my hair – strawberry blond, stick straight, and softer than anything.  I have actually always hated my hair.  I want its antithesis – curly, dark brown – and have made it thus once or twice.  I loved it, but I am far too lazy to do such things consistently, and blond roots make you look like your hair is falling out.  My hair is a blessing for someone as beauty-challenged as I am.  I use a blow dryer approximately twice a year, and I don’t own any hair product.  The bit I really like is how soft it is – seriously haven’t met anyone with hair softer than mine.  Which leads to people playing with it all the time, which leads to me being happy as a kitten.

I also receive a fair number of compliments on my legs.  I noticed this playing frisbee – a lot of the other girls would comment that I had “nice skinny legs,” which sort of baffled me as I’d never given them much thought beyond they’re utility.  This lead to a nice bout of comparing my body to other women’s (always a lovely idea!), and while I do appreciate my legs more now, it’s at the expense of the total package – suddenly I’m hyper aware that my legs are disproportionately skinny compared to the rest of me!  Alas.

Aside from my physical attributes, I am frequently complimented on my intelligence and for “having my life together.”  Both of these have always felt a little squicky to me – they are the type of compliments I’m not sure how to respond to.  I feel my parents deserve as much or more credit for each of these than I do, and I don’t feel particularly ahead of the curve in either regard.  On surface, I’m “further along” than most of my peer group professionally and financially, but I do feel much of that is luck of the draw and poorly thought out choices (that turned out well!).  Below the surface, I’m sort of a mess.  Though, I think a lot of people are!

My sense of humor tends to draw lots of compliments from like-minded individuals (which is to say, people who are crass and sarcastic).  One of my friends in particular has always maintained that I should have a one woman comedy show, wherein I would sit on a stool on a stage, knitting, and talking about whatever came to mind.  I don’t totally understand her amusement, but I do love to hang out with her – making someone laugh that hard is incredibly gratifying.

+++

What is the best compliment you have ever received?

I just finished my PhD in November, which felt sort of empty – anticlimactic.  I didn’t feel nearly so accomplished as I had hoped I might when I began grad school.  My parents came to my defense, and after I emerged victorious from 3 hours of questioning, my father pulled me aside.  My father, the physicist – one of not a small number of PhDs in my family – told me that he was incredibly proud of me, but not yet impressed.

I liked that, because while most compliments engender in me a mix of embarrassment and arrogance, he managed to curtail both in an incredibly sincere way.  Not to mention the modicum of sarcasm, which has always been our way of relating to one another – it has become one of my favorite moments with my father, sort of a summing up of our relationship thus far.

+++

What is your favorite thing about yourself that people rarely compliment?

My eyes.  I think I have beautiful eyes, but I sometimes wonder if I am deluding myself because no one ever notices them.  It’s sort of ironic that in the past year I have lost a notable portion of my vision, and developed chronic dry eye – perhaps I should pick a new favorite feature!

+++

I have seen the sunrise every day since I arrived.  And the sunset.  It’s only light for 9 hours a day right now, and I am at work for all of those hours.  My boss drove me home on my first day, because Husband was dealing with the movers, and I realized as we entered my neighborhood that I had no idea what my house looked like.  We drove past it twice, because I couldn’t see the number over the garage.  I didn’t really remember what color my house was until yesterday, the first time I saw it in daylight.

I have been diligently unpacking boxes and putting things in cabinets and drawers.  I can see the beginnings of a home, in this beautiful house I can’t really believe I own.  I’m just not sure if it’s my home.

I have work to do after work, gotta get those papers out, gotta apply for that award, gotta get that presentation ready.  Gotta read and read, so they are impressed.  And so I keep forgetting to call my friends until after dinner, when it’s already well past 11 pm on the other side of the country.

My job is actually great so far, as I knew it would be.  Professionally, this is the best place for me to be.  My colleagues are fantastic, the research is interesting, the lab is perfect.  If I am going to succeed in my field, it will be here.

People assume newcomers will have a hard time adjusting to the landscape – deserts aren’t for everyone, I suppose.  But that’s not it for me.  It’s beautiful here, even in the winter.  You can see for miles and miles, and the essentially treeless mountains underscore how amazing the earth itself can be.  The sky is breathtaking, even when it’s grey, as it so often is during the winter.

I’m just afraid I won’t be able to make the connections I need socially.  It’s a small town, a family town.  I know it’s only been a week, and it’s the doldrums of winter, it just seems so unfathomably difficult.  And so unlikely!  How could I possibly find people like the people I already had?

I’ve tried explaining this to a number of my friends, often to no avail – it’s a tough subject.  The author points out the fact that understanding very large and very small numbers, and even more so, very large and very small probabilities, is not intuitive for many people. Because it is intuitive to me, and also because I have spent the last several years learning to understand those ideas, I have a hard time explaining it to them.

Without even considering the negative effects of frequent and unnecessary exposure to radiation from mammograms (which is a very interesting part of this problem to me), it’s simply not worth it.  There are too many false positives, false negatives – reading the article for the discussion of these concepts alone is worth clicking over.  Can you imagine the emotional and physical toll of being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer, only to find out you don’t have it?

The problem is more easily explained with colon cancer screening, I’ve found.  Colonoscopies are uncomfortable, embarrassing, and risky.  Perforation of the colon occurs at a rate of about 1 in 1400 to 1 in 1000 – that is, for every 1400  (or less!) people who get a colonoscopy, a hole gets ripped in one of their colons (source below).  This requires surgery, with its inherent risks – you know how you sign a piece of paper that says you could die every time a scalpel or anesthesia is involved?  Yeah.

So the fact that colonoscopies are recommended for everyone over the age of 50?  A little scary.  I would wager that I know at least 500 people in that age group, professionally or personally.  That number will obviously go up as I get older.  And as you are to get one per year?  God, I’m getting scared just thinking about it.  But, 1 in 1000 is considered a low risk – that’s only 0.1%.  It all depends on how it is presented – I interpret the latter as less risky, intuitively, than the former.

Back to mammograms.  It’s tough to say whether I will follow the new screening advice (you know, if it hasn’t changed in 15 – 25 years when it becomes more relevant to me).  It’s hard to weigh the more nebulous risks of exposure to an invisible mutagen, and the possibility of unnecessary treatment against the more tangible (and publicized) demon – breast cancer.  It’s hard for me – for us – to consider “invisible” risks (things that will happen so far in the future that they seem disconnected from their stimuli) in a rational way.

What do you think?  Will you get mammograms before age 50 if you are asymptomatic?

———

Panteris, et al. 2009.  Colonoscopy perforation rate, mechanisms and outcome: from diagnostic to therapeutic colonoscopy.  Endoscopy 41, 941 – 951.

1.  Bake my own bread regularly

2.  Run at least once a week (preferably in addition to other exercise)

3.  Take more pictures of every day life

4.  Make a household chores schedule and find a way to split them up evenly

5.  Take pictures of my knitting and update my ravelry site

6.  Stop buying food I can cook just as well for cheaper

7.  Be the kind of person who sends holiday letters.  Or any letters.

8.  Take advantage of what my new city has to offer (i.e. play outside a LOT)

9.  Learn to repair minor household things, like leaky faucets

After moving out of the residential college, I went to my parents’ home ever so briefly, and then moved into a 2000 Nissan Frontier with my friend, Climber.  We embarked on a three month journey around the country, which is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done.  Peaked at 20, such a shame.  We spent time in West Virginia (New River Gorge), Philadelphia (this kid we met at the NRG paid us money to move him from his dorm in Philly to….), southern Illinois (there are rocks there.  seriously.), Wyoming (Wild Iris in the Wind Rivers Range), British Columbia (Squamish), California (Yosemite, duh), and Idaho (City of Rocks).  I could spend an eternity talking about this trip, and probably should at some point.  This was the defining experience of my life thus far; it is when I found my confidence, it is when I learned about friendship and adulthood and dumpster diving, it is when I tore the ligaments in my wrist that kept me at UGA for grad school.

I returned to UGA for my senior year (wait! that’s only 3 years!…), and moved into an apartment for the first time, with my good friend Turboslut.  Now, I didn’t yet realize she was a turboslut, and in fact, hadn’t yet coined the term (I maintain that is my neologism, and every time I say it I get a particularly naughty visual likening a woman’s naughty bits to a mariokart driver going over one of those turbo strips…  You’re welcome!).  I spent the first 6 months or so essentially having the apartment to myself, as Turbo was in a serious relationship and spent all her time with her boyfriend.  She would come home occasionally to make a giant mess in the kitchen, and then be gone long enough for the fruit flies to come.  This is, obviously, where I perfect my passive aggressive note leaving abilities.  One gem included a delightful comic strip describing what happens when you leave a stack of cardboard in a thoroughfare, with a stick figure biting it hard on the way to the bathroom.  Once Turbo was single though, the tables turned.  And by that I mean she slept with more men than I currently know.  I frequently came home only to be greeted by a sex scene right out of a porno, her felating some guy on the couch in front of the front door, or sounds resounding from her bedroom that I’ve only ever heard issuing from a Jenna Jameson flick.  It was delightful.  They never even paused to acknowledge how icky they were being as I entered the room.

Shortly after all my close friends had worked out their living situations for the following year, I decided it would be a grand idea to attend grad school at UGA and set about finding a place to call home.  I ended up finding a roommate on Craigslist, and spent a year on the north side of town off Boulevard.  This is a quaint, hipster area with cute ramshackle houses and townies in tight jeans with adorable wild-haired children. I lived in a small shotgun house near the railroad tracks with a girl we’ll call Who Cares.  Which is to say, we never really connected.  We had a couple of heart to hearts about how she was an incorrigible cheater looking for love, and how my boyfriend-at-the-time (let’s call him Fester) may or may not have been good enough for me (the answer, it turns out, was a resounding NOoNononono No).  Highlights of this year included watching my cat, Pumpking, and her dog, Mac, pretend each other did not exist.  Also delightful was the fact that my bed only fit one way in my tiny room, and that was up against a poorly fitted and forever shut door.  Directly on the other side of that door was the living room couch.  This was, in a word, awkward.

From there, I moved into Fester’s house (he and his roommates were vacating the place), with three close friends Caro, Monty, and Clorox.  The house was on one of the seedier, townier sides of our downtown area, in close proximity to bars and shops and food galore.  This was the year of the great depression, as I found myself with a very bad, terrible, no good advisor after my first year of grad school, and a very bad, terrible, no good boyfriend to boot.  I remember the night Monty moved in – she was sleeping on a mattress in the living room that night – and Fester was out with all his friends.  He stumbled home – to the wrong home, as he had moved days before – to our front porch, and yelled for me until I came down.  He then proceeded to puke all over me and our front porch, and raise hell, and make an ass of himself, and scare me half to death, before I could locate his (noisy, boisterous, douchebaggy) friends to take him home.  This was after I found out he’d been cheating on me, among other things.  So, obviously, I waited 6 more months to break up with him.  I can only plead Stockholm syndrome at this point, for both the boyfriend and the advisor.  The latter relationship culminated in me getting a clipboard thrown at my head, after which I got a new advisor.  Anyways, despite all that, I did have some fun that year – I was finally of drinking age, and I spent a good bit of time exercising that right (I never had to worry about getting a ride home! It was so easy!).  When I wasn’t getting soused downtown, we roomies spent much time harassing drunken tailgaters from our porch (candy corn projectiles!), listing to Clorox’s stories of the rampant gay experimentation occurring in the nearby fraternity, and helping Caro sand down her art projects, including this one:  .  This was the year my kitty cat died of cancer, a few days after somehow catching a bird from the porch of our second floor apartment and depositing it by my usual seat.  It was also the year I snapped out of a lot of crap (grad school, bad boyfriend, not exercising) and started playing frisbee.

Rather than stay in that house with my darling Caro, I skedaddled to an apartment in the Boulevard area with my other favorite, Swilson.  I was not in love with our apartment, but I was very glad to live anywhere with her.  I adopted a parking lot kitten, only to find out he was a malnourished three year old later on.  Dragon eventually became Swilson’s, as I was far too busy that year to be a proper cat owner.  I played frisbee like a fiend, and consciously implanted myself into the frisbee community, constantly going to parties and whatnot.  The previous several years had left me without a decent community of people, after I stopped climbing and dated Fester for waaaay too long.  I spent very little time at the apartment, between traveling to tournaments every weekend and sleeping on friends’ couches after having too many drinks (I won’t drive for hours and hours after even one or two).  The first half of the year, I pretended I was an undergrad, phoning it in at work and partying most nights and weekends.  Then, I started dating husband, and it was wonderful.  But – I spent even less time at the apartment, because he was a night owl and had nothing to do there.  I slept at his downtown loft so often that it gets its own paragraph…

Husband’s apartment was located a couple floors above a bar that was known for its loud dance music and underage clientelle.  You could feel the bass all night, but it didn’t bother us too much.  His apartment was a loft – basically a single huge room with a very high ceiling.  Four boys lived there, knew each other through playing poker.  The bedrooms were literally little boxes attached to the walls, the size of a bed and perhaps 4 feet tall.  You got to them using ladders.  They had a poker table like you would see at a casino, two couches, and perhaps 6 televisions.  The televisions were like bizarro nesting dolls – they had at least one each of a 17″, 27″, 37″, 47″, and 57″.  They had every video game thingy known to man.  It was a bachelor pad to the nth degree.  I actually really enjoyed hanging out there – lots of good natured shit giving, restaurant food, Planet Earth in HD, cave dwelling.  It was probably the closest I will ever come to being a fly on the wall in a metaphorical boys’ locker room.  Educational, to say the least – they really aren’t talking about boobs or sex most of the time, whatdya know…

I’m stopping there, because it’s gotten too long again.

My in-laws spent the holidays at my parents’ too, as did my aunt, uncle and cousin on my mom’s side.  Oh, and did I mention Husband was there?  Husband came home!  Hooray!  Though, booo to the bit where we finally got to see each other in a house chock full of our relatives.  BOOO.

It was a good week, all together, though I was more than ready to come home yesterday.  A little too much family for me, this time of year.  I bribed one of my besties into rescuing me, and now I’m trying to motivate myself into finishing the relatively minor edits necessary to wash my hands of this dissertation stuff.  Almost done…

So, I know I’ve been nearly non-existant as far as the internet is concerned – sort of an NaAntiBloPoMo, for me – I’m hoping I can get my head back into this soon.  It’s just, I’m in this bizarre holding pattern.  I kind of don’t live anywhere right now – my stuff is still here in my house  for another 2 weeks, at which point it will begin the trek to WA; my husband is not here, my friends are all over the place.  I don’t have that much to do, but I’m busy as all get-out, somehow.  My car certainly isn’t helping matters.

I suppose the real impediment is that the inside of my brain, lately, is a catalog of complaints: my car is broken, my husband is way over there, my friends aren’t conveniently located, I don’t have a cat, I’m not sure how to pack my belongings for the move, I have a giant huge enormous zit on my chin (again).  Writing that stuff down makes me feel like an overly-negative (or perhaps overly-entitled?) little whiner.  I’m hoping it passes, but I fear that it won’t until I’m done with this limbo period.  I’m still managing to have a great time with my friends and family before I skip town, but when I am alone and thinking, it’s not the best.  I’m also hoping that seeing Husband last week re-set the clock on the crazy, since now it’s onlt 3.5 weeks till I see him again – but that’s soooo loooooong waaah!  I’m going to get an advent calendar, since he’s coming home on Christmas.

Shit!  No car, no advent calendar.  Le sigh….

To bed!