Perfect Holiday Reading

My lovely sister gave me this terrific little book for my birthday.  I mentioned The Indian Grocery Store Demystified in my Splendid Table post a few months ago, and the book does not disappoint.  It’s perfect for geeking out over ingredients and tantalizing descriptions of Indian goodies.  Take, for example, this passage about yogurt:

“Yogurt enrichens and thickens sauces, acts as a tenderizer in marinades, is used in creamy dips, or is folded into cooked rice.

“Dehin is a thick yogurt cheese made by straining off the whey in a cloth-lined colander in the refrigerator overnight.  This is used to make shirkhand, a dessert that is blended with sugar, saffron, and rose essence and sprinkled with chopped nuts.  Similar to sour cream, dehin can be flavored with spices as a dip.  Kharis are smooth, yogurt-based sauces and soups.  Pachadi are yogurt salads that are similar to raita but have grated coconut added.  Mishti doi is the Bengali delicacy of sweetened yogurt set in clay pots and served at the end of a meal.”

Shall I go on?  How about a quick description of one of my favorite spices, cardamom?

“The flavor of cardamom is sweet and zesty with a hint of eucalyptus.  For subtle flavor the whole pods are added to rice pualos, simmered dishes, puddings, and sugar syrups.  It is best to lightly bruise whole pods first so that their fragrance will permeate the dish.”

Maybe you are in the mood for a sweet:

“Mysore pak.  A famous South Indian sweet, this is a rich, melt-in-your-mouth, chickpea-flour shortbread.  It is made by slowly adding roasted chickpea flour into a buttery, cardamom-infused sugar syrup, then stirring it constantly until it froths.  The yellow-ochre mixture is cooled and cut into thick squares.  It has a silky-smooth surface, a melting texture, and a rich, buttery, toffee flavor.  It is usually garnished with sliced almonds.”

Yum.  Mysore pak, you had me at toffee.  But what if I’m in the mood for cheesecake?

“Kalakand.  This is Indian cheesecake.  Creamy bars or diamond shapes are made from a condensed, boiled mixture of chenna cheese, ghee, milk, sugar, ground almonds, and pistachios flavored with cardamom.  The cream-colored treat tastes like a cheesecake brownie with a dense, fudgy texture.”

Oh baby.  A cheesecake brownies with cardamom and pistachios?  Now that I might have to try to recreate at home as an American knockoff.  We can do it!

I really could go on and on, but I probably shouldn’t quote the entire book in a blog post.  Suffice to say that this book satisfies a deep craving for delicious food prose and a sense of the exotic.  I feel transported to a place I’ve never been.  And I think sometimes, when we read, that’s exactly what we want: to feel lifted out of our everyday lives and deposited somewhere new and exciting, where our only task is to taste and sniff and explore.

Will I ever visit India?  Maybe someday, when I am brave and rich enough to buy that plane ticket.  Until then, I’ve got a kitchen and a tiny Indian grocery store near me and an appetite big enough to keep things interesting.   

On the Internet, Everyone is a Scientist

Two things are worrying me these days.

Thing the first.  I worry that “friends with benefits” has ruined dating.  I’m not a fan of friends with benefits as a way of interacting with men.  I realize that FWB is all the rage among the college set these days, and I’d guess that even when I was in college, it was popular, which would explain why I was not the most popular girl on campus.  It’s okay—the college kids can have their FWB.  But what about us older folks who actually want to date?  As in go out with someone, have fun, get to know that person, maybe hold hands if everybody is feeling romantic?  I fear that dating is a lost art, that men don’t know how to court a woman without assuming they are in a relationship.  I had a good discussion about this with a colleague today, and he and I agreed that even among people for whom life partnership is the goal of dating, it’s important to get to know someone before making assumptions about the nature of the relationship.  I’m not explicitly on the market for a life partner, but I would like to date, should I be fortunate enough to meet a nice man.  I’m just afraid that even if I do meet a nice man, he will be so clueless about how to court me that I will throw up my hands in frustration and decide that being a spinster is easier than dating.

Take a lesson from the fruit flies, gentleman: you’ve got to court her before you make any lusty moves.  Flies who try to skip the steps of courtship are met with a very firm NO in the form of a kick in the head.

Thing the second.  I’m doing research these days for my grant application(s), and I’d really like to find some scientific studies that link dieting to sexual dysfunction in women.  My search is turning out to be more difficult than I had hoped, but it’s especially frustrating when I run into articles like this piece from “FOXSexpert” Dr. Yvonne K. Fullbright.  The article, which is along the lines of what I’m hoping to find, is filled with scientific claims about what happens to a woman’s libido when she loses too much weight, but where are the damn references?!?  That popular news piece does me absolutely no good without references, and frankly, I find it rather presumptuous of her to tell a story like that with almost no citations to back up her claims.

The reason that the article bothers me so much is that I think a woman’s libido may shut down far earlier than the point at which she stops menstruating or displays a severe loss of body fat.  For me, the whole point of combing the science archives and googling things like “nutrition and sexual dysfunction” is to find a few studies that might back me up here.  But Dr. Yvonne K. Fullbright, you are no help to me.  No reviewer who is evaluating my work is going to let me cite a FOXSexpert article as evidence.

Is This Thing On?

Hello?  Is anybody out there?  Do I still have any readers left after my inexplicable silence?

Actually, I have a really good explanation: everything fell apart.  And by “everything,” I mean my computer fell apart and I’ve spent way too much time over the past week trying to restore its health.  But I do believe that tonight, with the installation of over 60 Windows Updates and finally, FINALLY, rebuilding my “blogging office” (also known as Windows Live Writer), I feel like order has been restored in my virtual world.

Hi!  It’s good to be back.  I have missed you and this blog.  I say that in all seriousness: one of the most frustrating things of the past week has been the loss of my writing routine.  I write for all kinds of reasons: to share, to take notes, to ponder, even to grieve.  I think out loud on this blog.  I make sense of my world.  And it’s been tough not having that outlet, even just for a week, because I had so much to say.  Now, after spending hours and hours saving my files, reinstalling the operating system, and installing hundreds—yes, literally hundreds—of updates, I’m just tired.

For tonight, let me say I’m sorry to have disappeared with no warning.  I really did miss you.  And for tonight, I’ll leave it at that.  I’m going to watch Grey’s Anatomy while eating a cranberry-chocolate bar and sipping herbal tea.

Ah, home sweet home.

Meandering

I wouldn’t say that I’m feeling especially certain or confident these days.  I do feel certain that everything is going to be all right, if I can just be patient.  And this feeling of mine was echoed in a note from the Universe, who said it so charmingly that I wanted to share:

Have you noticed, how lacking clarity is clarity itself?
How, if you aren't sure about something, that alone has meaning?
Honor uncertainty. It's the seed from which
all-knowingness comes.
Give it time.
Clearly,
The Universe
I'm not sure, but I think you needed that.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I did need that! 

I found the Universe’s notepad via an old post of Chrissy’s, whose blog is always worth perusing.  I don’t know what’s going to happen next around here, but the Universe says knowing that I don’t know is something.  And even chaos, uncertainty, blurriness—these things can be beautiful because they shake you and wake you and make it possible for you to say things you didn’t know you needed to say and do things that perhaps you haven’t done because they weren’t “important” enough to do right away.

I’m embracing the chaos, even as I try to create some order around me.  Eventually, the path will become clearer, but for now, we are meandering together.

And So It Starts

Scenes from a Saturday…

I started writing my paper on Saturday.  Writing a science paper is like being in labor for months, or at least it feels like it to me, a woman who has never been in labor with a child.  (Perhaps the mothers in the audience will forgive my use of this metaphor.)  It requires a lot of patience, attention, deep breaths, and tolerance for uncertainty.  Will you find the right words to describe your results eloquently?  Can you craft an introduction that is at once snappy, interesting, and accurate?  Can you inject some provocative speculation into the discussion without making the reviewers go berserk?  It’s all very exciting, the craft of writing.  A science paper is simultaneously fiction and nonfiction: it’s a set of data, edited and parsed for presentation, told as a story.  Turning science into a story makes it a work of fiction because the process of doing science is never as clean as it appears in publications.

And yet, I do love to write.  Even the messy, stop-and-start process of writing a science paper delights my word-loving heart.  Even knowing that my paper will get shredded by my advisor, reviewers, and any readers I can rope into reading it* doesn’t subtract from the joy of getting to write professionally, even if it’s on the weekend.  I could feel myself hesitating to start writing this paper, but I feel really good now that I’ve started.  My goal is to submit the paper by the end of February 2012, which means my advisor needs a draft a few weeks before that, which means I’ll be writing the paper and finishing(?) experiments in January.  Which is, um, next month, in case you were curious.  Wow.  When I put it like that, it kinda freaks me out.

But I’m going to take the writing section by section, and I’ll take the data figure by figure.  I’ll write a shitty first draft, if I must.  And I’ll make myself a really good lunch because writing, as you know, is hard work.  It’s important to keep ourselves well-fed while we create something from nothing.

Have a good week, my dears.

* Want to be one of my readers?  Yes?  Seriously?!?  Hurray!  Let me know in the comments or send me an e-mail at lifeloveandfood [at] gmail [dot] com, and I’ll send you the manuscript when it’s ready for readers.

When It Rains…

…it pours, right?  Too many things are going wrong in my life at one time!  Today I felt like if one more thing went wrong, I might be reduced to tears and forced to go home and hide in my bed.

But not everything is wrong around here.  Like this beautiful candlelight, for example.

And those sweet little kids in the photos behind the candle.  The baby, my nephew Devin, turned one on Monday.  I can’t wait to see both of them in a few weeks.

But this week, this very week, has been less than awesome.  Normally, when I write an Up/Down (+/-) list, I start with the good stuff and then I don’t have much to say for the bad stuff.  This week is different.  For example:

* My kitchen has ants.  ANTS!  Normally I’m pretty relaxed about bugs, but not this time.  They showed up on Thanksgiving, I think, and I’ve been smooshing them ever since.  And I find them cuddled together in an ant-mass in the strangest places: under a sponge, in my coffeepot.  Yes, IN MY COFFEEPOT.  It was so gross but also fascinating, as far as animal behavior goes.  It made me think of the aggregation pheromone that fruit flies release, which helps other fruit flies find them.  I wondered if ants might do the same thing, and a colleague at work confirmed that ants do release an aggregation pheromone.  Fascinating!  That explains why I found hundreds of them in and crawling on my coffeepot.

Animal behavior aside, I’m so tired of the ants.  I hope the pest control people are able to take care of this problem because I am seriously outnumbered by the ants.  Damn exponential insect reproduction.

* My computer has a trojan, which is mostly just a pain in the butt: unwanted popups, computer freezing, slow processing time.  But I’m worried it could destroy my machine, so I consulted a tech-savvy friend, who recommended Sophos/Webroot (thanks, Andy).  Wish me luck as I attempt to heal my pathogen-ridden computer.

* And then of course, there is the on-going stress of trying to cope with work and planning for an uncertain future.  I’m so happy tomorrow is Friday and I’m working at home this weekend.  At least I get the luxury of my couch while analyzing data or writing my paper!

Whew!  That’s my Down list, and while it’s only three items, they’ve been sucking the joy out of my life.  But today, while feeling grumpy about everything that’s going wrong, I forced myself to think of some good things, something worth remembering, such as:

* A colleague lending me his super-sharp forceps for my dissections.  Good tools make lab life so much easier!  I even managed not to damage his forceps, which is kind of amazing because I am a klutz.  Matt can confirm this for you—but I think he’s lucky I haven’t accidentally given him a black eye.

* Rediscovering Monna McDiarmid’s blog.  I “met” Monna a few years back and have perused her blog occasionally ever since.  She and her partner recently moved from Bangkok to Japan, so her blog has been ripe with new Japan moments and some nostalgia for Bangkok.  Here are two posts I especially like: Preparing for the Flood and Dreaming of R&R in Bangkok.

* “Winterizing” my summer dresses from Five Bamboo.  I wish I had a photo of my outfit from today, but let’s just say that a cowl-necked top is a sundress’s best friend in winter.  Its pretty color and lovely layers add interest and warmth to sleeveless dresses.  (If you’re curious, the cowl-necked top I wear all the time is shown here.  It’s useful for hiding, turtle-like, on especially bad days.)

* Gillian Welch.  Matt introduced me to this amazing musician, and bless his heart for it.  I’ve been listening to her newest CD, The Harrow & the Harvest, at home—it’s haunting and beautiful and dark and honest.  You can listen to the whole album here.

* And finally, tomorrow is Friday.  Can I get a hell yeah?  I thought so.

Happy weekend, dear readers.  I hope to be back here on Sunday with something for you to read.  Thanks for sticking around, even when I’m a bummer.

On Resilience

I would like to start this post with a wonderfully calming photo.

There.  That’s better!

I’ve been struggling with how exactly I’m going to write this post.  We’re going to talk about my career today, like I said we would, because this is a blog about life.  Science is a big part of my life—it’s my intellectual passion, my livelihood, part of my identity.  Being able to say now that I’m a scientist is so fun.  Working as a scientist is very challenging, but I like to think that I’ve done the best I could with what I had.  And right now, I’m in a good place, science-wise.  Over the past year, I’ve been able to take an observation and expand it into a full-blown project with publishable data and a working storyline.  I’m immensely proud of this accomplishment, and until about a week ago, I was feeling very happy with my job—I was convinced that I was well on my way to a publication.  I hadn’t put a deadline on this project, but maybe I’d guess that with another six months to a year I’d have a manuscript ready to be sent out for review.

On Friday, November 18, I met with my boss for an unexpected meeting, during which he told me that in about six months, there would be no more funding for my project.  I’ll spare you the details of that conversation, but suffice to say that it was an alarming piece of news.  I sat through the meeting the same way I sit through breakups: calmly stone-faced.  Afterward, I struggled with tears on and off for the rest of the day.  I tried to call Matt after lunch, and when I got his voicemail, I got so choked up that I couldn’t speak, so I hung up.  Later that day, I called back and left a proper message.

When we finally talked that evening, the feeling that left me most unhappy was the complete surprise of this news.  I felt like a fool, assuming that all was well with my project and my position in the lab.  I worked really hard to establish my project, and I just felt so stunned that my hard work had led me to this point.  I burned with disappointment and anger.

I can’t go into any depth here about my boss’s decision because I don’t wish to make things worse by making accusations on this public site.  You only have my story here; he can’t defend himself.  And most importantly, I have no desire to burn any bridges.  What goes around comes around, right?  One never knows what the future holds, and while I’m not religious, I think that it’s not a bad idea to cultivate good karma.  So I won’t say any more about why I’m angry, other than that I have now invested two years of time in this lab, and I’d like to see a return on my investment.  I may be angry, but I am not bat-shit crazy!

In my line of work, there are two major items that signify success: publications and funded grants.  Publications, arguably, are more important than grants because they are the record of your accomplishments: what you have done that deserves notice, praise, discussion.  Grants are important for continuing your science, and they indicate that you have good writing and project development skills.  At this point in time, my number one priority is to publish my work.  I have decided that I don’t care how flashy the journal is in which my paper is published; the important thing is that it is published, preferably within the next 6-8 months.  So that is my immediate goal—so immediate, in fact, that I’d like to start writing the paper next month.  It won’t hurt to get a good jump-start on it, even if it isn’t submitted until February or March.  (In my dreams, it will be submitted by the end of February.)

As for long-term goals, I am in serious thinking mode.  I always thought that I wanted to be a professor at a small liberal arts college like the one I attended, but now I’m thinking more deeply about science industry.  I am still interested in teaching, training, and pedagogy, but I find it hard to believe that those skills would go to waste in industry.

What I really want from my career is to feel like I am part of a team of equals.  Being a postdoc is pretty lonely, and in my lab, I’m doing work that is quite different from what other people are doing.  I’m the only one reading the papers in this field, which makes me feel isolated.  I don’t like it.  In academia, people become stars.  I don’t want to be a star—I want to be part of a team.  I want to contribute to something bigger than any of us could achieve on our own.  I’m wondering if science industry might fulfill that desire of mine.

I also want to spend more of my time working with people, rather than toiling away on my own experiments.  I suspect I could be quite good at project management, in part because I’m good at setting realistic goals and keeping an eye on all the moving parts.  I’m actually pretty good at multi-tasking on a large scale: planning my time so that today’s experiments get done and so that I’m ready for tomorrow’s experiments.  As Matt loves to point out, I am an excellent planner, which I think might make me good at organizing multiple people on a project.  And importantly, I tend to get along well with my colleagues; in fact, the best part of both the labs in which I’ve worked has been the people.  So I see no reason why I couldn’t teach, train, and supervise other people’s work while contributing to the development of the company’s projects.

To be honest, I never thought I would consider science industry as an option for me.  I loved my college experience, and I do love the idea of being on a college campus as a professor.  But I have to say, I’m pretty curious about what it’s like to work in industry, and the good pay isn’t too shabby either...

Stay tuned for Part Two of this story…(yes, I know—it’s another multi-part story on this blog!)