rivka

I'm applying for a program designed to help early-career psychologists develop as independent researchers in the field of HIV and communities of color. One part of the application asks for an honest assessment of the "strengths and weaknesses of the applicant's current capacity" in this area.

I did a little brainstorming, and here's what I came up with off-the-cuff:

Strengths:
Experience
Population access
Clinical acumen with research population
Broad involvement with/knowledge about many research areas within HIV
Communication and writing skills
Cultural competence working with African-Americans
R21 – already funded in this area for an exploratory/developmental grant
Developed research ideas

Weaknesses:
Isolation at my current institution
Weak statistical background
No prior experience in intervention research
White as a freaking piece of paper

...Okay, so maybe that last item shouldn't make it into the final edit of the application. But it's something that I'm acutely aware of, and I'd be kidding myself to say that it won't be a disadvantage. I like to think that I have the skills and awareness to do this work well, and yet.

I wonder how the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate extends to research.

A while back I asked for some advice on making use of the little courtyard in front of our house. I think the best advice we got was just to dive in and try some stuff, and not to worry too much about not doing it perfectly. We put a bunch of plants in the ground in the first week of May, without doing a lot of planning or research. And so far, most things seem to be doing pretty well: ( read more, and see pics )

I'm really enjoying this. When you have one of the only front yards in the neighborhood, there is a certain amount of social pressure to make it look good, and a certain pleasure and pride in succeeding. But it also just makes me happy to walk in the gate into our lovely little oasis of color and fragrance. A fresh herbal scent hangs over everything. It's fun to watch the vegetables grow, and look for little changes from day to day.

Michael and I are thinking of signing up for a City Farm next year, if I don't get pregnant. For $20, we can get a 150-square-foot garden plot in a city park plus tools to borrow and all the water, leaf mulch, and wood chips we can use. I'd love to be able to have enough sunlight and lead-free soil to really grow things. But this isn't too bad, for a start.

(Part I.)

Alex (holding an action figure): What's this?
Me: That's her ID badge. It has her name on it.
Alex: Dana. /d/. peers at the tag, points to the letters that say "FBI." It doesn't have a D on it. F. /f/. It must be Fox Mulder.

Alex narrated a little piece of Mary Sue self-insertion fanfic this morning, complete with dialogue markers. It began like this:

"Hi, I'm Alex," I said. "I'm a new friend in Miss Frizzle's class."

As tends to be the case with Mary Sues, there wasn't much of a plot. When you're a student in Ms. Frizzle's class, and Ms. Frizzle is your teacher, apparently all you need to do to enjoy the story is to revel in the coolness of the situation. But there was a suggestion of a hint of a plot in this bit, which was my favorite part:

[...] "Wait!" said the children. "Didn't you go to Leo's party?"

"No," said Miss Frizzle. "I went to Alex's party, and she gave me a present."

"Wow!" said the children. "Wow!"

I think Alex has a long career ahead of her on fanfiction.net.

Alex: I'm a pretty little wife.
Michael: You are? Whose wife are you?
Alex (to me): You and me are Papa's wives.
Me: Y HELLO THAR, Electra!
Alex: Y HELLO THAR, Electra! ...Who's Electra?

...please don't let me get hit by a bus or something and taken to the ER today. Not when I've got a big wooden penis model stuck in my purse next to my wallet and appointment book and iPod. And a dental dam.

kthxbai,
Rivka

Apparently we aren't even bothering to use codewords for race anymore:

Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"Working, hard-working Americans, white Americans." As opposed, apparently, to the shiftless welfare queens of color who support Barack Obama. That's as naked a play of the race card as anyone ever pinned on Al Sharpton. Hillary Clinton, supposedly a Democrat, is pinning the last desperate hopes of her campaign on white racists.

This is not her pastor speaking. This is not a guy in her neighborhood who did bad things forty years ago. This is not a random white guy she's tenuously connected to. This is Hillary Clinton herself taking a page out of the John Birch Society's playbook: "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans."

I've never been a Hillary Clinton fan, but at the beginning of this campaign I admired her historic candidacy and was delighted to be able to say that I'd be happy to throw my full support behind whichever Democratic candidate won the nomination. That was before Clinton refused to say, when asked, that Barack Obama was not a Muslim. That was before she justified her ridiculous bread-and-circuses pandering about a gas tax repeal by sneering that "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists," and "We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans."

"Elite opinion" is a Newt Gingrich phrase. It's part of the frame that the Republicans have successfully used to marginalize Democrats for the past 14 years. It's all one piece with the race-baiting attempts to position "hard-working Americans" and African-Americans on opposite sides: both are strategies that could've come right out of the hard right wing playbook. Hillary Clinton is deliberately making use of these strategies. There is no question - none - that she doesn't know what she's doing. And by doing so, she is reinforcing themes and frames which benefit the hard right wing and hurt the Democratic Party.

Obviously no matter what happens I'm not going to vote for McCain. But if Hillary Clinton somehow manages to come out of this disgusting, ugly mess with the nomination, I won't be donating one penny to her campaign, making one phone call, or handing out one campaign flyer.

I am so. Utterly. Disgusted.

Via Atrios.

Alex is talking about death a lot these days.

I posted a few weeks ago about having to explain to her why we can't send a letter to someone who has died. Since then, she's continued to raise the topic several times a week. I'm not sure why.

I think the topic initially came up because she was asking lots of questions about relatives. She likes working out the details of relationships: Grandma is her grandmother, and she's my mother. That led, inevitably, to questions like, "Who is your grandmother, Mama?" And I would answer something like: "I had two grandmothers - Grandma's mother, and Grandpa's mother. Their mothers were my grandmothers. But I don't have any grandmothers anymore because they died."

Once she absorbed the idea that she had a grandmother who died - Michael's mother, who died in 1997 and who we call "Grandma Nancy" when we talk to Alex - she kept returning and returning to the topic. "Grandma Nancy died," she'll inform me at random times. Sometimes she'll add, "Papa was so sad. He cried and cried." (I think that was initially something I told her.) And once: "I'm so sad that Grandma Nancy died, because I want to play with her."

She's constructed a logical story about Michael's family relationships: "Grandma Nancy was Papa's mother, but she died. And then Gran was Papa's new mother." I can see where she got there, and in the chronology of Michael's experience she's not entirely wrong. Gran is Laura, Michael's birthmother; Grandma Nancy was his adoptive mother. We didn't meet Laura until after Michael's mother died. (We haven't tried to explain adoption yet.)

Death talk is not limited to Grandma Nancy. She held up one of her Little Einstein dolls and informed me sadly, "Annie's mother died and her father died. She doesn't have any parents." The other day she said casually, "When my doctor dies, I'll get a new doctor."

Death, death, death.

"A child's mother and father usually don't die," I told her once.

"But Grandma Nancy died." She didn't sound especially distressed, just thoughtful.

"She died when Papa was a grownup. She stayed alive and took care of him the whole time he was a child."

"Oh."

I want to promise her that we won't die, but I haven't. I can't. Fortunately, she hasn't asked. She doesn't seem to worry about that, and she doesn't seem to worry about dying herself. She mostly seems to be trying to figure out death-the-concept: what the heck is up with death?

acceberskoorb - and let me say right here that all children should have an acceberskoorb in their lives - helped us find some books to read to Alex. There are quite a few picture books about death out there, but most of them fall into the category of "books to buy when someone significant in your preschooler's life has just died." Very few people seem to write "indulge your preschooler's philosophical curiosity about death" books. We wound up with two.

We've already gotten the first one from the library: When Dinosaurs Die, a comic book-format guide to basic questions about death. ("What does alive mean? Why does someone die? What does dead mean?") The text is general; the focus in the pictures and speech bubbles shifts back and forth from a dead bird some children find in the park to beloved pets to unconnected people (a soldier, an accident victim) to close relatives. I skip over a lot of the intense details about grieving when I read it to her. She loves it.

During tonight's reading - and OMG I am going straight to Parent Hell for reading a book about death and dying as a bedtime story, but she specifically requested it even after I suggested it was Not Quite The Thing - she came out with a couple of new comments: "Goodbye, Grandma Nancy" (said in a sad voice), and "I want to light a candle for Grandma Nancy." So she's obviously taking in quite a bit from the book, and reorganizing the way she thinks about having a dead relative.

The other book I ordered is called Lifetimes. From the Amazon reviews, it seems to focus on death as a natural process, a shared characteristic of all living things. That seems like it might be even more to the point, if her interest really is mostly philosophical.

It's hard to figure out where the line is between meeting your child's sincerely expressed interest in information about death and encouraging her to be weirdly, precociously morbid. I don't think a preoccupation with death is particularly normal for a three-year-old. And yet, if she's thinking about it and asking about it, obviously we can't cut her off completely. I'm hoping that these books will help settle her mind on the issue, and we can go back to her plans to become a veterinarian by age ten. ("Ten is old," she has informed us.)

I had a complete physical this morning for the first time in... jeez. I don't know. I don't take any ongoing medications and I've been able to have my Pap smears done by my midwives for the last few years, so I've just never been motivated to see my primary care doctor unless I was sick.

I saw her last month for an ear and sinus infection, though, and she pretty much made me sign up for a physical. I worked myself up into a minor state of stress beforehand, figuring that she would lecture me about losing weight and that I would need to figure out what to say to her.

Except for pregnancy - and literally just for pregnancy; I was below my prepregnancy weight a month after Alex was born, thanks to the revolutionary new "extreme stress verging on nervous breakdown" diet) - my weight has remained steadily between 165 and 168 pounds for at least the past seven or eight years. According to the BMI tables, this makes me 21-24 pounds "overweight," and 7-10 pounds shy of "obese." Since physicals are supposed to address ongoing health issues, it seemed likely that my weight would come up. I dreaded it.

"I'm not willing to consider dieting," I told the mirror in her office bathroom. "Research shows that 95% of dieters regain the weight within five years, and that repeatedly losing and regaining weight has more health consequences than staying steady at a higher weight."

Back in the exam room, the nurse checked my blood pressure (excellent) and pulse (excellent). My doctor came in and checked my blood sugar and kidney function with a urine dip test (normal). She went over my family health history, looked at my ears and throat, listened to my heart and lungs, felt my lymph nodes, did a breast exam, palpated my (pudgy) abdomen, asked about some weird little lumps on my feet, checked my standing posture, asked a couple of probing questions about my post-miscarriage mental health.

As we talked, she filled out a lab slip: complete blood count, cholesterol, comprehensive metabolic panel, thyroid level and thyroid antibodies (there's a family history).

I brought up my two health concerns: potential long-term damage from my acid reflux disease, and irregular menstrual cycles since my miscarriage. She was concerned about the first but not the second. Apparently I shouldn't be having any breakthrough heartburn when I take over-the-counter acid reducers - which I do, more often than not. She gave me a booklet on lifestyle changes and a bunch of free samples of Prevacid, and added serum amylase and H. pylori tests to my lab slip. I'm supposed to go back and see her in a month to get my lab results and discuss whether the Prevacid is working - she'll decide then whether I need an endoscopy. I'm relieved that she didn't send me for one immediately. (She's usually very big on precautionary testing.)

Her major concerns:
1. I always need to wear my orthotics, because my feet suck. (She was a physical therapist before she went to med school.)
2. We need to get my reflux under control.
3. I need to try not to be anxious and stressed-out about conceiving again.

That was it. Not a word about my weight.

I suppose that she may be waiting to bring up weight loss until she sees the results of my lab tests. But they weighed me, and that would've been enough ammunition for most doctors. So yay, for now.


("But don't you realize fat is unhealthy?" Before posting a comment to that effect, please click here.)

I went English Country Dancing[1] last night, for probably the second or third time since Alex was born.

I was surprised to see how much I remembered. All of it, really. Not necessarily the steps of the individual dances, of course, although many of them felt deeply familiar. But I found that I effortlessly remembered how to form the figures, and was free to focus on satsifying extras like making sure that my movements were precisely the right size to carry me through the alloted beats of music.

I love to lose myself in the patterns of ECD. I was particularly aware of that last night, coming back after a long absence. Nearly all of the dancers present last night were highly skilled, which meant dressed sets, symmetrical movements, and attention to rhythm and flow. Every figure fell beautifully into place, bodies weaving in and out with confident precision. My attention might, at a given moment, be locked on my partner - perhaps turning in a circle with her, our only connection steady eye contact - but at the same time I was aware that our actions were being mirrored all up and down the set.

The first dance after I arrived, Sun Assembly,[2] has a moment when you take right hands across with the couple below you so that your joined arms form an X, wheel around in a circle, and then join left hands across with the couple above you in the set and circle in the opposite direction. This is all one long fluid motion. You circle around. Just as you reach the crest of the circle, the music cues you to reach your left hand out, and someone is there. You grasp their hand, keep stepping forward, and another hand reaches out at precisely the moment when your partner reaches the crest of the circle. Everyone is in whirling motion. Everyone is part of the pattern, and the pattern unfolds with mathematical beauty. You are at once an individual, one of a pair, and part of a whole. The pattern repeats, musically and physically, as you move up and down the set with your partner. It almost feels like ritual to me, like spiritual practice.

There's a sense of rightness about it, to me - falling into position, reaching out my hand, having the other's hand in place to take it - a sense of intense, almost painful satisfaction. There. There. There. I'm reminded that humans are pattern-seeking animals. This is partly what my brain is wired for.





(Hey, madrobin: more than three years later, Laura and Neil still dance only with each other. Do you think, in all this time, that anyone has ever explained dance etiquette to them?)


[1] ECD is the kind of dancing you see in movie adaptations of Jane Austen. Most dances were written in the 17th or 18th century (althouugh ECD is also a living art; people are still writing dances today) and are performed by long sets of couples. Here's a lovely demonstration set by skilled dancers in period costume. Here is a fine example of a casual event where dances are taught and called.

[2] Whoa, I just made a crazy discovery: this webpage which attempts to map out the dance using tables. No, seriously. To get the full effect, hit the "sync" button and watch the steps progress to music, but you can also advance through the dance manually, step by step, and see precisely where the dancers ought to be standing during bar 7, beat 13 of the A section. This will not help you to understand the dance unless you are an ECD expert, but geekiness is a deeply beautiful thing in and of itself.