Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Last night markgritter and I went to the celebration concert for the Minnesota Orchestra's Grammy nomination. Walking in was a bit like going to a large convention where you don't know very many people (but still recognize the people around you and know that you're all anticipating the same thing) and a bit like coming back to Gustavus after the tornado, where everything is a bit more fraught than usual, every small detail a bit sweeter.

And, like coming back to Gustavus after the tornado, things aren't over yet. (For those of you not following this story, this was a special concert--the lockout is still ongoing.) The storm was only part of what went wrong there. The life lesson I learned fifteen years ago in March was that there isn't anything so bad that humans can't make it worse on each other. There were heartwarming life lessons, too, but that one was...a little less obvious.

Mayor R. T. Rybak got up before the concert and talked about the institution we all love, and...look, I'm glad there are people like Rybak who can care for institutions, because institutions are not all bad, and like everything else they need care if they're to continue. But I wasn't there because of the institution. I don't love the institution. Or at least, I don't love it unconditionally. I want to go to a large classical music ensemble at which talented musicians play awesome music. If they completely disbanded the Minnesota Orchestra and re-formed as the Minneapolis Symphony, I would not mourn the old institution if the new one treated its musicians better. For some people the institution is more important than the members who make it up. I'm not one of those people. I will roll with the changes that have to come along as different musicians move along to different parts of their careers and lives...but for me it'll be the musicians and the music over the institution every single time. We judge institutions not by their antiquity but by their works, and one of the most important facets of that is how they treat the actual people in them, now, today.

Anyway. The Sibelius symphonies were just grand. I was in a mood to be appreciative, but they more than earned that mood and its appreciation. And tears came to my eyes when I heard the notes of Finlandia for the encore. It was exactly the concert it needed to be.

Let's hope that some key people were as moved as I was.

aliseadae is doing the five questions meme again. Ask or be asked in comments.

1) What book character would you like to be friends with in real life? Friendship is hard, because it relies on particularities of personality. I have been missing Patrick from the Secret Country books, even though right now he'd be one of my friends of whom I would think, "Oof, not now, Patrick," and put off answering an e-mail unless it had something time-sensitive in it.

2) What is your favorite mathematical concept? The relationship of e, i, pi, 1, and 0 is nice.

3) What is your favorite fairy tale? At the moment I am turning over The Twelve Dancing Princesses in my head for a thing, but I don't know that the underside of it will look the same.

4) Tell me about a good memory from college. Sometimes on Saturday mornings I would get up and go to the library, up on the second floor, and I would get whatever I wanted and look out on campus, and there would be nobody in the library and nobody walking around that early and it would be so quiet. There were lots of good people in my life in college, but on the down side, there were lots of good people in my life in college. And having an entire floor of library and view out over campus and the edge of the Minnesota River Valley to myself was really, really lovely.

5) If you could go anywhere in space or on earth and observe something with no harm to yourself, where would you go? (e.g. the horsehead nebula, the center of a volcano) Right now I am weirdly water-focused. So I am thinking the Marianas Trench, with a good light source and some good recording devices. Alternately under the ice crust of Europa if Europa actually has ice crust and water.

I had to discard the last of my physics department T-shirts from the 1996-97 school year tonight. The gaping hole that had opened up along the seam with the sleeve was the sort of gaping hole that happens when the fabric is just done being fabric now kthx.

I haven't been that girl in awhile now. A good while. A few of the important people in my life were not only not born then, I think their parents had not yet met. But I kept repeating to markgritter, and now I am repeating it to you, "But--but my shirt. That was my shirt." And after a mere 13 years of consistent washing and wearing and washing again, in hot water most lately to get the sweat smells out from being used as a workout shirt--after only 13 years, it is gone from me. So unfair. That was my shirt.

There was a T-shirt. When comes such another. And so on.

Every time I'm trying to describe a large building in a way that will make it feel nice and comfortable and just a little quirky, if I'm not thinking too hard about it, it comes out with three wings in pale tan sandy stone, with stylized human figures carved in bas relief on parts of it. This is probably not a horribly telling quirk for anybody who didn't go to Gustavus, but for those who do, it's pretty clear that I imprinted like the proverbial wee duckling on our dear departed Wahlstrom Hall, and my subconscious is not ready to let it go.

I am not conscious of any analogous reaction to my high school, not even when I'm trying to describe nasty places. From the first semester, Gustavus was mine in a way Ralston High wasn't, because I chose Gustavus for myself, and it chose me. And also I think I am wired to have a stronger memory of the good stuff than the bad. Our shabby old apartments are similarly not particularly strong components of my subconscious landscape.

(Which reminds me that my cousin was telling me that there were lots of people from RHS on Facebook, for good and ill. Do I want a Facebook page? I kind of think I don't, but if you have any knowledge of anything good that comes of it, do let me know in the comments section or on e-mail. I'd like to think I'm not closed-minded about these things.)

Anyway. I don't think this is to the point where I need to institute a sandy tan stone ban; it's unlikely to annoy even the most dedicated of readers at the current level of frequency. Still, it's odd to read what I've written and think, "Oh. Um. Well, that. Again. Yes." Some people have a thing for parent/child tropes, some people always write redheaded heroines who toss their curls. Me, I've got rocks in my head. Grainy pale ones.

Ten years ago today, Gustavus Adolphus College and the rest of St. Peter, MN, were hit by a tornado. Like most of the students, I was away on spring break. I believe that this directly caused the zero fatality rate among the college students -- we all saw how people behaved when the sirens went off for previous events. If we'd all been around, there'd have been someone who was finishing a sociology paper, someone else who was just going to have a look.

I didn't learn so much from the tornado as from its aftermath, which seemed to stretch on forever. I guess the main thing was, there's no natural disaster so bad that the behavior of humans afterwards can't mitigate at least some of it for some people -- and there's no natural disaster so bad that the behavior of humans afterwards can't make it significantly worse. Primates are like that, I guess.

It feels like a decade. It really does. Close and yet distant, that's what decades feel like. I'm not getting out my old journals to bring the anguish and the worry closer or to feel more distant from that teenage girl. I don't want to relive, and I don't want to forget. Remembering is the right compromise between the two.

As timprov noted, we are okay here, and so are porphyrin's.

We drove across that bridge yesterday to go get Robin from daycare. We took him to see "Ratatouille." The bridge is not far from his daycare building. Not nearly far enough.

I am pretty shaken up here. But fundamentally okay.

Ninth anniversary, and the Star-Tribune remembered once again. They remember every year, in Paul Douglas's column. Every year I am touched, and in an odd way pleased.

This is my home.

First, I'm going to copy a request from a friend who is a librarian. This person has a patron who wants books (preferably good ones) with the following characteristics:

--female main character who is older and single
--absolutely no love interests, romance or sex
--no swearing, graphic violence, etc.

I have very little sympathy with the person making this request -- it seems to bar a great deal of the human condition from art -- but a good deal of sympathy for the person doing a hard job trying to help her. So. Chime in if you have any ideas.

As regards yesterday's poll: eight minutes. Eight. Those few of you who bet on my continuing sanity on this subject: thanks, but, um, that's not something you should rely on particularly much.

And there's a comment I made in the comments section that probably deserves a moment of explication: orbitalmechanic told me I was cute, and I tried my standard, by now thoroughly failed response to that: "I'm not cute, I used to be a physicist." It was, as I noted, much pithier when it was a growled, "I'm not cute, I'm a physicist." It was no more effective but a great deal more important to me.

See..."cute" is not the same as "pretty" or "attractive" or "hot," or, on the other side of the cute spectrum, "charming" or "fun." None of those other words has quite the same ring to it. And when you're a young, female physicist, often "you're so cute," means something friendly and innocuous...but a substantial percentage of the time, it means, "I don't believe you can handle the math and/or the soldering." People who think you're cute aren't always dismissing you and your capacity to do the work -- but sometimes they are. Often enough to be disturbing. So I developed a knee-jerk reaction to "cute" pretty fast -- more or less upon first contact. (Which was college. Nobody in high school thought I was cute anywhere along the pretty-to-charming spectrum. I promise. I was terrifying, not cute. I got used to that.) (Now I can be both! Yay, adult world!) (Ahem. Sorry.)

And I use "cute" myself sometimes, and never to question someone's competence. I use it of big hulking males whose ability to do linear algebra I have never doubted. In fact, in the personality side of things, the "charming" side, the man who taught my Modern, Math Methods, Quantum, and Nuke courses was just so cute. He had these Inspector Gadget arms, and when he demonstrated rotation over 4Pi with his coffee cup, it was just the cutest thing. I still smile at the cute thinking of Tom doing that. This is not the "ooh baby baby" cute, this is the "awwww" cute. But it's "awww, the way he does physics is so cute," not "awww, he thinks he can do physics!"

Tom wasn't a young woman, he was a middle-aged guy. If someone told him he was cute, they were not going to attempt to take lab implements away from him on his own project and smile condescendingly if he explained how they were using them wrong. No one was going to corner him to try to cop a feel when they were supposed to be discussing results of the last data set if he was cute. No one's girlfriend was going to have to hear a careful explanation about how, no, really, she's a valuable lab partner and not just cute lab decor.

And deliberately attempting to be neither pretty nor charming nor any of the other things cute sometimes means did not seem like the way to go either. So: railing against the cute. Even when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt -- as I know with orbitalmechanic -- that there was nothing of the sort in it.

And the thing is, I don't live there any more. I am not Marissa Lingen, Girl Physicist, on a daily basis (though she still pokes her nose out sometimes). Most editors and agents have no idea whether I am cute in any sense of the word, and if they do, it's not a big deal, either way. Either way, they're not going to pick up a story of mine and say, "Oh, she's cute/not cute," and reject the story unread. Whatever gender problems the field may or may not have -- and we can argue about that somewhere else and at another time, please -- cuteness is not at the center of them. If I hear someone calling me cute for a particular comment or behavior, or telling me I look cute in whatever I'm wearing, there is not even the slightest hint of "too bad you can't plot your way out of a paper bag," in it. Nobody even has to fight that implication, because as far as I can tell, it's just not there.

So, the knee: I need to get it to stop jerking. I know that. But that's why it does.

E-mail conversation with columbina has me wondering about a lot of things. I'm going to write more about some of them in a bit (that is, not today), but until then I'd like to ask a slew of questions. Answer some, all, or none of them, as you like.

Did you have a good high school experience? (For those of you outside the US, this question applies to your schooling in your late teen years, somewhere between 14 and 18 for the typical student.) What do you think is most wrong with the way your schooling at that age was conducted? Do you have anything you think was institutionally most right with how your schooling was conducted? (By institutionally, I mean that "Ron Gabriel, my ninth and twelfth grade English teacher, is so awesome" doesn't count unless the school specifically nurtured his awesomeness. Which it didn't. Rotten bastards. You do not use a person's disability against him. This is not acceptable human behavior.)

Do you have stronger, less strong, or similar feelings towards grade school? Junior high/middle school? If you went to college, college? If you went to grad school, grad school? If someone says "your school," which one do you think of? (That presumes that you're not currently working in any capacity at a school that's becoming "yours.")

Did you have one best year of your schooling, where you were learning the most and figuring out the most about yourself? Did you have more than one? Did you have one worst year? Did they correspond with best/worst years otherwise, or did you separate out your school life and your outside/home life?

Was there a time in your schooling when you really enjoyed the books assigned to you to read? What kind of books were they, or, if you remember, what books? Did you otherwise manage to find good books to read, mostly, or did you go through dry spells in your reading life when you were younger?

( My own answers )