Making News

This may be my favourite headline of all time:

Orlando Bloom Hoping to Grow Out of Elf and Pirate Roles, Perhaps Play Dancing Cat on London Stage

From here.

Missing You

From a description of Bay to Breakers:

Some participants were motivated to run fast and others were motivated to drink beer in imaginative ways -- such as while doing a handstand over a keg in a shopping cart on the corner of Howard and Fifth streets.

Oh, how I miss you San Francisco. I miss your crazy residents (except for the certifiable wackos whose curses fill your rather squalid public buses), your sanctioned public looniness, your familiar steep and winding streets, and your abundant taquerias. I miss the friends who are similarly attracted to your aforementioned qualities and who choose to live in and near you. Hopefully, we will all see each other again soon.

Stoopidhead vs. the braggart

One of the issues I've been struggling with lately is feeling stupid. Like most PhD students, I find that the more I learn, the less I know. However, feeling stupid is, well, stupid considering that all the evidence points to me not being stupid. Yes, I feel stupid for feeling stupid. I'm smart like that.

Z has been "gently" encouraging me to get over this by saying things like, "Get over it already!" I've been doing my best to heed his advice but it's a challenge. Whenever I start feeling clever, I either immediately do or say something really dumb or, more insidiously, start to feel like a proud braggart. This leads me to my question de mois:

How does one act smart and clever without coming across as a know-it-all jerk?

Got any answers? I sure don't.

For me, this goes back a long way. I remember winning the maths prize in year 8 and dying on the inside as what little social standing I had evaporated. There was nothing cute about a smart girl in middle school. Being smart incurred much ribbing and I quickly learned to down-play my grades when I couldn't hide them. I really only stopped doing this during the final years of my masters, though I rarely volunteered to share my marks.

This all came to a head last week when I attended a reception for recipients of the University's prestigious scholarships. There are about 1,000 post-grads at the University, 350 of which have been granted federal scholarships. I'm one of the 350. Of the 1,000, 11 were awarded a prestigious scholarship; I'm one of those 11. Hearing these statistics out loud made me realize that someone, somewhere thinks I'm smart (I can hear you groaning at that sentence, Z). I need to remember this when I find myself unable to articulate a complex scientific thought.

One of the difficulties is that I'm me and so am completely unqualified to assess how well (or not) I present myself and my thoughts. I don't know if I come across as a bumbling idiot or a brilliant scientist, though can guess that it's somewhere in between and highly reliant upon my caffeine intake. Yes, it's true: caffeine does make you smarter.

I've recently realized that this only matters so much, is so important, because science is what I want to do with my life. This is what I enjoy doing. If I'm not good at this - or am only mediocre, I'll feel like I'm wasting my time. I want to accomplish things and feel like I contribute; if I'm only ever fair to middlin', I won't feel like I'm doing the best thing with my life.

Fortunately, someone somewhere thinks this is a good thing for me to do. Perhaps one day I'll realize that they're right.

Commitment? What commitment?

From Day in Pictures.

This could start a war somewhere else

I finally dropped the boat off for repairs today. It's taken this long (this being about four weeks!) to get the approval from the department to not file an insurance claim. It has been an incredibly frustrating process.

On my drive down to Williamstown, I saw a billboard advertisement for a web-site that lists homes for sale and lease. The caption read something like, "It's so easy, anyone can find a new home." The photo was of a man in a nicely tailored grey suit sitting on a chair. The model's head had been replaced with that of Dubya. I'm glad to see that Australia is not above publicly mocking his stupidity. Now if we would all just get around to recognizing Howard's stupidity in the upcoming election...

Plastic crap

We have been trying unsuccessfully for the past few months to get a credit card. My credit rating in the States is good enough to get me a card with a $28,000 limit, but here no-one will even consider my applications. So, we got a debit card instead. Yes that's right: our bank account came with an ATM card only; the debit card is extra. Do you remember the last time you saw an ATM card without a credit card logo on it? Me neither. When the cards arrived, Z called up and activated them. Yay! We can now do things like make on-line purchases and order concert tickets. Today I used my card for the first time to make a reservation at a house down near Wilson's Prom. Like all my credit card applications, my little debit card was rejected. A little panicky, I checked our account and found it adequately stocked with moola. So I called the bank to find out what was going on. I was informed that I hadn't linked the card to my account.

Say what???

Yes folks, it's true. The bank sent me a card, allowed me to activate the card, but never connected the card to any money thereby making the card a completely useless piece of plastic taking up space in my wallet.

Media Cottons On to Scientists' Predictions

The press is full of bad news about global climate change (I'm not calling it "global warning" any more because every time there's a cold snap, people say, "See? There's no such thing as global warming."). When we got back to the land of newspapers after our trip around the world, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot more news coverage of environmental problems. 'Suddenly' the mainstream papers were talking about fisheries collapse and carbon emissions. That sort of coverage has only increased; it seems almost weekly that an article discusses the seriousness and severity of global warming. I guess the media has finally caught up to what scientists have been saying for a couple of decades now.

A couple of months ago, I came across this article that talks about the larger-than-predicted spike in greenhouse gas emissions in 2006. That has me worried because there are all sorts of positive feedback loops that could kick into action, speeding up climate change suddenly. OK, not as suddenly as "The Day After Tomorrow" but more quickly than current models predict. For a great discussion of these (and a really great scary novel), read "The Weather Makers" by Tim Flannery.

In January, an article in the NY Times quotes Dr. Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge, as giving civilization no more than a 50 percent chance of surviving until the year 2100. Meanwhile Brisbane is on stage 5 water restrictions - stage 5 of 5. I don't know what happens next. There are very real concerns that hydropower plants supplying Sydney will have to close down if there isn't rain in the 18 months. A couple of months ago, the cover of our local paper The Age proclaimed that the Great Barrier Reef is facing extinction. But don't worry, according to Howard climate change is not a major issue and Australians aren't the biggest emitters of carbon - we're behind the US and China. What he fails to mention is that our total population is around 20 million so it's no surprise that we're emitting less carbon than two vastly more populous nations. Unfortunately, on a per capita rate, we're number two.

There's only one piece of good news I can glean from all of this: I chose the right field. If I'd chosen to study coral reef fish ecology, I'd be seriously worried about job stability. All those days spent diving in cold murky waters may reap a pay-off yet.

File this post under the category: glass one eighth full.

Enculturation

We've been in Melbourne for six and a half months, though it feels like so much longer. I'm pleased to say that I no longer look the wrong way when I cross the street - though I haven't done that for quite some time. I've recently being to perceive cars in American movies as driving on the wrong side of the road. These steps towards being comfortable in Australia are balanced by my inability to hear American accents - they still sound "normal". And every now and then I'm surprised to hear someone near me sound Australian. Last week I called a pub to make a dinner reservation and nearly laughed out loud at the guy on the other end of the phone - he was so Australian. Real okka, if you know what I mean - which you probably don't. In addition to excellent 'roo steak, the same pub offers a bogan burger, a bogan being the Aus equivalent of American white trash. The burger includes a grilled beef patty, breaded and fried chicken, fried bacon, fried potato pancake, and canned beetroot all in a bun with a cocktail umbrella on top. Everything about it screams class. Just thinking about it may be bad for your cholesterol. I had this pub recommended to me by one of my lab-mates. The German post-grad in my office overheard us discussing this and we then had fun trying to define the word "bogan" to someone who had also never heard the terms "white trash" or "trailer trash". I think we got the idea across with some swearing and pantomimes. I'm glad to be a cultural ambassador when I can.

The curse of the clothes horse

As I have mentioned before, I lost all my clothes in the mold incident of '06. I have, however, managed to beef up the wardrobe in the past few months, in part on my own, and in major part thanks to various parental figures. One person in particular took me on a wonderfully exorbitant shopping trip where I was bought an absolutely fabulous tank top costing at least three times what I would ever pay for a tank top. It makes my boobs look great and is interesting while not being overwhelming, thereby wearable with pretty much everything: jeans, skirts, work, play. Because it was expensive and because the tag says to, I always wash it by hand. Yes me, washing things by hand. Shocking. I wore it out to the pub last night and so it smelt like an ashtray this morning. Playing at being a dutifully responsible adult, I decided to do some hand laundry this afternoon in an effort to avoid the cigarette smells becoming a permanent part of the fabric. In addition to the tank, I washed my new favourite long-sleeved top from Anthropologie (a birthday present), some French lingerie and a couple of other things. When I do hand laundry, I'm exceedingly careful to keep the colours way the hell away from the lights, which is what I did today. So, I washed and rinsed and washed and rinsed, careful not to rub too hard or wring too much. And then I carried the items out to dry and discovered that my two favourite shirts and my expensive lingerie are covered in big, ugly, brown stains.

Swearing furiously, I returned to the laundry room to soak them again. And that's where Z found me, crying and banging my head against the window. He stood looking at me like you look at something that's about to explode in a big bad terribly no good way. Which is pretty much what I felt like doing, so his concern was justified.

At first I didn't understand what had happened. Then it came to me: the culprit is the fucking laundry basket we use to carry clothes out to hang on the line. It has left brown stains over all our clothes, stains we thought were caused by the oil seal failing on the washing machines we bought from the cheapo dirtbag salesman on Syndey Rd. You know, the three washing machines we went through before finally stomping into the shop and demanding our money back for them and the fridge which was also, at that point, not working. We couldn't at the time understand how three - three! - washing machines in a row could fail on us. Now we do...

Truth be told, I don't feel so bad for giving cheapo dirtbag salesman such a hard time. I mean the fridge really was befucked. And, as Z pointed out, even the repairman thought all of the washing machines were blown.

But my clothes! I feel cursed. What Egyptian goddess of the outfit did I piss off while we were at Karnak? Or is it a Congolese esprit de costume upset that we bought that wooden statue? What the fuck???

Perhaps it's time to have an exorcism. I think I'll begin by feeding that laundry basket to the goats.

Field games

There are certain phrases, casually bantered around any science facility, that make no sense at all if you stop and think about them. Take, for example, one I use frequently: in the field. As in, "I won't be able to catch up over lunch tomorrow because I'll be in the field." Field? What field? When have I ever done research in a field? And what does it mean to be in the field anyway? Wouldn't it be more correct to say on the field?

This really has nothing much to do with anything at all - it's just one of those things I've been thinking about when I'm not thinking about the massive ginormousness of the project that I've signed up to do. I had a three hour meeting on Friday with my supervisor at the guy in charge of running Victoria's marine parks. I left feeling under qualified and overwhelmed, not the best of combinations. It did however, shift the way I think about this project. I no longer think of it as a university course; it's become a research project that I've been hired to execute. Because they are paying me so poorly, they've sweetened the deal by agreeing to give me a nice piece of paper and a title change when I'm done. Perhaps surprisingly, this little change in perspective actually makes the whole thing easier. I like doing research projects - figuring out which questions to ask, how to ask them and then how to figure out the answers - but I'm not sure at all that I like getting a PhD; that sounds far more difficult. So, I play little mind games with myself (and the other self who so pleasantly agrees) and think about the foolishness of language in an effort to make it all feel better.

one of us ... one of us ...

In one of my favourite Raymond Chandler passages, he describes a drunk dame setting a glass down on a coffee table saying, "She was eight inches wrong".

I managed to do the same thing today, but with a boat. As in, I launched it but was five metres wrong. Which is to say that the boat came off the trailer and onto the ramp rather suddenly and rather not in the water. No damage to the prop. No crack in the hull. "Just" some big old scrapes down to the lightly shredded fiberglass.

What happened? As I've always done, I disconnected the boat from the tailer before we backed down the ramp. But this is a different boat, a lighter boat, one that's back heavy and, evidently, overly anxious to get in the water. So, it parted with the trailer prematurely. Reuniting boat and trailer would not have been possible without the stranger who stopped to help out. As we began the muscle-aching task of winching the boat back into position, it looked like we might actually be winching the truck down the ramp instead. Fortunately, truck did not share boat's desire to get wet.

My lab-mates, all of whom have been involved in similar "minor" mishaps, say that I'm now christened; I'm officially one of the crew. There wasn't so much grinning or joking from my supervisor when I told him - more standing around the boat and saying, "That's bad."

As bad as the damage is, the timing is even worse. This comes on the heels of an incident last week in which our other boat got swamped. This means that the lab is out of boats at a time when they are needed for field work and when the ocean conditions are actually good.

The day wasn't a total loss as we still managed to go diving - we did a shore dive with an entry that involved dropping over a 5'5" wall and scrambling over several metres of large boulders. The entry wasn't really the problem; it was the getting out that was difficult. My graceless clambering had an audience of 15 Japanese tourists, a Scottish family and a small group of young boys. After spending an hour and a half floating weightlessly, it's difficult to find one's land legs.

I spoke to Lumpkin on the phone when I got home. He cheered me up by sharing one his dad's quotes with me:

There are two kinds of boaters: those who have run aground, and those who haven't yet.

Is it still called running aground if you weren't in the water in the first place?

Before you buy a house...

Use this map to check out the effect of different sea level increases around the world - including in your own back yard. In particular, look and see what happens to the Netherlands with a sea level rise of 1m. Ouch.

(More details about the map here.)

Uphill both ways

I have a pretty easy ride to Uni: it’s a fairly flat route that takes me through parkland via quiet back streets. It takes me a little over 15 minutes to get to school – on a normal day. Then there are things like this:

(Image from here.)

Note the hurricane to the south of Australia. That would be the first hurricane to ever effect southern Australia. The edge of this storm has been buffeting Melbourne with seriously strong winds, causing the sections of my ride that I usually coast down to feel like a steep uphill slog. And they blow my light road bike all over the road. Not fun. About a third of my way to Uni today, my quads were insisting that I’d just climbed Twin Peaks.

And that's just what's happening on land. Western Victoria is supposedly getting pounded by 20ft waves. A buoy near the entrance to Port Philip Bay (close to Melbourne) recorded a 7m (~21ft) wave this morning. And the experts on diving in Victoria say that March and April are the best months to dive!

Endings

I've been thinking a lot about Nina this week, since Lumpkin told me she was killed in a mountaineering accident last Friday. She was such a sugar-loving, vivacious person who not only made us welcome in Wellington, but pretty much convinced us to move there in the first place. I loved walking through the city with her, learning about all the things that could be done to make a city more pedestrian-friendly. Like those pavers that we teased her about when we were out with Jason and Paul.

There was another death last week, though not as tragic I suppose. My good friend Alicia's Granny Annie died. I spent a fair amount of time with her when I was young, playing cards and learning Mah Jong. I don't know any of my other friends' grandparents like I knew Granny Annie. She was 89 and had suffered from Alzheimers for years. In fact, Alicia told me that one day while she was visiting, Granny Annie told her, "You look a lot like Alicia", to which she replied, "I am Alicia!". In some ways she had been gone for a while.

At Granny Annie's memorial service, Alicia's mum shared the story of Granny Annie's life. What struck me most was how hard she and her husband worked. Annie's husband would open their shop every morning until it was time for him to go to work, which is when Annie would take over for the day. When Allen got home from work, he would take over from Annie, working in the shop while Annie prepared dinner and took care of the kids.

Hearing that made me realize how luxurious our lives are. We have choice like perhaps no other generation has had choice. This choice comes with the pressure to figure out what we want to Do With Our Lives. This makes it so much harder. There's room to waffle and room to change our minds and room to worry about what we're doing. Back then, you had to work - and hard - every day. No room for lengthy sabbaticals to ponder your life's direction.

I see this in my grandmother too. She's in her late 80's and definitely losing her mind, but still she weeds her enormous garden and takes care of Vince and Sam (the alpacas). I know that she also spends the occasional day in bed, which she entirely deserves but would never, ever, ever have happened even 10 years ago. She has a work ethic that puts mine to shame - so much so that it makes me question whether I even have one!

And this is balanced by hearing about Nina's death, which makes me want to live to the best of my ability Right Now. You never know when the end will be. How to balance these two lessons? How to find the medium between working hard and working toward something you love? Perhaps that's called a PhD.

So, this is some of what I've been thinking about: death and change and the different forms of loss. Saying, "I'm sorry" at Granny Annie's funeral wasn't right - she had a good long life and a good death. And then there's Nina, just turned 30. Saying "I'm sorry" doesn't even begin to cover it.

Questions

Science is all about asking questions. There's an art to devising a brilliant question with far-reaching repercussions that can be answered through a simple experiment. Failing that, there's a process to taking a big question and simplifying it into testable components. The trick is to make sure that each of those components is still interesting, otherwise you're likely to find yourself in the middle of an experiment bored to tears and wondering how on earth you're going to convince anyone that this is ground-breaking research. It's all about making a little part of a little experiment tie in with the big picture.

Honing this ability to ask good research questions is a necessary part of the PhD process and what I've been working on for the last five weeks. Today my big picture just got a whole lot bigger. In a meeting, I was asked by one of the department's more senior professors what I want to do at the end of the PhD. Perhaps foolishly, I answered honestly - I believe my exact words were, "I have no idea." If only I had given my internal editor a chance to disagree! Fortunately, the other grad student in the room also had no idea. We were both then scolded and told that this was unacceptable. Everything we do during this PhD, all the choices we make, are supposed to further us along our career path. Do we choose to TA in order to gain valuable teaching experience in preparation for a job as an academic lecturer? Do we work with government agencies to lay the groundwork for a position as a researcher? Or do we network like crazy with industry so as to get in the door there?

All I can say is, Uh...what? It's time for me to really start thinking about this stuff? I thought I had another few years!

This question of "career" feels so antithetical to who I am. Or perhaps it's merely that the word "career" instantly brings to mind a desk-job at some large firm where I spend a good part of my time weasling my way up the ladder of promotions and raises. In other words, it sounds bloody awful.

I do know that there are other options out there and, in fact, that's why I'm subjecting myself to this three (and a half) year research program. I guess my attitude towards the What Comes Next has been very much a wait-and-see. Today as I was mulling this over in my over-worked neural circuitry, I realized that the wait-and-see attitude is devoid of hopes and aspirations. Instead of going for my dream job, I have been planning to see what's available when I get out (saying get out like that sounds way too much like this is a prison term). How passive! I'd much rather live striving for something than waiting for whatever shows up. That isn't antithetical to me at all.

But there's a catch: I have to decide on something, and I'm notoriously hopeless at making decisions (just ask my husband). I really don't want to be strapped down to some career path, which is part of my resistance to making a decision - it just seems so final. And yet, if I don't start thinking about this I may realize what I want too late to get there. There aren't so many positions open each year for marine ecologists.

Once again, this PhD is showing me how little I know. Thanks a lot.

Competition

As you may know, Z is trying to make it as a freelance writer here in Melbourne. The competition is really tough. For example, check out this guy.

I agree

Confession time: I talk to myself. You're probably not surprised because you most likely talk to yourself, too. Recently, however, I've caught myself agreeing with myself. As in:

- I think I should have sushi for lunch today.
- I agree.

I miss the days of simple internal monologues. This feels a few steps closer to clinical. And what happens if I start disagreeing with myself? That could get ugly.

I've also recently had to come to terms with the fact that I have very little intuitive sense of left and right. At 31 years of age, I still need (and I do mean need) to look at my palms and spell out the "L" for left. This is difficult to do while driving, which is why I need my directions to be littered with large gestures.

And I'm getting a PhD?

- Who's idea was that?
- Well, it wasn't mine.

Martian invasion

I went diving yesterday to help a colleague out with his research. While he counted fish along a transect, I explored. I saw my first wild sea horses - saying it like that makes me imagine them galloping past in a storm of turbulence, leaving a trail of silted water in their wake. As cool as they are with the whole "pregnant" male thing, they couldn't compare with seeing one of these:


It's a giant cuttle, Sepia apama (photo from here). When I first came across hovering just above the bottom, I had no idea what I was looking at. Its coloration and the raised skin flaps on its back made it look like part of the reef,though the fin along the bottom of its mantle rippled continuously. Its tentacles and arms were curled up into its face, and it sat starting at us with its strange eyes. At one point, my dive buddy and I moved to one side, and it moved so as to remain facing us. Was it an animal? Responsiveness suggested yes. Was it a fish? Completely the wrong shape. A vertebrate? Sure didn't look like any vertebrate I'd ever seen. An alien from Mars? Maybe. A Cephalopod? Distinct head region suggests probably - but far less interesting than the alien from Mars hypothesis. An octopus? Nope. A squid? Also nope. We surfaced and I asked my partner what it was. Fortunately, he recognized the creature. Unfortunately, he's from France and doesn't know the English word for it. Neither did the other guy on the boat who's from Germany. When I suggested cuttlefish, there was general consensus, backed up by the guidebook when we got back to the truck.

This may be one of the coolest things I've seen underwater in quite some time. It can't get over how otherworldly and alien it looked. Perhaps Martians have invaded Earth and have been classified as Cephalopods. It sure would explain their intelligence and looks. Come to think of it, Martian invasion would explain the intelligence and looks of a lot of people too. For example, Tom Cruise. No, wait - hasn't he expelled his aliens?

Summer? Winter? Who can tell?

It is still summer here in the southern hemisphere - unless you live in Canberra, apparently. A few weeks ago, a similarly ferocious storm a couple of hours north of Melbourne cracked the windshield of my aunt's car. While I certainly wish it would cool the hell down, I hope it doesn't happen quite so violently. Though, of course, there would be something amazing about experiencing the downpour of that much ice. In fact, the more I think about it, the better it sounds. I take it back: can we please have a massive hail storm here in Melbourne?

The good kind of stormy

I fear that I am becoming one of those people who gushes about how much they love their yoga class at every opportunity they get. But I do love it, even when just sitting there hurts in places I didn't know existed. I've tried to get into yoga at other times but it's never stuck. This time, it feels positively gluey. Perhaps it's the teachers, though one is so soft spoken and flexible that I can't quite hear her and when I try to imitate her moves, discover that my body does not do that. Perhaps it's the type of yoga - this is my first time with Iyengar yoga, having tried mainly Hatha in the past. Or perhaps it's that I let my body get into such a state of un-fit that anything feels restorative.

I rode home after class into a menacing grey sky with a fresh wind from the south at my back. I am now trying to coax said breeze into the house to cool everything down. Meteorologists are predicting that the drought will break this autumn - a colleague told me that one meteorologist is even giving a date for the break: 23rd of February. While I don't believe anyone can give a date for the end of a drought, I do believe that climatologists can look at the weaking El Nino conditions in the Pacific and correlate this to an increased chance of rainfall in southeastern Australia. This is great for the birds and the bees, but not so good for those of us who commute by bike.

On Sunday, Z and I drove across the city to watch The House of Flying Daggers in the botanic gardens. About halfway between home and park, an intense gusty wind rocketed the car. The temperature quickly dropped 14C (~25F) and it began to rain. Sure enough, the screening was canceled, though we did get to have a wonderful walk in the drizzle through the gardens. There's nothing like a cool breeze and rain after a weekend that spent most of the time over 100F. I am so very ready for winter.

The rapid change reminded me of watching a storm roll in across the ocean toward us while Z, Lumpkin and I were in the Perhentians, Malaysia. I've never seen anything like the clearly defined wall of cloud that approached us, massive and towering, like something out of The Day After Tomorrow. As we watched it approach, Z said that he didn't think it would rain on us. Ha! After the usual burst of wind heralding its arrival, the front let loose with such a downpour as to grey out the boats moored about 20m offshore.

While perhaps not quite so picturesque as a tropical island, Melbourne certainly has the stormy weather covered. How I love the thunder and lightening and aliveness to the air as the atmosphere roils. Now if it would just cool the fuck down.