some new results

There is a very good reason why I have not been updating my blog.  Well, sort of.  As you, my faithful readers, are likely aware, my life has been very much in the balance for the past few months.  So many things happened, or almost happened, and then everything very suddenly magically worked out.

Here's the scoop.  I applied for a postdoctoral research grant from the National Science Foundation back in early November.  It was extremely last minute.  Maddeningly so.  I learned about the grant something like a week before the proposal was due.  Thankfully two things had happened: I was already in the process of preparing a different grant proposal, so it wasn't too terribly hard to rewrite that one into a different version for NSF, and the government shutdown had backed things up at NSF so much that they ended up extending the deadline by a week or two, giving me a little extra time.

In any case, it was kind of miserable pulling everything together at the last minute, but I did it, and then I sat.  And waited.  For months.  At the end of January, I learned that my proposal had been sent out for review, which means they sent it to some experts in my field to read what I had written and make comments on it for the big committee meeting.  Then in early March, the committee met, and we heard nothing.  Radio silence.  And then - suddenly - in May, after months of no communication whatsoever from NSF, the status of my proposal magically changed from "pending" to "recommended".

What that means is this: the way NSF works is a big committee meets to discuss all the proposals that have been submitted.  The committee members read the proposals themselves, and also the reviews written by the expert reviewers, and the program manager (the head of the committee) has to write up a summary of all of the discussions, and ultimately make a recommendation for which grants should be funded.   Normally, when the program manager recommends that a grant be funded, it's funded.  So for my grant status to change from "pending" to "recommended" is huge.  The problem was, there has been discussion of a bill in congress called the FIRST act, which is the reauthorization for the NSF budget, and it's kind of a mess, from what I understand.  They're trying to slash science funding, and they're also trying to implement some really damaging changes to the scientific review process.  It's extremely disheartening, to say the least.

So in my case, there was the added issue of the timing of this legislation.  I was really worried that even though my grant was recommended, depending on what was happening with the FIRST act, the program manager's recommendation might get shot down.  And then I would be in the somewhat tragic position of being the only person anyone's ever heard of who had their grant get recommended and then not funded.

But.  But!  On June 1st, the status changed again: from "recommended" to "funded".  That's it - "funded".  And suddenly there's paperwork to fill out and plane tickets that I can buy on my very own grant and my salary is getting changed over to my very own grant as of July 1st.

So all of this time that I have been not blogging, I've been in kind of a precarious mind space, wondering where I would be next year.  Hoping against hope that things would work out with this grant, and wanting to write an update here, but holding my breath because what if, what if it doesn't work out.  In the meantime, I also had a job interview elsewhere (sort of... that's a subject for a different post), and also spent some time convincing myself that truly, the absolute worst case scenario would be for me to move back to Berkeley for a year, and come on, that's not exactly the end of the world.

But here I am, and it's summer in State College, and the weather has been truly lovely and I get to sit in my upstairs office in my apartment that I love, and work on things that I think are interesting, and go for long runs on Sunday mornings, and spend the day on Saturday brewing beer and pulling weeds in the garden plot I'm sharing with my neighbors.  Things have gotten so cozy here.  I'm really feeling at home, and at least part of that is because I now know I can stay here, so I can afford to get attached to it.  I have some really great friends who live in the same apartment complex as me, and some nights we sit out on the porch together, or in the grass behind our houses, munching on snacks and shooting the breeze.  It's a good life, and I'm glad I get to live it for a little while longer.

This summer is about to become a little bit crazy, though, so I'm trying to enjoy the lazy days of summer while I can.  J will be here starting Tuesday (yay!!), and we will have a month of hanging out and probably alternately working from home and going out and exploring the environs.  Then the craziness starts.  I'll be in Geneva for a week (yes, just one week) in July, for a conference.  Then I stop off in PA, do my laundry, and head back out to California almost immediately, where J and I are driving up north (basically on the border with Oregon) for his family reunion.  I'll be back here at the beginning of August, and then I guess it's time for the semester, and it'll be time to start keeping my eyes peeled for faculty jobs.

And that is the story of what I've been up to for the past few months.  Oh, also, I went to my Berkeley graduation and G & S's wedding in May, and it was really wonderful.  I hope they don't mind if I post a picture here.  (It's on the internet elsewhere, so I don't think it should matter.)

I think this is G's 1052nd picture of the day.  I assure you he was quite happy in person.

Tonight I think I'm going to Happy Valley Brewing Company to watch the World Cup, and tomorrow is long run day, and I also have some laundry to do and more weeds to pull.  (Gardening is hard work.  Especially when you only do it in extremely punctuated spurts.  :-P )  I will try to make my next update not take quite so long as this one did (although no promises that I will be able to top the NSF news).

Happy Summer!

weird weekend, weird blog post

I wanted to write a funny post about what a Berkeley weekend I've had, but only parts of it are funny, so I'm not sure how to write it up.  On Friday night, I went to my friend G's house, and we brewed up some beer.  G has been brewing for something like 2 years now, and I've really appreciated that he's let me sort of glom on to the process and learn a little bit about it.  I'm going to start brewing when I move.  I would've started earlier, except that I don't have much room in my place, and also each batch makes something like 50 beers, and having two people regularly producing 50 beers within a relatively small friend group is just too much beer.

Anyway, on Friday night, a small group of us were brewing up some raspberry ale (it's raspberry season right now, and the raspberries are plentiful, cheap, and delicious).  We were standing in the kitchen, being generally extremely nerdy and philosophical by turns.  One friend in particular was talking about how he'd like to re-do the U.S. government.  He had some really, really interesting ideas (I think), like adding lobbyists as a fourth branch of government.  The thing is, they are the fourth branch of government right now.  They're just invisible and unregulated, and it's totally screwing a lot of things up.  So we were talking about how to regulate that and bring it out into the open; what you'd have to do to really make the "lobby" an official branch of government.

Then another friend pointed out that this was probably someone's worst nightmare: five Berkeley grad students brewing beer in a kitchen in Oakland, talking about how to restructure the government.  (Actually, it's probably my dad's worst nightmare.  Love you, Dad.)

But I loved it.  It was so fun and interesting.  I love thought experiments, and this was a really good one.

Then yesterday, I read an article about a movie that just got released this weekend, Fruitvale Station.  The article said you should go see it if for no other reason than the fact that it's by a black director and stars a mostly black cast of really talented actors, and it represents a unique and important point of view that basically never gets portrayed on the big screen.  And the article said that the movie was under a limited release this weekend, and that if it did well, it might be released more widely.

Besides that, the only thing I knew about this movie is that it was about Oscar Grant.  Oscar Grant was shot in the back by a BART police officer on New Year's Eve the first year I lived in Berkeley.  It was a huge deal out here.  He was unarmed, and he died a few hours later, and the whole thing resulted in protests and looting in Oakland.

So I knew going in that it had something to do with the incident, which is the story of a black man getting shot and killed by a white police officer, and that it was by a black director (apparently originally from Oakland, although I learned that later) and was starring black actors.  That's all I knew.

I felt really weird about the movie.  It was indisputably a very good movie.  What felt weird about it was that I knew Oscar Grant was going to die.  That was kind of the point of the movie.  Well, no, the point of the movie was to portray a (fictionalized?) version of the last day of Oscar Grant's life.  It's his mom's birthday, he stops by the grocery store to pick up some crab so his grandma can make her famous gumbo for everybody.  He takes his daughter to preschool, he drops her off at her cousins' so he can go out with his girlfriend for New Year's Eve.  On the one hand, it's just a normal day in the life of a flawed but well-meaning human being.  But the movie really felt like it was at pains to make you like Oscar Grant.  It felt a little too heavy handed at points, like the scene where a dog gets hit by a car, and he runs out into the street and holds the dog in his arms as it slips away.  It's a short, very painful scene, and it's completely obvious that the only point of it is to make us see what a loving person Oscar Grant is.  It doesn't connect with any other aspects of the plot.  And come to think of it, it's in stark contrast to the scene immediately following it, where Oscar drives out to a parking lot to make a drug deal.  I guess that's the point, but it just felt like it was trying too hard sometimes.

It's hard to know how I would have felt about the movie if I didn't know anything about the whole situation.  What's interesting is that even though I felt the heavy handedness of it at points, and even though I knew what was going to happen, I was still absolutely horrified when he was shot.  That's why I have to say that it was a very good movie.  Even though I could feel the mechanics of it a little bit too much - like I could feel it working on me - the reality is that it did work on me, and it's hard to argue with that.

The big takeaway for me was that even if everything leading up to the scene where he gets shot was completely fictionalized, I came away hurting for Oscar Grant and his family, because the point is that he was a person, and even if he was flawed, he certainly didn't deserve to die.  And my personal opinion is that even if the guy who shot him did do it completely on accident (which seems somewhat likely, although admittedly it's not like I know that much about it), he should have done longer than 11 months of jail time.

So we came out of the movie, and we decided to go for a beer.  It was pretty intense, and we wanted to decompress rather than head straight home by ourselves.  We walked around the block, and our normal spot was totally packed and too noisy, so we decided to try Saturn Cafe.  Saturn Cafe started in Santa Cruz, and it's a vegetarian and vegan retro-themed diner.  Kind of like Steak 'n Shake if it had started in Santa Cruz.  Apparently they normally have beer from Bison Brewery, this place in Berkeley that's supposed to do some interesting stuff.  So we're looking at the menu, and our waiter comes over, and he's this really cute, skinny, kind of femme little guy, with big plugs in his ears and big black glasses, and a very emphatic way of speaking.  We tell him we just saw Fruitvale Station and we want some beer to decompress, and he says, "Well... unfortunately all we have left tonight is PBR."  He sees the expressions on our faces and quickly adds, "But we have other alcohol!  We have... mimosas."  And we all start laughing.  And he adds, increasingly awkwardly, "And... champagne.  And... Bloody Mary's."  So we've just seen a movie about the Oscar Grant fiasco, in a theater full of locals who were here when the whole thing went down, and now we're in a vegetarian diner being offered champagne by a cute little gay boy.  What a night.

We ended up "taking a minute to think about it" and then sneaking back outside, then going to Beta Lounge and drinking real beer instead.  We talked about the movie a little bit, and lots of other things, and then eventually I came home and went to sleep.

This morning, I heard the verdict from the Trayvon Martin trial, and I'm just feeling really weird about things.  It is strange (but important) to realize how much your life is shaped by the color of your skin.  I hate it, and it hurts, but it's important to think about it, and to realize how different your entire life would be if you were a different color.  Far, far too often it affects the way people look at you, and the way people relate to you, and especially the snap judgments people make of you.  When you're white, you don't notice it, because the snap judgments are generally good or neutral ones.  But when you're black and there's a gun involved, it damn well seems like you're not going to get the benefit of the doubt.

So there were parts of this weekend that were really fun, but also a lot of it makes me feel a little sick if I really think about it.  And now I have to compartmentalize all that stuff and do some work.

Yosemite

We added another National Park feather to our cap this weekend: Yosemite.

I'm still pretty tired from our two hour hike yesterday, and I'm not sure that typing up a big long narrative would really do the place justice anyway.  Suffice it to say that Yosemite is absolutely gorgeous, and if you ever get the chance, you should go.  I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

These first ones are actually from the drive home last night, as the sun went down.  California is a really beautiful place, and I will miss drives like this.

And this is where the Yosemite ones start (in case it's not obvious):

National parks, man.  They are truly a national treasure.

Now I'm back home and it's time for another week of dissertating... but first, a slow and deliberate evening jog to enjoy the beautiful weather, and perhaps an evening of Game of Thrones...

On Being Home (reprise)

Here I am, at my mom's house in Illinois.  Every time I come back for a visit, I find myself driving aimlessly around C-U for a bit, just sort of... trying it on for size.  I'm back in town for my 10 year high school reunion, and I also find myself thinking about all of the things I've done in the past 10 years.  In a way, high school seems so recent.  I remember it so vividly, just like it was yesterday.  And in another way, it seems like an eternity ago.  10 years ago, I had probably just decided for sure that I was going to the U of I for college.  Since then, I've graduated from college, spent a year of my life in France, gotten married, moved to California, spent 5 years of my life in California, nearly completed my Ph.D., gotten divorced, and now am fairly certain that I am moving to the other side of the country in just 5 months.  And what's truly mind blowing is all the people I've met along the way.  When I think back on all the wonderful people who have become such an important part of my life, to think that I didn't even know that they existed 10 years ago is just astounding.  People who have touched my life and my heart, who have changed me as a person, who have made me grow and think and feel things I never would have imagined.  And just think - it's probably going to happen again in the next 10 years.  How many people are out there that I haven't met yet, just waiting to come into my life and make me forget that I ever could have existed without them?

This is what's weird about being back in C-U: it doesn't change.  It's essentially exactly the same as it always has been, and yet it feels so, so different than it did 10 years ago.  But the strange part is realizing that the reason it feels so different is because I'm different.  I look at it through very different eyes than I did 10 years ago, and to know that I feel the same on the inside, but I'm demonstrably quite a different person is very weird.  It's hard to remember what I was like 10 years ago.  I've always been a little bit too old for my age, so it's not like I was completely immature, but within the past year or two I've really started to feel like my age suits me for the first time in my life.  I feel like 28 is about right, because I finally feel like a real adult.  A young adult, certainly, but I've really been growing in to my own skin recently, and I feel like 28 suits me.

So where does this leave "home"?  I always feel wistful when I come back here, and it does always feel like home.  But now that I'm here with the knowledge that I'm about to move away from California, I'm surprised to find myself feeling a bit reticent.  When I moved to California nearly 5 years ago, I never thought it would grow on me as much as it has.  And now, 5 years later, driving around Champaign on a cold Wednesday night, I've been psychologically "trying on" life in a small college town again.  How would I feel if I were moving back here?  Would I actually want to do that?  Because I'm moving to a very similar place in a very short amount of time, and I'm mentally preparing myself for some reverse culture shock.  Berkeley has gotten into my bones in a way I didn't expect, to the extent that it's much more difficult than I anticipated imagining myself living in a small college town again.  I am still so, so thrilled and excited about it, and I think it will feel really right once I've actually moved and settled in.  But realizing that there are things about life here that are annoying or foreign to me now is a very strange realization.

It will be really nice to see everyone from high school, too.  I'm looking forward to a very nice but very strange week!

Sequoia sempervirens

Note the size of the tree as compared to the car.

Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park

This is where they filmed the chase scene in Return of the Jedi!

Jevon is standing next to the overturned roots of a collapsed redwood.  The bases of these trees are enormous.

a perfectly California week

This week has been an absolute hoot, let me tell you.  In preparation for our Grand Road Trip, and also just because we wanted to do something fun and different, Jevon and I decided to do a test trip up to Humboldt County this week.  There were many reasons for it: I'd never been there, and it is so quintessentially northern California, his mom's family is originally from the area, and we wanted to see just how uncomfortable it would be sleeping in the car before we commit to doing it for a week on the way to Illinois.

Also: there's a semi-famous theater company up there I'd never heard of, the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theater, and they do a month-long theater festival every summer that Jevon had always wanted to see.  So, we got tickets to the opening night of "Mary Jane: the Musical".  That's right, a full length musical theater production about marijuana growers in Humboldt.  It was so interesting.  Like, way more interesting than I'd expected.  I wasn't all that jazzed about watching a musical comedy about marijuana, seeing as that's not exactly my scene (I know, I'm a Berkeley grad student, I should stop being such a square all the time...), but it was actually fairly nuanced social commentary from a really interesting perspective.  Plus the songs were really good!  I can't say I ever expected to be sitting in the grass (no pun intended) at an outdoor theater in a tiny town in Humboldt County, wrapped in a sweater and a sleeping bag for the cold California summer night, watching a musical with a bunch of locals about the complicated economic and social issues surrounding marijuana growing.  According to the play, marijuana brought in $2.6 billion to the Humboldt economy last year.  Whether that figure's exactly right or not (although I'd think they'd have the best idea of anyone), I had no idea the extent to which pot dominates the local economy.  I guess I'm totally naive, but it was a completely different social climate up there.  Of course, the audience at the opening night of "Mary Jane: the Musical" is probably a self-selecting group, to a certain extent, but it really seemed like everyone was on board with preserving the pot-growing way of life; for them, it's a cash crop, and the fact that it's illegal seems to create a lot more problems than the plant itself.  My impression was that they just wanted to be left alone to keep producing a product that there is obviously huge demand for, and that they're going to keep producing whether it's legal or not, since it just brings in so much money.  But in the play they talked about how people have very different attitudes toward legalization; some people think the tax revenue would be great, and that the reduction in crime and crime-related expenses would be incredibly beneficial to society, but some people worry that if it's legalized, the price will plummet and the local economy will suffer tremendously.  Really interesting stuff.

Anyway, we did plenty of other stuff besides watch a musical about pot.  Mostly we wandered around little towns and went in to used book stores and breweries.  (Northern California is a pretty excellent place for used books and local beer, in case you were wondering.)  We also went to Grizzly Creek Redwoods State Park, which was amazing and gorgeous, and I think Jevon got a kick out of my wonderment at the redwoods.  It's fun going around California with a Californian; he takes so much for granted, and I'm sitting there bug-eyed going, "What?! Do you SEE that?!"  The trees were just unreal, and I got plenty of pictures of them, which I will soon upload in a supplementary post.

So, we left Berkeley early on Wednesday morning, spent all day Wednesday and Thursday wandering around Humboldt, went to the play on Thursday night, and then decided to start driving home late last night.  It's about a 5 hour drive, and we had slept in the car on Wednesday night and weren't looking that forward to doing it again, so we drove for a few hours, took a nap for a few hours, and then made it home early early this morning.  Once we got up and moving today, we decided to look into buying a tent for our Illinois trip.  Sleeping in the car was fine, but it'd be really nice to have the option to camp, too.  So we got on Craigslist and, lo and behold, there was a sweet tent for sale in Berkeley.  We called the guy, and it turns out he lives about two blocks directly north of me, and we're going to check out his tent tonight.  He bought it in the late 60's and has used it a grand total of 6 times, but he said it's spent the last few decades sealed in a bag, perfectly dry and in storage, and that it's in nearly perfect condition.  We looked up the brand of tent, Stephenson, and the equivalent of this tent would go for over $600 today, so I'm thinking it's totally worth the $50 this guy is asking, even if we only use it on this one trip and never again.  But the guy said apparently Stephenson - which is now known for super high-tech, fancy-schmancy tricked out backpacking tents - was originally a nudist organization, so their catalogs back in the 60's were filled with naked people hiking around.  I love this.  I am buying a tent from an old Berkeley nudist hippie for my epic road trip across the country.

Speaking of my epic road trip, I remain über-excited.  I think we're leaving on Thursday!!  We're playing it by ear, but the itinerary looks something like this:

Leg 1:  Drive to Medford, Oregon.  Stay with Jevon's mom for a day or two.
Leg 2:  Stop by Crater Lake National Park on the way to Boise.  Spend a day in Boise, maybe.
Leg 3:  On to Yellowstone National Park.  Spend a day or two in Yellowstone.
Leg 4:  Swing up through Billings, Montana, then back down to check out Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument, and Badlands National Park, in South Dakota.
Leg 5:  Depending on how tired we are of being in the car, either swing up to Fargo and then down to Minneapolis, or head straight for Madison.
Leg 6:  Madison, Wisconsin for a taste of civilization again.  Then on to Chicago for a day or two.
Leg 7:  Chicago to Home Sweet Home, where we will hopefully recharge our batteries for a few days, eat at Papa Del's at least once, and see everything C-U has to offer!  It's no Santa Barbara, but I am so looking forward to it.

I'm tired of typing, so I'm going to go!  If you will be in any of the aforementioned locations in the next 2-3 weeks, drop me an email, because I would love to see you (yes, you!).

Christmas Eve at Point Reyes

My mom just left yesterday morning.  She was only here for a few days (on the way back to Illinois after visiting my brother in Las Vegas), but on Christmas Eve, we drove up to Point Reyes, a lookout over the Pacific Ocean where there's apparently a really cool lighthouse (which we didn't venture out to see because it was too cold), and where you can do some whale watching if the whales are around and you're patient enough.  Even though it was a bit of a long drive, made longer by the fact that I missed a few turns on the way back, I think we both had a good time, and I got some nice pictures out of the deal too.

I think this is my favorite one.

Yesterday, for Christmas, we went to my friend Jess's house and consumed way too much cheese and butter and cream.  Well, I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely consumed way too much of those things.  I tell myself it may have been slightly offset by running 9 miles yesterday morning, but even if not... oh well.  I also told myself I would do 9 more miles today, but I seriously doubt that's going to happen, since I already ate more bread and cheese this morning, and it's cold and gray outside.  I think I'm going to walk the dogs, listen to This American Life, and do some errands instead.

Merry Christmas, everyone!  I hope you spent it surrounded by the people you love.

California Is Lovely

We drove up along the coast yesterday, for no particular reason (which is absolutely the best reason).  I brought my new camera with me.  We stopped at a seafood shack along the ocean for dinner and I had fish tacos.

Northern California is so lovely, especially when you can get away from the hustle and bustle and the golden sun just sets the whole world aglow.