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!

lazy Saturday

Leaving Café Lemont

It's snowing something fierce outside, and I'm sitting at Café Lemont in State College, just letting the cafe noise wash over me and enjoying the hum of warmth and activity.  All of the mugs here are handmade by a lady who sells them in house, and mine has a thick, bulbous ceramic base that you can cup in your hands, and it's full of warm, frothy latte.  My friend and neighbor E and her boyfriend are at a table a few feet away, and she's explaining to him what garden path sentences are, and the couple behind me are code switching between Arabic and English.  I love this café.  It's furnished with what seems to be antique/thift store furniture, and there are these beautiful dreamy paintings on the walls painted by a local artist.  They're the types of art I'd like to have in my house someday, maybe in some far off future when I'm making a professor's salary instead of a postdoc one, and I can do things like buy art from local artists that I like.

Inside Café Lemont

I've been feeling down this week.  Very intermittently, though; it comes and goes, and thankfully it mostly goes.  That is to say, most days I'm really happy and there are so many good things in my life right now.  I love my job and my work, and I'm making some really great friends here.  I've made it a point to exercise every day since I got back from break, and that's been really nice.  It is so cold here right now.  Too cold for running some days, really, and I am not exactly a wimp when it comes to running in the cold.  15 degrees is about my limit, though, because below that and it just hurts your skin and lungs.  So I go running as long as it's not too windy and biting, but that's usually only once a week right now.  The other days, I've been doing strength training-type stuff at home, and I'm getting noticeably stronger, which I really like.  I haven't had much upper body strength since I was playing volleyball and lifting weights regularly in high school, and I'd like to get back to the point where I'm actually strong-strong.  Winter in central PA is a pretty good time to work on that, it turns out.

Last night I had two bad dreams (two!) and I don't know what to make of that; I can't tell if I'm in a weird-sad mood today because of the dreams, or if already being in a slightly weird-sad mood is what brought the dreams on in the first place.  I think it's a little bit of both, unfortunately.  But I woke up in the middle of the night and was just so, so sad and couldn't get back to sleep for a little bit.  Thankfully I did get back to sleep after not too long, but then I had a second bad dream, and then it was morning, so I stayed awake after that.  But it was just not a restful night's sleep, and it's definitely affected my day today.  Bad dreams are funny when you're an adult, too.  Not funny-ha-ha, obviously, but funny-isn't-that-weird.  You'd think they'd go away when you grow up, but really all that changes is the things that feel out of your control enough to make you feel scared.  I don't mean this to be as cryptic and worrying as it sounds.  I'm just musing on the fact that at nearly 30 years old, it's still possible to wake up feeling freaked out from a bad dream!

Well, one of my postdoc friends is here now, so maybe that will help get me out of my funk.  I decided to dress up a little bit today, and it's almost silly how much that perked me up.  I decided to wear a dress and put on some mascara and even a tiny little spritz of perfume, and it's kind of fun to feel the tiniest bit fancier than normal.

* * * * * * *

We just had an awesome conversation about science and programming and spectra, and now I'm feeling much better.  I have these three friends I met through the Penn State Postdoc Society, and they are some of the most interesting, fun, smart women I've ever known.  The one who's here now is an astrophysicist, the one I went out to dinner with last night is a biological anthropologist, and the one who might be joining us later today is a cancer researcher.  So basically we sit around and have hugely nerdy conversations and it is so so so much fun.

So... things are good, in the scheme of things.  But I miss my boyfriend very much, and that sucks, and I still don't know how long I'm going to be here or where I'm going next or for how long, and that kind of sucks too.  (The other side of the coin is that it's fun and exciting by turns, but I definitely vacillate between those feelings with some regularity.)

On a related note, it's looking pretty strongly like I'll be staying here for at least one more year, maybe two, and conceivably even three.  I have a near-guarantee of funding for next year, and I also have two grants that are going to be reviewed very soon, and if one of those comes through (fingers and toes crossed!), then I would have 2-3 years of my very own funding.  So within two months, I will know for sure just how long I'll be staying here, and I think that will help a little bit with my mild feelings of drifting-related anxiety.

Hmph.  I think I'll try to go back to reading Game of Thrones now.

One Week in State College, PA (a report card)

Today marks my eighth full day in State College, so I think it's about time for a report card detailing my preliminary impressions.  Here is a list of ten things that have been particularly striking to me over the past week, along with what I think of them, in case you care.  (And if you're reading my blog, it seems like you might actually care what I think about things, for some reason.)


Population density.  My first inclination is to just say A-freaking-plus and be done with it.  Don't get me wrong.  I love Berkeley, very much.  But I can't help but feel how much more at peace I am here, and it's definitely due to the relative lack of people.  There's just fewer people here, and less noise, and more space, and it is so nice.  I live in a beautiful neighborhood, with tall leafy trees and big yards where families can run around and play.  There are many nice things about living in a relatively urban area, for sure.  But I think a place like this is really the place for me.  The downside, of course, is that life is much more car-dependent here.  I was totally fine for five years in Berkeley without a car.  But a week in SC (three days of which I rented a car anyway) is already a little annoying.  This place is just not as set up for car-free living.  It's doable, but it will be easier once I've gotten a car, and I don't have to do things like walk for 45 minutes to get to Ace Hardware and discover they don't have what I wanted anyway.  All things considered, then: A-.  (It's the stuff that's generally correlated with low population density that brings this one down a bit.)

Penn State campus.  It's really pretty!  Prettier than I expected, actually.  Let's be clear, it's no Berkeley, but no campus really compares to Berkeley, with its eucalyptus grove and redwood trees and babbling brooks.  The PSU campus is pretty in an East Coast, brick buildings, lots of foliage and criss crossing paths sort of way.  It's definitely more like the U of I campus than like Berkeley, although it seems geographically more compact than the U of I.  Definitely classy, but welcoming too, and that's a nice combination.  B+

My new department.  It's going to be kind of weird to be in a psychology department, I can tell.  I got a tour of our facilities yesterday and discovered that my little branch of our department occupies the bottom two floors of a six story building occupied entirely by psychologists.  There are so many psychologists.  It is weird.  But I've got to say, everyone has been fantastic so far.  Incredibly warm, nice, welcoming, and helpful.  It definitely doesn't feel like home in the way Berkeley did, and I sort of doubt that it ever will, since I spent five years with the same small group of folks who all knew me pretty well.  (It was kind of like high school in that respect.)  But there are definite perks to being in such a big powerhouse of a department here.  They have some serious resources, for one thing; the building is beautiful and modern, and the research facilities are really great.  It's going to take some adjusting, but I'm pretty sure I'll manage to get used to it.  A-, for reasons of sentimentality.

Downtown area.  Super cute!  It's kind of like... Green Street plus Downtown Urbana, if you're an Illinois person, and maybe... Elmwood plus Northside, if you're a Berkeley person.  Lots of places to eat, extremely safe, but also has a distinctly collegiate feel to it.  One thing that's really interesting to me is that the types of restaurants here are just nothing like Berkeley.  First of all, the actual-restaurant-to-bar ratio is waaaaay tipped towards the bar end of the scale, which is the opposite of Berkeley.  Also, there's a lot more "normal" food here than in Berkeley, and by that I mean the offerings here are not as interesting.  The more mainstream types of "ethnic cuisine" are definitely represented (Thai, Chinese, Mexican), but you can replace things like Vietnamese and Ethiopian with like, Italian and German.  There's a German deli and an Austrian deli downtown, and that kind of blows my mind.  I think I'd rather have Ethiopian food, but I guess I'll take my time here as an opportunity to become reacquainted with the food of my people.  A-

Undergraduate student body.  It's pretty weird to be surrounded by thousands of 19 year olds attending a Big Ten school again.  It's taking me back to 2003 in a major way.  If I put my 2003 brain on, it feels pretty normal.  Like, oh yeah, I remember frat boys with backwards baseball caps and sorority girls with bleached blond hair and short shorts.  It is weird to walk to campus through my neighborhood and be surrounded by evidence that 50,000 rowdy undergrads inhabit this town.  There are gaggles of made-up girls in sequined tank tops roaming from house to house, and boys in polo shirts crowding on to dilapidated porches to play beer pong and yell at passers-by.  And I say "girls" and "boys" because it is striking to me how much they resemble children.  I cannot believe I am going to be in charge of educating these young minds.  ("Animals," my neighbor calls them.  "A hoard of savage beasts.")  When I think about how much the people in some of my classes drove me crazy in college, I get a little bit apprehensive about being in charge of them next semester.  But whatever: for now, it feels strangely familiar, and I'm okay with it.  B

Smoking.  There are so many people who smoke here!  It is really weird!  I think what this actually means is that there are very few people who smoke in Berkeley (well, who smoke cigarettes, anyway...) and I didn't notice that, because I don't smoke.  But now that there are people smoking everywhere I go, it's very noticeable, and very strange.  On the other hand, I've been here a whole week and have yet to walk by someone getting high on the sidewalk, so, there's that.  C

Driver/pedestrian etiquette.  Remember when I moved to California and was perpetually annoyed with drivers actually stopping for me when I was approaching a cross walk?  Well, I have now come full circle, because I'm really confused about when I'm supposed to cross the street.  I lived in California long enough to accept the fact that drivers expected - even wanted - me to cross the street in front of them.  That is definitely not the case here, and I'm having a hard time remembering what I'm supposed to do when I get to a cross walk at the same time as a motor vehicle.  Do I slow down?  Speed up?  make eye contact and wave them ahead?  Not make eye contact and assume they're going to just barely come to a rolling stop anyway?  Lay flat on my stomach and wait until it's over??  I don't know what to do anymore.  It's usually fine because they usually exhibit no signs whatsoever of detecting my presence and just blow through the intersection anyway.  I guess I'll get used to that again soon.  What's interesting to me is that driver/pedestrian etiquette is only noticeable (and really, only dangerous) when you don't have an intuitive sense of how it works.  I'm not making a value judgment in either direction, just observing that the important thing is to internalize the customs, whatever they may be.  S, for satisfactory.

Pennsylvania liquor laws.  This is the first place I've ever lived where you have to go to a special store to buy alcohol.  It's stupid.  And it doesn't accomplish anything except making me go to a special store to buy alcohol.  Apparently you can only buy two six-packs of beer at a time here, too?  I dunno, I read that somewhere.  The upshot is that I haven't bought any alcohol since I've been here, because alcohol stores make me feel kind of skeezy.  (I think there may be separate stores for beer vs. wine and liquor, too.  It sort of looks like "bottle shops" are for beer, and there are plenty of those around, but I haven't seen any wine or liquor stores.)  Anyway, why can't I just buy a six-pack of Blue Moon at the grocery store like a normal person, Pennsylvania?  What's the freakin' deal?  F

Farmers' market.  The farmers' market here (and CSAs; see below) might make up for the stupid liquor laws.  I went to the farmers' market for the first time today, and it was so cute.  Just like everything in this town is so cute.  Pretty much all of the vendors were Amish, which is kind of a trip when you're used to the Berkeley farmers' market.  The Berkeley markets are huge, with weird but awesome California produce (avocados! $1 each!  fresh figs! $5/basket!), and are filled with a wonderfully and totally Berkelified clientele.  Lots of tattoos and piercings and half-mullets and homemade clothes and people who probably shop exclusively at the farmers' market because we only have one Earth, man.  And I love that, don't get me wrong, but it is pretty much the quintessential liberal hippie paradise.  When you're used to that and then suddenly the person behind the table is a sweet little Amish boy wearing overalls and a straw hat and calling you ma'am, it's kind of a trip.  Anyway, the farmers' market was amazing, and Amish products are amazing, and the prices were dirt cheap!!  Maybe because the vendors have less far to travel to get here?  Maybe because the cost of producing things is just so much cheaper here?  (Gas, land, water, fertilizer... it's probably all way cheaper here.)  In any case, I spent way less than I ever spent at the Berkeley FM, and got way more, so a big ol' thumbs up for that.  I'm a little sad I can't get fresh figs anymore, but what are you gonna do?  A

CSA offerings.  Related to the farmers' market offerings, there are some amazing CSAs out here.  I found this dairy CSA, where you get to order raw, local, organic dairy products every week and they deliver them straight to your door.  I think I have died and gone to dairy fat heaven (which is probably what my heaven would be anyway).  The only slight bummer is that produce shares are far less flexible here than in California.  In the Bay Area anyway, you can sign up for as many weeks of produce as you like, and stop and start your order whenever you like, and there's always plenty of local crops available year round.  Here the CSAs only run from March to November (because things don't grow from November to March, because I am back in the land of seasons), and you have to sign up for the full season in advance, which means you're plunking down $400 dollars in February for a half year's worth of fruit and vegetables.  Maybe to offset this slight bummer, there are other CSAs that run year round, like dairy products and herbs and fresh baked bread.  I'm totally doing the dairy one, and I'm going to try to find a winter vegetable share somewhere too, but those are a little few and far between.  In any case, way to go, PA.  A

Everything is wonderful.

Everything is wonderful!

I freaking love this little town.  It is so gosh darned cute, and everyone I have met so far is ridiculously nice and welcoming.

I love my apartment.  It is beautiful, and huge, and perfect.

I love that my stuff is arriving from California tomorrow, so I will actually have normal things, like a normal person, and not be sleeping on a borrowed mattress on the floor (although that has contributed to imparting a certain zen-like air to my evenings thus far).

I love that I have already managed to acquire a sweet desk and a sweet office chair.  The former was discovered by yours truly at a used furniture store (which had a surprising amount of high quality stuff!) and is an old, classy, solid wood thing that looks like it might be from the 60's, and the latter was purchased at Staples today and is the nicest office chair I have ever owned.

I love that my Penn State ID says "Faculty/Staff".  Tee-hee!

I love that I found a couch that I love and a futon that I love (for my guest room/office), and that those things will be delivered next week.

I love that I finished grading final papers and entered final grades for my class this evening.

I love that Jevon is going to be here in just over a week!

I love that I have already been invited to participate in a color run 5K in September, and I love that I went for a beautiful evening run yesterday.

I love that there are crickets and frogs here, and that it sounds and smells and feels like summer.

I love that I am not writing my dissertation anymore!!  I love that I have free time to just adjust, and get used to things, and meet people, and explore my new town.

I just love everything.  This is a great week.