sciatrix

So I think I mentioned, we flooded last week on Friday evening. What that means, if you've been fortunate enough to never live in a place that flooded before, is that we walked down the hallway on Friday, noticed standing water, immediately started bailing everything we could out, and have spent the subsequent few days with my poor roommates sleeping in the living room and me and T (miraculously, this time spared) in our room for once instead of in the living room with everyone else.

Last time this happened, we bought everyone s'mores and weenies and roasted them on the gas stove, because it felt so much like camping. I'm going to swing by and pick up s'mores tonight, probably, because ffffuuuuuuck this shit. (The electrician just terrified me by suggesting they might have to ask us to turn off all our lights and outlets in order to support the fans and dehumidifiers in here for drying the walls. Fortunately we've dodged that bullet, but I want fucking melty chocolate now.)

T and I own our current place, and this will be our third go-round with a flood incident since we bought it in 2016, so I suppose I qualify as a veteran of this shit now? Hell if I know. But... if I write this out once, maybe this time I won't forget about it, and maybe next time it will help someone else. Probably I should be sanding the rough edges off my committee talk to turn it into a departmental seminar talk for two hours from now, but this is what's on my mind.

This is from the perspective of someone dealing with US homeowner's insurance via water damage, but I have also dealt with this from the perspective of someone dealing with US renter's insurance if that's your bag. (If you don't have renter's insurance and you rent, you should definitely go get some. It's cheap, and it exists primarily to cover your stuff in the event that your landlord or someone living in your building fucks up and you lose all your belongings. It will also cover you in liability if you fuck up the building, which is why some landlords require it. I don't require it for my roommates/tenants, but I did just sit down with M and give her a very dry, pointed talk about what it is and why she might be glad she has it, given our general luck in this house; god knows I was grateful when I needed mine.

I have no idea how this works in other countries, but I'd be happy if folks who have dealt with this want to chime in.

( So your house flooded, you got all the loose water out of your shit, and everything is soggy. What now? )

...you get five exams turned to the correct set of pages in before you see a student who has written a desperate apology for his lack of studying and explained he stayed up to 4am the night before and then spent the intervening day working on a homework assignment that he was supposed to have completed before he left class the previous week. I hate notes like this because while I have a lot of compassion for students who are, for whatever reason, struggling... at this point in the semester, there is literally nothing I can do to help this student, I know my instructor has tried to figure out how to meet his needs all semester, and at the end of the day passing him out of sheer awkwardness and pity isn't actually doing him (or anyone else) any favors. I would rather set my students up for success, thank you, and I know for a fact my instructor feels the same way. Bless her.

Incidentally, yesterday's talk went pretty great, inasmuch as anything could given that technical difficulties meant that I didn't have the correct HDMI-to-VGA converter for the screen: I had forgotten that the room this seminar is in contains neither a built-in PC (as I am used to using in lecture rooms) nor any kind of video hookup that anyone has on a laptop these days: it only has a single, sad, VGA port. I could have sworn my boss, who runs the seminar series, had purchased a VGA-to-HDMI converter to sit in the room, but nope--so one of my labmates, bless him, volunteered to run to the front desk of the next building to go borrow a converter from them.

I own a converter now that will live in my bag so this never happens again, thank you.

After I stared, dead-eyed, at the audience for ten minutes after the talk had been supposed to start--I'd figured this problem out ten minutes prior but not been able to find a converter in that time--my labmate got back with a converter in hand, and we spent another ten minutes finding out that my laptop was incompatible with the slide display for some (probably Linux-related) reason.

Eventually I offered sheepishly to sign up for an early talk in the spring semester or possibly to convey my talk through the medium of interpretive dance, to which my boss pointed out "These aren't mutually exclusive..." I wound up giving a quick chalk talk instead, which went surprisingly well. Got a compliment on grace under pressure from another faculty member, even, which I am going to take with a warm sense of mortified gratefulness.

Anyway, I'm doing better housewise--got a storage unit in the front yard, getting nice burly men to move my shit into it, more on that later--and I've survived last week no worse for wear, so I can more or less breathe again for a bit. Finals are due this week, though, so I'll be spending much of my weekend grading. Fortunately I have time.

Oof. I'm getting a cup of tea.

I'm sitting in my bed, ten hours into working on this fucker, staring unblinkingly at dissected testicles while I try to find just the perfect set for this slide.

this is fine

everything is fine

(on the upside, I learned a couple of days ago that if you remove the epididymal fat pad that wraps itself around the testis, no spermatogenesis happens at all. behavioral shit is unchanged, but you're firing blanks. we have absolutely no idea why, but I think it's cool. wonder if it works for ovaries too...

if you just cut off part of the fat pad, it will totally grow back, btw)

SCIENCE

I have data I want to be analyzing because it is new and shiny but no, instead I have to make a powerpoint about the motivations and the hypotheses, and I just want to stand up and excitedly word-vomit them at people who already understand me instead of having to communicate and EXPLAIN why this shit is cool.

if it is, because I don't know until I analyse the fucking data, which is taunting meeeee. Dicks.

tell me how many songs the mice made dammit

(I have a committee meeting a week from tomorrow and a dept seminar two days later, so this is supposed to be my talk prep for that. But my shiny new data is overwhelming and enormous and I'm struggling to figure out how to properly run through all of it--48h of recording! per! mouse! continuously! and it's all mine and it's like I've stuck one of those massive novelty jawbreakers in my mouth and it doesn't quite fit, but goddammit I'll bite you if you try to take it away from me.

In the meantime, I'm supposed to walk through why I'm doing this this way via powerpoint first thing tomorrow, and I haven't even started poking at slides because THAT DATA IS RIGHT THERE, I WANT IT.)

Ugh. It's probably time to go look at images of mouse testicular anatomy so I can point at the bits I'm taking and the bit's I'm not and explain why I've been weighing them, I GUESS.

I have hit my first Annoyed Nitpicking Snag on The Body Keeps the Score, which is: the left-brain analytical right-brain emotional divide is not that simple and not nearly as pat as he is making it out to be, and it has left me grumpy.

Whether or not I am using that crankiness as a shield to avoid really engaging is an exercise for the observer.

Anyway, have some links I dug up while trawling my DMs with my collaborators, for future use:

Queering chemicals (EDCs): A bibliography

There is a class of environmental toxicants that are known for their ‘queer-making’ effects. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, or EDCs, produce a wide swath of health issues, including cancers, diabetes, and heart disease that disproportionately impact already marginalized communities (Murphy 2017). Recently, scientists have begun linking EDCs to supposed ‘sexual abnormalities’: stories of gay birds and trans frogs have sounded the alarm on possible impacts to human sex, gender, and sexuality. ‘Queering’ refers to practices of questioning, historicizing and “making strange” often taken for granted categories associated with sex, gender, and sexuality. The following is a bibliography of this literature.

Tidepool creatures bend the sex rules we take for granted

We humans are accustomed to thinking of sexual function as being both fixed and segregated into bodies that we designate as either female or male. In the larger animal kingdom sex doesn’t always follow our rules. Many animals are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, having both male and female sex organs in the same body. Not only that, but lots of animals change from one sex to the other. As in so many aspects of biology, the way humans do sex may be thought of by us as “normal,” but it isn’t necessarily the most interesting way.

Scientists Genetically Engineered Flies to Ejaculate Under Red Light

Their experiments confirm that sex is pleasurable, even for animals we think of as simple.

(I'm really curious to think about how you would engineer a similar thing to study female flies.)

Coming out Darwinian: Is it time to rewrite the story of sex?

All coming-out stories are members of the same genus, if not the same species. Mine, however, has one distinguishing trait: along my path to understanding and accepting that I was gay, the obstacle of my religious upbringing was aided and abetted by none other than Charles Darwin. That is, there was a time when I told myself that the uncomfortable feelings I had for male friends and classmates could not possibly be real, because they would be wrong and sinful, and also because they were impossible in a world shaped by natural selection.

Heterosexism in a scientific study of lesbian attraction

An evolutionary psychology study that gained much media attention in May 2017 claims to show women’s sexual attraction to other women is the outcome of evolution, specifically for the pleasure of heterosexual men. The study was reported widely as ‘homosexual women evolved for men’s pleasure.’ Journalists have not read the study nor linked to it. The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The study is led by Associate Professor Menelaos Apostolou. The team is based at the University of Nicosia, with apparently only one woman co-author.

“Categories aren’t these things that are just there”: An interview with the CLEAR Lab’s Queer Science Reading Group

What does it mean to do queer science—or, rather, to do a queer science?

....today, the learning experience is that coordinating the shipping of twenty-odd singing mice from New York to Texas is a mind-bogglingly complex endeavor, and I am just barely coming out on top of the bureaucracy. But! But! There will be mice I can use for this experiment, ideally by my committee meeting and at least so that I can do a kickass talk for Evolution this year. I'm applying for the SSE Grad Council this year, although the deadline is today--gotta make sure I set some time aside today to do that in amid the flurry of emails.

Also, I'm very carefully dipping my toes into The Body Keeps the Score and gritting my teeth the entire way--more because conceptualizing my life as traumatic in any way feels bad and wrong and self-indulgent and terrifying than because I think that the book itself is problematic. (I'm listening to the text-to-speak function on my phone, which is comforting and a little less scary than reading it for reasons I have no idea how to articulate.)

I'm low on Diamine Meadow right now (review) in my TWSBI stub pen, and I'm really sad about it. I think I need to commit and buy myself a proper bottle of it--this is just the tail end of the 2mL sample I got for my birthday last year.

...I have two cats snuggling on me as we speak, and I would probably have three if Pete could find himself a comfy spot.

And I have tickets to Hamilton for June when it comes through Austin, and I'm very excited about those; and I'm uh. Tackling the other stuff. So that's good, too.

It's being a very productive day so far, and I haven't had to take off my jammies.

so I was sitting here, minding my own business, trying to watch Critical Role on Youtube--my other DnD friends all love it and I trust their judgement, but attempting to podcast it didn't go great so I'm giving it another shot when I can't be so overwhelmed by the voices. So far I'm having trouble fighting my way through the getting started stuff, which was CRUELLY AMPLIFIED when Youtube took the opportunity to force me to watch two and a half minutes of advertisement for this terrifying movie. In which a dog, uh, haunts a human child and eventually adult and eventually the human child's grandchild over the course of several lifespans, breeds, and bodies, apparently finangling its way into their lives by sheer canine obsessive force, and... apparently discovers a life's purpose in some way? which it has not worked out in any of the previous canine lifetimes?

I can't not take this to the horror place. My dog Tribble is not, like, the secret incarnation of my childhood Jack Russell Terriers or the pointer I had later on. Dogs aren't interchangeable, they have personalities and lives and desires that don't revolve around me! It's the kind of thing that probably seems really cute and heartwarming if you think the world revolves around you, like oh even if you didn't know it this immortal dog spirit loves you enough to follow you around for all eternity with no effort or awareness on your part, but when someone fixates on me without my knowledge or consent it all just comes off as creepy.

Also, the trailer heavily implies that the grandchild's mother chooses to move the grandchild across the country (TERRIBLE woman, ofc) but the grandparents MISS HER and YEARN FOR HER and SHOW UP UNEXPECTED ON HER DOORSTEP and this is all portrayed as very heartwarming and could you not?

afghkdfljgl.

I just wanted to listen to goblins!

...just remembered the abstract deadline for the poster I meant to submit was yesterday.

I'm torn on emailing and asking if they'll take one a day late--this conference has no limit for posters--or just writing the conference off entirely, since as of last I heard it was looking like it would probably be me + PI going and the postdoc I would have wanted to spend more time with won't be attending.

And I don't actually exactly have new data anyway, although I might by then.

Augh. *bangs head into wall* I got so hyperfocused on the manuscript + the experiment I'm starting this week that it totally slipped my mind.