Expertise:School: how to pretend you know what you're doing.
Boys: why they're stupid and how to punish them for it.
Stress: how to worry even when there's no good reason for it.
Food: how to keep your tapeworm well fed and happy.
To understand the miracle, you have to understand two things: 1) With the kind of experiments that I do, every single working device I have to test is precious. Each tiny culmination of a lot of money and man hours. And if I need a new one made, it can take up to a month before I actually get one in my hands. 2) Once I get them in my hands, the devices are still ridiculously fragile. And I've broken them every which way possible - death by tweezer, death by wirebonder, even death by careless flick of my hand when I'm wearing latex gloves that are too big for me.
Anyway, I've been waiting months to get a particular working device to test. I got one. One measly working device. I have to transfer it from its carrying case to a permanent package. I take a deep breath and a firmer grip on my tweezers, and I slowly remove it from the carrying case. This is usually the hardest part, because the case is sticky, so sometimes the device stubbornly sticks to the surface and my tweezers just end up scratching the top of it. (i.e. death by tweezer) But this time - success! I have it in my tweezing hands. I only need to move it 5 inches to the left over to the permanent package, where a dot of glue is waiting.
About 3 inches into the journey, my tweezing hands lose their grip. It falls. About 6 inches. It lands. Upside down.
I think I stopped breathing for a little while.
I considered calling it a day and just going home.
I think to myself, "Well, at least this idiot move is a new one for the books."
I decided that I wouldn't want someone else to come into the lab and discover that my shamefully upside down device. I pick it up and put it right side up. I slide it under the microscope. I look for the obvious signs of destruction so that I really can call it a day and go home. But there are none. I zoom in. I take careful stock. I zoom in again. But it all looks perfect. All I see is the most pristine device that ever did a bellyflop and lived to tell about it.
The minutiae of my life: - All semester, the only women's bathroom on my office floor has been undergoing renovations. Myself, and most of the women on the department staff, have been going down one floor to use the bathroom there. Well, the newly renovated bathroom was ready yesterday morning, so the women on the department staff organized a ribbon cutting. They brought sparkling cider and everything.
- The woman I sat next to on the bus yesterday asked me for a quarter, and I gave her one. When she thanked me and said "happy holidays," I (in a rather out of character fashion) asked her if she was going anywhere for the holidays. She told me that no, she wouldn't, because she was staying at the abuse shelter. But that she was free now, and that was the only thing that was important. I must have had a rather ridiculous look on my face, and the only thing I could think to ask was if they were treating her well (they were), and if her husband knew where she was (he didn't). She kept saying "I'm free," which in other circumstances sound like dramatic tv movie words, but she simply meant them. But I didn't know what else to say, and 30 seconds later I had to get off the bus, lest I be late for a meeting, so I wished her well and went about the rest of my day.
***
"I'm Yours"
He could totally compete with the best of the emo lead singers with his tortured face and complete lack of diction, don't you think? Someone get that kid some asymmetrical bangs, stat!
And by "wizard," I mean Allen. And by "off" I mean embarking on an 8 hour journey that involves two separate buses, two separate planes, several long lines to wait in, and a couple bags of complimentary peanuts. Totally worth it!
Have a great holiday, all!
* edit later *
There were no complimentary peanuts after all. Totally not worth it.
For a long time now I've been trying to work out why Sunday mornings are so rough on me, compared to the rest of the week. Why I feel so irritable sitting in a room full of churchgoers. Why I feel more intensely how my hope and doubt pales in the middle of worship, when I seem to be surrounded by oceans of faith and certainty. This is not a very recent article, but "Cancer, my parents and my doubts about God" was an interesting light read. We should talk more about our doubting - it helps with the discomfort of being a doubter. For the same reason, I ought to be praying more. In the article linked above, she writes "I had both always prayed and never prayed, which is to say that I often found myself in bed at the end of a day saying to no one in particular, 'Thank you for this good man beside me and those girls in the other room.' But I had not beseeched God to make me well, had not begged God for my father's life. Among other things, I didn't want to be -- to borrow from sixth-grade parlance -- a user, a phony who thought she could get what she wanted by conveniently nuzzling up to someone she usually snubbed." The last bit reminds me that it is silly for me to censer my own prayers for sound too selfish or indulgent. I think instead of what C.S. Lewis said of God - "[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him."
Apparently it's Anti-Bullying Week. Hug a bully today to celebrate!
Pittsburgh Hosts International Anti-Bullying Conference "The International Bullying Prevention Awareness Conference is being held at the Omni William Penn Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh.The focus of this year's conference is cyberbullying, a problem affecting younger age groups as more children are being given cell phones and have access to computers and the Internet."
