Nibble Lumberyard

[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]

Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in the "fictionjunkie" journal:

January 26th, 2007
04:46 pm [Link]	pimpin us out on lj Is anybody else as disgusted as I am by the recent blood and chocolate onslaught on LJ? It just flashed me an ad claiming to be a desperate plea for my advice from one of the blood and chocolate characters. GAAAAACK. I have now gone from being indifferent about this movie to gnashing my teeth at the thought of it. Way to go B&C publicity team! Current Location: office Tags: advertising, lj abuse, stupid movies (Leave a comment)
October 25th, 2006
08:40 pm [Link]	Antisocial and misAligned Today in class my beloved advisor pointed out that my comments on Alignment (Garrod and Pickering's theory of priming/common ground effects) reflected what a bookish nerd I was (I had said something about how joint activity/interaction with other humans is hard, not easy, and therefore why would you want a theory where things like witty rapporte and flawless ballroom dancing were supposed to be the default rather than the outcome of years of practice). I think it was a compliment, but I'm not entirely sure. Current Location: office Current Mood: amused Current Music: the clickety keys of my productive officemate Tags: advisor, alignment, nerds, public announcements (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
October 17th, 2006
03:16 pm [Link]	much more interesting than the Mona Lisa Oh, and over the weekend I saw this picture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. http://www.artsmia.org/viewer/detail.php?v=12&id=593 I'd been dying to for ages - my friend Elissa had given me a postcard of it. "masculine-looking woman" my ass! That's a Man! I mean, have you ever seen a woman - even an ugly mannish woman, or a woman with a moustache - who looked like that? I can't find the story behind it anywhere. There's got to be one. Maybe she was one of those Ambigously genitaled babies, got wrongly assigned by some poor confused midwife, and then by the time the "Prominent Family" figured it out, it was too late to do anything without losing some big-time face. Maybe that's the man that Nathaniel Allen was having a secret affair with, and Copley wanted to make a Statement by painting his lover's face on the commissioned portrait of his wife. Maybe that's Mr. Nathaniel Allen in his very favourite outfit. I really want to know, and for some reason, no one has written about it. I mean, you'd think art historians/gender issues type people would be all over this one. Why are they neglecting their duty? Current Location: office Current Mood: curious Current Music: more hissing radiators Tags: ambiguous genitalia, art, art historians, drag queens, minneapolis, transsexuals, women with moustaches (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
September 26th, 2006
03:49 pm [Link]	living on the edge I have just decided not to sign up for Death and Dismemberment Insurance, or even life insurance through work. Who knew psycholinguistics could be so dangerous? Of course, I am still not yet officially hired, so all this is purely hypothetical. Tomorrow I leave for boston for birthday festivities. Yaaay! I'm even flying first class, due to my flukey Silver Elitehood. Must remember not to die or be dismembered on the journey. Yesterday I got to pet a chinchilla in the language learning lab. I love chinchillas! They are so soft and cute and fuzzy. I would be a crappy chinchilla language researcher. I would spend all day petting them and singing them the Chinchilla song (Satan sucks. But you're the best!). Then I got back to my office, and my New Computer had Finally arrived. It is sleek and black and lovely, although it is a little quirky about monitors. I named it Chinchilla in honor of my frolics in the lab, and because the spacebar makes a funny squeaking noise (????). Current Location: madison psych Current Mood: happy Tags: boston, chinchillas, death, dismemberment, new computer (2 comments \| Leave a comment)
August 4th, 2006
10:20 pm [Link]	wine investment and hyena endowment My sister was here this weekend. She and her husband are thinking about buying a vineyard in the fingerlakes, so we went wine tasting as research. Stupidly, the one that was for sale was the very last one we visited, so it all seemed like quite a good idea at the time... Who knows what we would have thought of it had we not been drinking since 11am that morning. We also went to the Seneca park Zoo and saw a bunch of sleeping felines, stinky monkeys, dry elephants, and a hyena. I was hoping that the hyena would be the kind where the females have bigger penises than the males. Apparently it was not such a hyena. Either that, or it was just a very meagerly endowed male. Speaking of which, I recently received spam with the headline, "if your penis could talk, it would ask for....!" The image struck me one of charming yet disturbing puppetry (or perhaps animation? claymation?) Current Location: CS lab Current Mood: thirsty Tags: genitalia, hyenas, sister, spam, wine (1 comment \| Leave a comment)
06:37 pm [Link]	Mommymartyrs So with some notable exceptions that are not relevant here (but that many of you LJers already know), my two officemates are both my good friends, and without any exceptions at all, they are both highly intelligent, highly capable, superkickass women. I love this about them. It’s probably a lot of the reason why we are friends and not just officemates. They are also both mothers of young children. And for some reason, they both often find it necessary to rant at me about how hard it is to manage and schedule a life with both children and a job, and how I will never truly appreciate how noble and hardworking and amazing they are for being able to manage their lives at all until I have children of my own. And it’s not just them. Most of young women with children I know will go off on this jag from time to time. Plus, you see it on TV, commercials, literature, everywhere. I noticed I even subconsciously came up with a name for them – mommymartyrs. And lucky you, I have joined Live Journal especially to bitch about them, and the phenomenon they represent. First of all, I find this line of whining about having to balance jobs and kids both annoying and personally insulting. I do know how hard it is to have a kid while in graduate school/doing a postdoc/having a full time job/etc.. – hence my conscious choice not to have a baby at this juncture (thank you, desogen). And furthermore, they knew exactly how hard it would be when they made the opposite conscious decision to have the kid in the first place - I really find that they have no business whining about it to me now, as though it were all some crazy question of luck as to why they got saddled with a kid, and I magically got off scott free. We just made different choices, that’s all. Which brings me to my second point of personal annoyance about the mommymartyrs – for some reason, many of them like to insinuate that rather than having made a personal choice about whether or not they wanted to have children, they in fact are doing an immense favour for all of humanity by bearing the burden of producing the next generation, and dammit, we should all bow down and be grateful (I’m not kidding about that last bit – my officemate (not DH, amazingly) once said exactly that). Now, don’t get me wrong here… I’m all for having kids if you want to have kids. But for christssake, don’t try to tell me you’re doing it to save the world and increase the standard of living for future generations! In fact, aren’t we facing (or about to face) a global overpopulation crisis? I’m sure if you weren’t feeling all that enthused about having the standard 2.2 children someone among the other 6+ billion people in the world would manage to pick up the slack. Spare me the self-righteous moralizing about how selfless and noble it is to pump out babies. These people are having kids because they want to. Period. OK, so that’s my personal bitch about this stuff. But I actually think there’s a more important point to be made here. In fact, mulling it over on the walk to work today I decided it was so important that I needed to join Live Journal just so as to be able to bitch about it in a public forum. Here it is: Aside from any issues about personally annoying your coworkers, if you are a woman with children who works, you should make a huge point of never, ever, being seen (especially at work) to be going on and on about how hard it is and what a sacrifice you’re making, how everyone should be grateful that you even managed to show up at all, etc., etc. Because you know what? Most employers already believe exactly that. In fact, that’s exactly the kind of bullshit that women in the workplace are struggling so hard to overcome. All of my female friends who have been on the job market have come back with stories about how potential employers asked them all kinds of leading, illegal questions like, "so, are you married?" and even "are you planning to have children?" because on some level, they truly believe that women with children make bad, non-productive, irresponsible, blow-off-work kind of employees, and they want to protect themselves from that. Now we all know that that’s not really true, and that employers should ideally be above that sort of bias, and that it’s even officially illegal, and we also know that there’s no reason that someone with kids can’t be an effective employee (hey – men do it all the time!) and that this sort of prejudicial behaviour should not be tolerated, no matter what the "logical excuse". But we also all know that this shit still happens, and that we have to fight it. And seriously, what would you think if every day you heard the mommymartyrs in your firm whining and pining about how put upon they are, and how hard it is and how they can barely manage? DON’T GIVE THEM ANY MORE AMMO! They ALREADY WANT to hire an equally (or more likely, lesser) qualified male to do our jobs!!! DON’T VALIDATE THEIR PREJUDICE. I know it’s hard, and I know that on some level these women just want to let off some steam and get some support from a sympathetic coworker but please, for all of our sakes, please Just Shut Up! At least while you’re at work (god knows my officemates will crow their mommymartyrdom from any handy mountaintop, regardless of who’s around and how it might affect their opinion of them/women in general). Hell, you may want to just shut up about it all the time, and be extra super careful about the public image of Professional Women that gets projected – frankly, it would be better for everyone if this crap were just allowed to fade out of the public consciousness. Whining and crying about how it’s so draining and terrible and upsetting to have both a job and children is the worst kind of nasty damaging terrible PR, and only serves to make it even harder for women everywhere to get a fair shake in the workplace. Anyway, so that’s the important political soapboxy thing I had to say, and I promise my future LiveJournal life will be much more gossipy and fun and normal. Tags: children, discrimination, feminism, jobs, mothers, women (Leave a comment)