Why I Majored in English

I didn't major in English because I was a bimbo who wanted to obtain a fancy degree without exerting herself. Why am I still angry over this accusation? Because the real reason why I majored in English is so ugly, and my actual undergraduate experience was so bleakly painful, that all of my attempts at a measured rebuttal leave me shaking with rage. I loathe Becca.

By the way, I don't think the shrinking number of what I would consider to be good jobs in the developed world is wholly attributable to "lazy and uneducated youth"-- nor, by the way, have I ever made this reductionist argument*-- but I also continue to harbor serious doubts about the utility of lower-tier universities to students without money and connections. It isn't because I don't respect the professors who work there, either. See, once upon a time, I was an undergraduate at a top-tier university without money or connections amid snooty kids with both, and I learned the hard way that success-- nay, survival-- depends on you having as many inarguably valuable skills and worldly accomplishments as possible. You need to study a subject that everyone respects. You need quantitative abilities. You need prizes. You need to ignore the stereotypical conservatives who think you're a monkey as well as the stereotypical liberals who quote that wretched "Emerson" nonsense ** and urge you not to be ambitious. You need to avoid the snooty kids like the plague. I imagine this goes double for working-class kids without even a brand name to trade on come graduation. Wait, do these strategies even work for the latter in our current economy and educational system?

I am currently urging an undergraduate research assistant whom I like very much, a wicked-smart, hard-working, lively and compassionate first-generation college student from a Latino family with a keen interest in clinical work, to go to medical school. She's got "friends" who like to discourage her; I had those, too. I wish, with every fiber of my being, that I had found mentors during my undergraduate career. Maybe I would be farther along than I am now. I'm an older graduate student who doesn't manage her depression well and who lately struggles to catch up. I'll have to put up with snottiness such as Becca's on- and offline-- resentment over my admission to graduate school; resentment over my NIH grant; constant casting up of my undergraduate major to me as a "rebuttal" to any controversial argument I dare to put forth-- until I'm almost forty.***

I don't think I'm unfortunate. I think I have it pretty good, all things considered. I'm just done with being depressed, I think. I dislike my life right now and want to make a number of changes. And I hate people, which is why I didn't go to medical school myself.

* If I get caught up with everything else this winter break, I may read Erik Bryjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Of course there isn't only one reason why competition has increased for what I would consider to be good jobs.
** I particularly despise this insipid poem. I have, in my heart, a special place of hatred for this poem.
*** And this is me exhibiting the optimism I inherited from my parents.

My Growing Anger Makes Me Not Want to Work in My Lab Anymore (An Update)

I haven't been to class or the lab in four days. I've also stopped attending lab meetings. One reason is because I'm sick and depressed. Another reason is that I'm tired of several people I work with. I can't stomach their rudeness to me anymore.

Lest one accuse me of "hypersensitivity": I don't think it's "hypersensitive" to want a labmate who disdains me to stop interrupting conversations that I'm having with other labmates who do like me and pretending that I'm not present after she's hijacked joined the conversation by cutting me off mid-sentence. It's her prerogative to dislike me; it's not her prerogative to interrupt me when I'm minding my own damn business. Don't interrupt me when I'm talking every single day we meet; don't tell me your time is more valuable than mine; don't scream and call your colleagues idiots because our PI lets you get away with it; don't tell me that I'm not as smart as our PI's male postdoc when I haven't asked for a comparison and you're wrong anyway. I am talking about this kind of totally unnecessary behavior.

Oh, and I'm dreading Society for Neuroscience next month, because I foolishly agreed to be the roommate of someone from another lab who is also rude to me. I am doing her a favor, too. I was going to be the roommate of three labmates who like and respect me. I was looking forward to it. Now, I'm spending more of my travel money to share a room with someone who will make catty remarks without provocation and look me up and down for five days. I don't know why I didn't have the spine to say no.

My former mentor, Carl Lipo, has published a book on Easter Island archaeology that I will review soon. There are NOVA and National Geographic episodes to be aired on it, too! Stay tuned.

I haven't quit blogging, by the way. I like blogging. I just want to blog about something other than how pissed I am at people I work with. Clearly, I haven't figured that out, yet.

I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends

I didn't come here to make friends. I didn't come here to make friends. I didn't come here to make friends. I didn't come here to make friends.

The Deep Well of Major Clinical Depression, Part Eleventy-Four

I have been severely depressed for the last two or three weeks. Two? Three? I've lost count of the days. I feel nauseated and unrelentingly fatigued. The effort it takes to pedal my bike to school is laughable. The effort it takes to shower and dress is laughable. I have been keeping to my apartment and sleeping for most of the day. Moreover, I am bored by discussions of my depression. I'd rather have remained silent and posted my entry on receptor theory. Feeling this intense desire for an outlet is depressing in and of itself.

I've been trying to will myself not to fall behind. It's the end of a semester in which I've found it difficult to efficiently manage my time and concentrate. I did not do well on two exams at the beginning of the semester. Over the last few weeks, though, I've made dramatically better grades. So I don't want to blow it now. I have two course papers to write and my share of a grant application to finish. Presently, I am trying to will myself to shower and then finish my post on receptor theory. This last kills two birds with one stone, as the post is really an attempt to understand material that will be on my Principles of Pharmacology final.

I am very, very, very tired of no one understanding my point of view. Here's my point of view: I am cumulatively angry and exhausted. I am putting a lot of energy into affording people the respect that they don't afford me. I want the catty comments about my having to study hard to earn A's or ask for help with Schild analysis to end. "Oh, I never studied after class." "Oh, I had to learn that on my own." In the smug, smug under-the-guise-of-friendliness tone. Look, you're a fucking biochemistry major. I'm a fucking English major. How many people could successfully take on a PhD program in pharmacology and neurobiology after having majored in English literature? I'm tired of not getting credit for that. I'm sick of people insulting me when I haven't insulted them; that includes some of my fellow grad students as well as the asshole outside of our department who trained me how to do something recently.

I'm tired of white feminists who don't give a damn about bigotry against black people even as they're castigating "the black community", which doesn't fucking exist, for not giving a damn about bigotry against gays and lesbians. No, wait. It's more specific than that. I'm tired of white feminists who refuse to condemn bigotry against black people with the same compassion and attentiveness with which they condemn bigotry, namely sexism, against white women. In order to get taken seriously, I must confine myself to discussions of explicit statements of bigotry against black people, but you don't have to do the same when it comes to bigotry against white women? You get to talk about "context", "tone" and "implication", but I don't? You're capable of developing a nuanced understanding of manifestations of sexism against white women, but you still think that my anger and hurt and frustration are only legitimate if they're in response to cartoonishly overt manifestations of racism against blacks? Really, this kind of isolation fills me with despair. I can't stand everyone's tacit approval of this sort of thing anymore. I don't want to feel like the only person in the blogosphere who understands that it cuts both ways: There are wrongheaded black activists who don't care about bigotry against other groups of people, but there are also wrongheaded white feminists who don't care about bigotry against other groups of people, because human beings are glorified chimpanzees, and dumbassery is an equal opportunity employer.

I'm tired of people not understanding that racism against any group of people is comprised of a set of ideas, and that ideas are culturally, not biologically, transmitted. This means that it is totally possible to be racist against yourself. Jeezus fuck, no one comprehends this. I am so tired of reading blog after blog comment, by self-identified white authors in most cases, about how "there's no way that so-and-so could be racist against black people, because he's black himself". Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Trust me. I'm an American. I did not grow up in a cultural vacuum, and I know all about being racist against oneself.

I'm tired of no one understanding that I'm fundamentally tired of everyone who does something in this line. No one understands that I tend to fixate on examples of racism against black/brown people only because most of the stereotyping I'm personally subjected to has to do with my being half-black. My need to express my anger over racism against blacks isn't some sort of hypocritical sanction of bigotry against numerous other groups of people, including gays and lesbians and whites. Nor is it a "liberal" call for the government to violate people's right to free speech. It's me giving voice to my experience. It's the product of a great deal of repressed fury over the years. It's my painful disappointment in the predominantly white skeptics' and atheists' cliques who disingenuously use examples of blacks denigrating gays and lesbians to excuse their own unexamined prejudices against and caricatures of blacks. It's my exhaustion over constantly having to encounter the defensive, reflexive, burningly self-righteous resistance to sympathizing with a perspective such as mine. I'm surrounded by an abject lack of introspection. I'm sick, sick, sick and damn tired of feeling invisible. Who wants to feel invisible? Who wants to feel worthless?

I'm tired of the idea that you have to be indifferent to an issue in order to skeptically evaluate it. By the way, why does this rule never seem to apply to skeptics who crow fervently about their opposition to "political correctness"-- whatever the hell that is-- and who eagerly accept every sensationalist claim ever made by someone styling himself as an evolutionary psychologist? Why does this rule only seem to apply to "liberal" skeptics, skeptics who are angry about sexism against women and skeptics who are angry about racism against brown people? Anyway, this idea is poppycock. It is entirely possible to fairly and skeptically evaluate an argument while simultaneously harboring intense feelings about the issue in question. There is even a neurological, not a sociological, hypothesis that the brain's ability to generate emotions is inextricable from its ability to logically evaluate the world. Moreover, you are fucking insulting me by asking me to be indifferent towards questions such as "Are blacks really dumber than whites?" By ignoring my efforts to treat all questions as worthy of investigation and support intellectual and academic freedom in favor of condemning me for so much as one quiver of my mouth, you are being hypocritical, you are being irrational, you are being breathtakingly cruel, and you are insulting me to the very bone.

This post is titled "The Deep Well of Major Clinical Depression" for a reason: I don't feel like dealing with all the readers who will inevitably be tempted to tell me that my feelings aren't legitimate because I wrote a rant instead of a dispassionate essay with citations. Yeah, I get that this is an angsty post. I sound a little like my grunge-listening teenaged self in the '90's. I am sure that there do exist people out there who understand and sympathize with my perspective. My point is that I don't trust anyone, and I feel alone most of the time.

"G-Coupled Protein Receptor" vs. "G Protein Coupled Receptor"

I first learned of GPCR's from a publication in which they were called "G-coupled protein receptors". Guess what? No one says that. So now I stumble on the name all the time like a backwards child. I even mess up the acronym.

Today I feel like the stupidest person in the world, but for more substantial reasons.

Back to work.

(P.S. Thank you for your comments. I love comments. If I have not replied to your comments or emails, it is because I have exams to take and a time management/downheartedness problem to solve.)

What's My Wage Again, NIH?

I am presently creating a NIH eRA Commons account. Look at their password suggestion!

If that's too small to read, look at this close-up:

"$1trainee"?  I guess they're pessimistic about the future budget.  Maybe this is a not-so-subtle hint that I should write letters to Congress.

What Do You Do When You're Angry, and You're Sick of Choosing Your Battles?

I'm sick of choosing my battles. In a movie, the protagonist never chooses her battles and lives to regret it. In real life, the protagonist becomes an avid reader of books at an early age and preemptively resolves on rarely engaging in battle. For decades, she endeavors to say nothing as an array of relatives, classmates, false friends, total strangers, instructors, deans and colleagues tell her that she's "abrasive" because she writes eloquently and passionately about incendiary issues, or that she's too skinny, or that she's ugly and vapid because she's skinny, or that she's too sensitive, or that she asks too many questions, or that she'd ask "nicer questions" about the world if she were a "nicer girl", or that she's evil because she doesn't go to church, or that she can't possibly be a scientist because she majored in English, or that she's lucky that she didn't end up serving coffee at Starbucks for the rest of her life because she majored in English, or that she ought to be ashamed of herself because she's not stereotypically black, or that it was inappropriate and unprofessional of her to try to talk to a professor about his inappropriate and unprofessional behavior toward her, or that she never tried once to please her crazy Korean mother, or that her Berkeley degree isn't an accomplishment because she majored in liberal arts, or that she's a failure because she didn't go to medical school, or that she can't be brilliant because she's not a physicist, or that she shouldn't expect to finish her PhD in under five years or win an NRSA because she's so obviously mediocre. Occasionally, she loses her temper, and she yells in front of a crowd of people. This never results in anyone's taking what she has to say seriously, and it always results in her having to abjectly apologize to the point of retracting her statements, even when those statements are true. Eventually, she realizes that "choosing your battles" has amounted to passivity, and that passivity has made her a very angry person.

I am a very angry person. I hold grudges. I am full of repressed fury over past injustices big and small. This is one reason why I continue to blog, even though I have my doubts concerning the wisdom of my blogging under a thin veil of pseudonymity where my PI can see it. It's either blog or start sleeping all day again.

I want to make it clear that life is pretty good right now. I still spend my Saturdays in a depressed stupor; that's mainly because I spend too much of my off-work time alone. But I like being in my graduate program. I really love working in my lab. I've been entrusted with bigger roles in projects sooner than I'd anticipated upon my arrival. I've been given opportunities to generate publishable data that I never expected to receive so early in my graduate career. I'm an author on a paper, which I have not ceased to be squealingly excited about, no matter how many seasoned scientists with first-author papers might make fun of me.

My attitude has also improved with age. One advantage of being an older graduate student is that I've held a variety of jobs; frankly, I'd much rather be studying my brains out and struggling to squeeze experiments into a jam-packed schedule than copywriting or mindlessly paper-pushing for a much higher salary. Being a graduate student is a privilege, which you don't realize if you're a twenty-two-year-old who doesn't know herself very well, who has all the maturity of a teenager and who has always been in school. Moreover, I am less discouraged in the face of adversity than I used to be. When I get the impression that someone either doesn't think I can succeed or doesn't want me to succeed out of jealousy, I work harder. I don't worry about hurting his or her feelings or coaxing him or her into "liking" me anymore. And I refuse to let people with ulterior motives decide what my limitations are.

That said, I'm kind of in fight mode right now. I don't blame my present situation. It's all those years of repression. I'm sick of choosing my battles. I'm sick of keeping my mouth shut when people say stupid shit. Lately, I have not been keeping my mouth shut. And it feels deliriously good not to keep my mouth shut. It worries me that this doesn't worry me, though. I have a career to think about.

P.S. You know what else I'm sick of? Plays about male geniuses and the women they have sex with. Christ.

Freaking Micropipettes

Freaking micropipettes! Like fairies' wands! We'd get a lot more science done if we could make ourselves Lilliputian at will. And I should be good at this sort of thing! I made quite a name for myself as a youngster by making beautiful tiny Christmas ornaments that all the adults exclaimed at! I swear that science is like magic sometimes!

The resident electrophysiologists in the lab have been nothing but generous in their attempts to teach me how to patch cells. I greatly appreciate this, because I know that I'm exasperating. Especially today. I think I broke six of the ten glass micropipettes that I pulled today. I hope it wasn't any more than six, and if it turns out to have been more, I am not going to tell you. Of the four that I miraculously refrained from breaking, two of them turned out to have tips of insufficiently large diameter. Guess I got too heavy-handed with the pedal switch that controls the tiny heating filament over which one shapes the micropipette's tip for patching. That's one of those things that one doesn't necessarily discover until one realizes how shitty the seal resistance is. For those of you who are not electrophysiologists or their interested friends: This is far into the arduous cell-patching process. You really don't want to wait until that stage to discover that your tips are inadequate.

I mounted a micropipette incorrectly, which caused it to dive into the cell dish's bath upon a computerized command that should have suspended it neatly above the dish's center instead. It was almost funny. Meanwhile, the bath level kept mysteriously sinking, which never happens when the senior grad students patch. All unaware, I gazed through the microscope lens and slowly lowered the micropipette toward my chosen cell, thinking, "That's odd, the pipette shadow keeps looking like it should when the pipette is still suspended above the water--" only to see the crystalline tip crush open the cell and shatter into a dozen miniscule fragments as it struck bottom. Awesome.

Too fast or too slow, and heartily endeavoring to concentrate, I kept at it until the sun had long gone and the grad student who was training me discovered that I'd risen at five and begun work at 7:30 am and said kindly that no one should patch cells when she's tired. And I am tired. And I would like to continue to get to the lab by 7:30 am, and I'm old, so I will go to bed now.

Dude, You Can't Show Me a Movie Like The Social Network. This Is Why I Boycott TV!

I want to write quality posts about topics such as those contained herein, but those are difficult to compose in the time that's left to me between studying, mastery of lab techniques, and mixing up stews for my slow cooker. So you're going to get the serious essays later, and you're going to get a disjointed rant now:

1. I don't have a Facebook account. I hate Facebook, for Reasons One, especially Three, and Four of PhysioProf's diatribe against Twitter. (I don't have a Twitter account, either. I love high technology, not the butchery of the English language.)

2. I did not enjoy the first few scenes of The Social Network, because what "Mark Zuckerberg" does to his ex-girlfriend is what a UC Regents scholar did to me on a much smaller scale. We were undergrads at Berkeley. For the record, we never dated, and we never slept together. We used to be close friends. After an unaffectionate encounter, which I am hesitant to describe now because people with whom I work know that this is my blog, he wrote a "short story" about it and posted it on a multiple-author blog that was invisible to search engines but accessible by anyone who knew the address.

In this story, I am mocked, under my real name, for my sexual clumsiness-- I was a virgin who had never before so much as kissed anyone outside of a theatrical production-- my skinniness-- never mind the fact that my friend's worshipped Last Unicorn of a white ex-girlfriend was as thin as I was; white and full-Asian girls always get the pass I don't when it comes to being a size 0-- and my bra size-- incidentally, I am even less endowed than "Zuckerberg's" ex-girlfriend, as I am a 34A-- and it is strongly implied that I am very ugly, fuckable only as an experiment or under condition of excessive drunkenness in the dim light of a crowded frat house. This story also indicates that I am darker-skinned than I am in real life. I remember how unseen this last made me feel.

The worst part of this story is that "I" look stupid in it. "I" say idiotic things I never said in real life. The author was on a full scholarship at UC Berkeley majoring in four subjects who graduated with highest distinction and who once told me that I was smarter than he was, and he made me look stupid. How that wounded my pride! Upon confrontation, the author was self-righteous in his conviction that I deserved to be humbled thus.

To this day, I don't know exactly how many of my UC Berkeley peers read this story. I know that a roomful of tittering affluent white Cal undergrads read it, because my "friend" indifferently informed me that they had as I stood awkwardly among them at a party. Several others of my peers, including Jonathan, criticized me for being angered and wounded by it. They said that I was a baby; this was "high-school stuff". They compared me unfavorably to "superior" women of our acquaintance "who would have never reacted this way". I remember how I felt when I realized that I'd allowed--ALLOWED-- these spoiled white kids who didn't give a shit about me and who didn't even see me as human to turn my UC Berkeley experience, for which I had relinquished my admission to my first choice, Brown University, and for which I had endured so very much, kindergarten through twelfth grade, white Republican communities and Catholic cliques, my parents, into high school. I remember what it was like to stand in Madison Square with a cell phone clutched in my hand as one of my detractors waxed lyrical about my inferiority and have that icy-cold realization at the end of my undergraduate career.

Incidentally, I am the only middle-class college graduate that I know who does not have an extensive network of friends from college. I have one friend from college. She's worth twelve of them, though. And I don't think about this short story as frequently as I once did. The movie just reminded me of it.

3. If this movie is representative of the real Zuckerberg, then he's an asshole. He's not a tragic figure "trying to be an asshole", as the useless short-skirted Hollywood product of a fictitious girlie-lawyer tells him soulfully at the movie's denouement. (Technically, it's the final turning point of the narrative, and occurs just before the denouement. Okay. English major's pedantry: off!) He's an asshole. Moreover, regardless of who Zuckerberg really is, this movie functions as a glorification of yet another James Watson. It doesn't matter how uncompassionate you are as long as you are brilliant, yes? Even I have a tendency to believe this. It makes me even gladder that I don't have a motherfucking Facebook account.

4. If this movie is representative of real life, then women really are and will always be inconsequential providers of sexual gratification incapable of the intellectual feats of men, and there really is no God.

5. I have been thinking, as I have since first grade, about whether or not I am "special", and whether or not my doubts about this are legitimate because I'm female and half-black. I am always trying to answer the question of my inferiority. This kind of movie turns up the volume. Why, just a few nights ago, someone said comfortingly to me, "Don't feel bad just because we're not geniuses like [two scientists we know]. Our brains are not wired like theirs, is all." I blinked at her, genuinely astonished, and she hastily added, "Actually, I don't know how your brain is wired-- for all I know it is wired like theirs. I should speak for myself." She isn't the only person to have said something along these lines to me; she is one of the few who have had the grace to retract the judgment (even if she unfortunately continued to denigrate herself in the process). The judgment doesn't anger me, though. It only increases my desire to answer these questions: Am I a moron? What is it about me that elicits this kind of comment? Why do certain people-- not this particular woman, but certainly other people I've encountered-- seem bent on convincing me, despite evidence to the contrary, that I'm essentially going to become a stereotypical housewife whose metabolism hits a brick wall, who chooses a husband and kids over an ambitious career, and who unimaginatively trudges through nine-to-five, bread-and-butter science? Is it jealousy? Is it my fault for not busting ass at Cal to win a Fulbright or do graduate work at Harvard? Is it my fault for not defying my parents and going to Brown? Am I really of average abilities? Will I never do world-class science because I'm me? Do I have a predisposition toward laziness because I'm black? Have I failed to work as hard as possible in the past, despite my good intentions, my awareness of the importance of making a name for myself, and my straightlaced behavior, because I'm black? Am I stupid because I'm black? Am I not as gifted in mathematics as I am in writing because I'm a woman? In general, are women really less capable than men are of great ideas born of freewheeling creativity and exceptionally high intelligence? Fuck, why do women always wind up being harridans or groupies in this kind of movie?

6. The Social Network is a surprisingly good movie. First, and most importantly, it's well-written. Mainstream Hollywood films are never well-written; I'm fucking shocked. It's well-cast and well-directed, it does a masterful job of creating atmosphere, and it represents a sufficiently thoughtful evaluation of American entrepreneurship and the questionable worth of friendship. Damn. I warned you this was going to be an incoherent presentation of several connections I've made.

Open Note to the Cells I Tried to Patch Tonight

Dear Young and Naive Cells with Smooth, Bright Membranes and Clear Nuclei,

Thank you for allowing me to successfully establish one seal and break another. I will wager that you were so obliging because you came not from the experimental tissue full of old, decrepit neurons who would have known better. Nonetheless, it was very gracious of you to yield to a novice who crushed the tip of the first micropipette she mounted herself because she was ludicrously hoping that a microscopically fine glass point meant to help record freaking action potentials would somehow magically operate after she'd accidentally pressed it into a hard surface first and unceremoniously stabbed one of you to death with another. This week has been a decent week, because I believe that I've finally gotten serious about working hard, and I look forward to kissing more of you through a plastic tube in what must be the most bizarre technique still extant in a modern biomedical laboratory when I have the chance.

Too sedated by half a bag of milk chocolate nuggets to presently address the thousand roiling things in my head, and off to watch The Social Network at my sister's behest, I remain:

Yours affectionately,

Juniper Shoemaker