Future Posts. Academic Transcripts. Last Week’s Interview. Moving. Dating. Repeat.

I will soon resume my discussion of Philosophy of Science in the context of Method and Theory in Archaeological Science. When I wrote the first post, I thought it would be one of three. Then I realized that I wanted my discussion to withstand all but intense scrutinization—especially that of Ambivalent, biopunk, Coriolis and JaneB. So I pulled forth my old notes and articles and expanded the series. This time, I’m also relying heavily upon evolutionary archaeologist Robert Dunnell’s Systematics in Prehistory. Whoa. Watch out! I may actually start to write coherently about this stuff!

The series will probably include current rewrites of the two major papers I had to write for this two-semester course. I quit my master’s degree program in archaeology in 2007, but I’ve intermittently continued to work on an immensely difficult rewrite of my Spring Semester paper. I’ve done so because I’ve never tried to write an analytical (as opposed to rhetorical) paper on metaphysics before. Good fucking grief. It’s like writing entirely in geometric proofs!
Read more. . .

I’ve never before tried to write a truly good academic paper, either. As in, one I carefully did all the reading for and did not write the night before its deadline. I very much want to see what I’m fully capable of. Somewhere inside the mental illness, artistic temperament, history and paradoxical self-loathing, there exists a joyfully productive Juniper who yearns to put aside her ego long enough to figure out wonders and curiosities for real. Not a whim. Yearning.

Due to my undergraduate exposure to postmodernism as well as my involvement in a virtual New Age cult of drug-abusing trust-fund-baby Drama Kids, I harbor a vestigial and reactionary prejudice against philosophy. However, I’ve learned that science is foremost an ontology, and that good (and fun) scientists understand this. So I also have been working on this paper in an attempt to understand the material as well as I would have had I applied myself in class. I may as well rewrite the Fall Semester paper, too. That would make such a satisfyingly solid series. A series you could take home to Mom. I don’t have one of those yet.

I will publish the Fall and Spring Semester papers at the appropriate junctures in the series, and I will publish one post a week. This series begins in April May.

I am also working on a second series of amateur reviews of papers I manage to beg off friends with PubMed access. I have been attempting to nail down the kind of biomedical science I really want to do. This is one of my strategies. I feel insecure about blogging my thoughts on these articles, though. I can hear you all cackling at my feeble summaries now. This is all I’m going to presently say about the PubMed article series. No. You can’t make me talk.

Another future post is “Your Notebook Is Too Old For You and Doesn’t Care About You or Your Academic Career to Boot”, which I’ve alluded to before. This is another work that I’ve already begun. It’s about a graduate school experience of mine that I’ve decided does not constitute classic sexual harassment, but that I disliked nonetheless. I will use it to publicly judge whether or not my university was entirely off-base when it accused my four straight white male professors of “creating an environment hostile to women and minorities”. I will do so for no other reason than closure. My side of the story has never been properly told. It troubles me. Feeling lazy and silent, on top of bitchy but complicit!

Additionally, whether or not I rename this post, you will receive an amusing explanation of its original title. I can never be entirely glum. Or grim.

Way back in January, biopunk and I had a brief email conversation about Chris H’s “The Ayn Rand Deprogrammer”. Being Juniper Shoemaker, and therefore unfeignedly contrary in the face of multiple attempts at a cure, I am an Ayn Rand fan. Well. I love We the Living and Atlas Shrugged, anyway. Those are two of my favorite novels. However, I am no longer one of the phalanxes of wee undergrad practitioners of Objectivism. Neither do I still belong to my virtual New Age cult. Confused? I’ll explain later how one motley crew of college kids managed to integrate Objectivism with hippy-dippy mysticism. I have seized the golden opportunity to conceive a post that is proximally about why I like Ayn Rand and ultimately about pseudoscience and woo*.

I also want to tackle the issue of amateur scientists that Eppendork once mentioned. Presently, I feel both frustratingly unworthy of and haughtily barred from science. Maybe I won’t feel as blue by the time I write this post, because it isn’t my highest priority. Write it I shall, nevertheless.

Last week, I had an interview for a laboratory internship. I tanked. My readers were all warmly, reassuringly supportive. Some of my bestest-totes-favorites were even incensed on my behalf. While I deeply appreciate the offers of cudgels and farm animals, though, I must emphasize that this outcome is my “fault”.

I say “fault”, not because I refuse to take responsibility for having made adult life difficult for myself, but because I don’t regret who I am. I compare myself to worldly, accomplished people my age merely because I’m not fucking clueless. I know how I’m seen by most academics who are as successful as I want to become. In interviews, I’m measured against the winners:

I’m twenty-nine. I don’t own a house. I don’t yet own my (battered) car. Except for my graduate assistantship, my jobs have been non-professional ones.

I’m single. I have always been single. I don’t mind broadcasting the first fact. I am sick of broadcasting the second. I do it because it’s a fact and I learned about the power of transparency in grad school. I don’t plan to marry, but that’s only because I fear depreciation and mediocrity. I adhere to an irrational, misandrist, everlasting superstition that men aren’t biologically capable of faithfulness, kindness and honesty. Particularly to and with girlfriends and wives. And that it is better to leave them alone and be as free as they are, rather than consign yourself to a petty, petty existence with one of them in which you both take one another for granted after the honeymoon and he inevitably fucks the nubile babysitter or the coworker coquette at his office after you’ve turned into a nag and ruined your body having his children. (There. I said it. Isn’t this blog entertaining?!) It isn’t because I don’t want to be in love with a man who’s in love with me and mutually commit to a monogamous relationship. It isn’t because I’m not a contrary romantic who refuses to sacrifice breathtaking ambition for love but whose heart breaks because she has never been loved that way and firmly doubts that she’ll ever be.

It doesn’t help that I no longer feel susceptible to inveiglements in love triangles wherein I ultimately lose “my” beloved asshole to a perky white girl. It doesn’t even help that I honestly don’t believe that I can both have a family and realize the kinds of ambitions that I have and can’t live without. Nor does it help that I know that, in terms of intelligence, talent, physical attractiveness, generosity and potential, I’m an awesome catch. I have a lot of love to give, too . . . Why the fuck am I blithering on about this? Oh, yeah. Because all the twenty-nine-year-old nerdette queens who’ve already conquered the world have doting spouses as well as houses. Reality is crueler than the fiction of stereotypes.

(I’ve been awake all night. You’ll have to forgive me for being willfully morbid.)

I meant it when I said that my current grades are poor. My cumulative undergraduate GPA ended at 3.4. My cumulative graduate GPA sank to a 2.4. Did this last plummet immediately after my mother lost a breast to cancer? Yes. Who cares? As I wrote to Dr. Isis four days ago, I know damn well that my accomplished peers succeeded in the face of equally weighty challenges, and therefore I can’t blame any PI or admissions committee for not giving a crap about mine.

I refuse to write a Statement of Purpose in which I disclose the other stuff: the mental illness, the suicide attempts, the hospitalization, the hopelessness, the confusion, the volatility. When the time comes, I’m going to write, “This is what I want to study.” I’m going to have the nerve to dare these committees to take a careful, merciless look. By then, my merits will withstand it.

It is no one’s fault that I started out on this path as a naïve, working-class bumpkin who lived in her quaint fantasy world and had no idea how déclassé it was to listen to Sublime or eat at Burger King until a sufficient number of Valley Lords and Ladies sneered at her. My past is inextricable from who I am today. I have been a mess, but I am coalescing. For the last ten years, I have fought very hard to improve my character and survive. Now I see things that other people don’t. Does this make me especially valuable? I suspect that it does. To some grand endeavor. To my niche. To where I belong.

Still. I know how “everyone” sees me. I think it’s fair. If only because I’m too scrappy to settle for it.

It is important for my readers to know that my interviewer could not help her dismissal of me. She wasn’t malicious. She tried to encourage me. She began all her sentences amiably. It’s just that she couldn't think of me as anything but a state university student of average intelligence (or drive?) who “liked the idea of science” and had only approached her lab at her Major Research University because she was too unsophisticated to understand that she shouldn’t have presumed to even imagine working there. I object to her characterization of my interest and her insistence that only perfect students who publish papers in undergrad gain admission to PhD programs in any circumstance, merely because both of these assertions are untrue. However, I do not blame her for dismissing me. She’s an honest, decent person and she did what honest, decent people do: she told me what she really thought.

Did I enjoy this? No. I felt ashamed of myself. I felt like a serf who had crashed a royal ball and brought the dancing to a halt with my stink. I felt like I was back at Cal getting sneered at by trust fund babies again. Oh, well. Even as my heart clenched, I calmly thought the sentence: “What do I do next?” Academic Science Is Not a Motherfucking Care Bears Tea Party.**

Last week, brooding and plotting, I realized anew that my current living situation is untenable. There’s no reason for me to remain here. I keep telling myself that I’m here to save money. Yeah. That’s true in the cases of many of my peers. It’s not true in mine. I’m here because I’m hiding. I’m buying the Shoemaker family line that despite my ardor, good health, childlessness, spouselessness and manageable debt, I can’t support myself financially. I’m submitting to a sitcom conception of Juniper as an asexual brainiac teenager who doesn’t need the privacy a grown woman prefers to have before she relinquishes a certain stupid idea and accepts attentions like those of the guy she met two days ago. (No. It doesn’t matter that I wouldn’t bring a guy home on the first date . . . or the third. I’m still a privacy freak. I can’t stand to have family members eavesdropping on my phone conversations no matter how softly I talk, or petulantly questioning me whenever I so much as step out for coffee. I loathe my family, right now. Just like a teenager does . . .) I’m masochistically insisting upon remaining in a city I practically swore a blood oath to flee for good when I was sixteen. “Why don’t you come back to Northern California, Juniper? Unless you wind up going to school on the East Coast or something?” Good question, Bay Area Friends Who Keep Asking It.

I have lived in my current situation for longer than I care to tell you. None of my plans have come to fruition. Why don’t I accept that this is an unproductive environment for me and MOVE my ass to change it? At the very least, I need to move into my own place. I need to live independently. And FOCUS.

I would like to gain lab experience over the next year. I would like to simultaneously take classes. If my only option is an unpaid lab internship, then I will find an odd job or two and work nights. I will work my way up from there. People do this. I’m a hard worker, from bona fide workaholic stock. If I work unbelievably hard, I can make it happen. I should accept that I should get out of here in a month or two and devote myself to this.

Thank you for all your comments. I heartily appreciate them. I did not answer them because I have felt depressed. I stopped running again. (I hope to resume tomorrow.) I accidentally filled a Wellbutrin prescription for tablets at 200 mg apiece, so I’m currently taking a hundred milligrams less than I usually do per day. I also took myself off my much smaller doses of Prozac because it ludicrously exacerbated the tremors induced by Wellbutrin. I refused to try to fall asleep while twitching out of my own skin anymore. The twitching has subsided. I have felt dreary, sad, lonely and fatigued. I’m telling you this so you know I’m not an ungrateful wretch who ignores your comments.





*Okay. So it may ultimately be about what happens when immature privileged kids from incompatible socioeconomic classes and ethnic backgrounds try to have “adult relationships” for the first time, instead. But I’m not old enough or ridiculous enough to be dumb enough to dismiss our erstwhile worldviews wholesale.

**However annoyed I am with CPP right now.