Surprises

I was coming back from class one day when I found this on the lagoon lawn. 

It was a surprise, as I'd been off campus since about seven that morning and had only noted a very large truck parked in the area. I make a habit of ignoring most of the emails from the office of student affairs, as there are only so many times you can be alerted about fraternity fundraisers, rap concerts and beach cleanups before it gets old. Especially if you're carrying a heavy schedule. 

I was also puzzled. I had not the foggiest clue what this thing was. It looked like one of the exhibits for the county fair had gotten lost and decided to set up anyway. Much puzzled, I asked one of my friends. 

It turned out that the strange spaceship thing was the Mirazozo Iuminarium, a traveling piece of art. And bizarre as it was, the outside was not the point. It was the inside. The silver parts of the structure were opaque, and the only light inside came from translucent, colored strips of plastic. 

My friend scolded me and dragged me off to have a tour of the thing, ignoring my protests of homework.

We spent about half an hour inside. They encourage taking pictures of the structure, so we did just that. 

It was a good thing we went when we did. The next couple of days, the line was three hours long.

In the end, I think it was one of the most successful de-stressing events our student government ever put on. But it's unlikely that I'm going to repent and reform my email-ignoring habits. There's too much of it.

(All photos courtesy of the aforementioned friend, who shall here remain anonymous.)

Fanfiction

This last week has been one of those classic college sequences--first a midterm, then a presentation, then three high-school students crashing on my floor as they participated in an outreach program, then being stage crew at my middle school's talent show. In other words, there was a lot of fuss and not much got done.

The presentation was fun, though. I got to watch all three professors have a huge argument. It took their attention off me, an excellent thing indeed.

Being as it was one of those weeks, I spent a lot of time bouncing around the internet and procrastinating. In the course of these adventures, I encountered this.

It astounds me how negatively authors see fanfiction, even as another author. Yes, I've heard the horror stories about people actually trying to sell fanfiction or stealing your copyright entirely, but really?! I'd think that most of these people would have the sense not to come down on their fans like a ton of bricks for the crime of creating fanfiction. In the first place, it's like telling a roomful of kindergardeners to stop fidgeting: it's not going to happen, and you can't enforce it by punishment because there are too many people to punish. This article made me lose a lot of respect for a number of authors, for the reasons listed below.

In the second, it's jumping up and down on the fingers of new writers. Young writers often start out with fanfiction. I know this because I was one of them. Somewhere on my hardrive lurks a terrible Lord of the Rings fanfic, and a still more terrible Les Miserables one. Neither should ever see the light of day, but I owe the fact I'm a writer to that LotR fic, because it was the first thing I'd ever taken pleasure in writing. If I'd been forbidden from writing it, I don't know if I'd ever have started writing in the first place.

This stance is also just plain being a dick to your fans. They're writing fanfiction because they love your world. They're reading fanfiction because they love your world. If you feel like you're going to barf just looking at it, don't. (Actually, you shouldn't because of copyright reasons--you shouldn't steal their ideas, even if they're your characters.) Don't throw the lawyers at them! If they're not making money off you, they're no threat! For the most part, they can't afford the lawsuit, and it makes you look terrible and scares further people away from your fandom. (Which means that fewer people will buy your books!) If you take a long time per book, you are being really unfair; you're expecting your poor fans to wait long periods with absolutely nothing new, and forbidding them from coming up with it themselves.

Personally, I think Neil Gaiman has the most sense about this.  But then again, he usually does...

Math and other issues

I have always struggled with math.

No, let me correct that. Struggling implies a degree of success and competence. It does not quite cover the tantrums, anxiety attacks, and utter bewilderment that have dogged every mathematical venture. I have not, for the most part, had great difficulty with other parts of my schooling, so my difficulty in preforming even the most basic of arithmetic has been confusing and distressing. I hoped I was dealing with some sort of learning disability; otherwise, this implied that all my issues with math were my fault. I was either lazy, and refusing to try with something I didn't like very much, or I'd just talked myself into being bad at math by repeatedly telling myself that I was. I got my first F on a test in 6th grade math, and it took me two years to complete my high school precalculus course.

Until this last year, I never pursued getting tested for a learning disability. I could function in high school math classes; I could even get As because I actually did the homework. But my first quarter of college changed that.

I took Chem 1A, and then Chem 1B. And even with the assistance of a brilliant tutor, and doing all of the assignments, and starting to study weeks before the test, and going to CLAS (university provided group tutoring) sessions, I barely scraped through with Cs. I'd never gotten a C before in my life. I decided that enough was enough, and went to get tested.

Friday, I got the results back. Apparently, I have a 'math disorder', which sounds like I need to take antibiotics for an integer infection. My ability in mathematics is 1.5 standard deviations lower than that in other subjects.

 I'll get a lot of help with classes that require math. If I want one, I'll have a note-taker (!), and a private room to take my test in (!!), and extra time (!!!). But none of these really compare to my relief. I now know that it's not my fault. I know that I need to work around something, and now I've been given tools to do it. I can stop being scared of people thinking that I'm a bad student when I do badly on subjects that require math.

If you're struggling with a subject, getting things wrong that you were certain were right, if the rules seem arbitrary, if 24 and 42 are the same number to you, I'd encourage you to get tested. If you do have a learning disability, it'll get you help.

5 Evil Responses to Noisy Neighbors

*WARNING* This post is not intended for those without a dirty sense of humor. If you are possessed of Victorian sensibilities, read no further!

The original title I was going to give this was "Evil Things To Do When The People In The Room Below You Are Having Inconsiderately Noisy Sex" but it wouldn't fit. I thought I should address this because it's a rather common problem when one lives in a dormitory with fifty odd stressed-out people at the peak of their reproductive abilities. And it can be unpleasant. There you are, memorizing the muscle structures of salamander mouths, when suddenly your amphibian reverie is interrupted by singularly mammalian noises that you really don't want to have to listen to, know or THINK about. And closing the window does NOTHING. Cue rage.

The lovely webcomic xkcd has one suggestion but not all of us can obtain an elliptical reflector dish and a noisy girlfriend on short notice.

Before I proceed, I must add that I have only used one of these, and that was because I had a final the next day and it was the second time it had happened that night (and it was late. *grumble*). I accept no liability for injury of any sort resulting from the use of these responses.

1. Wait till they shut up, then applaud.

2. Play 'You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want' from Avenue Q. LOUDLY.

3. Shout 'FINISH HER!' (suggestion from a friend).

4. Make embarrassing noises of your own and gradually make them weirder and weirder (helps if you have a friend).

5. Email them above xkcd comic. Just because you don't have an elliptical reflector dish YET doesn't mean that you WON'T... (And it'd work so well with #4)

Now that I've gotten that rage!post out of my system, I'll return to the salamanders. A batch of them don't even have internal fertilization...

Mary Sues

One of the things that new speculative fiction authors (or at least the ones I've been hanging around) warn their peers about is the Mary Sue. Many forum threads sport titles such as HELP IS MY CHARACTER A MARY SUE?!, and there are a lot of online tests offering to help worried authors determine the extent of this dread condition in their new characters.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a Mary Sue is a character most often associated with fan fiction who is overly idealized. Recently, this label has been applied to characters in original fiction as well, perhaps most notably to Bella in Twilight. (I think no more needs be said?) Further definitions are here and here. This paper deals with the role of Mary Sues in a cultural context.

I don't pay much attention to the definition of Mary Sues in fanfiction. I figure that I will begin worrying about the Sueishness of one of my self-insert characters the moment that I actually show any of my fanfic to anyone, i.e. never. My issue is with characters in original fiction being branded as Mary Sues and accordingly abandoned. A new writer is highly likely to write a work with an idealized character, and having a new character or a new work be dismissed as 'A Sue' is highly discouraging.

Let us start with the Mary Sue Litmus Test. There are a lot of these on the internet. I use them frequently, because I find them amusing and I like procrastinating far too much. Here is one of the ones I use far too often. It's simple: you go down a list and click on the checkboxes next to things that apply to your character, and then the website evaluates how much of a Mary Sue your character is.

A bit ago, I used this test on one of my own characters, the love interest in a series of novels that I've been working on for a few years. Here are the rankings of Mary Sues that the site provides:

And here is what my character scored:

Now, said character, when evaluated in light of the afore-cited paper is not that much of a Sue. He's very similar to the rest of his species in regards to the scope of his powers, he has some serious failings, and most of the reason he's described as so physically attractive is that the novel is written in first-person from the perspective of a character who's deeply in love with him. I certainly don't think that starting over completely is the solution to this; I'll start worrying about that when his eyes start changing color or he starts sparkling. It should also be added that I tested the rest of the major characters in the novel, and they scored 36 and up (and then, out of curiosity, I tested myself. 41. I'm a Mary Sue. You can all flee now).

Nevertheless, it's a rather worrying result. I've workshopped this novel quite a lot, so I'm reasonably confident that this character is not off-putting in his abilities, but I must admit to a certain qualm when I first saw the result. If I had tested this character with this the minute I'd created him, I probably would have had a far more difficult time writing him, and felt highly discouraged about the results.

From the above, it is understandable that the critics of the label 'Mary Sue' in original fiction often say that the application of the trope actually stifles new writers--there are even some schools of thought that hold that the creation of a Mary Sue as a main character is the first step any beginning writer takes. Another problem is that the very term 'Mary Sue' is gender-biased; strong female characters are far more likely to run afoul of this accusation than male characters. Indeed, on many litmus tests, one of the questions has to do with whether the character follows expected gender roles.

Another issue with Mary Sues is that they're rather popular. Harry Potter, Irene Adler, Artemis Fowl and even Jean Valjean all classify as Sues. In David Weber's Honor Harrington novels, the eponymous heroine has often been accused of being a Sue. I haven't checked, but I'm willing to bet Katniss Everdeen has more than a few accusations of Sue-ness leveled against her.

In the end, accusations of this character or that being a Mary Sue begin to seem less like thoughtful literary critique and more generalized put-downs. So, discuss. Is a Sue a terrible horrifying thing that must be rooted out of all stories? A harmless wish-fulfillment starting point for a new writer? Extant only in fan fiction? Or a definition that has gotten entirely too broad and now includes many of the characteristics necessary in a main character? (Guess which camp yours truly is in.)

Fieldwork

I was fortunate in the first lab that I worked for. It was an ecology lab that focused on the impacts of global climate change on California grasslands. The people were wonderful, the work fascinating, and, most importantly to a restless undergraduate, our research required a lot of fieldwork. All of this took place out at Sedgwick Reserve, an ecological preserve owned by the University of California. It looks like this, a lot of the time.

(all of that stuff in the foreground, by the way, is non-native and invasive. Woo European grasses!)

Here, we spent hours upon hours collecting samples, counting plant reproductive structures, and being bitten by everything in existence.

There are a few long term experiments running at Sedgwick, one of which involves grazing (aka, cows). We didn't have any plots in these areas, but we could only imagine the difficulty of those scientists who did.

What we did have were mountain lions. Or, more accurately, mountain lion spoor. Masses of it.

We also found the carcass of a deer once, quite fresh. We didn't get much work done that day; we all got the rather erie feeling of being watched, and were too twitchy to do much good.

In short, the whole experience was an excellent one for a new lab slave. I quickly learned that science was not clean, that involved an enormous quantity of manual labor, and that it frequently bordered on the absurd. In short, that science was bloody fun.

Culinary Adventures

I love food. Because of this, life in the dormitory can become a bit trying; though the dining commons at my university are certainly among the better sort (as in, the food is largely identifiable, and even tasty), they still commit heinous crimes such as thickening the lemon bars with gelatin, and dumping runny oversalted sauce all over the stir-fries. Occasionally, in a fit of environmental responsibility, one of the commons will have 'Green Monday' which means that everything on the menu will be vegetarian.

Fortunately, my house is equipped with a kitchen, and, when I'm fed up with spagetti and microscopic fragments of meat, I can cook for myself. Or whoever decides to help me and pay for the food.

This evening, we decided to cook a chicken. We flavored it with honey, soy sauce, garlic and star anise, and then cooked it for an hour and a half in a covered container in the oven. It was served with bok-choi and rice/potatoes, all steaming hot, and everyone settled in and enjoyed the respite from mass produced food.

At least, that was the plan.

Let us consider the dormitory kitchen, or, for that matter, any kitchen shared between fifty people. Let us consider the pile of dishes on the counter, the sticky residue in the sink, the refrigerator that reeks of mold. Let us consider the much-abused dishwasher, the ragged sponges. Then let us add two very OCD people trying to utilize these facilites.

The first thing we found was that the chicken pot had gone missing. Fifteen minutes or so of diligent searching was rewarded when we found it in the fridge, serving as a sort of glorified tupperware to an odd concoction of apples and rasins. After dislodging this, we had to wash the pot.

Which presented a new challenge. The sink wasn't draining properly. We ran the garbage disposal, and were rewarded by a fingernail-sized piece of metal hurtling from the interstices of the drain. Then the dishwasher started making funny noises. Further investigation revealed that the much-abused machine had decided to try to do its job without water. Environmentally noble, yes. Effective, no. This being a dormitory, half the dishes were there. Cue swearing. Cue dishwashing. Cue water being on too hot. More swearing.

Things seemed to be going smoothly (we propped the bok choi pan up so that it didn't lean drunkenly over to one side due to its convex bottom) until we got to the potatoes. They were greenstruck. We peeled them, bunged them in the microwave, and perched to watch it with hungry eyes. Three minutes passed. They were not done. Seven minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen.

One potato burned onto the bowl, but only one. The rest were raw. The swearing reached new heights of creativity. We gave up and had leftover rice. We put the rice into the microwave. Twenty seconds. Nothing. A minute. Lukewarm, good enough. It was 8:40 at this point, and no one was in much of a mood to wait longer.

The only redeeming point of the meal was the chicken. It turned out well. But we turned to our homework afterward with the distinct feeling that it was the lesser frustration.

Egg Hunting, Or, We're Grown-Ups, We Swear

Today was Easter. Most of the people in my dormitory and in my general acquaintance took the opportunity to flee back home to spend the holiday with their families. A number of us remained, from general unobservantness, poverty, convenience and in my case, the feeling that I'd JUST had spring break and my parents really deserved a weekend to themselves. (Also, my roommate went to Costa Rica and left me all alone in a double-sized room. It's huge. And comfy. I have two beds. The incentives for going home have decreased significantly just there.)

However, all was not well. Even for me, happily agnostic, Easter had some significance. Admittedly, said significance ran more along the lines of hunting small brightly colored objects filled with delicious sugar. Indeed, the Easter Egg Hunt was a big deal for my family. I think this was because my parents thought that it was good practice, finding things being a useful skill. Or, more likely, because both of them had an absolute blast hiding things in the orchard and then watching their daughter rattle around like a stoned squirrel, looking for them.

My parents were absolutely devilish when it came to hiding eggs. A favorite trick was a lilac egg in the wisteria. Often, I'd walk past an egg six or seven times before finding it, even with them calling hints. But the hiding places weren't the real difficulty.

My parents would forget where they hid the eggs.

They had put so much effort into concealing the eggs that they would be incapable of finding them again. So the Easter Egg Hunt would become a more or less yearlong thing, often culminating in a surprise plastic egg to someone's head six or seven months later. It was a good thing that the average Snickers' bar has a shelf life equivalent to the lifespan of your average hydra.

So, doing homework today, I felt there was something fundamentally missing from the day. One of my friends felt similarly, and arming ourselves with two bags of cheap candy (and six individually wrapped teabags) from the only grocery store within five miles, we called up our friends and headed out to the bioswale (artificially created marsh, designed to handle runoff) behind our dormitory. We split up into teams, each team taking a different picnic area, and went about hiding our candy.

It was a lot of fun. We hid teabags under picnic tables, candy eggs in bushes, Jolly Ranchers in flowers. At the end, I found myself with one candy egg left. I decided to tuck it in a depression by a deserted-looking groundsquirrel burrow, and we went back to meet up with the others.

We searched for their candy first, and rapidly discovered that an easter egg hunt in your own backyard is very different from one on a college campus. We found all the eggs there, certainly. We also found a broken cell phone, two beer bottles, a bottle lid, and a used condom. We had similar luck with the other area. It was awesome. We're definitely doing it again, but next time we're using plastic eggs, because it decreases the chances of a small mammal nicking our candy before we can get at it. (Candy egg by squirrel burrow? Never found. Here's hoping that the peanut butter/chocolate ratio is such that the squirrel won't experience too many ill-effects.)

Yeah, we're totally responsible adults.

A Digression on the Subject of Gender

Today I ran across a friend’s link. She and I have different (read, polar opposite) political views, so I wasn’t too surprised to see that it was an article protesting gay marriage. The catch was, it didn’t attack the idea of gay marriage from the ‘eeew, gays? Groooosssss, amirite?’ angle I’d expected it to. Instead, it was more a protest of androgyny and the ‘erosion’ of gender roles in society. One of its main points was that a marriage without distinct gender roles assigned to the ‘correct’ gender was a bad marriage.

Which got me thinking. You see, my gender identification is far from clearcut. After learning that gender was more of a spectrum than a binary structure (male/female), I spent quite a bit of time wondering what exactly I was, because I knew I’d never entirely identified as female. For a while, I wondered if I were gender fluid, that is, moving between identifying as male or female. But I couldn’t remember ever distinctly identifying as male, and feeling uncomfortable in my body. Rather, all the things that made me wonder if I were gender fluid were cultural, not biological. I was happy being female and feeling female, and being attractive as a female, but I was not happy with the cultural expectations that went with being female.

As a responsible feminist, I recognize that I should not let the culture around me dictate my gender identity, which was the main reason that I realized that I was not truly gender fluid. Instead, I now identify as biologically female but culturally male. That is to say, I am happy with my biological gender, but that I assume a more classically ‘male’ cultural role and am happier adopting male etiquette and mannerisms than females. Etiquette is one of the more distinct demonstrations of this: I stand when someone enters the room, I take my hat off, I hold doors, and am more comfortable bowing than curtsying. When it comes to dancing, I am far more comfortable (if I know the dance) leading than being led. I feel really weird when people treat me as a lady. It’s not that I resent being treated as delicate (in fact, I don’t resent it at all--I realize that people are being highly polite, and I appreciate that), it just seems wrong.

I suppose all of this is a really fancy grown-up way of saying that I’m a tomboy who hasn’t grown out of it yet. I suppose that this can also be read as me trying to jump on the genderqueer bandwagon. Honestly, I’m not sure either, but this is as close as I’m going to get for a while to a conclusion.

I find that article especially disturbing because not only is the author demonstrating a disregard of gay rights and an intolerance toward the LGBT community, but they’re unhappy that some people might have different gender roles than they do. It’s clear that they have never experienced uncertainty about their gender identification, and so want to exclude people who have.

An Introduction

I have been informed by everyone and their dog (well, I assume that was what the dog was trying to do--interspecies communication is hardly reliable) that, to be taken seriously as a writer in this day and age, one must have a web presence. But, I protested, I do have a web presence! I have Facebook! I snark on it frequently!

Which didn't merit a response, from human or canine.

I was still hesitant. I'd always felt, deep down, that getting a blog or a website was something you did after you became famous and your books were on the bestseller list. There was a worrying element of narcissism in a general nobody starting a thing all about her life and her thoughts and then expecting other people to be interested. And wasn't there something else I should be writing? Like getting that character out of prison? (As I recall, I never did finish that story. The main character is still in that prison. Oops.)

Then came the introductory biology course last year, in which my instructors made an enormous fuss over the importance of communicating science and dispelling misunderstandings, for the good of humanity and for the grant money. Soon after that I made the sudden discovery that people knew less about science than I'd thought when the over the 2012 election season started. And finally, because virtue and noble thoughts are nothing compared to a grade, I'm taking a class this quarter for which we are required to create a blog.

(Hi Professor.)

So, I started this blog. Mostly, I hope to continue it after this class is over, because the alternative is rather a cop-out. We'll see about the making everyone love science later.