I read two fascinating books recently. I would bet that you have all heard of one (and I know at least one of you has read it), and that almost none of you have heard of the other (I told one of you, though).

The book you have heard of is The Feminine Mystique. I learned about it in high school, but never read it until now. I learned a lot from it about conditions for middle-class women in the fifties and early sixties, and what really surprised me is that while some arguments in the book could be looked back upon with a mentality of "I'm so glad we don't do that now", other arguments Freidan brings up are still being debated. Despite the flaws in the text, it gives a good perspective on both how far we have come and what challenges remain, and the advice near the end of the book is constructive for anyone.

The book I doubt you have heard of is Covering, by Kenji Yoshino. The author is a Yale law professor and a former poet, and as a result the book is one of the best syntheses of fluid, beautiful prose and solidly reasoned argument that I have ever read. The main thesis of the book is that the acceptance of a minority group into the mainstream is in three stages: Conversion (what you are is inferior and that's all there is to it), Passing (don't ask, don't tell), and Covering. Covering as he defines it is hiding parts of yourself that are not accepted in the mainstream, which applies to both minority groups trying to fit in and non-minority groups in unusual situations (a nice example of this is single dads). He sees the acceptance of gays, women, and racial minorities to be in this Covering stage, where people are often asked to hide parts of themselves or be subject to consequences. There were positive messages about the importance of accepting others and the need to not be required to cover--Yoshino sees this as the new stage of the civil rights battle. But what was alarming for me about the book was the examples he gave; as a law professor he gave many examples in the form of legal cases, mostly in the last 15 years but many from the last five years. I did not know that the court has helped people lose their children or their job teaching children for not hiding their homosexuality, or upheld the firing of women for refusing to wear makeup, or the firing of blacks for not changing their hairstyles to traditionally "white" hairstyles. In general until quite recently the idea was that if you are being asked to cover and you possibly can, the court would rule that you are obligated to do it. This was really shocking to me, especially how recently this was.

What was also really interesting is that when he discussed women, he said they were the only group covering that he knew of which was subject to both covering and anti-covering demands from the majority group. What that means is, while for a racial minority they are asked to act white by the majority white group, but lambasted by their minority if they act "too white"; women in careers are asked to hide parts of their gender identity (for example, not take too much time for pregnancy/childbirth and hide evidence of parental responsibilities) but are also taken to task by the same people for not being feminine enough (women will often get passed over for promotions if they are perceived as being too aggressive or frigid, which basically means not being a pushover). What I liked about hearing this was that it put a categorical description to behavior I've seen a lot of times, from many different sides. And I've said it before but I'll say it again--legislation to help women in the workplace helps some men as well, men who have outside interests or want to actually be fathers or any number of other things. The basic idea of the book was that we should be accepting diversity, which will make everyone more productive and capable of pursuing what they want, and it was presented in such an eloquent and well-reasoned fashion that I wish everyone would read this book. Really.

This is hilarious, especially the animation. It's actually the basis of some really silly litigation. I love how all the commenters are trying to be the wronged townspeople in a science fiction movie.

blackberry flower, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Our garden is doing better this year than last year. We have the two rosebushes established in pots from last year which are now 2' and 3' tall, which aren't blooming just yet. We also have our blackberry plant, which spent last year covering a trellis with canes. These canes turned red and orange over the winter, and I was vaguely afraid they would die, and then they turned green again and now it is blooming! It heartens me to know that every flower will turn into a big juicy berry, to be eaten outside on a hot day in the sun with Ben.

Last year our attempts to grow herbs from seed met with failure: we only managed to get parsley, cilantro, and thyme to sprout. This year we tried cultivating seeds inside first, and they flourished but died before we could get them into the ground. So we bought some from a preschool having a plant sale, and now we have little plants of rosemary, sage, basil, lavender, peppermint, and recao. We also got a habanero plant and two tomato plants. And we were planning to plant peas again, and we had gotten some sugar snap peas which were in the fridge too long and sprouted... so we planted them in the ground, and now they are tiny vines grabbing the fence! We will plant the parsley, cilantro, and thyme from seed again, since that worked fine last year. I can't wait for the peppers and tomatoes and peas, not to mention the blackberries... and I also can't wait for the herbs to get big enough that I can start tearing off leaves and seasoning things with them.

Oh, and we recently did something to make our tiny backyard even more awesome! We got a small charcoal grill. It makes great burgers and also great grilled eggplant and mushroom sandwiches, and later this week we plan to make grilled corn on the cob. I used to think a grill was redundant over our broiler, but it was really cheap and the food really tastes more smoky and delicious. Plus when it is really hot during the summer, we won't have to be making heat inside the house to cook with.

emmy, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently, it was a weekday morning and I had just gotten back from running. Ben came downstairs to talk to me while I was stretching and the first thing he said was, "Did you see what our cats did?" I shook my head, and he went on, "What they brought us? Outside our bedroom door?" While I was out on my run, they had thoughtfully deposited a dead mouse there. For us, their big friends who pet and feed them! This is gross but kind of nice, since before we had cats we had an on and off mouse problem, finding mouse droppings around and occasionally a mouse dead from natural causes. We never left anything edible out on the kitchen counters, even in a box or under plastic wrap, because we would find gnaw-marks on it later. So now our mouse problem is more or less solved. Yesterday I came home and walked into the bathroom to find the front two-thirds of a dead mouse, partially cached under the bathmat. I would prefer that they just ate it and I never had to see it, but still, that is a mouse that will not be licking our silverware or pooping on our counters.

I like the aesthetics of cats; they are fast, sleek, playful, and very cute. I grew up with them, so their actions and movements are also reassuring in a way. But what is a little weird to think about is that cats are deadly predators, and most of their 'cute' actions are deadly and brutal, but look cute to us because a housecat is much too small to take down a person, or even a child. They bat at things to see if they are alive, make sounds at birds while imagining crushing the birds' throats in their jaws, savage toy mice. The only exception, for our cats at least, is that they are very cuddly with us, and will snuggle up with us or on our laps and lick us to clean us if we let them, and this is a pack behavior rather than a killing behavior. I'm not saying this is a bad thing either, just one that you can forget the basic meaning of after having cats for a long time.

We got a bird feeder to put outside our kitchen window for the purpose of entertaining our cats. They love watching birds, but there is also a lactating squirrel that keeps coming to steal the seeds. This would be bad if we cared about feeding the birds over the squirrel, but the cats also like watching the squirrel hang down from the roof and pick at the seeds, so I suppose our goal of cat entertainment is being met.

cat tv, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

On Saturday a stray cat came to our backyard and sat below the window meowing to our cats, who meowed back. She was very small, probably not older than 6 months, white with a gray tail and face. I assume she was a stray, at least, since she was really hungry and didn't have a collar. I felt really sorry for her and put out some food, with the result that she came back Sunday, and yesterday night, and I saw her this morning on our street. I didn't feed her again but now we are seeing her a lot, and it tears at me to imagine something happening to this poor cat. Ben is opposed to getting another cat, and I suppose I am too. He thinks we should call PACCA, the group that takes in strays and sends them to PAWS, their adoption branch. I am sort of worried because PACCA was outed for having something like an 80% kill rate three years ago, though they replaced their management and two years ago I think it was more like 40%. The PSPCA, where we got our cats, doesn't pick up strays or take them. I am really worried that if we turned in this cat she would be euthanized, but on the other hand she is still very young and very cute so I think in a shelter her chances of being adopted would be great, assuming she doesn't have feline immunodeficiency virus or feline leukemia (both of which are apparently somewhat common in strays around here). Plus I suppose if we turned her in she would be fixed and not be a source of more strays in the future. But I feel some hesitation about this; have any of you ever turned in a stray? Or worked in an animal shelter and can give advice on the best thing to do?

I had been thinking about getting more BPAL when mousekinn had a sale of her BPAL fragrances to finance medicine for her sick kitty. It was a perfect opportunity to try new scents out!

( talking about the scents I got )

In the past I have rarely worn perfume but I often use scented lotions or shower gel or candles or bath salts. In actually wearing a scent I worry about overwhelming the senses of people around me. But I really like when you are putting on a lotion and big clouds of the scent waft up, and if you use it before bed a few times then you will get into bed and faintly smell whatever it was. I am actually considering mixing some of my own body oil and scenting it with some of the perfumes that don't last long on me. The best ingredients for body oil are really cheap, and it would be fun to do. I saved a glass bottle which used to have body oil in it just for this purpose.

Getting more into perfume and smell is a little like exploring painting for the first time, looking at works of art in a medium I have been taking for granted. But concoctions of scent, like foods where different flavors have been carefully balanced, are strange as works of art. Visual media is constant, real, tangible, and we can close our eyes and view it again in our mind's eye. Music is real in the sense that it does have a physical existence, but a necessarily fleeting one. However, if you know a musical piece well, you can replay it for yourself countless times and hear it almost the same as hearing it in person, so in some sense you can carry a musical piece with you using only your mind. But while scent and food have a corporeal existence, we cannot remember them accurately. You can recognize the taste of orange or rosemary or milk, but if you imagine them, you cannot re-taste or re-smell them in your mind. To me, that gives them a poignancy and immediacy different from other media.

Supposedly, Ben and I will both be learning some Turkish before we go there in September. We will be on a tour so it may not be that necessary, but I think it's good to know anyways and it would be nice to be able to interact with people there on our own, at least for basic things. But before I started with Turkish I wanted to brush up the rudimentary Italian that I know, which I learned for our summer 2006 trip. So I spent a lot of today reviewing that, remembering the vocab that was starting to slip. It's nothing ground-breaking but I really enjoy language; I wish I had the time to take a real language class. Maybe I will once all my coursework requirements for my Ph.D. are done. What is nice too is that I learned Italian with a Pimsleur-like course, though one that has a lot more vocabulary, so reviewing it today was something I could do while cleaning the kitchen and making a key lime pie. It feels both productive and mentally stimulating.

My French, which I actually received a lot of instruction in, I keep up by listening to French news podcasts. They are short and have too many soccer results, but they maintain my listening comprehension. I'm sure, though, that if I actually tried to speak with someone in French I would have a hard time making the words come out of my own mouth. I wish I had time to learn some crazy new language, like any of the Asian languages. I really ought to know Spanish but it's not as exciting to learn Romance languages because they are all like French but with different pronunciation.

Today it is beautiful out, as it has been more and more recently. I finally moved some of my recent photos from my camera to my computer, so here are some that I took at Sakura Sunday (Philadelphia cherry blossom festival) a few weeks ago. They are of the garden of a Japanese house we visited, the dancers with a taiko group, and the cherry blossoms themselves. Overall the event was so-so, but it was worth going just to see all the cherry blossom trees in Fairmount Park.

shofuso, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

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This is sort of a cool meme, or at least one that makes you think, to list a book you like for an author corresponding to each letter of the alphabet. I noticed some letters where I have lots of favorites--M, P, K--and in some places there wasn't that much choice and it was more a book I liked ok but had some problems with. There was one letter where I could only think of an author who I dislike. But still.

A - Allende, Isabel: Portrait in Sepia
B - Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451
C - Chabon, Michael: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
D - Dostoevsky, Fyodor: The Brothers Karamazov
E - Ellison, Ralph: The Invisible Man
F - Faulkner, William: The Sound and the Fury
G - Gibran, Kahlil: The Prophet
H - Heller, Joseph: Catch-22
I - Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll's House
J - Joyce, James: Dubliners
K - Kawabata, Yasunari: Snow Country
L - Lem, Stanislaw: The Cyberiad
M - Murakami, Haruki: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
N - Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
O - O'Connor, Flannery: Collected Works (short stories)
P - TIE Proust, Marcel: In Search of Lost Time, and Pynchon, Thomas: Gravity's Rainbow
Q - Quinn, Daniel: Ishmael
R - Rand, Ayn: Atlas Shrugged
S - Stephenson, Neal: Snow Crash
T - Tolstoy, Leo: War and Peace
U - The only author I can think of that I've read is some short stories of John Updike. I don't like his writing style, on top of which his book reviews in the New Yorker always give away the plots of the books. Sorry, Updike, I just do not like your writing.
V - Vonnegut, Kurt: Cat's Cradle
W - Woolf, Virginia: The Waves
X - Xingjian, Gao: Soul Mountain
Y - Yeats, William Butler: Collected Poems
Z - Zukav, Gary: The Dancing Wu Li Masters

For the purposes of this meme, it's lucky that Ron loaned me Soul Mountain back when I lived in Berkeley.

I just started reading Covering by Kenji Yoshino, and I'm sure I'll want to write about it later. But I did recently read Snow Falling on Cedars, after years of hearing what a good book it is. I liked it... but most of the best elements reminded me of other books, like Farewell to Manzanar or To Kill a Mockingbird. I did love the setting though, which was beautifully described and made me lust to eat strawberries.

I recently watched two romantic movies, one that made me feel lovey and happy and one that made me really depressed. The one that made me happy was Before Sunset (I watched Before Sunrise last summer), and I immediately ordered Before Sunrise to make Ben watch them both. :) Such unique movies, and really romantic. We watched Conversations with Other Women last night, which was excellent in a lot of ways. In the end I found it really depressing though, I think because it tapped into a fear I've mentioned before that relationships can end even if people really love each other, for complex and tricky reasons (see: my parents). This has got to be my biggest fear with marrying Ben, not that he is somehow wrong for me, but that I will somehow manage to lose him anyways. It's not a very rational fear, and at this point we have analyzed our compatibility far beyond what's necessary anyways. I think the strongest impetus to take marriage seriously is to watch people very close to you get divorced. Anyhow, the movie was excellent but sort of disturbing because of how it made me think of that. I'd still recommend it, though.

Awhile back I loved the PC games Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II (though II was obviously not really completed). Ben played Mass Effect a couple months ago and loved it and kept telling me how it was like KotOR but bigger, with better graphics, better storylines, and overall a lot more innovation and enjoyable gameplay. I finally started playing Mass Effect recently, and it is a lot of fun: a huge universe to explore but in a single-player game. I am maybe halfway through? There's a huge number of side quests, a lot of good gameplay, though some flaws in the game. I also recently played Portal (I got it for Ben for his birthday), which is a much shorter game and in my opinion, a nearly perfect game. It is clever, interesting, has very innovative gameplay, and is incredibly funny. I can't overrate it; it is so fun I wish it had been longer, but that is part of its perfection. Especially the very last scene, with the cake.

And I bought three CDs recently and overlistened to them a lot. I continued a fine, storied tradition of mine of stealing music recommendations from other people and loving them so much I spread the music to my friends. I got CDs of Ekova, Octopus Project, and Federico Aubele and have been loving them. Spread the love!

Two days before Ben and I got engaged, we had portraits taken at Don Taylor's as a Christmas present from my dad. This photo is my favorite, though I have looked at it so much that now it looks weird, like my hair is too dark and I'm all hunched over. Ben looks cute though.

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I don't know why I have been so terrible at updating recently. Things have been happening, and I think of interesting entries, but I don't manage to write most of them down. I will try to do better at that, mostly for my own sake because I like having a record of things which have happened.

This week was a bit stressful because I had to give two talks, one to my group meeting on my research (which is a lot of preparation but doesn't make me anxious) and one to my nanofabrication class (which was nerve-wracking). The nanofab talk was on a cool subject, using nanowires as radial p-i-n junctions in solar cells and how that's more efficient and cheaper than a planar solar cell of the same material. I was also glad we went early, because some later groups have discussed solar cells or nanowires or VLS fabrication and we got to it first (I say we because it was a joint presentation with another student). I covered the physics in the nanowire talk, and for the first time I felt the power of being able to show complicated derivations and intimidate people into not asking questions. This is a trick professors use all the time, but I generally assume my audience will understand derivations well enough to stump me with questions. Not so with engineers! Being who I am though, I ditched the Bessel functions and spent a lot of time making diagrams so that my content would be as clear as possible.

Oh, and I went to a thesis defense this week, the first I had gone to. It is interesting to see the difference between professors listening to a talk and professors trying to pick at every detail of a talk. By interesting, I mean intimidating and frightening. But it is good to see how it works. Later this year sometime, I will have to give my oral exam, which here consists of a talk about your research so far and what your thesis project will be. No one really fails it but your committee can rip you a new one if they feel you aren't on the right track. I will be trying to get some nice results this summer so that I can wow them into approval.

This is also the worst time of year to be working in my building. Penn is hosting the Penn Relays right now, and the track and field stadium is on the same block as the physics building. The three entrances to the building are partly or completely blocked by booths, lines, toilets, souvenir stands, food vendors, and sometimes loiterers. There are signs all over the building emphasizing that this is not a relays venue and you cannot enter, use the bathroom, or loiter. But it takes forever to get anywhere outside the building, pushing through big crowds. On the other hand, the street outside smells like barbeque.

cleaning, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently Ben and I came home from the grocery store to find that the cats had caught a mouse! A live mouse, that is. They have ample training to recognize and pursue mice from their days as strays and all the tiny mouse toys we get them, but unfortunately they fell into that age-old housecat trap... they would put the mouse in their mouths, then when he stopped moving they put him on the floor to see if he's alive. When he runs away, one of them picks him up again. They did this several times, the final time by the refrigerator where the mouse vanished. Whoops.

Sometimes when Ben is petting Blinn, Blinn bites him on the chin while looking really happy. Ben always looks a little put out but also a little amused, and I really ought to be keeping the camera on my desk ready to go for just such a moment.

The last couple weeks have been meh for me, for a variety of reasons--boring research, being tired of homework, frustration with wedding planning, not getting enough exercise. But this week things are picking up and turning around. Yesterday the weather was beautiful, finally up in the high 60s/low 70s, and all the cherry blossom trees are blooming. I am going to a cherry blossom festival in Fairmount Park this weekend, which should be really nice. My research started progressing some, and I learned to do something I wasn't much good at before (some Matlab things). And at last the wedding is coming together--bridesmaid dresses are on order, we sent a retainer for a photographer today, we are supposed to get a catering menu soon, our honeymoon is booked--so even though there's still a lot to do on it, I no longer feel like we are not moving forward with things. We even started getting reply cards back from our invitations!

A plus to it being warm is that we can leave our windows open now, and the cats love to sit at them and watch birds and cars, and I think just smell the air. At Easter my mom sent me a pot of lily of the valley, which sits on my desk and is now blooming. It smells heavenly! I heard that people put it into bridal bouquets for the scent, and thought it was a little silly because it is too small and delicate-looking in my opinion to be a good flower for a large bouquet. But the scent is amazing; I understand it now.

I have been all about the women's issues lately, going to a Princeton conference on women in science, attending a lot of the Penn Graduate Women in Science and Engineering events here, going to talks, reading feminist stuff online, etc. etc. I also get a lot of exposure to women's issues through playing World of Warcraft and being in the wonderful wow_ladies livejournal. Learning about inherent prejudices is very valuable, and trying to reach out to others and improve the lot of women in science is a rewarding thing. Plus I often learn skills from these events, such as salary negotiation, walking the line of competence between being too accomodating and being a bitch, and networking strategies. But I have to admit that even with all these benefits, the outcome of thinking about women's issues a lot can be really depressing. A good women in science event will teach skills, show information in a new way that yields some insight, and reassure you that you aren't the only one that deals with this stuff. A bad event will be a parade of sad statistics, like being beat over the head with the idea that it won't be fair for you or your female friends and there's still a lot of fight and little progress. It can tear at your spirit.

But I found something to do that really picks me up when I get down about women's issues. It is silly, too silly for some of you no doubt, but it really lifts my spirits. I am talking about ( ... )

As I've mentioned, my mom is sewing my wedding dress. Since she hasn't made a dress like this before, needed to combine several patterns, and can't easily have me try it on, what she decided to do was sew a practice dress out of muslin and send it to me. I can indicate alterations that need to be made, and send it back, and then she will make the alterations and then disassemble the muslin dress and use it as a pattern for the real thing. I received the practice dress in the mail yesterday, and had Ben take some pictures to e-mail to my mom. I was going through them this morning and found this really striking one he took, which was backlit because it was getting dark but we were trying to keep the natural lighting. Ben never takes pictures and doesn't even own a camera, but he's really quite good at it.

practice dress, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

It's hard to get the taste of envelopes out of my mouth. And you know what that means... invitations are assembled, stamped, and ready to be mailed tomorrow! It's very exciting.

invitations, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

invitation fan, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

One of the most exciting things I've done recently was a lab for my nanofab class, where we are learning from someone who does fabrication method research at DuPont how to use ProLith and what it does. It is a simulator for chip fabrication, which allows you to set things like what laser light to use, what kind of resist to use, resist and anti-reflection layer thicknesses, beam exposure, etc. and see whether you would get good line resolution on a chip. Supposedly real people in 'the biz' use this software all the time to optimize processes before bothering to spend zillions of dollars on printing wafers, and if you think about how many layers there are on chip wafers (5-7 is standard I think) it makes sense to optimize it in simulation first. The whole process is very interesting to me, as is the concept of a 'process window'. You want to be able to vary the focus and beam intensity as much as possible and still get nice chips, because this will guarantee a higher yield (since the focus and beam intensity are increasingly expensive to make very consistent). So you not only want to optimize your process to get great results, you also want a big process window because that ensures good yield.

In my nanomechanics class, we recently started talking about scanning probe microscopies (like atomic force microscopy--what I do in research) and cool measurements you can do with them. I am really impressed that someone managed to attach a nanotube to an AFM tip, and attach the other side to another tip, and then pull the tips apart to do a strain measurement. What is really cool is that when you do this on a multi-walled tube, the outer shell breaks first, and then the inner one just slides out because it's only held in by van der waals forces. AND you can measure the friction between tubes using this! They weld the tube to the tip using the hydrocarbon residue that forms from a scanning electron microscope when the beam is focused, which is apparently really hard stuff--on the order of hardness of diamond.

And my research has been boring lately, until today! Another student and I have this chip with electrodes on it, and I did extensive AFM/EFM on it before today, when we dropcasted nanocrystals on it. Now the surface is all crazy-looking, supposedly because it hasn't dried yet, and the images are some of the coolest AFM that I've taken. We'll see how it looks tomorrow!

Ben's birthday was Friday, so I made him a special meal today. The recipes are all online so I thought I'd share them with you: Merguez Lamb with Raisin Couscous, prosciutto and melon, and Key Lime Pie with Almond Crumb Crust. The Merguez lamb was delicious and really easy, with harissa we made from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (seriously, there are a lot of delicious things you can do with harissa). The couscous was good, though nothing to get excited about. I did prosciutto and melon because we already had it around, due to the obscenely cheap produce and prosciutto at the Italian Market, and to sort of round out the meal. And the lime pie was excellent; I didn't add the sugar and doubled the filling after reading some of the comments, and the result was very tangy and delicious.

I really ought to cook more on my own, without Ben helping me. I love to cook with him, but doing it on my own makes me feel a lot more proud and accomplished if the result is tasty.

Wedding planning progresses, albeit with some bumps along the way. In case you didn't know, a "bump" in wedding plans pretty much always means, "This vendor told me I would have to pay this, but now they are saying it will cost twice as much." The two main assumptions of wedding planners are that since you only intend to get married once, you're willing to be profligate, and since your parents are paying for it, they must have saved lots of money for this day. These are painful when you are trying to be thrifty because you have a little money from your parents, but they thought it was a better idea to pay for college than pay for an extravagant wedding. I have to say, that was solid logic from them.

But while I'm not enjoying the expense, I am excited about lots of aspects of the planning. We'll be getting a catering menu from a Mexican place soon which I'm looking forward to going over, and I'm in the final process of picking a bridesmaid dress with the help of my bridesmaids. I really like the dresses they are choosing from; I would almost want one myself. My mom is making practice cakes and giving them away to my friends in town, and she's also finished with the practice dress (in muslin, which I will fit and then tear apart to be the pattern). All the party aspects are going to be a lot of fun, and I'm also really looking forward to writing the ceremony in collaboration with the wedding party.

Something that has come up a fair amount, though, in my discussions with Ben about different aspects of the wedding, is the idea of being different from standard weddings. We agreed at the beginning that we would do things in a way that made us happy, and try not to feel bound by tradition. But at the same time, we also agreed not to reject anything out of hand because it was 'traditional'. ( Read more... )

I keep talking about how The Wire is such an amazing show, though to my knowledge I have not actually induced anyone to watch it who didn't already like it. So I found this really funny.