Wretched

That was the most terrible "end-of-work" work party/dinner imaginable...well, hopefully I left before it reached that unimaginable terrible point...but man, it was not good.

Read the post below, too, btw.

Rockin' Unemployment

I am officially, now, happily unemployed. (one of the few people enjoying being out of a job). Not that I didn't like my job; it was cushy, as summer jobs go. And it was certainly was fun. But my job wasn't really ONE job, it was many. I had to be doctor, lawyer, judge (a fun combination, those last two), psychiatrist, friend, mother-figure, police officer, janitor, singer, game-master, lifeguard and...well, you get the point. It was tiring. Good, but tiring. I'm ready to not work. Not yet sure I'm ready for school, but I am ready to not work.

Which leaves me unemployed and sitting at home watching mediocre television. I guess part of the truth is, I'm lonely. It's been nice being home...I missed Texas, I honestly did. I missed my family, terribly. But they are all busy doing things. My dad has started his new job, he's getting all ready for school. My brother is in marching band about to go to his first year of high school (that's busyness, right there). My mom is her usual level of busy...and I have no friends my age here at all. I was listening to my saved voicemails earlier; I have saved one from each school friend I've talked to his summer...and I just felt so sad. I miss y'all a lot... For example, I heard there is a Pink concert here tonight, and I actually thought that would be cool to go to. But I don't have anyone to go with, and I don't have a car, so I'm not going. I am, however, going to go to my job's end-of-work dinner with people older than me that are probably going to drink far too much and make me uncomfortable.

Anyway, ...be seeing you soon, hopefully.
Yours, Meg

Finally and BRAVO Prof

SAN FRANCISCO - As an Ivy League-trained neurobiologist who oversees a research lab at Stanford, Ben Barres feels qualified to comment on whether nature or nurture explains the persistent gender gap in the scientific community.

But it wasn't just his medical degree from Dartmouth, his Ph.D from Harvard and his studies on brain development and regeneration that inspired him to write an article blaming the shortage of female scientists on institutional bias.

Rather, it was that for most of his academic life, the 51-year-old professor who now wears a beard was once known as Dr. Barbara Barres, a woman who excelled in math and science.

"I have this perspective," said Barres, who switched sexes when he started taking hormones in 1997. "I've lived in the shoes of a woman and I've lived in the shoes of a man. It's caused me to reflect on the barriers women face."

Barres' opinion piece, published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, was a response to the debate former Harvard president Lawrence Summers reignited last year when he said innate sexual differences might explain why comparatively few women excelled in scientific careers.

Summers' clashes with faculty — including over women in science — led to his resignation, though not before he committed $50 million on childcare and other initiatives to help advance the careers of women and minority employees.

Even so, Barres thinks a meaningful discussion of what he calls the "Larry Summers Hypothesis" ended too soon, leaving missed opportunities and a bad message for young female scientists.

"I feel like I have a responsibility to speak out," he said. "Anyone who has changed sex has done probably the hardest thing they can do. It's freeing, in a way, because it makes me more fearless about other things."

In his article, Barres offers several personal anecdotes from both sides of the gender divide to prove his own hypothesis that prejudice plays a much bigger role than genes in preventing women from reaching their potential on university campuses and in government laboratories.

The one that rankles him most dates from his undergraduate days at MIT, where as a young woman in a class dominated by men he was the only student to solve a complicated math problem. The professor responded that a boyfriend must have done the work for her, according to Barres.

Barres makes a point of saying that he never felt mistreated or held back as a female scientist. At the same time, he wonders if his personal experience somehow shielded him from the more insidious effects of gender bias.

"I wasn't subject to the same stereotype threat because I never identified with women when I was growing up," he said. "In a way that was one of the lucky things for me about being transgender."

Aside from his unique vantage point, the thrust of Barres' article is that neither Summers nor the prominent scientists who defended his position used hard data to back up the claim that biology makes women less inclined toward math and science.

He cites several studies — including one showing little difference in the math scores of boys and girls ages 4 to 18 and another that indicated girls are groomed to be less competitive in sports — to support his discrimination argument.

"If a famous scientist or the president of a prestigious university is going to pronounce in public that women are likely to be innately inferior, would it be too much to ask that they be aware of the relevant data?" he writes in Nature.

"It would seem just as the bar goes up for women applicants in academic selection processes, it goes way down when men are evaluating the evidence for why women are not advancing in science."

Harvard University psycholinguist Steven Pinker, whom Barres names in his commentary as a leading defender of Summers, already has written a letter to the editors of Nature criticizing the piece as "polemic" that "contains numerous falsehoods and scurrilous statements."

Pinker said both he and Summers relied on "a large empirical literature showing differences in mean and variance in the distributions of talents, temperaments, and life priorities" among men and women to explain why women might be underrepresented in some scientific disciplines.

"He should learn to take scientific hypotheses less personally," Pinker said.

Barres said he won't be surprised if the Nature article makes him the kind of lightning rod for criticism that Summers was last year. He said he is disappointed that more senior women faculty have remained silent on the issue.

"Women have heard this stuff so much from people like Larry Summers, some corner of their brain starts to believe it," he said.

Great outdoors

This past weekend we went on a camping trip, my family and I. And it was going to be great. We went to Caddo Lake state park. Sounds delightful, right? Lake means swimming, frolicking, and general lack of heat.
Caddo Lake state park is a wetland. Wetland means fancy name for swampland. Including American Alligators, giant snapping turtles, scary-looking fish, and gross water. If I were a making a horror movie, I might do it at Caddo Lake state park; lots of trees, Spanish moss hanging from the trees, nowhere to run. Oh, and Caddo Lake is near Uncertain, Texas. That's right. The actual name of the town is Uncertain.

I won't ever understand some things.

Anyway, even though the brochure wouldn't be that nice, I had a great weekend. We went on a four-hour canoe trip where we saw lots of wildlife (the nice kind) and a hike where we saw evidence of deer and coyotes. It was nice. At 6:30 Sunday morning, we awoke to a terrifyingly loud *CRACK*. A huge oak tree not 100 feet from our camp had collapsed...not a breath of wind. It is only by the grace of God that the tree didnt' fall on us.

Which brings me to my point. I've really needed a break like this. No worries, nothing to fuss about, nowhere to be. It was fantastic, and I felt refreshed (until I went into work and my children were hellions...but that's another story).
Go camping, it's great -- and I've got the mosquito bites to prove it.