Conference posters

I'm off to my first conference in a long time, and finding myself doing something I don't think I've ever done - putting together a poster from a qualitative project. No graphs, no plots, just words, interview quotes, etc. To aid me in this task, and to accomplish it with some level of aesthetic non-suckiness, I've been looking through the "How to make a less ugly conference poster" blog-o-sphere.

Yup. There is more than one blog that addresses issues of how to make a conference poster less crowded, overwhelming, scary to read, unapproachable, etc. Among the lesser hints I've read (which I have nonetheless followed by deciding I'll wear a faded denim color shirt the day of my poster): that poster presenters who are dressed in colors that clash with their posters get less visitors to their posters.

One blog I browsed for a bit: BetterPosters

And I will probably read some more of Designing conference posters. And who doesn't want to Pimp Their Poster?

After reading and browsing, I finally looked back at some talk slides and started designing. I wanted to keep the colors minimal but pleasing. I wanted to put some information in as icons instead of text, because who wants to read an article on a wall (this is what I find hardest at conferences...my brain just doesn't handle wall-mounted text very well). And I still need to add blocks of motivations and conclusions texts. Here is what I have so far, blue people represent grad students, red people represent faculty, and I need to add the notion of the American, Research I institute as my study site, to the lower left corner where my 12 grad and 9 faculty interviewees are represented - comment away!

Can't touch these

Technically, they're not made of enough fabric to be Hammer Pants, but for my purposes, they are close enough. Three pairs of them, in fact. One is snake pattern rayon. And cost $10. And are now the only pairs of pants I can wear as I wait to find out more about my journey towards the spine surgeon. I'm hoping that he and I will only chat, exchange some information and statistics about sequestered discs (I've graduated from herniation, it seems), and then I will leave his office with a few trips and plans to cancel and no surgeries in my near future. We'll see.

Although I went into town by tram in search of my non-jeans today, I returned by taxi. I've been taking taxis about 3-4 times a week these days, to make sure I don't overdo it with the standing and sitting, but can still go to the odd birthday party (in reality, it was totally normal, with amazing party favors from a Dollar Store in Montreal), shopping trip or pool outing. I make sure to just decide not to buy the last item and bam!, there's my cab fare home.

I've gotten to know a few taxi drivers, with all this being ferried around which brings me to my other topic - learning German. I think that should we every move back to the US while I am still of employable age, I should really look for work as a relocation expert, or a university study abroad counselor. Because this whole thing about "oh, you should just learn German, you'll feel more at home" is hitting some serious roadblocks in the form of misunderstandings. Sure, my conversational partners will forgive my bad grammar and small vocabulary when they are friends, but when the taxi dispatcher sends the taxi to pick me up at the children's hospital instead of dropping me there, or the guy I just called to come in 30 minutes shows up 10 minutes early at 30 minutes past the hour, I'm not sure how much of it is my German versus their mistake. And they get pissed off, and I just feel like calling off watching an hour of bad soap operas a day and reverting to English where I can be magnanimous....and right.

I also have a new found respect for all those people learning English as a second language. I apologize for in, to, after, before, under, on, around and all those other words that can really mess with your intended communication. I finally get how much it sucks to be misunderstood on those points.

The cramped, loud machine

I'm an old pro when it comes to MRI's. I've had three now, and although I may sometimes wake from a nightmare of being stuck in a small space or a small dress that I can't get out of, I don't even flinch when I'm in the machine. Actually, even the first time I didn't flinch from any claustrophobic reaction, as much as I did when the "kind of loud" noise of the machine completely drowned out the music they had piped in on the headphones on my head. Why even play music if I can't hear it for all the "HMMMMG!!!" "BRAAAPP", and "WAGAWAGAWAGA" of the machine?

But even though I'm cool and collected in the MRI machine, I can't help but worry each time whether I've forgotten some piece of metal that my body has acquired since my last MRI. I routinely forget things that happened yesterday, these days, and I always worry a bit when the first sounds start on the machine about whether or not some tattoo I forgot I got is going to get ripped off my thigh and go flying towards the walls of the machine.

Physicists shouldn't really be allowed to understand how machines they are lying inside of work. It just makes you nervous. And the question on the intake form about permanent make-up? Yikes. Do I have to imagine what could happen to some unfortunately eyebrow-laden woman if she forgets and goes in that machine?

I know it is a strong magnet, but would a navel piercing rip out of my belly button and fly to the wall of the machine, only to fall back down on the person crying in pain once the tech shut off the machine? Ew. Of course, I'm probably just overreacting to what could happen, right? Because nothing feels that weird during the MRI exam. How strong is that magnetic field anyway.

And Google responds....apparently, wheelchairs and even floor-polishers have been sucked into those machines. And beware the foil-backed nicotine patch. Should you care to indulge your curiosity further, I leave you with this webpage. And no matter how many times I've been in one of those machines, next time I have an MRI, I will once again the technician ask about all my fillings - probably one by one.

I may not be a whiz at langauges after all

As I keep winding up in bed or on the floor for my back, I'm starting to move to the "long haul view" of my sequestration, and have started working on my German again. Given that I just used a possibly made-up English word in that last sentence, perhaps I should also start working on my English.

I've taken some German language classes while we've lived here, some 8 weeks worth before A was born, and then another class last fall. I learned a lot in each, although I don't think I got very far either time. At least, not in that undergraduate-language-immersion sort of way. But at the same time, I know how little benefit I'd get from another group class right now if I only could spend a few hours a week studying German. My brain is mushy, whether from age or motherhood, and things just don't sink in like they used to, leaving no foundation for new information to take hold. I consistently perform spectacularly poorly on the little flash cards quiz feature on my dictionary app. "Oh sure", you comfort me, "but those are random words that you may never have seen before."

"Oh no", I hand you back your comfort, newly washed, with a homemade thank you note, "those are the words I have been studying, marking in the app, and just failed to identify last time I took the quiz. An hour ago."

In search of a high value, decent return on my time investment, given the little time I have, I have decided to take the quiz every day (I add words to it as I look them up for the first time), and to watch at least an hour of German-language TV. The conditions on this are: (1) it must have subtitles because I am not yet good enough with verbal German and there are some 5 dialects, at least, flying around our cable channels, and (2) it must be entertaining (movies or soaps or cop shows) and (3) it must be simple enough language that I have a chance of following partially by context (soap operas and American romantic comedies dubbed in German perform very well in this condition). I get about 20% of what is being said (written on the screen), I hear German, I fill in context enough to keep watching even though I am missing 80% of the words. I do okay so far. I hope that, at the very least, I am reinforcing German grammatical structure in my brain even if I keep forgetting vocabulary words.

When my grandfather moved to Brasil from Lithuania, he learned something like 10 new Portuguese words a day. I've never been able to get even close with German. Actually, even one word a day is kind of easily beating me. Then again, my grandfather wasn't at home all day, raising the many daughters he had. He was working, and speaking to people, and you can bet than few people in his workday were speaking much Lithuanian to him. (Not as few as one might guess, given that he was living in a Lithuanian immigrant neighborhood, but still....).

Yesterday while I flipped channels in search of subtitles, I found a Brazilian athlete being interviewed, with German subtitles. And at this moment I started to doubt how skilled I actually am at learning new languages. I grew up hearing Portuguese when my mom and her sisters talked on the phone. Later, in highschool, I took to Spanish pretty quickly and have since thought myself quite adept at language acquisition. Watching this soccer player talk about his life and family, I was instantly comforted by the Portuguese I heard, and using that to practice my German. And then a bit disappointed to realize that my skill for Spanish may just have been early exposure to Portuguese.

In which case, as regards German, I'm pretty screwed.

Greetings, dustbunnies. I bring news of the world above.

Well, I really did it now. I just couldn't leave well enough alone, and just had to do something that has brought back enough back pain that I can hardly walk. How could I be so careless?

I wore jeans.

At which point, you are thinking "That's ridiculous.  Jeans don't even come up to where your herniated disc is. Oh, wait, are you wearing mom jeans? I'm disappointed, frankly, because that is the sort of thing I would have expected you to blog about already."

To which I reply "No, no, they were normal jeans that did not, in fact, have an elastic which held them up somewhere near my chin." And when I changed out of them into the loosest shirt and pants I own, I felt a bit better. And then felt worse. Maybe they were corseting the pain in, from one of the other crazy, wild, irresponsible activities I had engaged in.

Like buying, and carrying home in my bag, a 1lb. bottle of fabric softener. Carrying home on the bus.

Or the fact that I sat on the floor of the bathroom and sorted laundry. Sitting down. Carefully.

This is getting pretty ridiculous now. I can hardly stand, I slowly shuffle down the hall, body contorted to keep from using my left leg too much. And honestly, if you told me it was the fact that it rained last night that made things worse, I'd probably buy it. I have no clue what I did.

I spent some time on the floor, by the dogbed this morning, in search of a hard surface for my back, and a release from pain. I lifted the iPhone above my head and took some 5 randomly pointed photos before I got one with the dog in it. I looked up at the ceiling light, and the wardrobe scribble that says "You do enough" and wondered which do-ing got me here this morning.

I really have no idea. I mean, jeans? No way that could have done me in this badly....I've just been to Greece for a week with A and M, for heaven's sake. Sure we sat at beaches much of the time, but I also sat at restaurants and in cars and walked village streets. For a week. And took 2 three hour flights. And yet, not even the doctor will tell me it wasn't the jeans.

Well, ok, he will. He will say it is completely random. And I will do my best not to comprehend that last word, perhaps I can sigh loudly enough not to even hear it. I would plan to cough loudly to cover up that last word, but I'm sure that if I cough at all right now, my spine is going to just fall out. Just like that. On the floor.


Now, I've always thought of myself as a bit more evolved (read: better) than creatures without spines. Especially amoebas and the like. But I'm starting to think that this whole spine thing may be overrated. Now that I've realized I can get over the shame of getting around the house on all fours on a bad day, perhaps just blobbing along isn't so bad if you don't have to worry about herniated disks and all. So if there is some sort of "Convert to Invert(abrate)" group out there, like a Jews for Jesus of the spine/no-spine world, go on and send me some literature. I'm open-minded right now.

The trailing spouse.

It makes me sound like the toilet paper stuck on M's shoe that he forgot to check for before leaving the bathroom.

http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2010/05/20/spousal-hiring-is-unethical-puhleeze/

There are a lot of spouses of university faculty who work where I work. I'm one of them. And although I have been trying to go from being embarrassed by the fact to acting like it is okay, it is definitely a situation fraught with complexity and needing a lot more active consideration than it gets. So far, most of us are just left to separate (or not) our home and work relationships as we see fit. But the resulting range of spousal situations is extremely diverse, including in the variable of "how well you leave your home life at home."

But there is no way to do this. Not completely. If A is sick, and we can't use the babysitter, one of us will have to stay home. And if both of us has a deadline that day within the same department or unit, one of those deadlines will not get met. But even in day to day interactions - of course I'll be more likely to act towards M in a way that reflects our, um, frankness with each other as husband and wife. Now, sometimes, this means I'm the only one in the workplace who tells M he's wrong about something. And some of the time, I even have a valid point! But other times it means I exert more influence on him than others can, and vice versa.

What I am most confused about in this situation is just what a good balance is. We are married, and we have a certain relationship with each other. While we will not have a marital fight in a university hallway, there are parts of this relationship that it would be impossible to change. Especially in exchange for some sort of perception of a less closely familiar relationship. In the same way that close friends in academia will interact differently, and a very sympathetic advisor-advisee relationship will lead to different behaviors. And for the latter, I don't mean a romantic relationship, I just mean one in which an advisor has a personality match better with some advisees than others.

I'd love to hear some stories from the workplace of better ways of working with spousal colleagues than just pretending it isn't a special situation. Of acknowledging the relationship as something that has an effect, but doing with more subtlety than just requiring one spouse is not responsible for work evaluation of the other spouse (although, in some places, I'm sure that would be a good start).

Buying local

We have the great pleasure of having family visiting this week. It is always nice to bring a little bit of home to Zurich, and even to have the one-on-one time with people that is so hard to get when you do a crazy-fast yearly Christmas visit to the US.

One of the topics that came up at breakfast with my nephew was buying humanely-raised meat. And how much easier that choice is here in Switzerland than in middle America (although it didn't used to be, in the age of the small family farm). This topic easily shifts to the other conscious choices we all make at some point or another, to live a life that is more....something. More humane to animals, or to humans, to not buy "Made in China" or to only buy local. No one can do it all, and we each have the sacrifices we choose to make.

For a while, I tried buying on Etsy, but the communication issues and difficulty (for me) of returning things hasn't solved my buy-small issues. At the other end of the spectrum is buying from Amazon.com. Or Gap.com, or Zappos.com. Earlier this week I read an article that a friend had posted on Facebook about working conditions for low-wage, part-time employees that are hired to fill orders in this free-shipping, get-it-yesterday on-line shopping world. Today I found this article. The conditions were horrible - very short breaks, very fast pace, substantial electrical shocks when filling book orders from poorly grounded shelves (really? How is that ok?), draconian rules about bringing your belongings with you and no place to keep a cell-phone with which to call your kids to check in during your 12 hour shift so you leave it in the break room and hope no one steals is, having to decide between eating and going to the bathroom, getting fired for missing a day of work when "his woman gave birth", etc, etc. People staying in these jobs because there is no other work.

So until I hear about some significant changes over there, I'm off of Amazon.com. I'll continue to download Kindle books, but I'll probably cancel my Prime Membership. And unsubscribe to Gap.com emails. And hopefully have a chance to write, in each case, to the company, why I am leaving. I can do without. I can do with less. I can wait to get it next week.