8:45 AM: Rolling over to turn off the alarm clock, I reach just slightly too far and fall directly into the half-foot gap between my bed and the wall. Good morning!
11:30 AM: Walking out of operating systems exam wearing a big grin, knowing I nailed it. Considered high-fiving Osama on the way out, but that’s probably frowned upon, even if my performance could technically be described as “totally radical.”
12-1:45 PM: Desperately learning linear algebra, digging through past exams and mumbling things like “Gram-Schmidt process is u2 minus u2 v1 over v1 v1 times v1…” while waving my hands in the air to depict vectors and matrices, much to the dismay of the people trying to study near me. They do not appear to appreciate my visual representations of numerical concepts.
2 PM: Whispering a ridiculous prayer to Coyote (because Coyote doesn’t listen to any other kind) and thinking about the price of unpleasant university courses vs. the cost of septic tanks. We spend a shocking amount of money on maintaining our lives and doing necessary but boring things – but the really weird part is that that’s shocking. Society teaches that cash is for acquisition of new consumer goods, but that’s mostly not the case; money is just a conduit to transformation, after all. Anyway, math courses are expensive and irritating.
4:30 PM: Walking out of linear algebra exam, wearing a grin big enough to terrify bystanders. Thank you, Gram-Schmidt process!
5 PM: Cycling south and swearing feverishly, because that’s the only heat-related word that’s even remotely applicable. The -20 C windchill turns cycling into an extreme sport. Luckily, my parka gives me a visual field of about 45 degrees, which distracts me from the way my fingers have frozen and started to shatter.
5:15-8:30 PM: Eating Thai food with Bryan, sharing ideas (“twatwrinkle” caused a solid five minutes of laughter, not to mention the Gerontobear montage), drawing diagrams of Saint John’s six-way intersections, and contemplating our current projects. Some projects do, in fact, involve current.
10-11:30 PM: Reading in the bathtub. The cat approves, giving two wet forepaws up.
12 AM: Surreptitiously playing DDR, attempting to hop very, very quietly so as not to tip everyone off as to what a terrible neighbour I am.
1-1:45 AM: Preparing resume, transcript, and cover letter, then applying for a summer internship at Google. Realizing that damn, I look really good on paper. Why do I feel like such a fraud most of the time? Imposter syndrome is such a pain.
2 AM: Wondering why the hell I decided to apply to Google on a whim at 2 AM. Who applies to Google on a whim at 2 AM?! Also, why did I make so many jokes in my cover letter? This must be my way of repaying Coyote for helping me out on that linear algebra final…
“When the seizure occurs during sleep, the person will often become semi-conscious and act out a dream while engaging with the environment as normal, and objects and people usually appear normal or only slightly distorted, being able to communicate with them on an otherwise normal level. However, since the person is acting in a dream-like state, they will assimilate any hallucinations or delusions into their communication, often speaking to a hallucinatory person or speaking of events or thoughts normally pertaining to a dream or other hallucination.” (from Wikipedia’s simple partial seizure entry)
As most of you know, I’ve had strange events occur during sleep for at least the last ten years, probably much longer. I have a tendency to feel like I’m awake and react accordingly, but I’m hallucinating and interacting with concepts that I’d easily recognize as irrational if I were actually fully conscious. This usually happens within half an hour of my falling asleep, although it does sometimes occur later in the night; I’ve always assumed this meant it’s tied to the REM part of my sleep cycle. The results are weird and often hilarious; here are some examples.
Most recently, I vaulted about three feet straight up in an attempt to escape my bed, which, I firmly believed, was about to fold in half to devour me like some sort of down-filled venus flytrap. (There’s a metaphor for insomnia if ever there were one.) The examples in my old entry are cute, but most of the time, I wake up thinking that there are insects in my bed or that someone is trying to do me harm, and have to flee in a panic. I generally make it to the light switch by my bedroom door before my brain snaps on and I start to wonder, “Wait, does this make sense? ARE there such things are sentient, five-foot-tall cockroaches? CAN some faceless entity encase my entire bed in Saran Wrap without having keys to my apartment?” It takes about five more minutes, and then I feel secure enough in reality to go back to sleep.
No explanation for these events has ever really satisfied me. I usually just tell people that it’s some sort of extended somnambulism – I was well-known for ambling happily around my parents’ house as a child, mumbling nonsense until I was returned to bed – or that it’s probably related to night terrors. But I know that sleepwalkers aren’t actually conscious, so they don’t behave rationally and generally don’t remember anything, and night terrors cause similar effects. I keep meaning to go to a sleep clinic, but doing that is time-consuming and annoying, and the waking dreams don’t occur often enough to be a real problem. They’re just a five-minute distraction a couple of times per month.
But what if they’re actually simple partial seizures, occurring while I’m asleep? It’s apparently not a significant issue, since whatever it is has been happening for ages and I’ve experienced no adverse effects, but it’s very strange to think that it might be some sort of very specific epilepsy. Epilepsy is also positively correlated with anxiety disorders, migraine, ADHD, and infertility, and I have at least two of those. (I’ve been wondering about my fertility for a while now, for various reasons, but I’ve been diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder, and I get migraine-like headaches at least once a month.) Brain? Hello? Brain? What are you doing in there?! Hop to it, American researchers working on subdermal LED implants; I want my idiot lights already!
(To the tune of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. Jessica sent me a reimagining of DM’s Master and Servant, and this was my reply…)
Calculation’s
Like meditation,
Finding eternity
Inside an integral.
Anticipation
Of derivation -
Oh, how can you not
Love mathematics, girl?
All you’ve ever counted,
All you’ve ever added,
Sum more than their parts:
Numbers are nature’s own calculator,
They stretch out uncountably far…
Scribbling in sand
With thoughtful hands,
Hippasus was convinced:
Two’s irrational.
By contradiction
Showed fraction was fiction
And shared a complex truth.
This proof’s non-trivial.
The distance we’ve measured,
The music we’ve treasured,
Are gifts of this art:
Numbers are nature’s own calculator,
They stretch out uncountably far…
It has been brought to my attention that I have developed a reputation at UoT for being somewhat prickly. This isn’t a matter of friendliness, as far as I know; I like and am liked by almost everyone I’ve met, and never lack for conversation, high fives, work-related advice, and table tennis when I’m lurking around Bahen. I’ve actually never had an academic situation this gregarious and open, and the only thing keeping me from forming closer bonds to more people is the fact that they’re all so much younger than I am. It’s hard to imagine myself going to pub nights and getting drunk with 20-year-olds, no matter how like-minded they may be. During the day, though, I slide through the department like I belong there, which is nice.
I’m still known as the reticent girl, though. When I say this, I don’t mean I’m a girl who is reticent about interacting, because I’ve never been less shy than I am now; rather, I’m a person who is reticent about being a girl. It’s become steadily more apparent that there are complex gender issues at play here, in the professional world in general and in the computer science department in particular, and I don’t know how evenly the blame should be shared. Maybe it’s mostly my own problem, and I’m extrapolating too much from what I see and read. Maybe I’m an innocent bystander who’s being oppressed by her chromosomes. I suspect we’re all taking turns creating this situation, even if most people aren’t actively aware of it. As my own awareness grows, I have to figure out how to react and respond – and as far as that’s concerned, I’m not where I want to be just yet.
Last week, I had to explain to a good friend that the reason I constantly rebuff compliments from him and our peers is because they’re almost always focused on my looks, not my contents. If you tell me I’m a good coder or that a story I wrote held your interest, I’ll thank you; if you tell me I’m pretty and/or hot and/or that I have great breasts, my specific wording will vary based on my mood, but it will be some reasonably polite way of saying, ‘Fuck off.’ The thing is, it’s not that I don’t like compliments of that type – I like them a lot, in fact. I don’t need validation from men, but it’s always pleasant to receive positive reinforcement. That said, I don’t want to hear them from people I consider colleagues, unless we know each other well enough that I can assume they’re not determining my value based on my looks. Even then, it’s only acceptable when I also know that those people aren’t secretly planning to bone me someday. (Yes, men, I know that ‘all men secretly want to bone all of the women they find attractive.’ Most women feel the same way. That’s natural, and not a problem! But there’s a difference between wanting to have sex and plotting away, feigning friendship and human interest when all you’re actually seeing is a potential lay.) Basically, as I explained, I want to be friends with the nerdy elite with whom I identify so strongly, and I feel like doing that requires that I avoid admitting to being a sexual creature.
So I don’t wear my short dresses and big boots to class. I keep my clothing simple and largely unflattering, and I don’t go to town with my make-up and jewellery. I’m friendly and helpful and occasionally filthy-minded – I can sass any of the young men of my acquaintance into the ground when the situation demands it, and most of them don’t try to compete with my smart mouth – but as asexual as I can manage. I don’t participate in the guys’ conversations about sex, and bow out rather than getting irate when they casually debase women. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really work. Even if it did, it’s untenable.
I don’t feel particularly good about myself when I traipse around in t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, but that’s the most minor of issues. A bigger concern is that I seem to believe that in order to be taken seriously, I have to shelve my gender and become some sort of giant brain floating in depersonalized space. And even worse than that? I think I might be right. I can’t tell you how many of my classmates have expressed surprise when I turned out to be a strong coder who can debug their projects when they can’t; I’ve watched, and they don’t behave that way toward each other. I also frequently hear about how much I’m not a girl, and this thought is always expressed in respectful tones. What is so weird or wrong with being a girl in computer science that I feel I have to escape it, and why is it that when I succeed, people are impressed?
I’m afraid that I’ll never really feel like part of the team in CS, in class or in the professional world. I’m ever-so-slowly dealing with the imposter syndrome – it’s a condition that affects a lot of women in technical fields; they believe they’re not as talented as the men around them because of differences in the way men and women express themselves, and live in fear that their uselessness will eventually be discovered – but I don’t know what to do about my pheremones. I’ve traditionally compensated for perceived gender inequalities by being a flirt, playing up the Jenny McCarthy effect: if you’re one of the boys and like wearing low-cut shirts, men will want to keep you around. I’m still happy to do this to some extent – because, let’s be honest, it’s fun, and we should enjoy our bodies while we’re young and they’re looking their best – but it doesn’t and mustn’t carry over to my burgeoning career. Even if a woman could command actual professional respect that way – and I don’t think it’s possible – it’s a temporary skill. 40-year-old women really can’t do that, nor should they have to in order to find their place in a tech company. If I capitalize on my looks instead of developing my personality and demeanour, it’s going to cost me in the end, likely sooner rather than later.
I want to build a reputation for being creative, intelligent, and cool, not for being slutty or frigid or too much of a feminist. Men jostle for position in the corporate and social hierarchies, but I feel like if I try to do the same, I’ll be branded with a label that none of my male counterparts will. That pisses me off, and I haven’t really figured out how to deal with it yet. And I still kind of wish I were a guy, at least until I remember that dammit, I have great breasts. 
Picture, if you can, your friend and humble narrator and her best friend; they are in their Friday finery, twirling and thrashing to the dulcet tones of industrial noise at a dingy basement club. The speakers throb and bend outward, unable to contain the heavy beats – or, perhaps, unable to bear the burden of containing so much angst. Your narrator is wearing 6″ platform boots, fishnet stockings, a little black dress festooned with rivets, and ocelot-spotted red hair extensions that, as it turns out, glow a fierce pink under blacklight. She’s been dancing with her friend for about fifteen songs now, and they’re both a bit worse for the wear: they’ve dialed their mocking goth homoeroticism down a few points, and are now resorting to throwing ice cubes at each other’s cleavage during the quiet parts. The night has been fantastic, but they’re just about ready to leave. Then this happens:
She starts to laugh hysterically, a wave of unbridled glee forcing her feet to move of their own accord. It’s hard to be graceful in massive PVC boots, but she does what she can, and as the chorus carries the crowd away, she finds herself bouncing from heel to toe and around in circles, performing a mad sort of hoedown as her bared teeth and writhing hair blaze under the UV lamps. She’s never heard this song before, and it’s as if it had been created for this moment, filling the room with hilarity. The mood in the air, about as solemn as you’d expect from a goth club that had until recently been playing Wolfsheim and VNV Nation, begins to lighten; soon, everyone willing to dance is grinning as they spin through the darkness. She feels brilliantly, gloriously alive, feeling every muscle in her body working to bend her in unexpected directions, and as the song fades, she calls out:
“They’re coming to take me away, ha ha, they’re coming to take me away, ho ho, hee hee, ha ha…!”
And it is awesome.
I’ll just be over here, staying up past my bedtime to play with my favourite mouse cell transportation accessory.
S: “Hey, you know how some people – boring people – go down to the beach and skip stones across the water?”
B: *stifling hysterical laughter* “I like where this is going. Skip, skip, skip, kaboom!”
S: “Science!”
I had a bad day today. I knew it was coming, but that didn’t make anything better. Despite having spent most of my spare time over the past week studying for it, I bombed my statistics midterm – and by ‘bombed,’ I mean that I’ll be lucky to get 35% on it; small children leave patterns in their diapers that are likely to receive better reviews than my desperate scribbles will. And because I was busily studying for that, I fell behind on my operating systems assignment, so the next few days will be spent trying to finish it before Thursday. Three hours in the lab tonight yielded very little progress; the assignment is cool as hell (implementing fork and execv from scratch in a homebrew OS), but it’s hard to make headway on it. There are also two midterms on Thursday I’ll have no time to study for, and two other assignments due by or before that day…
… so needless to say, my left eye was twitching out the international call signal for “distressed computer science lunatic,” and the guys at Bahen were treating me with the sort of respect you give a live grenade balanced on the parted lips of a crocodile who’s towing a crate filled with weaponized plutonium through a lake of ebola-tainted blood. That’s the sort of respect I like, and not just because it makes me feel as if I could cause people to transform into tragic haemorrhagic masses at a moment’s notice. We were bantering a bit because I find that shooting the shit is a good way to defuse negative emotions, but I was still feeling very fragile. But then it happened:
Bryan showed up with a hug – and a styrofoam container filled with dry ice. He walked me home and left me to my own devices, my code, and my bathtub… which is now filling up with water in preparation for Science! I have a few beverages to provide colour, and some Lush products for texture; I’ll take pictures of the results if I can, but B. warned me that gloves and safety goggles/glasses are a must for this particular experiment, so the camera may have to miss out on the festivities. And by ‘festivities,’ I in fact mean ‘explosions.’
The man knows what I like, I’ll give him that. And as shitty as the day had been, the combination of thoughtful friendliness and mad scientist-style maniacal laughter really helped turn the night around. If this turns out to be my last blog entry, you can blame him for my highly amusing death…
They sat together in the spaces that exist outside of space, simultaneously and perpetually filling all of the untamed terrain available to their kind. Their forms shifted in a languidly unstructured sort of way, every possible expression constantly and never occupying their quantum faces. They glowed with the molten dreams that power the universe, radiating potentialities as endless and unknowable as their hearts. And they sighed in unison, spreading a light dusting of stars in all directions.
“I’m so fucking bored.” Bastet’s face split into a massive, planet-swallowing yawn; she looked strikingly like one of her temple cats, ears folding back against her head as her feline canines gleamed. “How long have we been sitting here waiting?”
Read the rest of this entry »
(I’m working on ripostes to both of the hilarious replies posted on my last entry – you guys made my day so much better! Thank you for bein’ a friiiieeennnddd… – and a long, blabbering rant that goes with this. But you’ll be happier with two paragraphs than with fourteen, probably, so you can have the terse version.)
Memories are strange, alien things; they feel so familiar, gliding through us like wind-pulled waves cresting above the sea of our minds, but they’re not, not really. Fragments of truth are in there, just enough to pull us in, but there’s so much subjectivity and outright neural deceit blended in with them that they can never really be trusted. Every specific moment of recollection involves a different camera angle, characters wearing different clothing – if we happen to glance at such minute details at all; they could be bare below the waist and we’d never notice, unless this happened to be a memory in which nudity was expected – and an ever-shifting cascade of volatile emotional responses. Sometimes a memory makes us happy; sometimes it fills us with a sense of nostalgic self-flagellation. Perhaps this depends on our mood and our perceptions at any given moment – perhaps it is the present which is so variable, not the past – but I’m suspicious, all the same.
No, you can’t trust a memory as far as you can throw it, and that’s even considering the fact that memories are flickers of electrical activity without a throwable physical form.
Why is my oldest daughter running around beneath the alder trees with a pink-painted crossbow, you ask? And why is my youngest hiding under a hlie-fern – yes, Nettie, I can see you; get to work on your new strategy! – with a small cache of recently killed rabbits? Well, it has a lot to do with dragons.
You see, dragons co-evolved with humans, since we occupy the same territory and have strikingly similar needs; both species covet the clean rivers and plentiful hoofed animals of Heng. We’ve been farming and raising herds here for centuries, but our problems with the megareptilian vermin go back much further. Just as a spider knows a fly by sight and sound, and just as a cat knows to pounce on a mouse or a mole but not a similarly-sized but highly poisonous firnk-rat, dragons recognize large male humans as their main competition. These are the creatures who steal their prey and their habitats, and who slay them whenever opportunity allows.
Humans traditionally sent men out to fight and capture food, and after the advent of agriculture, we had them doing most of the work in the fields while the women stayed at home to cook, mend clothing, and work small spells. This likely started out as an unconscious decision resulting from males’ larger bodies and greater upper body strength, but unlike dragons, we have the capacity to learn and change. Their flights of fancy are at the mercy of the thermals, but ours are unbounded.
As far as we know, a dragon is essentially a very large and talented alligator; it has many innate tools designed to destroy and devour, but it lacks the capacity for conscious thought. This means it behaves according to its instincts, rather than any sort of specifically designed plan – and it is susceptible to opponents who can use both.
Are you starting to see what I’m getting at? Two generations ago, we began to swap our gender roles in order to confuse the dragons. It was that or let all of our men die, since the monsters have a huge advantage when it comes to physical prowess; what good is a bow and an array of flaming arrows against a flying machine that can breathe fire? We could not expand our tribes effectively when we lost as many male members as our mothers could create, so we changed everything. It was not an easy adjustment – it still isn’t – but the survival rate of our warriors has risen sharply.
When the girls turn ten, they begin their full training. Children play in semi-serious wargames from age five onward, taking on different positions as befits their size and strength, and gradually move into leadership roles. By the time they are ready to become warriors, they already understand the least bloody aspects of war.
