Compactified Dimensions
Hi and thanks for subscribing to my newsletter! The breakdown is as follows: a personal essay on top of the message and some more concrete life updates, current media favorites and a recipe at its bottom so feel free to skip to whatever interests you.
(Hopefully now that classes are back in session and my schedule has at least somewhat stabilized, these letters will be back on a roughly weekly schedule. Thanks for bearing with me throughout the summer madness!)
COMPACTIFIED DIMENSIONS*
The way in which I procrastinate the most is by looking up recipes. My inbox is perpetually full of food blog newsletters and when I get stuck in a calculation, or fell unmotivated during the unfortunate window between lunch and my afternoon coffee kicking in, I scroll through them and make notes about the most interesting ones on my phone. I keep a very long list of recipes I would like to try to make and an even longer list of ideas inspired by food blog creations I know I cannot quite reproduce or can only imagine liking with slight tweaks. In the last day or so I looked at least five different recipes for cauliflower-based vegan mac’n’cheese, two gado gado salad recipes, three different posts on making cabbage-heavy dumplings and on top of one of my notes I wrote something about stuffed poblano peppers and a spicy jalapeno, almond and parsley dressing for a chickpea salad. Having recently finally made it to an East Asian food store in my town I have also, over the last few work days, made it past the first few Google result pages on yuba rolls. Yuba is a thin, chewy, ‘tofu skin’, product made by saving the top layer of boiling soy milk that can be steamed, stewed, wrapped into rolls or pan-fried. I first had it in college when I visited a, then vegan, friend in New York and then again last winter when a friend threw a hot pot party at their house. With a large package sitting in my fridge for over a week, I started planning a small East Asian food party for myself: braised yuba rolls and red curry tofu and cabbage dumplings, maybe with a side of steamed bok choy or stir-fried Chinese eggplant. I watched a dumpling pleating video on my phone while waiting for one of my meetings to start and drafted a farmer’s market shopping list while taking the bus to the gym. New foods amuse me endlessly.
***
Another food-related habit, one that I am somewhat regretful about, is my love for the Food Network show Chopped. In this television show, four (almost always) professional chefs prepare a three-course meal from mystery ingredients, often odd or oddly paired, in a short amount of time. The show is terrible. The contestants all get coaxed into telling a sob story to justify wanting the prize money (the winner is awarded 10,000$), non-Western ingredients are met with surprise and mild disgust that is almost never appropriate, and in ‘healthy’ episodes chefs very vocally bemoan the lack of meat, then slather everything with honey and coconut oil. The judges are dressed and made-up rather garishly and they dramatically complain about everything from the ‘lack of synergy’ between the provided ingredients to having bitten into a piece of spice that has not been fully ground. It is the kind of show where squid ink pasta gets thrown into the deep fryer and no-one ever successfully uses the ice cream machine. It’s trashy food TV at its best – infuriating, amusing but not as disconcerting as the likes of Kid’s Baking Championship or Man vs Food.
I’ve watched most Chopped episodes while in some stage of sprawl on my boyfriend’s parents couch in Brooklyn. His father likes to comment on the chef’s performances and I am more than comfortable with treating the competition as if it were sports as well. Neither of us is ever really pleased with the outcome of any particular round or episode, but neither is also willing to make the effort of finding something else to watch. My father is similarly inert when it comes to sharing bad TV experiences and there is something mildly comforting about that. At some point deep down the Chopped rabbit hole, my boyfriend’s father wondered out loud why I recognized so many of the ingredients meant to throw chefs off when even American cuisine should have technically confused me.
***
This past holiday weekend, I was spending a lot of time in a large kitchen belonging to the Girl Scouts of Central Illinois, roasting pounds upon pounds of vegetables in an oven three or four times as large as the one in my crummy grad student apartment, and dealing with the irony of being a vegan in charge of preparing troubling amounts of chicken. Mentors and mentees from the graduate-undergraduate mentoring program I help run in my department were on a retreat in a camping cabin in Springfield and I ended up heading the food crew. Feeling ambitious, we skipped cold cuts and spongy, pre-packaged bread sandwiches for lunch and served a full menu of pita pockets, baked falafels, lentil soup, hummus, baba ghanoush and baked chicken stained yellow with turmeric and other spices I had brought from home in a small box labeled with my name. For dinner we put out roasted vegetable tacos with optional chorizo, more chicken and two varieties of refried beans. Sometime in the week prior, as most of the organizing was frantically reaching its culmination, a large watermelon and an uncannily soft pouch of guacamole got displaced, but otherwise the effort to feed the retreaters ‘something more real than sandwiches’ was successful. Appropriately, I brought the nice apron my boyfriend’s mom had gifted me last winter and resigned myself to seeing it as my main outfit in any retreat photos. I was among the last people to eat every meal, sitting at long wooden tables with members of my department I had not met before, the apron a bit less nice every time and the conversation interspersed with loud chewing. During one of the lunches, I watched a student suspiciously wrap a few pieces of dry chicken into a pita pocket and explain that they were a ‘meat and potatoes’ type of person with no interest in trying any of the more foreign dishes on display. I was drowning my, by now lukewarm at best, falafel in a lemon tahini dressing as we spoke.
***
On Sunday before fall semester classes started, while my boyfriend was still staying with me and our streak of lazy days filled with hard science fiction shows, snacking on homemade sourdough and planning farmer’s market fruit fueled margaritas had hit this summer’s maximum, I found myself chatting with a stranger’s mom at the side of a pool filled with somewhat familiar faces yelling and laughing about a, less alcoholic than canonical, game of beer pong. A true Midwesterner, the mom had grown up, gone to various schools and found jobs in roughly the same area, barely moving across state lines. She was relieved that her child had chosen a school in Illinois for their graduate work because it could have been California and that is very far away. Once, this child who is really not a child at all, flew to the Pacific North West, had a few flights delayed and got home completely off-schedule. We talked about this flight mix-up for ten minutes, as if it were an uncommon occurrence. It is not hard to guess that once the conversation was politely turned towards me, mirroring some of my attempts to make courteous small talk, my explanation of where my home is and how often I get stuck on flights was met with surprise and mild shock. ‘Karmela is from Croatia. She’s been living here alone since she was 16’, the mom pointed out to her husband as he walked by looking for leftover sausages from the grilling portion of the day everyone seemed to be spending poolside. It has been a long time since I have been so explicitly reminded that to some, perhaps to many, my willingness to be far from home or even just the fact that I have spent so much time in that state is noteworthy and exotic. Later, when small talk pivoted to graduate school and my doctoral work, she pointed out to me that it was funny how many people would never even think to think about the kind of problems I am trying to chip away at. It sounded like another line on the exoticism scoreboard: far away home and an obscure career interest. Check and check.
***
My world is simultaneously tremendously big and tremendously small.
The smallness is inherent in my profession – even my papers that have been published in general interest journals only really mean something significant to the few specialists devoting their time to a shared narrow area of study. On average, it takes more than six years to complete a doctoral degree in physics at a school in the United States and out of those six years less than a third is usually the same for all doctoral candidates. Most very quickly learn to nod their head in a polite response to others’ work and manically spew jargon when they chance upon someone studying something related to their own. Sometimes relatives will naïvely ask me to speak about cosmology or astrophysics and they always end up disappointed as studying stars or the Big Bang is almost as foreign to me as studying another language. In a way similar to many other professions driven by creating original work (and science is without a doubt a creative endeavor), the goal in academia seems to be finding a very small niche and perfecting its place in the overall picture without actually paying that much attention to that large perspective. We box ourselves in and try to become experts on a particular corner of that box.
Additionally, beyond the nature of the work, the nature of the workplace makes it easy to confine ourselves and avoid interactions with people having radically different experiences. The push for diversity in fields like physics draws a lot of its importance exactly due to this observation that the kind of person that gets a PhD in physics is a type, and a very specific type at that. The prevalence of that type then goes on to form the notion of what a person with a physics PhD, or deserving of a physics PhD, looks like which makes it difficult for everyone who does not match it already to make much headway with respect to changing or disrupting it. It is not uncommon to encounter graduate students with family members in academia and there is nothing coincidental about that. As one moves up the ladder of academic positions, the interview and application processes become more and more vague so that insider knowledge, having one’s finger on the pulse of the academic archetype, becomes crucial. Transgressing unspoken norms is punished, often times (we are told) unconsciously, and the academic world remains small and confined.
Moreover, even for those of us that may not fully fit the mold (female, queer, foreign) it is remarkably easy to adopt the behaviors of the gatekeepers we have managed to work around and judge our peers unfairly when their diversity falls along the lines of identities orthogonal to our own. It is a common pitch in favor of graduate school that we get to set our own hours and choose our own projects; the somewhat darker complement to that is that we also get to cut ourselves off from anyone that may not have interest in academia or simply come from a background where academic and creative work were appreciated or encouraged. Quite frankly, we have the privilege of keeping so many of the philosophical debates about empathizing and connecting with people holding radically different opinions from hours exactly that – philosophical – because our workplaces are largely populated with people that mostly agree with us. This is not a bug; the tower part of the ‘ivory tower’, the confinement of it, is truly a feature.
On a more personal level, my path over the last ten years has taken sufficiently many turns for the area it covered to be quite large. While talking about food may seem like a mundane and un-poetic way to illustrate this, thinking back to being ten years old and relishing hotdogs with mayonnaise and fried eggs for supper, or eating countless grilled chicken breast sandwiches in a dining hall in college, makes me think that simply laying out everything currently in my fridge and pantry would be an irrefutable proof that I have learned how to taste, if not hold in my mind, a larger space. Another visual proof is the constant presence of beaten up carry on sized pieces of luggage on my living room floor. In the past, I have written about the ambiguity and the ill-defined nature of home for me and despite the fact that this is a feeling I have to reckon with, there is comfort associated with it and a certain self-assuredness. New places rarely stop me in my tracks. I also happen to be something of a veteran when it comes to being stuck in airports.
In the past year, I have done more work than ever on what could (very) generously be described as organizing or activism. I have been involved with the graduate employee union at my university and worked my way into leadership roles within various programs in my department especially when it comes to advocating for inclusion and incorporation of varied and diverse individuals and identities into the local physics community. This semester I am even serving as a diversity advocate for a student body that advises the graduate portion of our college of engineering. To some extent this has been a challenge in being comfortable with talking to strangers, performing enthusiasm even on most exhausting days and sometimes asking for things from people in some semblance of power. Being able to do some of these things has been beneficial to me from a utilitarian standpoint. More importantly, though, it has forced me to actually have the occasional hard conversation about aspects of identity or diversity. It has also given me the opportunity to have genuinely pleasant conversations about people’s hometowns, families and favorite things I would have never heard of otherwise. Being bold when faced with a new food or a new city widens one’s world in a very literal sense, but the true payoff is in making space in our worldview for the less tangible types of newness or otherness. To build a large world for oneself, the thought space we all cultivate when filing away interactions and experiences of the day, has to be as large as the one indicated by stamps in our passports. Of course, the two interact and overlap but the romantic notion of transforming fully only by traveling to somewhere else seems less and less sufficient if not accompanied with some conscious emotional and thought labor.
There is however some tension in this setup since often when we label ourselves as open-minded we struggle to make space for those that have been or chosen to remain boxed in, to reside comfortably in a world that is fully theirs and hence very small. In a time of increased polarization, of disagreements triggering the fight-or-flight response that much more quickly, it is a veritable challenge to commit time and empathy to a person that is not willing to accept the full breadth of other identities and places that are out there. It can be tiring and scary to engage fully with someone who’s world simply doesn’t include you, who has built a space inside their head where you do not fit unless you change something fundamental about yourself, perform an art of ritual self-mutilation just to be accepted. We often want to believe that people can change their minds, but examples are rare and what is publicized is more often than not the most egregious examples of the opposite. In that poolside conversation with that perfectly pleasant Midwestern mom at some point my immigration status came up and while I was explaining the mechanics of my student visa I could feel my body bracing, tightening, anxiety creeping in like it would not have just a few years ago. It was a completely one-sided reaction, not caused by anything specific to the person I had been talking to, likely even a somewhat irrational reaction, but I could not shake it off. Had the conversation become unpleasant, it is hard to confidently claim that I would have been able to engage in a rational exchange of differing arguments and ideas on an equally calm and non-threatened footing. This is not to say that that sort of an exchange is impossible, but it seems necessary to acknowledge that it often comes with an implied power differential that makes it really hard. This kink in the project of building in a space for differing opinions in your personal microcosm is a complex and layered one. Sadly, more often than not the notion of a differing opinion itself is weaponized to couch hatefulness in some sort of validity and it is hard to imagine wanting hate to be a part of your world. However, gray areas do exist and may be worth fighting for.
At some point during our conference mandated travels this summer, my boyfriend and I spent a night talking to a former colleague of his at a brewery in Grand Rapids, Michigan over some craft beers that were honestly trying too hard and a bowl of pretzel bites kindly prepared without butter. The former colleague, a psychologist, a philosopher and recently a professor, was somewhat boisterously denouncing a swath of research that indicates that people do not really change their mind when faced with new or contradictory information. Their big objection fell along the lines of time being a variable that studies don’t give enough attention to. In other words, maybe people do change their mind, but it takes time and repeated exposure. Maybe people do make more space in their inner world, but the building process is not instantaneous and reading a single article or having a single conversation won’t immediately do the trick. I am not qualified to assess the validity of academic work that was invoked in this conversation (and alcohol tends to turn every academic much braver than they would be when writing a real referee report) but it stuck with me. I came away from it thinking about continuity and re-examining ideas and views periodically, instead of letting them become ingrained once deemed them correct or appropriate. In a way, this gave me hope that some difficult, unnerving conversations can maybe lead to ones that feel less high stakes once the time factor does its thing. A small hope that simple exposure has value and that making space in my worldview for people that may have not made a lot of space for me in theirs (even just on days when I am not tired, even just for those who disagree only mildly) can help us both build something larger for our respective selves.
A few weeks ago, I helped organize a two-day retreat for women and gender minorities in my department. Amongst ourselves, the organizers discussed what sort of people and interactions we intentionally wanted to make space for. We wanted to be inclusive to all identities someone who does not call themselves a man might carry within themselves. It was a purposeful widening of the mini-world we were about to create and manage for those two days and, speaking for myself, I don’t think it would have been as large had I been given a chance to construct it a couple of years ago. It is possible to have a bigger world, to make the world one starts with wider, but it requires thinking about it, examining and re-examining the boundaries and, over time, learning that some might be quite susceptible to an outwards push. I am grateful for all the circumstances that conspired to let me start with an emotional and geographical space that was quite large already. And I am hopeful that with some intention and patience I can make it encompass even more.
Best,
Karmela
* In thermal field theory and string theory, one often considers spaces in which one or more dimensions are compactified. In other words, while a space might start as having some number of infinitely long, open dimensions, some of them can be ‘shrunk’ by imposing periodic boundary conditions, something similar to ‘curling them up’. As a somewhat crude illustration, one can imagine walking on a street without a beginning and an end as a standard dimension and walking on the inside of a hamster wheel as walking inside a compactified dimension. In string theory compactification is necessary to explain the discrepancy between the large number of dimensions the theory is formulated in and the relatively small number of dimensions experiments suggest form our (measurable, experiential) universe. So far, there have been no experiments that would definitively point towards the reality of compactified dimensions.
***
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: This past week was the second week of classes at my university and with two recent retreats under my belt (one for grad-undergrad mentoring pairs and one for women and gender minorities) and a new teaching assignment, I definitely plunged right into it without much time for adjustment or contemplation. I am teaching three discussion sections, holding one physical and one virtual office hour, attending two research meetings every week (one for each of the projects I am working on) and mentoring two new students so the answer to what I have been up to recently is simple: I have been busy.
On the research front, I am still tied up in the same problems I have been trying to push through during the summer. Although I have had less time to devote to them in the past few weeks, my advisor being geographically closer and overall more present has made the work feel more productive. I took another short dive into the ultracold vortex literature and emerged with a laundry list of calculations that should be within my reach and are currently on top of my to-do list. Combined with some long, involved conversations about quasiperiodicity, tori and the special linear group with a collaborator on my other project makes research prospects seems somewhat more rosy despite the fact that our group has a history of fairly long project timelines. As a bonus, the International Space Station (ISS) experiment that some of my previous work directly connects with is supposed to be actually conducted in October and the necessary apparatus has reached the ISS already. Even if it does not work out as we have predicted, it is absolutely amazing to recognize that cooling atoms to near absolute zero on a chip sized device in a space station is the kind of science we can actually do these days.
I’m still going to yoga at least twice a week and the experience continues to be stimulating enough and difficult enough to qualify for this subsection. I don’t think I ever truly understood what gravity does, even when I wrote about it pulling on atoms in my publications and exams, until a yoga instructor tried to get me to flip upside down.
LISTENING: In the past week I revisited two bands I really liked in the past but for some reason thought weren’t making music anymore. Luckily, I was wrong and both this Skeletonwitch record and the sophomore effort by Anciients are good. I saw Skeletonwitch live in college and they were good enough for me to forget who it was they were an opening act for, so I was happy to see they had put out this album that I have somehow missed. It has a somewhat different feel than their work I’m most familiar with (I really like Beyond the Permafrost – it’s fast and doesn’t take itself too seriously while avoiding serious cheesiness) but it is still good, unpretentious metal. Similarly, I was a big fan of Anciients first album and its earthy, fantasy vibe and Voices of the Void is also not quite that. It takes a while to really pick up and even though I was not disappointed by it, I enjoyed its second half much more than the first few opening tracks that were slightly underwhelming. Clicking around the Anciients page on Spotify luckily led me to this album by Dvne which is a pretty great record and likely what I will be listening to for the next week.
I struggled slightly to recommend podcast episodes that connect with my thoughts above since even though I try to consciously listen to shows hosted by a diverse group of hosts and producers (and there is a lot of great content produced by people of color, women and queer folks out there), I do not really listen to many that I disagree with. The two episodes of WNYC’s Death, Sex and Money (titled discussing the changing nature of masculinity fall into an adjacent category as some of the listener opinions expressed in them did make me annoyed or uncomfortable. I struggle with some of these conversations as finding empathy for men bemoaning being held accountable for their actions is rather hard when I perceive myself to be cast as a very different player in the discussion of consent and relationships nowadays. However, pushing back while not dismissing someone’s pain or lived experience is something I want to consciously work on. On a less strenuous note, this episode of NPR’s Code Switch titled Behind the Lies My Teacher Told Me discusses a number of misconceptions about the history of race relations in the United States that simply stem from poorly written textbooks and it is quite eye-opening when it comes to how some people literally learn to be intolerant and closed-minded. Finally, on a completely unrelated note, this episode of Radiolab about blue-blooded crabs and the medical industry was absolutely fascinating and features some of their more playful and amusing producers.
EATING: I got somewhat ambitious with cooking as the summer neared its end and ended up taking on things like making ravioli from scratch (with a surprisingly convincing tofu ricotta I Frankenstein-ed from a number of similar recipes) and rolling a bunch of cucumber and tofu sushi rolls with my boyfriend. Even my sourdough baking improved a little and I made a few batches of both pickled and roasted peppers. However, as my schedule has transitioned back to being mostly hectic and the weather is finally cooling down, I suspect my work in the kitchen will take a turn towards soups, stews and curries that can be made in big batches and feel appropriate when it rains and everything looks increasingly grey. I adapted the soup I am sharing below from Power Plates by Gena Hamshaw of The Full Helping blog. This is the only cookbook I have bought in recent history and I have been really enjoying it even though I struggle to always stick to the recipes. This soup is an example of that struggles since I turned it into a quinoa soup from what was originally supposed to be a tomato base mixed and blended with torn tortillas. I had it for a few dinners with the roasted corn, poblano pepper and black bean salsa Hamshaw suggests, for lunch with sautéed kale or avocado, and once with a generous serving of homemade sweet potato sourdough bread. It was great in every combination and since it is not necessarily as summery as a corn or a zucchini soup might be and not as suggestive of fall as a butternut squash or a pumpkin soup would be, it feels like an appropriate recipe to share at this time of year.
For 5-6 servings of soup you will need:
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 yellow onion, finely diced
2 carrots, peeled and cut into half-moons
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 can (28 oz) can diced tomatoes
2 chipotles in adobo, chopped and 2 tablespoons of the sauce they come in
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon coriander
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup quinoa
4 cups water or vegetable broth
Heat the oil in a large pot then add the onion and carrots. Sautee until the onion is soft and translucent then add the garlic and cook for another minute or so. Stir constantly to prevent garlic from burning and becoming bitter.
Add the diced tomatoes, chipotles in adobo with the sauce, cumin, coriander, salt and water or vegetable broth. Stir well and bring to a boil.
Add quinoa, lower the heat to a simmer then cover and let cook for 15-20 or until the quinoa is cooked.
Transfer about 2/3 of the soup to a blender and blend until smooth. Add the blended portion back into the pot and mix well. (Alternatively use an immersion blender)
Serve topped with black beans, cilantro, crumbled tortilla chips, cashew cream, diced avocado, lime juice, hot sauce , vegan cheese shreds or whatever other toppings you like
Tips: It would be fairly easy to add more vegetables to this soup: sauté some finely diced peppers with the onions and the carrots, add coarsely chopped zucchini with the tomatoes or simply stir in two or three cups of corn kernels after blending the soup then simmer for another few minutes.
If you prefer chunky soups, reduce the amount of water to roughly two cups and skip the blending. If you avoid spicy foods, omit the chipotles in adobo and add 2 teaspoons of smoked paprika instead.