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EXPECTATION VALUE*
It was a gray Sunday morning and we were sitting in a coffee shop in Chicago and watching dogs. I was drinking an oatmilk latte and he just a regular black coffee, both in flimsy to-go cups but without the lids so we could see the rise and escape of caffeinated steam. In between dogs, I complained about my, and maybe his, future.
That’s a good dog, with very long legs, a very classic color scheme.
But are you not tired of living this way, of always being in-between things and exhausted?
That dog is too small for its coat. Dog coats shouldn’t be that puffy.
That dog looks like it could have a good job at the airport then retire to the countryside and hoard sheep.
What if the next thing is just this thing on steroids.
What if I never actually get stability.
What if I never become a real grown-up.
That dog has odd eyes, it could be pure evil.
That dog could tell you to do some really murderous stuff.
A litany of self-absorbed worry stopped in its tracks because I had to laugh at the inappropriately grim reference.
We passed up the chance to sit on the coffee shop couch in favor of backless wooden stools because we thought that would incentivize us to focus and read. The stools just made it easier for our knees to interlock and near-touch. I remembered a phrase from a William Gibson novel: boy-girl LEGO. We clicked. I wondered how I could be so full of dread when we were having such a nice morning.
A good dog, kind of a riff on a Pekingese, walked into the coffee shop with its owner.
***
Two months prior, I was spending a similarly overcast early afternoon in a very large bookstore in Portland. The path that led me there instead of a science museum was typical: first an inexplicable desire for waffles I could only get far from our hotel, then reconnecting with a friend on social media for some pleasant last-minute plans. I spent a few hours trading one busy room full of shelves for another, hands full of paperbacks I knew I had no space for back in my graduate-student-sized apartment in Illinois. By the time I made it to the science fiction section, a favorite of some previous me that had more time to read and more hunger for it, I realized that almost every book I had picked up had been written by a woman and a seemingly unhappy one at that. Books about women being angry, women misbehaving, women resisting, women trying to survive in a world that hates them, sometimes very openly. A panic came over me – was unhappy women, or women being unhappy, my preferred genre now? I reduced the pile down to two titles, both by women still, but seemingly less likely to be food for the bad gender feelings that drive the too frequent knotting of my stomach.
I emerged from the bookstore haze, the kind that takes over when you spend too much time reading random pages standing between shadowy bookshelves, into a drizzly afternoon and walked to a coffee shop without an umbrella. My friend had already ordered a pot of tea, it was steaming on a small table by the window. I got a cup of coffee and a baked good and settled in for conversation reminiscent of the pile of books I tried to abandon. My pastry was crunchy and brittle on top and soft and gooey in the middle. I could tell which vegan baking substitution tricks the bakers leaned into, tasting banana behind the sweetness of brown sugar, as my friend talked about a new job, new norms, and new possibilities. After we re-hashed everything there was to say under the header of ‘diversity and inclusion’ and also ‘post-graduate life’, an anecdote about a violin came up. My friend had a violin for years then moved to a new town and found out that the person who built it happened to work in a shop nearby. The story stuck with me because it was such a generic ‘what a small world’ moment which made it something like heartwarming. Sometimes you just run into the person that made your violin, how funny is that?
Friends are better than books: they can shift gears from retelling a lived experience that sparks complex, heavy conversations to sharing simple pleasantries rainy days and coffee shops with vegan pastries are sort of made for.
***
There is a narrative about learning physics that you pick up in college. It trickles down from smug seniors, the types that ignore you in study groups unless you are asking for help with enough desperation. The idea is this: every year you learn that your past teachers didn’t tell you the whole truth, maybe even taught you something incorrect. When you take harder classes, you will understand just how much more there is to what you think you know. You will realize that you don’t actually know anything, right now you’re just deluded into thinking you’re knowledgeable because you did well on that one exam in intro E&M. Sometimes teachers, faculty members and graduate students alike, play into this narrative too. They’ll precede particularly punchy parts of their lectures with ‘despite what you previously learned’ or ‘I know you were told something else in previous classes but’, maybe pause for the drama of the moment to sink in before continuing to scribble on the blackboard. If you are particularly zealous, you hang a lot of hope and anticipation on that ‘but’.
Learning science must be a little bit like getting trained in a monastery: you’re made to feel like you are always on the edge of a kind of revelation that not everyone has access too. Except you are in college, under-slept, a little sick to your stomach from too much sugary dining hall cereal, and more than a little anxious about sitting next to your physics crush. (They will date your briefly, half in secret, then become a math major and occasionally text when they need help with Honors Algebra homework.) You drop your pencil a lot and the rattle makes you as uncomfortable as coughing in pews would. The lead inside breaks and some of your notes get very faint, you can’t quite make out all the hurried remarks later. You never go back and correct the notes you now know were not quite right. And rarely does realizing that your previous understanding was incomplete lead to a huge change in your worldview. More often, instead of your take on the nature of physical reality being fundamentally shaken, you just scramble to sponge in as much of the new formalism as you can before the senior person gives up on trying to pour it over your head in some sort of perverse ‘we lied to you last year’ baptism.
***
I’ve had a few moments in my very long physics education when I briefly felt like I was grasping something deeper, more real, than my textbooks suggested. Once, at an awkward pizza event, a professor told me, in between greasy bites, that all of quantum mechanics is just linear algebra. Once, in a quantum field theory class, it hit me that sound is a Goldstone mode and symmetry breaking briefly seemed like something I might one day understand. More than once, I have been struck by how some very simple things, like understanding what symmetry is on a purely mathematical level, lie at the core of complex phenomena that we struggle to make sense of as a field. (Even if you cannot solve a problem, there is something profound about understanding how to formulate it in the most essential way.) However, most of my moments of re-learning or un-learning in pursuit of a deeper truth have had nothing to do with the discipline I have committed most of my life to.
A friend recently conjectured that even though our generation may not do better than our parents financially, we may be less emotionally repressed and more free to work out who we are and who we want to be. They were leaning against a tall window, backlit by the tentative is-spring-here-yet sunshine just enough to seem mildly prophetic. Striving for wholesomeness cannot pay bills but being at peace with yourself can maybe make looking at those bills more bearable. At least we might be able to say, ‘I am such-and-such and this thing makes me feels such-and-such way and I understand how my history and identity inform that’. At least we might have words for interactions we would have had to call awkward or laugh off nervously ten or twenty years ago. At least we can convince ourselves we have a chance to figure a few things out before we get old and jaded and tied to a family that would have to suffer our, sometimes violent and destructive, soul seeking.
Squinting because that same suddenly not so elusive sun was in my eyes, I thought about dating boys in college and realizing that when they said I wasn’t like the other girls they weren’t actually being complimentary, then about realizing how many times I had previously said I preferred male friends because girls were catty. I thought about judging people on the street for wearing clothes that seem to clash with their body type then looking at my own body at home, in the mirror every morning and every night, and not understanding why even after I had made it firm and toned it still felt, at times, undeserving of both some clothes and most praise. I thought about how long it took me to grow into the word queer, how much I strived to convince myself all of my girl crushes were no more real than a function of circumstances (for a while I attended an all-girls school), how much I’m still anxious about saying it out loud (this sentence was cut from many previous drafts of this letter). I thought about hearing a podcast, just a few weeks ago, about how Mickey Mouse is part of a legacy of racist minstrel shows, and being reminded again that I have spent so much time unaware of my whiteness and the way it influences the way I move through the world. A million disconnected points of self-awareness, of recognition of rules no-one ever really spelled out for me, of nascent attempts at deconstructing them and letting them go. My friend was probably right, it was a sign of progress that I could have all of this at my fingertips, even after a very long, squinty day.
***
The main difference between learning that, for instance, the specific heat of a material is not just a number as you lower the temperature towards zero, or that there isn’t really such a thing as zero energy or empty space, and grappling with something as complex and pervasive as (internalized) misogyny or (implicit) racial bias, is that the former tends to lean more towards fascinating and less towards exhausting. Scientific research can be tiring, and chipping away at the same problem over and over without much success does start to feel personal. In many ways, being a scientist-in-training is about little other than perseverance. The science problem you are working on, however, rarely informs everything you do. It does not lie at the core of every interaction and every decision that make-up the way in which you are a person. On good days, I leave the dimerized chains, the incommensurate potentials and the condensates at the office. The other stuff, about why I judge the people I walk by the way I do, about why all my friends fall into certain categories and not others, about why it is so hard to be kind to myself sometimes, has to come with me wherever I go. If I leave these thoughts somewhere, I am abandoning the possibility of being better. They have to stick to me and as long as they do, so does the (emotional, social, organizing) work that goes into dealing with them.
My time living alone as an aspiring academic in her, first early then mid and now increasingly late, twenties often feels like a long-term brain re-wiring project. A masterclass in taking a breath after a thought appears in my mind and asking myself why I might think and feel that way before embracing it as belief or acting on it in some way. In the 2013 parlance, I have decided to treat myself as my own ‘problematic fave’ as an everyday practice. Both the ‘problematic’ and the ‘favorite’ parts of that fraught concept seem worthwhile and both are inevitably thorny. I’ve always thought most problematic things are fine to like as long as you acknowledge why they are problematic, engage in conversation about it and consequently strive to do better in the future. This process is easier with yourself than a piece of media because no matter what society throws towards you, you can still regain creative control over who you want to be. Even in the worst of circumstances, we all cling to some idea of who we ‘really’ are, what we are about beyond some particularly complicated moment in time. The translation of that abstraction into someone tangible might be influenced by outside forces, but the idea is our own. We can grow by tweaking that idea, work on ourselves by working on who we want to be.
Thinking about this as a way to live, gives me a small sense of hope. There is some rebellion to it and something like liberation – we are often shaped by largely invisible forces and they don’t always turn us into the best person we can possibly be, but with enough effort we can beat them. But as with all rebellions, it comes with a cost in terms of time, labor and energy. There is always the next thing to learn and learning has to occur on multiple levels, from purely factual and historical to very personal and emotional. Having grown up in an extremely racially homogenous, white country, the example of racialized bias in the United States exemplifies the former for me as so much of the history that surrounds things like red lining or historical riots or past immigration laws simply requires me to learn in the same ways I learned in school. The latter, the emotional work, is in some way more accessible (you are always with yourself) but also harder to quantify, having murky success metrics. And sometimes, the whole thing is just tiring. Some days it’s just the news about people in power seemingly negating everything you marked as important in your better-person-outline. Some days it’s realizing that very few of your instincts have actually been untouched by societal structures that you dislike. Some days it is just the double-work of saying ‘I hate my thighs’ and then ‘I hate that I hate my thighs’. When I was outlining this letter, the stand-in for this paragraph were the words ‘un-learning fatigue’. That characterization of the sentiment is probably too simple, and definitely too whiney. It is also one that is really hard to shake off at times when it feels bodily and real.
***
The thing about graduate school being so grueling, my friend said, is that at some point it forces you to decide quite consciously who you want to be, forces you to at least try and grow. That’s the exhausting part, the growing, but also the most valuable. That’s where the potential for real progress is. But the progress is fragile, and it is localized. It is susceptible to outside perturbations. It can feel like such a rude awakening to realize that the big picture is looking less good, less likely to re-arrange itself away from the same building blocks of bias we start with. There’s a judicial appointment made, or a bill signed or a report about your field published and suddenly you stop being eager to learn and do better and just go back to being tired.
***
It was a regular Tuesday and I was trying to focus my gaze right in front of me, chin tucked towards the chest, in the quickly dimming light of a late April evening. The view in front of me: the upper portion of my stomach, arched and glistening with sweat. Beads of moisture sliding across my skin like in a soda commercial close-up, the tension in my shoulders and hips growing stronger. My head a few inches of the ground, my elbows desperately trying to stay close to my body, my feet moving inwards to push my navel higher. To get out of the pose, you look up and slowly lower your head, then hips, then lay your whole body flat on the sticky mat. You let breath guide your spine into relaxing to just where it wants to be, to forget that it had just been scrunched up like the top of a plastic straw. Urdhva Dhanurasana, Upward Bow or Wheel. A colleague once told me this pose is good for depressive types because back-bending and the rush of blood to the head elevates the mood. Something about adrenaline and serotonin probably. In the moment, the teacher reminds me of the elbow thing – I should really be pushing them towards my ribs – but it looked good overall. I know it did. The brain chemistry seems to be working too; I feel good as I hug my knees to my chest, tightly, for a counter-pose.
Yoga is one of those things that never really worked for me and then it really started to. I hated doing sun salutations in my bedroom in Croatia with my mom as a teenager, and I despised the yoga classes my high school track team would sometimes get roped into during the winter months when upstate New York weather made running outside unfeasible. Years later, given an actual choice to try the discipline again, and abandon it if I want to, I find myself in a crowded, warm studio three times a week, cherishing my time among strangers that are slowly becoming less of a collection of unknowns. On Fridays, I make my workday slightly shorter to go to a ‘happy hour’ class and try to let the anxieties and stresses of the whole week dissolve into the ground beneath my cheap purple mat, just like the new-age-y mumbo-jumbo suggests when you buy into it.
***
I have been running much longer than I have been practicing yoga. It probably started in the fifth grade when my fall semester report card caused a minor scandal at all family Christmas festivities because I had received a C in Phys Ed. The teacher told my mom I looked like I was about to fall apart while I was running. As I was even worse at handball, volleyball, dodgeball and any other sport that included a team or a prop, I could only remedy my failure in one way – by becoming good at running. None of my Croatian schools had team sports but my American high school did so this effort was eventually put to test and I aced it. For two years I went to two track meets every week and when I was not running on the track, I was running in parks for the cross-country team. My junior year, one of the coaches was so devoted to our team that they named their Labrador retriever puppy Miles and I found this to be heartwarming and near-inspirational. The next year I was the varsity team co-captain. Being a runner was a part of who I was at that school, the one that kicked off my living by myself in a foreign country for years to come.
My priorities shifted in college and I mostly stopped running. A few times friends drew me out to the trails alongside Lake Michigan, and there was one surprisingly unmemorable run in New York’s Central Park years before I would become a regular Big Apple visitor, but being a runner became less of a marker of who I was since all the freedoms and obligations of college provided plenty of other labels to choose from. I started running again in graduate school when I decided to cultivate a gym habit; it just seemed natural to start on the track again. It felt safe because you can’t really embarrass yourself when there are no machines and weights involved. It felt good because I quickly discovered that I could still do it reasonably well. And it just sort of spiraled on and out from there.
On the last Saturday of this past April, I started my day in corral E of the Illinois Marathon at 7:03 am and completed my first half-marathon 2 hours, 4 minutes and 10 seconds later. There was no teacher or trainer there to tell me I had done well but I knew I did – I beat the time I had trained for and, probably more importantly, I enjoyed the run so much more than I expected.
To train for a long race, like those 13.1 miles, you get on a pretty strict running schedule, accumulating roughly ten miles during the week and taking longer and longer runs on weekends. When I started training, I was already doing well on the former. Most of my days end at the gym and most of my gym time starts with a run. Those runs add up quickly. But I had never really run more than 4 or 5 miles in one go. Last summer I ran 4 miles with my boyfriend’s brother in law, the morning after a fourth of July feast that left me utterly stuffed with beans and vegan empanadas, and I had to put my strong face on, struggling in the bleak heat of small town New Jersey more than I wanted to. When my schedule suggested a 5-mile Saturday morning run, the memory made me anxious. And when I made it to 6 miles and realized that the rain will confine me to the gym and 30 laps on the small indoor track, I dreaded it. At 8 miles I stopped listening to Dirty Computer and bi/Mental and The Number of the Beast on repeat and switched to the soothing radio voices of the likes of Ira Glass (always on the edge of tears) and Charlie Bennet (always on the edge of a juicy ‘fuck that guy’) and worried that my pace would suffer without a strong background beat. Even some of my nighttime runs seemed like such a challenge when I was dealing with five hours of sleep and a day’s worth of research-and-teaching-and-meeting tiredness. The night before race day, going to bed earlier than I have in years in a likely futile attempt to catch up on a very extensive sleep backlog, I was more anxious than I have known myself to be before giving talks or taking exams. I considered various disastrous scenarios in my mind, ranging from sleeping through the start time to my left knee, the one that is always a little unhappy, giving out at mile 1 and leaving me both injured and embarrassed. When I picked up my race bib the day before, I was surprised to find myself on the edge of tears.
I want to say that I stuck with the training, because I am not a quitter. Certainly, this is true; I have never been good at letting anything go let alone letting anything fail. However, it is much more important to me that I stuck with it because I knew I could do it, and I knew that the end of every run would make me feel good. Good because I had proof that the machine that is my body is operating well, good because there was tangible progress I could savor, good because I stuck with something and it payed off, good because of all the adrenaline and my fast pumping heart. Runner’s high is probably as real as back-bends curing a depressive episode, but also as real as placebos generally tend to be; even if there is no science to back it, once your feet stop moving your head floats a little higher.
***
“Julian has completed five hundred-mile races so far, as well as countless “short” ones, and I once asked him why he does it. He explained it like this: he wants to achieve a completely insular system of accountability, one that doesn’t depend on external feedback. He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he’s running, so that the desire to impress people, or the shame of quitting, won’t constitute his sources of motivation. Perhaps this kind of thinking is what got him his PhD at the age of twenty-five. It’s hard to say.”
Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
***
Some nights, no matter how much I try, I’m just a little off. I think about scissoring my thighs towards each other in Warrior II and my hips being like a bowl of water that can’t be allowed to tilt. I think about lifting my knee caps and pushing my hips forward in Trikonasana and when we go into Down Dog I keep my palms flat to the ground and aim for that straight line from fingertips all the way to the tailbone. Still, I wobble, I flail, I can’t reach the ground, I feel my wrists giving out. Teachers tell you to just go back to the breath, or find you focal point, Drishti, somewhere in front of you, but my mind tends to be loud and the realization that something within me is just not clicking right overwhelms me.
At the end of the practice, when the heat in the studio is lowered and the lights dimmed, and we all descend on our mats, firmly rooted into the ground, feet wider than hips, hands to our sides with palms facing upwards, as I try to clear my mind for those last few minutes of quiet relaxation and meditation, a thought sometimes appears in my mind:
“God, I am such a terrible physicist.”
***
This is a letter about a bad attitude. My bad attitude towards my job, my future and the overall state of the world. About trying so hard to do well, or at least better, then being stuck in a negative place anyway.
This letter is an indulgence, a symptom of my procrastinating on letting some of that dread, that fear, that wallowing desperation go.
***
At the end of February, a not-so-dangerous yet consistently annoying medical issue landed me in an early morning meeting with someone I can call by their title, a Stress Management Coordinator, as means of avoiding the word counselor. I thought I knew would they would say to me, and I was not completely wrong in that anticipation, but the conversation still rattled me. I tried to recount it to a friend when I visited Boston in March. I was eating falafel, they were drinking a novelty soda, and I was struggling to put into words why it had been so hard to hear someone else say things I was not fully unware of – that I always entertain only the worst case scenario, that I always think I’m not good enough, that I get exhausted by pushing myself harder than anyone realistically needs me to. Graciously, my friend affirmed the feeling that even when it all seems so mundane (Just believe in yourself more! Just have a better attitude! You deserve it, girlfriend!), these therapy-adjacent encounters still mean real, hard emotional labor.
The thing that stuck with me the most, the biggest punch that this conversation with the counselor packed, is that what I really got out of that hour was the kind of pep-talk, a colloquial screed on self-love and confidence, that I have delivered to others so many times before. Watching the pale, blond employee of the university medical center reassure me that I am doing well and that stressing about what comes next won’t actually help me keep doing well, I saw myself saying the same to former roommates, project collaborators, mentees, friends, and students.
You are enough. You deserve to give yourself free time. You will be fine. We can all make things better; I have faith in us. You’re doing great. It’s Impostor Syndrome, it’s Stereotype Threat, it’s the fallacy of the comparison game. Don’t trust that voice in your head. You get to feel your feelings. You get to be whoever you want to be. Fight the systems when it tells you you’re confined by your productivity, or the traits of your body. At the end of the day, what’s the point if you’re not just plain good to yourself? You’re amazing. Just roll with it. Own the fucking situation.
Have I really never stopped to listen to myself? I believe in these statements, so why would they not apply to me too?
***
I have been reading Joan Didion’s White Album. The first essay in the collection, sharing its title, opens with Didion’s admission that between 1966 and 1971 she had undergone something of a mental crisis. Even though a snippet from her medical chart is included, it doesn’t seem like the words mental breakdown are quite right; she receives medical attention for a singular moment of vertigo and nausea, but the underlying problem is more ever-present. She describes something much more like a state of constant, frenzied uncertainty paired with a heavy downwards pull of realizing that sometimes nothing actually makes sense. Didion writes
“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
and then
“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”
The rest of the essay is composed by stitching together various scenes from Didion’s life in those years: living in a troublesome neighborhood in Los Angeles, seeing The Doors record, digging too deeply into the Ramon Novarro murder, rubbing shoulders with jailed Black Panthers, the Manson Family and student protesters on California campuses. She jumps from one anecdote to another, connecting them by a paragraph here and there about her mental state in each of the moments. The point she is hinting at: how can anyone remain certain of their narrative, of any structure that would explain everything around them in a sensical way, when so many bizarrely terrible things keep going on? She highlights that no one she knew was surprised by Sharon Tate’s murder. I got a sense that Didion is something of a small c conservative and the violently changing nature of culture and mores in the late 60s, the rapture in that followed all the talk of free love and peace, made it hard for her to believe anything could actually remain constant or be, as we say in physics, conserved.
In one part of the essay, she outlines everything she would pack for a reporting trip. Skirts, leotards, stockings, cigarettes, bourbon, soap, face powder and so on. Uniforms she puts together by permuting the clothing on the list allow her to blend in at most events, and the rest is similarly utilitarian. She stresses that nowhere on her list is a watch which leads her to never know what the time is. Didion takes having to constantly seek the information about the time, from the radio, from her husband on the phone, from a motel clerk, as a symbol for how living felt at that time in general:
“In other words, I had skirts, jerseys, leotards, pullover sweater, …, typewriter, legal pads, pens, files and a house key, but I didn’t know what time it was. This may be a parable, either of my life as a reporter during this period or the period itself.”
This parable fails completely for a modern reader. It is hard to imagine being somewhere and not knowing what time it is when we are constantly connected to something electronic, almost always reminded of the time, even if it is just the time until the end of a YouTube video or some similar distraction.
For about a year, I have been wearing a FitBit. When I first got it, I remember telling my boyfriend that I was surprised how much I liked that it was a functional watch, in addition to all of its more ‘smart’ features. If I turn my wrist it lights up to tell me what time it is. If I tap the narrow, dark and mirror-like, screen it can show me how many steps I have taken that day so far, how fast my heart is beating and how much energy my body has consumed in the handy unit of kilo-calories, abandoned from physics classes in favor of Joules but embraced by dieters everywhere. I always know what the time is. And then some.
Even though I travel often, like Didion, I am, unlike her, pretty terrible at packing. There is no list taped to the inside of my closet and my carry-ons are always on the edge of being too bulging and bulky to fit into overhead bins on cheap flights. I always bring something overly out there and fancy that I know I won’t actually wear. I never bring enough stay-at-home clothes. I’m always just a little short on socks and underwear that doesn’t cause visible panty lines. Reading Didion’s list I seriously considered nixing the bourbon and the cigarettes and the typewriter, and just adopting the rest. Then I realized that maybe the two of us had opposite problems more generally – just like I made it possible for myself to always know what the time is, maybe I have made it so that I always think I know what the narrative I am caught in is as well. Where Didion responded to the badness and confusion around her by not being able to piece a coherent story together anymore, I doubled-down and instead of letting it shake me just embraced it as set in stone. Pillars of democracy will dissolve, the Earth will burn, and no matter how much I try I will always be a tired bad person and a terrible physicist.
***
Months later, I am still trying to parse that visit with the Stress Management Coordinator, extract something from it other than the tightness in my chest and throat when they told me they were puzzled by the mismatch between the kind of successes I could put on a resume and the low self-confidence that seemed to spill out of me when I talked. I’m trying to find words better than ‘rattled’ and ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘disheartening’ to describe it, and soften myself to the impact of it, find it transformative rather than shattering. And I’m trying to believe the narrative competing with my own, pick the one in which I cling to the occasional moment of hope and insight rather than the exhaustion of everything else. I’m trying to keep it in my back pocket, within reach, for days when I work fewer hours than I’d like and feel guilty about it, and for days when I’m certain that in a year’s time, when the doctoral title will be attached to my name, I will learn that all that work was worthless anyway. For days when I wake up to NPR hosts reporting on another scandal and another hurtful piece of legislation. For days when every interaction feels like we have just all ran out of energy to be empathetic.
I tentatively conjecture to myself that maybe everything can be like running – you go in with a sense of dread, but you don’t give up because deep down you know you can do it and having done it will feel good. I weakly resolve to pretend every new day is just a wobbly back-bend. (It will feel good if I just keep working on my elbows.)
A week after our conversation, the counselor sent me a brief email saying they hope I’m doing well. They included the kind of meme only someone’s mom or, more cynically, a company specializing in inspirational posters for drab offices, could make: a puppy pointing its paw towards me and winking, accompanied by block letters assuring me I’m awesome.
It was a good dog, a very classic color scheme.
Best,
Karmela
P. S. To everyone mentioned in this letter – thank you for being a friend.
*In quantum mechanics, each measurements one may perform in a laboratory corresponds to a mathematical operator (think about very simple operations here, like doubling something or subtracting one from it – operators in Hilbert space are just more complicated) acting on a state (i.e. a function; think of a graph of a sine or a cosine curve that can be stretched or compressed or have its height changed). The outcome of the measurement cannot be predicted with absolute certainty, but the mathematical formalism can be used to calculate an expectation value which matches the average one would obtain if performing the measurement many times or on many identical systems. It is the quantum mechanical version of a very, very educated guess.
***
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: A few years back I heard Stephen Wolfram talk about collaborating with Richard Feynman. Wolfram is famous for computational software called Mathematica and Feynman was famous for his work in quantum field theory, path integrals and, of course, Feynman diagrams. Feynman was also famous for being a science communicator – someone who could take a complicated problem and translate it into a cute physical picture, a toy model as physicists like to say, then explain the principle behind it both in a very fun and a very clear way. In this talk, Wolfram pointed out that Feynman could only do that because he was computationally exceptionally strong; he would complete long and hard calculations, then come up with one of these famed, easily digestible examples. I have been thinking about Feynman often in these past few weeks because some days I have felt like my work has fully dissolved into just drawing pictures of rotating objects over and over again and hoping I will begin to see something simple that doesn’t call for proficiency in quantum mechanics or differential geometry. (A superfluid is basically just an ideal classical fluid and a thin fluid shell is basically just a two-dimensional fluid wrapped around a sphere and so on…) Eventually I had a small but novel thought and went back to trying to calculate something, but my research notebook will preserve a few day’s scribbles that look more appropriate for a kindergartner than someone who’s completed five years of graduate school. I threw in a lot more math into the notes I presented to my advisor and some collaborators which started a new strain of conversation about this project that we are all hoping to complete by the end of the summer. Work on research projects of this sort is usually highly non-linear and many conversations end up leading nowhere though, so I suspect there will be a lot more notebook scribbling in the weeks to come.
I am actually taking my research notebook out on the road for the next two weeks and attending two back-to-back conferences, one on the East Coast and one in the Midwest. I have very luckily been awarded a paid research position for the summer semester and will therefore avoid the June-July teaching frenzy, but traveling, working and slowly starting a job search process will certainly make for a few fairly busy months before my campus fills up with undergraduates again in late August. I am actually writing this section on a flight to New York, simultaneously excited to spend a weekend with my boyfriend before the first of my conferences starts and nervous about presenting work and trying to engage in the ever-elusive art of networking once conferencing actually kicks off.
Finally, this will be an exciting summer for all the organizing around equity, diversity and inclusion in physics that I have become more and more involved in over the past few years as the graduate-undergraduate mentoring program whose leadership I am a part of is hosting a small conference for a number of other similar programs in early June. I attended this same conference in Colorado last summer (and wrote about it here) and it was a very affirming and positive experience, so I am finding it rewarding to be a part of the organizing team this year. The workshops populating our current draft of the schedule look fantastic, I will get a chance to lead or co-organize a few, and it will be really great to see some familiar faces and compare notes on how we can help the physics community be more welcoming and enable more and more folks to thrive regardless of their identities or background. I am always very humbled by these conversations and I always take that as a sign that I am truly learning.
LISTENING: First, the podcast about Mickey Mouse and minstrel shows I mentioned above is this episode of NPR’s Code Switch. Even though it was recorded in response to a political scandal that involve blackface and has in the meantime somehow fizzled out, this episode is more than worth listening to and quite eye-opening with respect to how deeply racism is embedded in popular culture. Mickey Mouse is such a strong symbol of American animation and so ever present as a benevolent figure, but maybe I should not have been shocked to learn of the character’s ties to the racial bias and mockery of its time when we are still having conversations about faulty and harmful representation of all sorts of identities in contemporary films. One more reason to learn more about history and not repeat its mistakes.
As a contrast to learning about history, I recently caught up on the latest series featured on Flash Forward, a really fun and creative podcast about the future. In each episode, the host, Rose Eveleth, considers a possible future then produces both snippets of audio drama fiction and real life interviews with scientist centered around it. The series she produced most recently consisted of episodes dealing with a number of potential environmental futures of the Earth. Each episode in the series opens with a fictional Shark-Tank-style show with pitches tailored for the world on the edge of an environmental disaster, then proceeds to discuss the very real phenomena that inspired it. My favorite was about a future where cement is banned. I know that does not sound overly exciting when there are episodes considering reversing magnetic fields and dealing with global warming by spraying stuff into the atmosphere, but I just never thought about cement for more than five seconds and turns out its sort of a big deal.
Less related to the content of this letter, I have also been enjoying Michael Lewis’ foray into podcasting with Against the Rules. This show examines the decline of the referee as a valued and revered figure in American life. Lewis starts with basketball, moves onto art and makes it to judges over the course of the seven episodes that make up the show. I was somewhat cautious about picking this show up as the premise sounded like it could be a tad bit preachy (and it doesn’t help that it’s produced by Malcolm Gladwell’s company and he really excels at preachy) but Lewis’ narration is very natural, very tight and quite engrossing. I think the episode on the artworld, episode 4, is my favorite and it really showcases just how well the show is structured. Lewis weaves almost unconnected bits of anecdote together, sometimes seemingly going fully off-topic, then brings everything together for a punchline that is not presented so dramatically that it would lose its importance. I can imagine this podcast being quite terrible if handled by a different team but in this manifestation, it is really pretty good.
Since a lot of my work in the past few weeks came down to either writing or reading, all activities that require too much focus for me to be playing a podcast in the background, I cycled to a fair amount of very good, very loud music. Allfather’s Bless the Earth with Fire, Perished Bodies by Planks, Baptists’ Beacon of Faith and Empathist by Svffer are all jus really solid records, all bordering on some sort of crusty hardcore, fast and heavy and angry in a good way. I go through phases when I am just really weak for this sort of no-frills-just-heavy music and all of these very successfully filled that niche.
Beyond just satisfying a sonic craving, I also really liked this Amenra record, called Mass VI. It is less straightforward than some of the albums I mentioned above, an album with a concept more complicated than ‘really loud and good’, and while it is still very heavy the fact that it is slower makes it seem more serious and more grim. It made me think of Isis and Ash Borer but maybe played over each other – a whole other kind of noise I am very much here for.
Finally, this album by Thou surprised me by being so soft and melancholy, but it gives me a chance to say that this band has made some gorgeous music, something I would not have expected to say a few years ago when I saw them live. They are usually loud and screechy and there is something almost ugly to a fair amount of their previous work, but this record is very much not that (it actually reminded me some of the more folk-y iterations of Panopticon) yet very much worth listening to.
WATCHING: Since my last letter, I watched exactly half of an episode of Castle Rock on Hulu, and though I wanted to see Amazing Grace, I haven’t managed to make it to the movies. Maybe I can pretend that I meant to give my eyeballs a rest instead of just being very busy.
READING: I am trying to read a few pages of White Album every day during lunch. I read three essays so far and I have enjoyed them. Joan Didion’s writing is clear, direct, and compelling. She does not embellish much but she clearly chooses only the most striking scenes to make her points. There is a lot of her in the essays, but she is not a distraction nor is she omniscient or morally superior. I’m really liking her writing.
EATING: Since my last letter, the local farmer’s market moved outdoors as it does every spring and it seems to be picking up steam despite the chilly weather we’ve been having. I never really thought I would become the kind of person that wakes up before 8 am to buy greens on Saturday but here we are, and I must admit I was pretty excited to ease back into this part of what feels like a distinctly summer-y routine. In addition to greens and sweet potatoes, I have also been snagging some locally grown mushrooms and all of my semi-improvised fried-rice-like dishes benefited from me finding pak choi as well. Also of note, radishes in tacos and violet salad turnips in an avocado salad I made for a picnic with some coworkers. I’m looking forward to more of all of these and can’t wait for all the summer squash to start re-appearing.
Being a graduate student is not particularly lucrative so many of my food-related discoveries end up being somewhat driven by what’s on sale or what looks so good that it is actually worth a minor splurge. I began cooking with chickpea (garbanzo bean) flour in the former scenario but it quickly became one of my favorite ‘exotic’ but affordable ingredients (most stores seem to carry a variety by Bob’s Red Mill but it is also available online). It is gluten and grain free and a good source of protein, but mostly I like that it is well suited for making very quick flatbreads or pancakes. If you consider a typical plate having to include a carbohydrate of some sort, a protein, plenty of vegetables and some amount of healthy fat, a chickpea pancake covers two categories at once and if you fold some vegetables into it, it can really make for a whole meal when topped with avocado slices or a drizzle of tahini. I made a big batch over this past weekend and have been very happily eating them for breakfast. They have also been my Saturday or Sunday morning go-to for a while, especially if I haven’t made it to the grocery store yet. And it really helps that you can stick them between two halves of a bagel and not feel too guilty about eating a pancake sandwich.
The recipe for chickpea flour pancakes I am sharing below is loosely adapted from the Power Plates cookbook (one of my favorites).
For 2-3 servings (6-8 pancakes) you will need
1 cup chickpea flour
1 cup water
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
1/4 - 1/3 cup cilantro or parsley, chopped
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt and black pepper, to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
Juice of a 1/4 of a small lemon or lime
A few teaspoons of oil for pan-frying
In a medium sized bowl mix chickpea flour, water, spices and baking soda until a smooth, thick and sticky batter forms
Squeeze the lime or lemon over the batter and mix again, you should see some small bubbles or a slight foam form from the reaction of the baking soda with the citric acid
Fold the herbs and the peas into the batter and mix just until incorporated
In a non-stick pan, heat a bit of oil then add about a 1/4 cup worth of batter. Cook until the edges of the pancake look set, there is some slight rise (the pancake is rounding up at the edges) and there are air bubble opening up throughout. Flip and cook for another minute or so, just until set.
Repeat until you run out of batter. Eat with a side salad, in a sandwich or topped with your favorite sauce.
Tips: The only slightly tricky part of this recipe is being patient when pan-frying the pancakes. I find that a truly non-stick pan is really helpful and often only add a small amount of oil for the first pancake and not much for the rest.
You can change both the vegetables and the spices to change the flavor of these pancakes. Chickpea flour itself has a slightly nutty, savory taste but it is not very strong so spices really do make a difference. You could use curry powder instead of turmeric or omit both turmeric and cumin and go with an Italian spice mix or just some basil and rosemary instead. As for vegetables, anything that is chopped into pieces slightly smaller than bite-sized (so it doesn’t break up the batter too much) and not too terribly watery should do. Caramelized onions would be great, any sort of a leftover roasted vegetable could definitely be thrown in, or you could use my favorite lazy trick and get some cheap frozen vegetable mix (big stores usually have their own brands that go under 2$ for a package) that can be defrosted and chucked into the pancake batter as soon as it cools down (run it under cold water in a colander to speed this process up).
Another option is to mix in purees or sauces you might already have lying around. In the fall sometimes I add 1/2 cup or so of pumpkin or butternut squash puree and use sage and thyme as my spices. At times I have also mixed in a few tablespoons of tomato sauce. I imagine even some lentils cooked down until mushy would make for a welcome addition.
Finally, you can make these sweet by nixing the turmeric in cumin in favor of a tablespoon of maple syrup or brown sugar and a teaspoon (or more) of cinnamon. Instead of veggies, mix in about a cup of (fresh or frozen) berries or a mashed, overly ripe banana. Alternatively, a shredded carrot and some shredded coconut would also work as well as chocolate chips (if you are vegan and have trouble finding dairy-free chocolate chips, simply chop up a bar of dark chocolate). Serve with extra maple syrup, runny peanut butter, caramelized bananas or a berry compote.