Metastable State
On reald-adult-impostor-syndrome, main characters and ethical consumption
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METASTABLE STATE*
When you teach any sort of statistical physics or thermodynamics, you end up spending a lot of time defining what it means for a system to reach equilibrium. Is the system immersed in a thermal bath? Can it exchange particles with some other system? Can it expand in space? All of these factors contribute to how we define equilibrium – a state the system is said to “want” to reach. Some of these points, however, can be unstable. A marble sitting at the bottom of a fruit bowl will reach that bottom again if slightly displaced from it. A pen balancing on its tip will topple over and not return to that position by itself after even the slightest push. The former point of equilibrium is stable, the latter is not. Such stability can be determined mathematically, by studying properties of an energy functional, for instance. Or you can just kick the object, or shove it, and see what happens.
As part of the teaching job I started in August is introducing high school freshmen to what physics even is and how science is supposed to be done, I find myself often asking students to guess what will happen in some experimental scenario or to predict an outcome of an investigation before looking it up or trying it out for themselves. In the first few weeks of the semester, we discussed the scientific method, first as a way to approach gathering knowledge in itself, then in the context of geocentrism being rejected in favor of heliocentrism and the Scientific Revolution. The next day we tossed softball balls and took stop-motion images in the hope of inching close to a statement of Newton’s first law. After that we rolled bocce balls and tried to change their trajectories with drumsticks. Newton didn’t play bocce or softball, but you can converge on his way of thinking by answering enough silly-sounding questions about motion and forces and inertia. I am asking a lot of my students – I need them to verbalize their intuition, to explain and question it, to observe experiments carefully and to jump headfirst into both inductive and deductive reasoning. For the most part, they excel. If I asked them about the pen balancing on its tip, they would probably all correctly predict that it will fall over and never come back to its tenuous point of equilibrium. Given enough prompting and vocabulary, some may even generalize the observation into a statement about some equilibria being unstable or in no way robust to outside pushes, pulls and kicks.
I don’t need my students or physics theory to tell me about unstable equilibria. I don’t need to deduce it by watching pens fall over. It feels like I know the concept in my bones. Throughout my time in graduate school I learned to always expect the kick and to always be ready to fall over. Even when everything seemed to be going just fine, I was still braced for some sort of impact. Like the pen, I felt like I was holding onto the ground at a single, narrow point and could lose that connection at any moment.
My doctoral diploma came in the mail two weeks ago. I opened it in-between teaching two Zoom classes and almost immediately put it aside, allowing myself no time to savor the moment of having a milestone printed out for me. For the hundredth time, my mother-in-law reminded me that neither my husband nor I had a graduation party. It was hard for me to imagine even wanting one. When you’re always waiting for something to break and fly straight into your face, parties just don’t seem like a wise emotional investment.
But then we did have a very small birthday party for my husband and another small birthday party for my brother-in-law because family celebrations can be stripped down and minimized, but certainly not fully stopped by outside threats and influences. As we ate in the backyard, keeping far away from each other, we all slowly eased into old, familiar modes of interaction. Bits of conversation about the minutia of living stable, near-boring, adult lives started to emerge in-between discussions of cake or warm pita bread from the restaurant next door. Choosing couches, cleaning coffee makers in the most effective way, buying books or gadgets for an evening hobby, skincare routines, recommending Peloton instructors for your at-home workout setup. Someone took it upon themselves to explain to me that a lot of really good furniture is made in North Carolina. I realized that I haven’t even tried to buy furniture since my last year of college when I mistakenly sent six Ikea chairs to a Chicago address that didn’t exist. My interlocutor reprimanded me for not thinking about my life more long term – a good couch is a big investment, they stressed. Later, my husband reminded me of a graduate school friend we always made fun of for paying a few thousand dollars for a replica of an artisan couch that was too expensive for their salary in its original iteration.
***
My students struggle with what to call me. Professor Padavic-Callaghan is a mouthful, even for me. Talking to my older classes, the seniors that are really only taking college-level courses and calling themselves “year two’s”, I offered the option of just calling me Karmela, the way I called most of my college professors by their first names. One of them later emailed me to ask a calculus question in a postscript added “I feel weird addressing any teacher by their first name, but because you requested it I'm doing my best “. By their next message they had already reverted to “Dr. Callaghan”. Half of my 9th grade students opted for “Mrs. Callaghan” instead.
I had struggled with conceiving of myself as an authority figure when I taught college students, often only a few years younger than me, but with these groups, not claiming that status fully was mostly not an option. While I was internally spiraling into adulthood-impostor-syndrome all they could see is how much I waved my hands in front of the whiteboard with conviction and gusto, and how much homework I assigned them. During our first, unfortunately remote, session I requested that they ask me some personal questions to try and get to know me. I thought that being asked about my favorite food or music or hobbies would make me seem more approachable than just materializing on their screen with no chance to chit-chat would. They were either shy or bored and no one asked me anything. I get it, a teacher that gives you a day-by-day checklist of tasks you have to complete for their class does not seem like a good candidate for being a buddy. I’m sure they’d guess I have a spreadsheet for furniture shopping as well.
The past few weeks of having a commute, of having a classroom and a teaching routine, of picking up groceries at Whole Foods on my way home (of being able to afford to do so), and of being invited to teacher happy hours have made it clear to me just how much more stability I have gained this summer, and how much less braced for impact I objectively need to be. The memory of fear and anxiety, however, remains in my body. It is in my perpetually clenched jaw and overly fast footsteps, and in my mind, where a moment of calm and quiet is still rare.
Image: astrology is not a science but sometimes it makes you think
There is a perverse enjoyment that comes with being a self-proclaimed mess of a person or a problematic main character constantly on the edge. A friend I recently met for ice-cream in the park phrased it exactly this way – main character syndrome. It’s the adult version of “I am not like the other girls”, the manic pixie dream girl gone corporate. A potent mix of capitalism that wants you to overwork and overextend yourself to feel worthy and a need to be paid attention to even though you’d never really ask for it for the fear of losing independence. It is stressful and uncomfortable to be this person, but this person is memorable and stands a chance to be taken care off by someone seemingly less messy. Once you are pushed into being this person you embrace it as a defense mechanism that is likely to stick around even when you do get enveloped in a more secure environment. It does not help your case that main characters in works of fiction resemble this model too, tacitly encouraging you to stay at the point of unstable equilibrium and mistake it for a place of importance or promise of unrealistic future success.
Often, we find stories of calm, happy people to be boring or even suspicious. If a movie opens with a happy family, we are conditioned to expect something terrible will happen to them soon. When introduced to an overly well put-together acquaintance, we turn to friends to mumble “don’t you hate people that have it together like that.” We devour songs about anxiety and sadness and often assume that the best artists are the ones that are sort of messed up. Our media and pop culture reward a sense of instability, regardless of whether you don’t have any other option or whether, on the other side of the spectrum, you have just enough privilege to get away with not working on yourself. As cherry on top of the cake, our economic system rewards people that work too much and stress out about it even more. A worker who only thinks about work is portrayed as driven and insightful and relentless. We work in the hope of being able to afford the time and money that comfort and stability require but start to feel overly lazy or like we only managed to score something small the second we have it. A level of neuroticism and inability to be satisfied not only appears in fiction but also pads the pockets of our employers who benefit from both stress-driven labor and our not knowing how to ask for rest and help.
***
There is a scene in the American version of Utopia, a TV show with a strong aesthetic, a remarkable amount of violence, and an at best sophomoric take on ethical dilemmas concerning an overpopulated modern world, where a character goes into comedically blind rage over the amount of gadgets another character has in their kitchen. Holding a spiralizer, they foam at the mouth about how we humans just buy too many things and get too comfortable and lose track of what is really important, of what is really right, of what living should really consist of. Though I thought the show often did not succeed as satire or a more serious indictment of how we live in America today, this scene did get to me some. Probably because when I permanently moved to New York at the end of August I packed that exact same spiralizer into one of our many boxes, among my bread baskets and a kitchen scale, all gadgets that felt like splurges at the time. This too is part of trying to cling to being a troubled, tragic main character and the mostly false idea that being deprived and sad is the only way to avoid being some strawman naïve sheep-person. Last week, I bought a 14$ handheld milk frother for our kitchen so we could occasionally make lattes and instantly felt guilty. Guilty about wanting it, guilty about giving money to Amazon and at least a little guilty about being able to afford it.
Of course, it is ridiculous to feel bad about making a high school teacher’s salary while living in New York City, regardless of how special your school is. And a milk frother means next to nothing in the grand scheme of things in the same way eating avocado toast is not the reason why millennials don’t own property. However, now that I can ease into having both, I am feeling not just the emotional inertia leftover from so many years of feeling like everything around me could fall apart at any second, but also a childish resistance to “being a square” or “selling out”. The latter is something that is still shockingly prevalent as a type of purity discourse among the kind of lefties that the current political polarization moment has plastered over certain regions of Twitter and Instagram. Despite thinkers such as adrienne maree brown rightfully pointing out that a revolution should feel good because if it does not correspond to a deep embodied yes for all of us we will not be able to keep it going and maintain its results, there is still a strong brand of, often privileged, person who likes to point out ways in which many small comforts are imbued with the overall evil of the system we live in. It is not so much that these voices are incorrect as much as you have to question their urge to keep underlining these facts over and over. Why do we still assume that to be righteous we have to strip ourselves of everything that makes us feel comfortable? The correlation between virtue and pain is one I recognize from my childhood as a Catholic, and one that has often struck me as harmful. Certainly, we cannot be wowed by material things so much that we forget what is happening around us (and these days there is so much), but sometimes it is forgivable to order a gadget off of Amazon or buy a pair of shoes without thoroughly studying every person behind their brand name.
***
I keep telling my students that beginnings are bound to be hard and they shouldn’t expect classes to be easy, but also not get discouraged by new challenges. I tell them that everything that feels new often also feels intimidating, but that latter part dissipates in lockstep with the former. When a new way of learning and working stops being new, you feel more free within it and you perform better. The same is certainly true of me, even though no one has given me a checklist of readings and problems centered around being an ethical and mentally healthy adult. The pandemic does not help, adding a very real and tangible crisis on top of all the ones I have already internalized, many probably inflated by the smallness of my past bubble. As everyone is trying to adjust to the new normal of crisis mode, I am trying to be less intimidated by the exact opposite – the new-to-me abundance of seeming normalcy and security.
My husband and I are staying at a friends’ apartment for the month while they are out of town. We’ve put together a long spreadsheet of rentals we are considering moving into in November. Seeing the big empty rooms and three-digit rents makes my stomach turn as much as referee reports or slowly developing research projects (some still on-going) used to. We will have to buy a couch and a bed and a dinner table and a desk and I will definitely have to pay a lot of attention to where our chairs get sent. It will be the first place that is just our own. I am already worried that everyone will be able to see that people that live there have been forever stamped by the not-quite-adulthood of graduate school. I’ve signed leases before and once even toured a bunch of empty houses, but the whole project of moving on with our lives and moving into a space that reflects that makes me anxious. At times I wonder whether I just like being anxious or maybe think that anxiety reflects something virtuous or interesting about who I am. At other times I know that making mistakes in this situation is objectively quite easy and we could genuinely mess this up just by the virtue of not having had much practice with it. I guess my homework, my daily checklist, is to find a balance or a sense of equilibrium, between these two options.
Best,
Karmela
* In physics, metastability is a property of states of some system that are not lowest in energy but still represent a stable point. Any physical system naturally aims to reach its lowest energy state – this state is its true, unmovable equilibrium. A metastable state, unlike a stable equilibrium, is not robust to perturbations. Often it will have a finite lifetime. In other words, an object can be easily knocked out of its metastable state and it will not stay there indefinitely.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
Image: Getting ready to teach a Zoom class from a laboratory prep room after having taught my in-person classes for the day
WRITING Unfortunately, the past few weeks have been so filled with teaching, moving and family events that I have had little to no time to write. This newsletter being so off-schedule is probably the best example, but my science writing efforts have suffered too. While I will have a piece appearing in a print edition of a magazine that I had also written for on the web later this month, I have really only managed one new pitch in the last few weeks. I’m optimistic about it, but mostly hoping that my schedule will ease up a bit soon so I can work on more ideas. Beyond all I am itching to have some dedicated writing time just for my own selfish enjoyment of the process.
LEARNING Teaching both the most introductory, most conceptual kind of physics in the 9th grade and the most advanced, most abstract kind of math (at the level of a college class) in the 12th has been a learning experience every second of every day. While my blackboard work and classroom organization have never been too bad, and I have also had plenty of experience with Zoom last Spring, the hybrid in-person-sometimes-and-remote-at-other-times model has meant adjusting adjustments upon adjustments and being as quick on my feet as a person in a new job can possibly be. Classroom dynamics are certainly different when everyone wears a mask and when students are not allowed to be in a room or leave a room unsupervised. Rolling out a lot of material quickly is nearly impossible when the number of instruction days has been halved to accommodate more small groups seeing it on different days. I am grateful to my past self for having planned out so many lessons in advance, but each day has been a new small challenge only vaguely grounded by those plans. I am grateful for the support of other science teachers, but even my onboarding into the community of this new school has been hindered by the pandemic so I am spending a fair amount of time grading and designing activities by myself, in some odd lab room where I can be alone and mask-less without being a coronavirus risk. There have been many exciting moments as well, and my students constantly impress and inspire me, but the proverbial unprecedented times have caught up with me quite a few times, making me learn flexibility and resilience above all else.
LISTENING I came across Augustus Muller’s Machine Learning Experiments thanks to a playlist a friend had shared on Instagram. Though electronic or industrial music generally isn’t my favorite, I kept returning to the track Slow Blue that the playlist included, and later to the whole album which certainly paints a dark and slightly titillating mood rather effectively. I was then not too surprised to learn that the record had been composed as a soundtrack to a pair of erotic films produced by an independent queer company. Muller himself is member of Boy Harsher, another dark electronic act with a knack for conveying desire in a screechy, nearly aggressive way. This backstory maybe makes this an odd record recommendation, but the music here is just really good and works well as a self-standing coherent whole. On a completely different note I am still listing to lots of Power Trip and their really top-notch thrash metal, the kind that I could have loved at fifteen and am still nowhere near immune to today. I also checked out Winterfylleth’s record The Reckoning Dawn that came out earlier this year and liked it quite a bit – I’ve always been weak for the more lyrical and atmospheric takes on black metal. This Panopticon live record hit that same spot for me.
Also: this cover by Orville Peck because I continue to be utterly in love with his sad, queer, cowboy vibes. Please go watch all of his videos off of Pony and Show Pony.
Mostly out of sheer panic I have been listening to Vox’s politics podcast The Weeds a fair amount lately as well as to Slate’s Amicus and Strict Scrutiny which both focus on the Supreme Court. I have been on-and-off listening to the latter two for a while, but in past weeks legal discussions and analyses of what is happening in the judiciary just seemed to become that much more important. Amicus from Slate is the more accessible show and host Dahlia Lithwick does a great job of bringing on guests that can keep things very basic and layout essential facts while also being able to jump into really detailed and insider-like arguments when they need to. Strict Scrutiny is hosted by three female law professors and writers which makes it more academic and at times more disorienting by default. This show is, at the same time, a really in-depth and a very broad review of everything the Supreme Court does or does not do. Even if a lot of the legal-ese goes over my head, I appreciate hearing about cases that don’t make it to all the front pages. The previews of each Court “season” the hosts of this show regularly do are extremely informative as well. The Weeds is similarly academic at times and it is very clearly aimed at a certain kind of political person rather than a particularly broad audience. Matty Iglesias and Ezra Klein, the host and a near-regular guest, make no secret of their own political leanings and openly argue in favor of or against ideas such as court-packing or ending the filibuster. Something about their honest partisanship is refreshing compared to punditry-for-punditry’s-sake and horse race focus of shows like FiveThirtyEight Politics that I often turned to in past election seasons. Both Iglesias and Klein can come off as annoying and a tad bit preachy here and there, but their breaking down of where small-d democratic systems and values have been threatened or destroyed in recent years has given me some new scaffolding to frame my own views around.
Finally, Slate’s Hit Parade is again available for free, after a few months of being a strictly paid-for product, and I’ve been enjoying catching up with Chris Molanphy’s extremely nerdy and detail-oriented analysis of music charts through history. If I’m making this show sound a touch dry it’s definitely because it is, but it is also delightful for anyone who likes music history minutiae and wants to have contextual facts close at hand whenever a famous song comes on in whatever setting.
WATCHING We watched three movies in the past few weeks and they were as different as they get: David Fincher’s Zodiac, Kristen Johnson’s Dick Johnson is Dead and Aaron Sorkin’s Trial of the Chicago 7.
Zodiac tells the story of the serial killer of the same name, loosely focusing on the writer Robert Graysmith, who covered the case and is portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in the film. There is something odd about the pacing of this movie and some characters seems almost superfluous. But it is a David Fincher movie so it is rather hard to look away from it at any moment, especially when it is clear that something terrible and gory is about to happen. Fincher really excels when it comes to shocking depictions of the Zodiac’s murders and his detailed meticulous sense of aesthetics makes up for the fact that most characters are a bit underdeveloped and more often than not unrelatable.
We watched Dick Johnson is Dead mostly because I kept hearing its author on podcast interviews (on the Big Picture here and Fresh Air here) and liking her earnestness. Her film, a documentary about her father’s decline into dementia interspersed with fantasy scenes he stars in, is certainly earnest as well. It is an example of what sort of weirdness and cross-genre experimentation can happen when money gets poured into a creative project, unfortunately something maybe only Netflix can pull off these days. The scenes between Johnson and her dad, the titular Dick, are touching and his smile is so infectious that it must be impossible for the viewer to not feel like a family member too. Johnson’s camera, always on and often shaky, helps with that intimacy. The fantastical scenes of Dick Johnson’s accidental “deaths” and his going off to heaven where he dances, gets rained on by popcorn and has a foot metamorphosis are weird and joyous at the same time. They probably don’t really make sense in any way other than underlining the fact that Johnson is truly processing her dad’s fate in real time, by making this film. I’m not sure that Dick Johnson is Dead is a good or a great movie, but it is interesting, it is funny and tear-jerky, and definitely worth watching as an artefact of one creative person trying to preempt her grief.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is an Aaron Sorkin artefact and it feels extremely like it. It could have probably been an extended extra of the West Wing and no one would have batted an eyelash. It takes place in a courtroom, it features speeches about politics and debates about the nature of revolution, everyone talks fast, and everyone is slightly more quipy than they need to be. All the characters, for instance, are introduced in an incredibly fast, compressed, montage that happens before the title card for the movie which is either disorienting or energizing depending on your familiarity with the historical events and figures behind the movie. The acting in this film is great, but the politics is certainly not. For a movie about an unfair indictment and prosecution of protest released in a year when we’ve seen so much of that in real time, The Trial of the Chicago 7 is just toothless. It flirts with making statements about race but doesn’t go far enough. It paints the government as more likeable than it probably should be, giving Michael Keaton a chance to be a hero while forgetting that his character used to uphold a really rotten system. This is a fun watch and maybe it does teach us a bit of history that we should talk about more, but it betrays an outdate belief in righteous speeches making everything better that was heavily featured on the West Wing ten years ago and just doesn’t really need the spotlight today.
We watched the American version of the somewhat cult-ish British TV show Utopia, written by Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects fame, and at some point rumored as David Fincher project, on Prime Video and were mostly disappointed. Utopia’s story is propelling and the plot has enough momentum to keep eyeballs affixed to the screen, but beyond its fast pace and hyper-violence this series has little going for it. It is bleak, cynical and mostly just feels unreal. Its philosophical questions are flat executions of discussions you’d have after a gen-ed class in a college dorm. The cast of the show tries to sell its characters with lots of gusto, but ultimately they are all sort of cyphers with half-baked backstories. None of them are fleshed out as full on stereotypes that could work well in a more satirical approach, nor do they get real character arcs that could garner more sympathy. To a large extent I am also quite harsh on this show because it deals with a pandemic, and pandemic-related conspiracies and violence, within its plot which just struck me as an incredibly insensitive choice for the current moment. I understand that this show has been in production for a long time, but the choice of releasing it right now is just tone-deaf. Similar to my concerns and gripes when it comes to the Trial of the Chicago 7, if nothing else, we deserve a better made and sharper pandemic conspiracy show.
Before Utopia, we spent some time with the first season of True Detective. As I have mentioned before, this is another show that mostly disappointed me. Towards the end of the season some of its procedural elements became more compelling, mostly because the beats of a TV police investigation of any sort are familiar and comfortable, but the second half of the series felt unnecessarily compressed and many issues I had with its characters did not get addressed in any way. This is a show almost purely powered by vague understanding of sophomoric philosophy, arch maleness and a strong visual identity. By the time the big bad was revealed and confronted I was more bored with it than anything else. In all honesty, it made me miss Too Old To Die Young where you at least got to be surprised, genuinely shocked and showered in neons.
To keep our streak of conspiracy and crime shows, we decided to finally watch the cult 1960s show The Prisoner. Having memorized the Iron Maiden song of the same name as a kid so many times, I was delighted to see that we could stream the series and really struck by how little overlap it has with all the “prestige TV” content I have been consuming for most of quarantine. The Prisoner doesn’t always make sense, but that’s beside the point because it is unpretentiously committed to its bit and exploits an almost “monster of the week” framework to build a pretty odd word that’s intriguing and almost goofily fun to live in. I’ve been enjoying this show an awful lot, and its amazing 60s visuals add to that almost as much as Patrick McGoohan’s relentless smirk and furrowed brow.
READING A few more pages of Gravity’s Rainbow. One very short essay in Zadie Smith’s Intimations where I underlined almost every other paragraph. Three different Calculus textbooks and a whole lot of “flipped classroom” lesson plans.
EATING A cashew “cheesecake” and fig tart in an almond crust topped with an espresso tahini drizzle that I made for a small outdoor family gathering. The key to cheesecake-ness is a few tablespoons of genuinely tangy and sour coconut yogurt mixed with blended cashews (I boil them for 10 minutes first), lemon juice and maple syrup.
Many pile-style meals that come with meal prep: a grain, a roasted vegetable, a raw vegetable, a bean, a pickle or a sauce. You can prepare a few options for each ahead of time and then mix and match after any, or all, long days at work. Fried rice type dishes also become an easy option within this planning scheme.
Spiced tofu and tofu puffs and fermented tofu because we randomly ended a weekend evening in a large Chinese grocery, and I am beyond excited to buy new kinds of tofu whenever I can.
Chinese food in our new neighborhood, Indian food by a friend’s house in Queens and Burmese food in another friend’s part of Brooklyn. Vegan ice cream in a nearby park. All served with a large side of gratitude for the kind of weather that still allows us to eat outside and actually explore new restaurants.
Take two on veganizing the “ultimate” banana bread from Smitten Kitchen which is a recipe I cannot recommend enough. Almond orange muffins with a layer of red bean paste, based on a mix of this recipe and this one.