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This letter is written largely in response to the Kavanaugh-Ford hearings of this past week and as such may be upsetting. I also use one offensive word. Please feel free to skip it or revisit it later based on what is most beneficial to your mental health.
ZERO SOUND*
I was not raised to be afraid or timid. I played in dirt in our cabin in the woods so much that my grandfather bought a tiny shovel just for me, I played soccer with boys during recess at school and on the street in my neighborhood, I was loud and had no inside voice, I asked too many questions and people always knew my name. Even though they taught me to cross my legs at the knees instead of the ankles and even though my father always had something to say about my hair or my un-shaven legs, my parents had never told me I could not do something, or be someone, because I was a girl. As a teenager I devoured newspapers and fought with my grandfather about politics. He would make me cry at the Sunday dinner table and yet I would come back for more, challenging his leftover-Communist views with whatever I had read in the overly wordy culture section of the local paper. I had an opinion about everything and every little bit of even pseudo-intellectual jargon would lodge itself firmly into my brain. I craved to sit at the adults’ table at family parties, so I could argue and fight for my right to be taken seriously. It was a lot. I was a lot. However, the only person that complained about my being unladylike was my grandmother who everyone dismissed as just a little old-fashioned, a bit mixed up after watching too many soaps. Uncles and cousins joked that I would be an actress, a politician, even the first female president of Croatia. They were all somewhat disappointed when I decided to become a physicist because they thought I should continue to be loud, and big, and a personality, and get recognized for it.
There is nothing original with where this is going as this is not an uncommon experience: even though I have presumably been raised to take up space and be defiant, I have grown up to feel shrunken and defeated. I am not sure when it happened. Maybe being empowered enough to pursue a career in a male-dominated field simply did not sufficiently prepare me for being in a male-dominated field for upwards of eight years. Maybe dating the wrong men at the wrong time left me with too many emotional hang ups. Maybe I just spent too much time wanting to be like my father who never held back when it came to deriding women’s bodies and claiming that there is nothing less attractive than a woman trying to be like a man by yelling. Maybe I saw my mom warp her thighs in saran wrap to sweat off the parts that jiggled one time too many or had too many conversations with other girls, when I was a teenager, in which an acquaintance was shamed for her looks or her propensity to make out with boys. Maybe I just watched too much TV or listened to too much radio or read too many books and comics either displaying bad behaviors towards women or ignoring their existence altogether. Maybe it was the times when I was told boys were intimidate by me, when I had been called no fun or difficult. Maybe it was my cousin calling me ‘bat’ for my dark clothing and no one ever correcting him. Maybe it was my father once calling all women whores in an argument that went of the rails, and never apologizing for it even though I had apologized for my part and had been told I had to do so because he was probably just really stressed out at work. Maybe it was seeing female friends and acquaintances be manipulated, taken advantage off, made uncomfortable and then talked about as if it had been all their fault. Maybe it was last week when a remarkably creative researcher told me she had had to struggle to convince her department to hire just one more woman because they just did not seem to care about that sort of thing at all, no matter how many women applied. Somewhere along the way the expectations, the fears, the pressures and the risks associated with my gender seeped under my skin through a societal osmosis of sorts and I changed. When a college boyfriend told me I talked too much I took it to heart and years after he had broken up with me I still worry that I am too much in conversations, that others would prefer for me to be more quiet. I realize my friends and colleagues definitely do not consider me shy or quiet, but underneath that appearance I am constantly second guessing the sheer amount of words that come out of my mouth. Instead of becoming the future president, I was almost ready to forego my place at the adults’ table. No one tried to raise me to be this way.
Before triggers and triggers warnings were buzzwords that academics threw around instead of engaging with their students on a more human level and pundits used them to fuel even more derision and dismissiveness towards millennials, they were useful concepts. It was good to have a word for the experience of some word or action, seemingly benevolent or value-neutral, suddenly bringing you to the edge of tears or making your heart everything but jump out of your chest. Before only snowflakes were triggered in shaky YouTube videos, it was comforting to be able to know that this was what was happening to your body rather than something even more mysterious or sinister. The constant barrage of bad, and then worse, news in the past week or so has not felt like a moment where the body turns against you in lieu of dealing with the past but rather it has felt like slowly but steadily being drained of energy and hope. Every article, every podcast, every tweet, every long Facebook post has come together to form something akin to a marathon race that you cannot finish without tremendous pain and yet you also simply cannot refuse to run. It is not so much that there has not been running in the past, that the tiredness is new or novel, but now it has been put on display, dissected by those with institutionalized power, and then either played up for political gain or fully dismissed. What is even the point of speaking up, of being loud, if all that happens is the same conversation, over and over, until you finally give up your voice out of shear exhaustion?
On Wednesday night, I was at the gym and in between sets of dumbbell exercises I kept catching glimpses of the many TVs positioned by the treadmills and the ellipticals, presumably to distract gym-goers from the fact that they are actually exercising. Over the last few years I have built up my gym-confidence and feel less of a need to hide from others but I still prefer something of a corner spot where the TVs just happen to be. On one screen a political left-leaning show, on another a right-leaning political talking head, separated by another playing Food Network where oblivious home cooks ran through a pretend grocery store as if the biggest problem in the world was the choice of fresh or frozen broccoli. At some point the two political shows displayed almost identical footage and, trying to catch my breath, I found myself thinking that maybe I should just stay home the next day, stay glued to a screen instead of trying to talk about wavefunctions or phase transitions. The events of the next day would clearly bring together two almost parallel realities, so clearly displayed for me at that moment, and the clash would be more meaningful than we can probably fathom right now. There is always a conversation, a warning, about being on the wrong side of history and here we were at a point where most of us would be on the sidelines and a number of powerful men would be unilaterally picking a side. And all of it would be a show we can tune in to find out what sort of history they had decided to make.
I did not stay home the next day. I worked as I usually would, teaching, calculating, sitting in talks and meetings, and tried to stay away from the news. Incidentally, a favorite college professors was in town for a seminar and found time to meet up with me, five years after he had taught me everything I know about quantum mechanics. Unexpectedly, he asked me for teaching advice. He said he remembered me from way back when because I had asked a question once and when he had given me an overly simplified answer I had made a face that stuck in his memory. He said he felt like he had been condescending without even knowing it and has in subsequent classes always thought more about his approach to questions and his tone of voice. He said he especially did not mean to be condescending to women in his classes. We talked about this for the rest of the time that had been reserved for me in his schedule. I did not remember that particular interaction (in fact I almost automatically tried to downplay it by claiming I was conceited in college) but the observation he followed up the anecdote with definitely sounded familiar: male physicists are just more likely to talk, to be loud, to say things even when they don’t understand them because no one will shut them down and they can only gain status and social capital by being the kind of person that talks a lot.
My time in graduate school has through a set of various circumstances been fairly solitary and as such I have tried to use it to undergo a number of self-improvement projects. First, I decided to become a vegetarian, then a vegan; I made a workout plan then turned it into a habit; I started writing these letters. The biggest and most difficult of these projects, however, has been trying to allow myself to ask stupid questions at work. Over the course of my time in academia I have seen my male peers do this countless times: make a comment that is not actually relevant, ask a question that references a named theorem that does not really apply, challenge an idea strongly when they are clearly not an expert, bring up their own work even if it is only slightly relevant, keep the presentation or the lecture from moving forward because they just don’t understand something. We called this ‘being a that kid’ in college; apparently the older you get the less laughable and the more advantageous it is to be him. I often tell my students that not only is there no such thing as a stupid question but that even if there were any it is my job to answer them yet speaking up at a seminar or in an advanced course has taken conscious work on my part. It still raises my heart rate to bring attention to myself in a large room where still only a small percentage of people look like me. And I am not even trying to talk about anything tender or personal, I just want to know about some symbols that got pushed around into a new set of equations on the Power Point slide.
I have been incredibly lucky to never have been harassed past rude comments on the street and once or twice men trying to put their hands around me in bars. I have been around drunk men and aggressive men and men that were rude and mean and I hate that I have to be grateful that they have never hurt anything other than my feelings and that the bad sex I had occasionally had always been just plainly bad and not a euphemism for something much more terrifying. I don’t know what it is like to be a sexual assault survivor and I don’t know what it is like to testify in front of a committee of senators while a whole massive country watches and tweets about it. I know that Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford was collegial and accommodating in her testimony, that she did not yell, that she was patient with stupid questions. I also know that the man she had accused of assaulting her and laughing about it at age fifteen, a man who is about to be handed a truly remarkable amount of power, a man who should have been deemed unqualified for the job the first time anyone described him as belligerent, yelled and cried and interrupted and talked back when questioned. And even just a few clips that kept getting played on various NPR programs that quickly came out with emergency, off-schedule episodes convinced me that it was good that I had not stayed home to watch the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing because they were not only stunningly demoralizing but also nothing new. I was wrong in thinking the occasion would be historic, would be a referendum on how the country has evolved in its views on women since Anita Hill (whose harasser still sits on the Supreme Court). No, this could only be historic to someone who has not had to undertake having courage to ask questions as a conscious project, and it is not hard to guess where that line falls. Most devastatingly, this was business as usual, just blown up, zoomed into, so that we can debate it and put it on gym TV screens as if countless women hadn’t been made quiet and small before and that still gained them no favors when it comes to dignity and trust. Women who were not told to be that way, even women who could be so strong and courageous.
I believe Dr. Blasey-Ford. Her pain and trauma getting upstaged by a man being loud to gain social capital and political power does not change the fact that she showed tremendous courage. It would have been historic if she could have been able to take up as much space and be as loud as she wanted but unfortunately the aftermath is just more of the same, her courage repackaged as a common, relatable experience, as a story that is almost unoriginal in its dismissal and disrespect when women re-tell it to each other again and again. It seems impossible to not just become even more tired, to shrink even further, when confronted with this but I don’t want to dismiss what Dr. Blasey-Ford did this week by acting as if something historic cannot possibly still be in our future. Out of respect for her and all the other women sharing their stories, we just have to keep trying to move forward, and trying to be loud.
Best,
Karmela
* In classical mechanics, sound can be thought of as a series of compressions and rarefactions of air or some other medium. In certain quantum liquids, in addition to such sound, the notion of zero sound can also be formulated by appealing to the idea of a quasiparticle. A quasiparticle emerges in a system where there are lots of interactions between its constituents so that a quasiparticle is a particle-like excitation ‘dressed’ by the interactions within the system. Fluctuations in the momentum distribution of quasiparticles can give rise to zero sound.
***
ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING: This past weekend, I took a half day on Friday and flew out to the East Coast to spend a weekend with my boyfriend in anticipation of his birthday. I returned to work on Tuesday and was somewhat predictably met with a busier schedule than I had anticipated. Luckily, I had tied up a lot of my teaching tasks before leaving town and could fit in a meeting with a colloquium speaker and a local experimental group, both of working on issues related to topologically protected states in meta-materials. As foreign as a lot of experimental work is to me, meta-materials continue to be a great source of fascination. They are system usually built up of some simple mechanical units – acoustic resonators or even simple rotators similar to fidget spinners – that are large, macroscopic and classical yet exhibit behaviors consistent with notions of topology that has arisen as one of the next big things in quantum mechanics. The experimentalists I had been on and off talking to for the past year would really like to take some ideas my group had theoretically examined, having to do with quasiperiodic modulations and fractals, and turn them into tangible experiments. At my most optimistic I let myself imagine that this could actually happen.
On this more recent Friday I was luckily not trapped on a delayed airplane and back in my probably favorite yoga class instead. I want to say that I did a handstand but really, I would have never gone vertical had the instructor not been there to help me up. My cold atomic vortex project feels something like that too – the recent dive into the literature has been helpful but I am still not quite holding up on my own.
LISTENING: I am quite hesitant to recommend any news podcasts but I do pretty heavily rely on NPR for both information and commentary so these two episodes of the NPR Politics Podcast are likely a good way to get up to speed on the details of the hearing I have referenced above. In addition, despite of how much I dislike their approach to interviewing anyone whose pain can be played up for shock and drama, New York Times’ The Daily ran a short summary of the Anita Hill case in this episode which, in my mind, is also important to be up-to-date on. On a similar historical note, the current season of Slate’s Slow Burn deals with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and should also be something of required listening when it comes to discussions of gender and inappropriate sexual behavior of powerful men in politics (and Leon Neyfakh is tremendous in his role as a considerate and even keeled narrator). WNYC’s United States of Anxiety is running a whole new season on women and gender in politics in the United States and so far it has been really informative, especially in its tracing back some of the issues back to the early days of women’s suffrage and not shying away from intersectional concerns. For a more narrow story of harassment, this episode of This American Life, describing the terrible treatment of an airport employee in New York is likely one of the best pieces of MeToo related reporting I have encountered so far. Finally, I wanted to recommend this old episode of Stitcher’s Unladylike discussing female friendships as well because I very strongly believe that community care and reaching out to those we love at times when they might be struggling is one of the big ways in which we can both fight and ameliorate the effects of the current, quickly deteriorating, state of civics. Many who compulsively yell ‘self care’ at every sign of distress neglect the fact that taking care of yourself often requires time, money and energy we might not have but support from our friends and communities does not have to be dictated by any of those things but can make a tremendous difference. Female friendships have historically been given something of a bad reputation but reclaiming them and showing other women love can only be a great asset these days.
Additionally, on the podcast front, I saw a live taping of Radiotopia’s Criminal a few nights ago and for a podcast about crime it was really fun and delightful. Phoebe Judge was relatable, endearing yet not fully toothless, the stories were as interesting and as carefully nuanced as on the taped show and having some visuals along them really went a long way. I really admire this work as it can tell gruesome stories and tragic stories without leaving one feeling like someone is being exploited or their life repackaged for easier consumption. If you need a pick-me-up, Judge’s other podcast, This is Love, is actually quite wonderful as well.
Since I happen to be quite susceptible to long playlists (I have made many) and suggestion algorithms that seem to get it right, I feel into something of a Spotify recommendation hole for post-metal this past week. The delineation of the genre from other types of more avant-garde metal (and what does that even mean) is something that can be debated but listening to Morne did slightly remind me of Cult of Luna (an all-time favorite) and I very much enjoyed their latest record Into the Night Unknown. Coming from the same list, Brainoil’s Death of This Dry Season was some solid metal as well, something that I will be returning to even though the post-metal label might not quite fit.
WATCHING: Since we only had a few days together, my boyfriend and I took the opportunity to be really lazy and watched more TV than we probably have in ages. We binged about half a season of Netflix’s Maniac and got drawn into it much more than either of us really anticipated. I had not seen True Detective, director Cary Fukunaga’s last big TV triumph, and did not realize how serious of an actor Jonah Hill, a lead actor together with a fairly crunchy Emma Stone, is these days but thanks to my podcast habits I knew that this show was angling to be something of a big deal. However, this had not prepared me for the mix of futurism and nostalgia that is very evident from its visuals nor the constant switching between satire, drama and pretty mechanical exercises in paying homage to very specific pieces of genre fiction. The world of maniac is something of a future-due-to-alternative-history and it is both stuck in the era of chunky screens and unironic vaporwave graphics and advanced enough to solve everything with technology and pills. It references Blade Runner as much as it references pop psychology and 80s and 90s bad science and action movie tropes (the amount of Japanese technology and executives reminded me of a discussion of Die Hard I heard a while back where it was pointed out that in this era the main American anxiety seemed to be that Asian countries would eat us all alive with their tiny Walkmans and super efficiency). In a lot of ways, it takes the William Gibson-esque ‘hi-tech, lo-life’ and runs with it in a way that makes it impossible to forget just how long ago he had coined the phrase and its accompanying aesthetic. To write much about the story Maniac is centered on would likely be to spoil it and I am not sure I am interested in continuing to watch it for the ruminations on trauma and human psychology as much as I am interested in how all of its elements are glued together anyway. I am weak for this sort of show to begin with, and these days media dealing with processing trauma is easier to stomach when presented as a flawless execution of colorful tropes rather than something more ugly.
Thanks to a local music and arts festival, this past week I also saw a Tig Notaro performance. I have never been a huge stand-up aficionado (the only other performance I have seen live has been a Maria Bamford show a friend had luckily dragged me to in college) but it felt good to be in a room where people were laughing out loud at a story about dental surgery and not being able to play piano for a couple of hours. Notaro’s set wasn’t political, wasn’t overly edgy and reminded me of a more dark take on classic Seinfeld or Ellen bits from a time when the stand-up portions of their shows did not feel outdated. A part of me wanted Notaro to say something more biting and more provocative but that part, the one that is probably way too invested in breaking news, quickly gave way to just appreciating how much laughing-out-loud the women sitting in the same row in the theater as I was managed to do. It’s good to just have a completely innocuous feel good experiences sometimes.
EATING: I ate a lot of hummus and falafels and one really good layered chocolate mini-cake during my trip. We cooked at home for two nights as well and I always really cherish that rare domestic time we get together, even though I almost always default to quickly throwing together something curry or chili-like and roasting a bunch of veggies instead of something more ostentatious. After I returned to Illinois, a friend gave me a bunch of produce they had gotten after volunteering on a farm and I was super happy to just eat eggplants, cherry tomatoes and rice and beans for the next few days. People who know me also know that I find food to be one of the most compelling gifts, so it might not be surprising that being invited to a Mid-Autumn Festival snow skin mooncake making dinner party made my weekend really great, and not just in the food department (and the friends that hosted made everything vegan!). The quick pumpkin cake recipe I am sharing below was my contribution to this party, more in line with the theme of celebrating the harvest and clearly not at all Chinese. However, given my own cultural background, coming to a dinner at someone’s house empty handed feels odd and I rarely bake for myself these days so making this cake gave me lots of good feelings and even though we had filled up on mooncakes, my friends still considered it to be a hit. In fact, I was the only one that did not pack any to bring back home. Unfortunately, I did not get any great pictures, but it is the sort of snack-cake, adapted from this coffee cake recipe, that does not fancy styling as it is sort of dense, down to earth and full of deep flavor that really calls for a warm beverage and a book or a tv show than a celebration. It would make for a great, albeit indulgent, breakfast component so I glazed it with some runny cashew yogurt amped up with powdered sugar but a streusel topping, a cream cheese frosting, a vanilla buttercream or even just some milk whisked with powdered sugar and lemon juice until sticky would make for good toppings as well.
You will need
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp pumpkin spice
1 cup pumpkin puree (canned, the kind where the only ingredient is pumpkin)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup liquid coconut oil
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup plant milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar or lemon juice
Preheat the oven to 350F and grease a round or square 9-inch baking dish (spread evenly with a thin coat of oil of vegan butter, then sprinkle with flour)
Make ‘buttermilk’: in a small bowl or a cup mix the plant milk with either apple cider vinegar or lemon juice, mix well and set aside so it can slightly curdle while you mix everything else
In a small bowl mix coconut oil, pumpkin puree, maple syrup and brown sugar
In a large bowl whisk together flour, baking soda and powder and spices
Add the ‘buttermilk’ into the pumpkin mixture
Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the pumpkin mixture, mix until no dry patches or streaks of flour remain
Pour into the prepared pan and bake about 30 minutes, checking whether a knife comes out clean at around 20 minutes. Once it does, take the cake out, flip onto a cooling rack and let cool completely before frosting
Tips: I have not tried this yet, but I would really like to add some shredded apples or carrots into this cake, as well as some chopped raisins, walnuts or pecans.
This type of batter would do quite well in muffins, but I would be quite vigilant about not overbaking it once divided into 12 muffin tins.
In addition to all topping suggestions above, an extra healthy option would be to bake or boil a sweet potato, then blend its flesh with 1/3-1/2 cup of peanut butter, some maple syrup and cocoa powder. This produces a very spreadable, glossy ‘frosting’ that is naturally quite sweet but not overpowering.
In theory I know that oil can be substituted by nut butters or apple sauce and all sugar can be replaced by maple syrup to make this dessert more nutritionally balanced and less of a sugary indulgence but I have not reached this level of health-craze just yet and therefore cannot vouch that this would actually work.