Tidbits

I have to admit that I've only partially been reading all your blogs. For some reason I have had no focus this week. I've been trying to read scientific papers and get through the abstracts and get bored. Then, yesterday, it happened. I started flowing, you know, my period started, I'm on the rag, ect. I feel that it is so unfair that my energy and attitude change this time of the month, and that I have cramps that make me want to stay in bed. Unfortunately I work from home so I can stay in bed. NO! I need to be productive.

Anyway, since I'm not able to focus I'm going to post a few bulletins of items I've been meaning to write about.

• "Soon I will post .... specifically about the undertone sexism such as posted here by Dr. Medusa." While I was in dissertation town I went to a comedy club with my friend and her husband (also a friend). This is the friend who recently had a baby, my godson. Someone they knew was one of the opening acts. (I should mention that the two opening acts and the headliner were women, a male comedian introduced all three of them and did short interludes of his own jokes.) While the entire night was a lot of fun I started to get a little agitated during the show once I realized that 80% of the jokes were about sex/gender, race or weight. I have to admit that some of these jokes are in deed funny, but I think it is important to think about why they are funny, and should they be funny. I decided not to say anything to my friends so not to depress their fun, but the opportunity came up a few days later and I had to bring it up. This friend is very open minded, a strong female and my good friend, so I was surprised when she said, "stereotypes are there for a reason." This is such an easy statement to make unfortunately it is not always true. Sometime stereotypes are not created by the "type" that is being stereo'd (?). There are times when these stereotypes are perpetrated by those who would like to repress a certain group. In addition stereotypes can be further instilled in the minds of the people as truth, or as blanket statements about a certain group of people, by constantly seeing the stereotype in the media. So, in summary, I would just like to remind everyone, if you don't already, to really think about what you laugh at and how funny it really is, not just to you but to the group that is being made fun of.
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• "I have officially applied for graduation and have a defense committee" Yes this is pretty exciting, but when I do the back calculations it doesn't seem plausible to turn in my dissertation by May 20th.
• Defend by April 20th
• Give dissertation to committee (5 people) by the first week in April.
• Go through a few drafts with adviser within the next 7 weeks.
  
• I'm not sure if my adviser is going to be as tough on my dissertation as he was with my master's thesis with somewhere around 10 drafts between us. I say this because he has told me that all I need to do is dump in my publications into a graduate school friendly documentation. But still 7 weeks is not a long time to go through 4-5 publications. One which I'm still waiting for data.
  
• My progress has increased since November. As one would hope, but I have yet to submit a publication. It is difficult to discuss publications here since I refer to them as numbers but one of the publications we re-decided to submit as a short letter, so I need to make the rest of the data not submitted in the letter exciting enough to submit as an additional manuscript.
• Not to mention how difficult it will be to organize 5 committee members, one from another state, at the end of a semester for my defense.
  
• Oh well, I've decided that summer won't be bad since I don't have a job lined up yet anyway. (which is also something I should blog about)
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• Dissertation town fun. Besides not getting to bed until 2am after the comedy show I had another week-end of late night fun. One Friday night I met some friends in a "city" for restaurant week. We went to a French restaurant since these are the gals that went with me to Europe/France this past September. Good times. Then we went to a bar that my friends rugby team was going to be at. This was also fun, even though I have bad feeling towards said rugby team. We got back to my friends house around 2am. Woke up, late, at 930am. We had planned to go to a bar in the morning to watch two of the six nations rugby tournament games. My friend made the executive decision to sleep in. Thank god. So we went to a diner for breakfast and then lounged on the couch and watched TV until 2ish. It was, then, off to the city for more fun. We just walked around and saw some sights and then met up with my old rugby team and other teams for karaoke night. More fun! I really miss these gals. But yet again I didn't get to sleep (in my office) until 2am-ish. So with all this lack of sleep I still managed to wake up at 9am (to a phone call) and get some work done before lunch with old lab mates. They both graduated with their master's degree and now work for consulting companies. One works for a large international company and another for a small two office company. It was interesting listening to their stories. After lunch I stayed up until midnight getting samples analyzed. It was not until Monday after swimming that my headache started, reminding me that I need my sleep.
  

Let's hope my concentration comes back soon.