Tuesday morning things

* Meeting last night, so limited worktime on any projects. I did add a couple more rounds to the body of the Big Mac.

* Moments of indecision this morning: the departmental photo is being taken, so I had to figure out what to wear. Nothing that would wash out my complexion (I already look like a ghost next to a few of the other faculty), nothing too aggressively feminine (not that knit dress, not the one I have to wear a sweater over because otherwise I'm conscious of my bustline all day). Not that grey dress that is just a little low cut. I also put my hairbrush in my purse for last-minute touch-ups (I already have a lipstick over here for reapplication). I finally went with a long medium-brown skirt and lilac turtleneck (it's cold again here). I did add my long strand of multicolor (white and two shades of brown) dyed freshwater pearls to dress the thing up a little.

The thing is: one of us is retiring at the end of August, so aren't we just going to have to do this again in six months or so?

Since I've had the digital camera and have posted photos here of myself in knitwear, I have got a little more comfortable with having my picture made (I used to like to run away when someone had a camera and was taking "casual" shots), but I still spend an awful lot of time excluding outfits that I think are wrong.

* The photo is at 12:30, and I get out of class at 12:15. My SOP on Tuesdays this semester is to go home and eat lunch at home after class. (And I couldn't face packing a lunch for today). I slipped a granola bar in my purse just in case. Some days I get hungry before 1 pm, some days I don't. And I've learned not to let myself get too hungry; I get weak and a little distracted. And sometimes cranky. (There's a study that has apparently shown that 'hangry' is a thing. I'm not part of a couple but I know that my tolerance for stuff like "but I don't KNOW how to convert acres into hectares!" or "But you never told ME specifically there was going to be an exam today, and how should I know that when I wasn't in class!" is way way lower when it's past noon and I've been operating on three ounces of orange juice and a small bowl of cereal consumed at 6 am.... Actually, this whole study makes me think about how many millions of Americans are on some kind of ill-advised diet plan (as opposed to a smart diet plan, where they get enough nutrition but limit junk) and are just hungry all the time and make poor decisions and are snappy. I know when I did ill-advised dieting in college ("Nothing more than 1250 calories a day, and you have to write down EVERY SINGLE THING you eat") I got really cranky and could only last a couple weeks on it.)

Pull quote: ""What we conclude is that glucose is the food for the brain that we need to exercise self-control," Bushman says. "And when people's glucose levels are low, they are poorer at exercising self control.""

Interesting. So, a large proportion of the population is expected to exercise high self-control over what they eat (if you read any typical 'women's' magazine) and yet they are depriving themselves of the very thing that allows for that self-control. (There are previous studies that suggest that people who are sort of chronically hungry make poor decisions. That says something kind of sad about people in poverty who are "food insecure," that it would probably make it harder to do things to overcome that. But it also says something about the dieting mentality, where people who CAN afford to feed themselves choose not to. Or choose not to do so in an intelligent way.)

*  Some days I realize what a dinosaur I am. They are having "brown bag lunches" here on campus (short presentations on different things.) I've never gone to one because afternoon labs makes doing anything over the noon hour difficult, but the one for this week is "Using Twitter in the classroom" and I admit my reaction is kind of "and why would I want to?" Oh, I can see how some classes, particularly large classes, might find it useful - but I would just find it another distraction. Seriously, I wonder what things like Twitter and instant Facebook access on the smartphone and all that is doing to attention spans and styles of working and styles of interacting.

Also, it directed participants to "bring your smartphone." I suppose I will assimilate into the Borg eventually but I really don't want a smartphone, when I see what it has done to a lot of people: I can sit waiting for a meeting with a group of people I know, and everyone else is dinking around on Facebook on their phone, and no one is TALKING. (I should bring my knitting and pull it out, just as a little statement.) I know I can get sucked into internet stuff awfully easily: I wish no one had ever told me about the 2048 game and all its variations (there are a couple Ponified forms out there, there's a Doge form, and there's supposedly one that uses terms from academic publishing like "revise" and "resubmit" and the 2048 tile is "published). So I really don't want one.

Actually, one of my silly quixotic life goals is this: to be the last holdout faculty on campus who doesn't have a smartphone. I'm getting close to winning at that.