Back home again

As is typical, just some disjointed thoughts until I have put away stuff and rested up a little.

When we last left our "heroine" (I make no claims to being such; I once claimed to a person poking at me about something to do with my single state, "I'm not even a priority in MY OWN LIFE"), she was suffering the gift of the conference snafu fairy: her abstract had not made it in the proceedings for the conference.

Fortunately, she heavily redacted the e-mail (which originally contained the words "I am deeply hurt...") before sending it to the conference bigwig, who was, incidentally, her graduate advisor all those years ago.

Yeah, as it turned out, a combination of a water leak in the building he had been shunted to with the other still-somewhat-active retirees, a new e-mail client, and possibly negligence on someone else's part, and mine got left out even though it was approved.

(Another issue I have: I tend to never think my work is quite good enough. While that serves me well in some aspects - I keep pushing and striving until things are as nearly perfect as I can make them - it is not good for my emotional well-being).

But anyway, I was assured that yes, my poster was in, and in fact, someone had cancelled at the last minute, so my poster would be on their easel.

(Easel? ruh-roh. My poster was a big sheet of paper, the better to be rolled up and transported in a tube. But as it turned out, there were slightly-too-thin foamcore boards to thumbtack the posters to).

And the train was not as late as I was originally warned...only about an hour.

When I arrived, though, and my mom picked me up, she said, "I didn't want to tell you yesterday because you were already upset..."

Oh, what now. What now? Which of my few remaining relatives has died? What fresh horror has befallen someone I knew from up there? What?

Well, it wasn't good news, of course, but it wasn't unexpected and it was one of the lesser things it could have been: my brother and sister-in-law's 15 year old Maine Coon Cat, who had been poorly for a while (kidney disease) went into kidney failure and had to be put to sleep. I think my brother was equally disturbed by the fact that my niece didn't seem to react much to it, but she's not yet four, and maybe doesn't understand yet. (My first experience with death was with a family pet. And I reacted pretty strongly to it, but I was six, and was old enough to understand what it meant and to be very sad. I actually still remember it pretty vividly and how I reacted....actually pretending that a Siamese cat hand puppet I had was the cat, and even as I sobbed over it and said "I'm so glad you're here, I'm so glad you're still here" I knew it didn't work, that I couldn't pretend. Yes, at six. Maybe I'm such a serious adult because I shed the childhood ability to live in a fantasy too soon)

But still: Blooming HECK, 2016.

The conference was fine. Not outstanding, not terrible. Most of the bad conference stuff (I should make a "conference problem bingo card" up some time) that I've seen didn't happen. Most of the technical issues were minor and were things like people hitting the wrong button on the remote and advancing their slides when they wanted the laser pointer.

I was disappointed in that none of my old grad-school cohort was there. Last I knew, most of them were still working in Illinois but maybe they couldn't get off work, or maybe they're no longer in the field, or maybe they moved on to another career. (It HAS been nearly 20 years, which seems unthinkable to me.)

I did see the three remaining (still alive; the fourth has died) committee members from that campus. One is retired; two are still active and still have grad students. One of the committee members came and sat next to me several times during the mass meetings and talked with me, and at first that struck me as slightly unusual: I am an absolute nobody with nothing to offer in the way of networking for him. But then it dawned on me that, like me, he knew almost nobody at the conference - I was one person he knew. And as my mother remarked (she knows him slightly from campus) that he might be somewhat shy, and that talking to someone who is "known" is less of an effort than trying to break into a new group. And as someone who is somewhat shy myself (despite my ability to generally talk with people I don't know), it does take a lot of activation energy to walk up to a group and try to break in.

Not very many people stopped by my poster. The upside is I didn't get the semi-famous semi-somebody doing a "dominance mount" question (though that is more common in talks, where they have an audience, than at a poster). The downside is that it does get a bit lonely standing by a poster and not talking to anyone. (My poster was one of the more technical ones at the meeting - I really shouldn't have worried about it "not being enough")

A couple other thoughts:

- The student center on campus (it was my grad school) still SMELLS the same as it did 20 years ago. And yes, I remember what it smelled like.

- The field trip was to a site I had done a little research project for a class some 20 years ago, and yes, the same place looked much the same as it did then.

- I picked up a few pieces of conference swag. Scientific conference swag is generally a poor comparison to comics-convention or sci-fi-convention swag. I have a poster of the life cycle of the monarch butterfly to put up in my poster gallery next to my office, and a little booklet on how to identify the seedlings of prairie plants, which will come in handy. There were people giving out seed packets of "butterfly mixes" and I encouraged my mom to take some, but they were all Illinois region seeds and would not do well here (and there's also the question of outbreeding depression with local populations) so I didn't take any. I did get a little stress ball with the name of one of the seed-sellers on it, and a mock-carabiner ("mock" because it has "DO NOT USE FOR CLIMBING" stamped on it.) But no posters of Twilight Sparkle and no limited-edition figurines or fun stuff like that.

- Two booksellers (university presses) there. One didn't have anything I needed (it was mostly upper-Midwest identification books, that have limited utility here), but I did buy a couple books from the other and they are being shipped to me.

- This conference skews VERY much older-career people. Lots of grey heads there. (Lots of aging hippies, too, I think). I don't know if the mid-career people like me either are going to the "bigger" conferences in the hope of self-promotion, or if they aren't doing conferences right now, or what. (There were some grad students and early-career folks there; a lot of the Nature Conservancy types tend to be 20-somethings with few encumbrances and a willingness to live on $500 a month and the experience.)

Then again, I'm going a little grey myself these days. Not much as yet, but I can see more white hairs on my head than a few years ago. (And no, as I've said before: I'm not going to bother to dye; that takes more energy for maintenance than I have)

- Most of the people there are site managers or agency folks or people who are very much on-the-ground doing fieldwork day after day and I admit at a couple points I felt I didn't quite fit in, as someone who spends maybe 85% of her working time teaching rather than doing research. I don't know. On the one hand: I love teaching and I think I'm pretty good at it but on the other I can see I don't have the quick-to-hand field knowledge as much any more as I once did. And it's harder for me to talk with agency people, I spent a lot of the time on the field trip not saying anything.

I will also say I felt homesick again leaving out of there last night. That's odd, as I have lived here (Oklahoma) now for 17 years, and I lived there for only 9 - so I have lived here almost twice as long, and lived here nearly as long as I lived in Ohio growing up. I THINK the homesickness is partly memories of grad school, which in retrospect was really a relatively carefree and happy time in my adult life: perhaps the most carefree and happy time. I was teaching, but I wasn't the ultimate authority: if a student resisted my enforcement of the class rules and went to the professor, the professor told them "straighten up, fly right, respect your TA." I wasn't making much money but didn't have much in the way of bills: I lived with my parents and they didn't make me pay rent or chip in for utilities. I was surrounded by people who were pretty much on campus from 8 am until 6 or 7 pm, and someone was always around. Also, my friends were, by and large, like me: single and childless and able to make plans on the spur of the moment. And we did things as a group: going to movies, playing bocce ball, having cookouts. And there was a campustown: it was easy to say to a labmate, "Hey, you want to go over to the Pizza Hut tomorrow for lunch?" or "I'm going to run down to Babbitt's and see if they got any new books in, want to come?" Here, any kind of plans to eat lunch together off campus require a lot of juggling: who is going to drive, where is going to be quick enough for those of us with afternoon labs....and so we mostly don't. And I admit, I kind of miss the camaraderie of being part of a group that weren't the "big dogs" but were one step below them - so we could razz on our major professors when they were out of earshot, but at the same time if there was some logistical hangup, those professors by and large helped us deal with them. Now, so much of it is on US to fix problems, and we are the "authorities" that the underlings (our students) razz on (MOSTLY out of our earshot). And it's not the same. And of course,most of my colleagues are married, many have kids, and so there's that other layer of responsibilities to be dealt with.

Also, they have something like eight grocery stories in that town, and I have wal-mart and the little Green Spray. (And it's even harder now to get to Sherman: they are having to repair part of the highway down near Denison; it buckled in the heat this week). I think that "if I can't get it in town, I probably can't get it" kind of thing gets to me a little.