So when I say that I read somewhere that around the 4-5 month mark, most parents start to feel as if they’ve emerged from a cave and begin to start to see glimpses of the life they led before the baby, I mean that I read it somewhere. Like maybe Parents magazine. Or the back of a can of formula. Or a diaper advertisement. I have no idea.

That said, it is true. All of a sudden, life is returning to something which, if not normal, is at the very least human. I’ve been writing on my book all week for the first time since Torsten’s birth (and my spectacularly impossible post-C-section last-minute NaNoWriMo win), and I’ve decided to enroll in a CELTA certification course next month which will presumably eat all of my non-sleeping time for the month of May so that at some point after the summer I can either teach ESL/EFL part-time here in the area or can privately tutor foreign students. (Note that I can only do the course right now because Christian is a) officially on paternity leave, and b) a really nice husband…)

Oh, and this week I got to plan a few days of research in London while we’re in Europe in August. Muahahaha.

In other words, for the first time in months, in addition to being Mama, I get to be Krista too.

Not that I don’t love being Mama – I love being Mama – but it’s sort of exciting to be able to be doing other stuff too. A Mama who is also Krista is a better Mama for Torsten to have – I’m sure of it.

And let me repeat this: my husband is awesome.

This post is not, primarily, about that, though I’ll write about it briefly, and maybe more than once. In general, I haven’t been writing enough lately, and when I don’t write, I find it hard to keep my life straight. The one thing I’ve been doing a lot of lately is trying to keep my life straight.

So here’s the state of things, with some background:

When we lived in Los Angeles, it is no secret that I was relatively miserable with life there. Neither of us wanted to move to Los Angeles – I’d told more than one person that it’s the one place I’d never live – but it was necessary. One of us was working on a dissertation all the time in a cramped poorly-built one-bedroom apartment, and the other was stuck in an endless cycle of sleep 6 hours, spend 3-4 hours on trains and buses, and work 8-12 hours for The Man ™, with little time for anything else, including the cramped one-bedroom apartment and the beloved dissertation writer sequestered within. It is a sad state of affairs when the guy working on the dissertation in the drab, dark apartment under tremendous time pressure is the happier one. But it was to be expected from the circumstances, and it was ok because we knew it was temporary.

And now, now we’re in Denver. The dissertation-writer is now a professor, doing what he loves, and the former drudge for The Man ™ is drudge no longer, having the time and space to figure out what it is she wants. We’re in a good place, both literally and figuratively. And now it’s time for me to figure things out.

When I left my job with The Man ™, I returned to grad school after a year off. All of the coursework was done, and all that was left was research, so I figured it was worth a go. I won’t say I didn’t do this with some reservations, because I did, but having finally gotten my crap together after a decade in which my life hit more highs and lows than a bipolar heroin addict (no offense to bipolar heroin addicts), I thought I’d go back and try to finish things on my own terms, under my own expectations, and without 10 tons of other people’s problems on my shoulders while I did it. My husband, as always, was remarkably supportive. So was my absolutely awesome advisor.

And so I went back. I flew back and forth to the armpit of America all semester (I don’t care about those of you who’ve voted for New Jersey or West Memphis, Arkansas as The Armpit ™ – as far as I’m concerned, Lafayette, Indiana really does take the cake, and you’ll never convince me otherwise), and I frantically packed about 6 months worth of background reading and analysis into less than a semester. I wrote a prelim document which, while it was not perfect, was a significant chunk of work which would have pushed things forward (my advisor and I were both happy with it).

All in all, it went about as well as it could have gone. I can’t say that I didn’t get excited about the research or about making progress, because I did. Sometimes.

Of course, as always in life, other things were going on too. And those things are not the reason for what I’ve decided to do, although I’d be foolish to deny they may have had an impact.

But, you see, my husband and I had been having a conversation all semester about whether or not I really want this PhD.

I’m going to say something here that will perhaps offend some people that love and respect me, but it needs to be said. In the past 5 years – particularly since I left the Purdue CS department so unhappy (most grad students I know, it should be said, leave the Purdue CS department unhappy, and many very smart ones without the degrees they came for, but that’s a story for another day…) – the number of people that I love, respect and care about who’ve said something to me to the effect of “You’re so smart – you really should finish this PhD”, or “You really need a PhD” (for my own ego reasons, or because no one wants to see another woman give up her career for her husband’s – one favorite professor of mine was worried about me for feminist reasons – or because the speaker simply thought I’d make a good professor) , or “You’re so close to done – how can you stop now?” has been staggering.

None of these people are entirely wrong, with the exception of the person who was worried that I was giving up my career for my husband. My ego took a pretty good bitchslapping in the Purdue CS department, and being married to a very intense academic professional does mean needing to hold one’s own, ego-wise (this isn’t a commentary on my husband, by the way – my father is a professor, and from a lifetime of samples, I’d say the need to have an intellectual backbone just goes with the territory of being with smart people). So, sure, ego is a concern. And once upon a time, when I was very young and naïve, I undersold myself so that I wouldn’t intimidate people, spending a good bit of time hiding the fact that I was smart until it got me into a relationship with a lunatic that I almost failed to make it out of. That wasn’t good. So no, I’m not an idiot, and yes, I could get a PhD. And it is certainly inarguable that I have put a great deal of time and effort into getting through this many academic hoops. There are only a couple of hoops left. Those hoops, it can be said, are very big and would take a lot of my time. And the payoff at the end – emotionally, intellectually and financially – really wouldn’t put me ahead of where I am now. As for the possibility of “giving up my career for my husband”, in a strange sense, the move to linguistics itself was a career decision based upon my then-boyfriend-now-husband long ago. That decision was to stay at Purdue but transfer to a different discipline rather than transferring to a less dysfunctional CS department at another university while he finished up. Whether or not that was the “right” thing to do, from a feminist point of view, is irrelevant – it was my choice to make, and I’m happy I gave the relationship a chance to be what it is, regardless of professional outcome.

In any event, to those I love and care about who are in academia reading this, let me just make something clear: just because I am not choosing to become a high priest of the religion doesn’t mean I don’t worship at the temple or respect its rites. The long and short of it is this: it just isn’t what I want to do. And after I’d finished the prelim – after the only thing this was about was me and what I wanted, because my ego was satisfied that I could do this and that I’d done very well so far – I could finally step back and decide that without anyone else’s expectations or desires in the way. That perspective was worth all of the flying back and forth and reading and crunching ideas and wracking my brains to try to make a cohesive whole out of a bunch of disparate research.

Of course, there is this “something else” that was going on at the time too. Right around the time I defended my prelim, I was about 6 weeks pregnant. This was our first pregnancy – we were guardedly excited about it, but hadn’t told anyone. Looking at having a baby in the not-too-distant future and at where I really want my life to go certainly was an impetus for trying to get some real perspective, but it wasn’t the reason for my decision – in fact, being a grad student and taking care of a kid is a lot more compatible than working 9-to-5 and doing the same. But it played its part in getting me thinking. It emphasized what I already knew – that I cared a lot more about getting into a position where I could teach and raise a family than I did about being called Dr. Grothoff. Mainly, I care about being happy. A piece of paper, a “significant contribution to the field” and a ticket to possibly get in line in the tenure rat-race just aren’t going to do that for me personally right now.

And so I made a decision and gave myself a few weeks to think about it to make sure. I’d leave the linguistics program for good, work on my German and refresh my math skills, and go back to school for a teaching certification in a year or so. That decided, I set off to get through Christmas and not do a whole lot of thinking (or anything else). We planned to tell my parents about the pregnancy at Christmas, and I planned not to worry for a while.

Of course, I’m finding that people never talk about these things unless they go well. And this did not, unfortunately, go well. A couple of weeks later at the ultrasound – hours after my last post – we saw that the embryo had stopped developing right around the prelim, and that I would soon miscarry. The next day I went in to the hospital to complete the miscarriage (there was absolutely no chance that it would continue – there was really nothing there), and it wasn’t pleasant. But it happened, and we’re all right. It was a pretty routine occurrence, and as much as it might seem like I should be devastated right now, I’m really not. Disappointed, certainly, but since most first-trimester miscarriages are due to one-time genetic defects, I’d really rather it have happened early on. Mostly, it was just uncomfortable and weird. Thursday, you’re pregnant. Friday, you’re not. And there wasn’t a damned thing to be done about it.

Now, you may be wondering why I’d mention this on a blog to begin with if I’m OK and don’t want pity (which I really, really don’t). Well, first of all, it’s part of the story, and it’s my story to tell. One thing I’ve discovered in the last few years is that people may not want you to tell your own story because it makes them uncomfortable, but it’s your story to tell, as long as you don’t shove it down anyone’s throat. But I’m also discovering that nearly every woman I’ve talked to about this – let’s just guess 95% – has been through one or two early miscarriages, and no one talks about it until they run into someone else that has. Yes, its traumatic, but geez… it’s much worse if you think it really only happens to people who are sick or ill or somehow defective, and clinical numbers from the doctor’s office don’t really fix that perception. The thing that made me feel the most normal was having someone tell me, “yeah, that happened to me too.” Because even when you’re emotionally ok with it, it’s about 2 weeks of Teh Suck physically afterward, and so you really do need someone to tell you, “Yeah, that happens.”

So anyway, that was more than I wanted to say about it, but that happened too.

So it’s been one of those months. Up and down and back and forth. And now, now I’m studying for a math exam required by the state to teach, and looking at taking the GRE again, since they won’t take my 7-year-old scores (rip-off!).

And so with all of that, here’s the executive summary: I’ve finally decided to do what I want to do, regardless of what anyone else thinks, even the people I respect most. And for the next year or so, I’m going to work on my own projects and being with my family and doing what makes me happy.

And that, my friends, is just about as good as it gets in life, even if it takes 10 pages to give the setup for it.

The one thing I’ve discovered, though, is that even what seems like “false starts” give you something. Creating the database (and its lovely interface) structured my thoughts about what some of the important ideas are, and spending all of that time working on it means it stays in the forefront of my mind while going through the case study summaries I wrote. And knowing what is – and is not – in this set of case studies helped give me a context for where my analysis of these studies goes into the larger prelim paper.

I will say one thing, though… my previous prelim paper (before I moved away from computational linguistics) was a pain to write, but it was more straightforward. This one is taking a lot of perspective-shifting in my brain, and it’s easy to get down about it. In the end, though, I think it will be worth it. I hope so.

So anyway, I’m writing – and so far, while the content is good, the text is not exactly beautiful.

Thank God no one ever sees my first drafts

But hey, I’m writing, and writing means I’m one or more steps closer to having the thing written.

And hey… it’s snowing. One more reminder that we have truly escaped L.A.

The Johns Hopkins researchers used statistical estimates to come up with that figure, which considerably exceeds the Bush administration’s estimate of 30,000. Because finding out the actual number of deaths is difficult both due to the security situation and the fact that journalists and other third-party sources are not able to access much outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad, counting bodies doesn’t really do much. And in case some of this is news to you, let me repeat part of that again – journalists and other third-party sources are not able to access much outside of the Green Zone in Baghdad. So just as the U.S. government has prevented us from seeing dead servicemen returning home, draped in flags, they’re making it very difficult for any accurate reporting of what is going on in Iraq to occur. And they figure they can just say “eh, 30,000″, and no one will be the wiser.

First off, can I just say that 30,000 people is a lot of &*!#ing dead people? 30,000 people is not OK. But that’s assuming the administration is either not lying or is actually aware of what’s going on. You can take your pick of which you choose to disbelieve – personally, I think they’ve lied so much to themselves that they actually believe whatever comes out of their spin machine (leaving those of us in the “reality-based world” to toss our cookies in disbelief) , allowing at least some of them to remain unaware of what is going on – but it doesn’t really matter. Our Glorious Leader Mr. Bush’s response on the JHU estimate was typical – their approach as been “pretty well discredited” and the estimate itself is “just not credible.” Me, I’ll take 655,000 for the win, Alex. Or for the horrible, horrible loss. Or for something approaching the truth, at any rate.

Tell me, Mr. Bush – you got through Yale with C’s and your daddy’s backing. Since when do you – or most of your administration – have the knowledge to discredit peer-reviewed material published in a respected academic journal? Oh, right – you guys are the guys who still think global warming is up for debate (despite peer-reviewed science to the contrary), and your vice-president still thinks we found WMD in Iraq. And those in your administration who are smart enough to know better – ahem, Dr. Rice – are true believers, pimping the party line for the party’s good and the rights of the upper class.

Let me tell you something about how the rest of the world sees us, Mr. Bush – a couple of years ago, two Arab classmates of mine in Germany were absolutely shocked to find out that I, an American, openly disapprove of your administration. One of them took me aside and very quietly told me with significant disdain that in his community, they see you as the reincarnation of another murderous despot from about 7 decades back. I wouldn’t make that particular comparison; it’s a charged accusation to make, and it does a disservice to the memory of the 11 million brutally and deliberately murdered in the Holocaust. Your swath of human destruction has been ruthlessly careless – ruthlessly and intentionally ignorant and stupid – rather than ruthlessly and deliberately calculated. But with more than half-a-million Iraqis dead, more dying every day, our complete mishandling of any issue in the Middle East, our game of nuclear chicken with Iran (and a strike group of ships whose deployment was moved up so that they’ll arrive off Iran’s western coast around October 21st – October surprise, anyone?), and a constant stream of lies coming out of the White House about all of it, I don’t think it’s hard to see why those in the Middle East would see it that way.

Half-a-million people, Mr. Bush. Given the choice between you – who has stifled press freedoms, trampled the Constitution, castrated the Legislative Branch, skewed the Judicial Branch, brought us into completely unnecessary war, ignored urgent warnings from the intelligence community, destroyed our educational system, and lied, lied, lied – or a group of respected and respectable researchers, I think it’s you who has been pretty well discredited.

I’m not a statistician, and I’m well aware of the ways statistics are used and abused in science. I’m afraid, though, that the Bush administration is going to have to do better than “pretty well discredited” this time. And as long as they keep third-parties and journalists from being able to accurately report on the situation, statistical estimates are about the best we can do. And the real point is this – none of these people had to die in the first place.

Anyhow… I’ve been back in Denver since last Thursday. My trip home from Indiana was not terribly pleasant – I’d been up all night, since that was about the only way to catch a morning flight. Then my plane was delayed – apparently the airline knew about this the night before but didn’t think to, say, tell anyone (the Northworst moniker fits) – such that I had 12 minutes to catch a connecting flight in another concourse, booking across the airport on a torn calf muscle (and since the next flight from Detroit to Denver was oh, 7 hours later, I needed to be on that plane). Then the flight was packed, meaning up-close-and-personal time in cattle class with strangers and my wide behind, and then, well, I passed out in bed. I was in that near-hallucination mode by the time I got home.

Since then, I’ve been trying to combat post-travel lethargy and have spent a lot of time in the garden. I’m getting back on track with research today; I’ve been much less productive than I should have been this weekend. I’m hoping to make some real progress tonight, but we’ll see how it goes. I’ve also started on my German again – my pronunciation is lousy, and I’ve been putting off working on that for some time now, so I worked on that some this morning. That’s the worst thing about the research I’m doing – it makes me want to work more on my own language learning!

(In an unrelated aside, I’m currently also in the midst of baking deliciously grainy bread so that we don’t end up eating crap for breakfast like we seem to when I get too busy. Mmmm… fresh wheat bread!)

When you’re working remotely, sometimes it’s really hard to be sure how you’re progressing; after a nice long talk, though, I feel really good about where things are going. She’s also just a generally enjoyable person, so I always look forward to talking with her – but it was a good talk about research and the kind of stuff I’m encountering, and I feel much less like I’m spinning my wheels than I did at the end of summer.

Purdue may not be my favorite place to visit, but I do feel intellectually recharged Which is good, because the food and the scenery here suck. (Well, ok, so in about two weeks, the trees here will be beautiful, but otherwise… Teh Suck. And yes, I know, half-decent food can be found in the greater “metropolitan” (*cough*) area, but not near campus (Khana Khazana and Blue Nile excepted)… I have no problem understanding why I gained so much weight while here anymore. The food options are basically pretty bad. Bar food, bar food, bar food, fast food. Not so appealing.)

Regardless, it’s sort of odd to return here as a remote student. Last year, driving toward Chicago on my way back to Los Angeles, I was having a little celebration with myself, saying “this is the last time I’ll be in Lafayette, if I have anything to say about it!” I clearly lied – I definitely had something to say about it, and I chose to come back with a surprising degree of ease. As I said, not everything was bad here, and I do really like the department I’m associated with. Having a supportive environment and advisor is worth its weight in gold if you can get it – but it still feels weird every time I’m here, whatever the reason.

So anyhow… I’m here. In the 24-hour study room of the undergraduate library. I don’t know why, but it’s easier to work here than alone in my hotel room. Go figure.

I’m still cracking away at the stuff I wanted to finish last week – it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be, but it’s coming together in a preliminary state that I like. One of the reasons I’m discovering it’s frustrating, though, is that it’s not really in a state where I can write much up about it. Makes a Hell of a spreadsheet, though The real work at the moment, to be honest, is getting my head around some of the things I want to say about the problem, and trying to hit my own theories over the head with various things to see how they hold up. Or trying to figure out what size hammer I need to hit them with.

However, I’m getting pretty loopy due to the fact that I didn’t really get sleep last night – had to be out the door at 3 am Mountain Time today to return the Rental Car Formerly Known As a Big Banana On Wheels ™ to the airport (we occasionally rent a car the day before one of us flies to ensure timely arrival at the airport and, as a bonus, run a crapload of errands), and I hadn’t slept much the night before either, so except for a couple of unfortunate naps on the plane and a short nap in the hotel room, my brain is pretty much tapped out. I’ll have to sleep soon.

Ah well… back to work for a bit. Just needed a breather.

Grrrr.

Oh holy gods of Ibuprofen and moisture, can I have some respite now please???

That’s my only complaint about Denver, really… dry dry dry. We turned on the furnace last night, and I suspect the timing could have been better… I’ve got wet laundry hanging up to dry around the house now, hoping it helps.

(Oh well… End of complaining rant )

No, it’s not because you’re a confessed, proud geek (I’m a fan of geeks). It’s not even some sort of need to kick Wesley Crusher in effigy (I’ve no beef with Wesley – my friends in college and I used to cheer Wesley on, hoping he’d get more chicks instead of freakin’ Riker da Pimp all the time).

No, it’s because in this post, Wil introduced me to what I’m sure will be my downfall, Pandora. (You might say he opened Pandora’s box, but then I’d have to beat your ass as well.) With eclectic musical taste like mine, the last thing in the world I need is a service which will take artists I like, find more like them, and stream me a radio station according to my tastes. And let me give feedback, to make it more like what I want. I’ll spend hours customizing and adding to it, I know I will. Audio crack cocaine, I’m sure of it.

Damn you, Wil! I proclaim you the bane of non-tone-deaf easily-distracted researchers everywhere!

*goes back to tweaking Pandora analyzing case studies*

(Note that it is now super-late Wednesday – er, Thursday now, I guess, so this is now officially frustrating. Time to put on the coffee!! This was much easier at 19 than in my mid-30s, you know…)

I’ll be back at Purdue for a couple of days in two weeks, and discussions there should help pull things together a little more sanely, but right now, the process feels a little bit like the way my husband cooks – me, I usually use a cookbook when cooking something new. Christian will just pull stuff out and start dumping it into the pot until it’s right. (And, I might add, it’s usually delicious!)

I need to learn to let go and do more of the latter…