Bummed

As I was sitting down to write my final paper of the semester, I checked my email and saw this highlighted at the top:

Subject: SUMMER 2011 SECTION CANCELLED BY DEPARTMENT

One or more of your registered classes has been cancelled by the
course department. The Office of the Registrar has made arrangements
to waive the charge associated with dropping this course.

Subject Area: SLIS-S
Catalog Nbr: 603
Class Nbr: 10510

The course number here corresponds to a workshop in usability testing, which was the one class I was looking forward to within the next year. But information science students don't give a damn about usability, so too few people signed up for it.

Now I'm bummed. And mad. Not only was one of my few hopes of learning something useful before graduation shot down, but I'll have to find some other class to make up the credits (and I'm certainly not taking Python, Web Graphics, Podcasting, or any of the other pseudo-programming workshops the department decided to pay for instead). The only plus side is that I'll have some free hours this summer to get back to my personal projects. That, and I have yet another bullet point to my reply when the Alumni Association comes a-calling for donations.

Bulldozing

It's happened again.

At the beginning of this year, I made some "new semester resolutions" that included making sure I don't let school or work get the better of me. For a while, I stuck to them. I took weekends off, slept on a regular schedule, and had a happy laid-back relationship with my classmates. Then the assignments started, and the readings piled up, and the staff at my workplace got greedy for more and more features. I did manage to keep my exercise schedule tight, but by now I'm eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for at least one meal a day and spending my Saturdays glued to Microsoft Access 2007.

I can attribute my spiral back into workaholism to two insidious words: "Group Projects."

I hate group projects.

I don't hate my group members...most of the time. All but one of them this semester are darling people. But (a) darling does not necessarily mean hard-working, and (b) there's always that one. Last semester it was the president of the SLA student chapter, whose vocabulary did not include the word "compromise." This semester it's a dual masters candidate whose pride is more important to her than the quality of our product. So while I enjoyed working with these groups and think the projects we undertook were valuable (both for our clients and our resumes) these two bullet points boil down to me seizing 90% of the work and refraining from taking credit for it during the evaluations.

This shoots my stress level up in another two bullet points: (a) there's the stress of the actual work, which robs me of my youth, and (b) as a human being, I hate the social ramifications of taking charge. I don't like ignoring a person's feelings and obliterating her work so we can get a decent grade. I don't like eclipsing my group members' contributions, or watching them struggle to preserve the group dynamic and defer to me at the same time.

Sweetie says all this conflict is silly; just do the work and tell the professor you did. In other words, "Stop being such a girl." Apparently, working with people is less complicated if you're male. Men gain social status by boasting their accomplishments; women lose it and can earn a few choice nicknames too. If Sweetie wants to make friends, he lures people into his posse with bold leadership. If I want to keep friends, I have to flaunt my flaws and be as non-threatening as possible. Basically, it's like this:



Next week we will present our final projects and turn in our papers, and then I will begin an internship where most of my work will be solo. I'll have calm months where I won't have to step on many toes. Then it will be back to monopolizing class discussions and eating Pop Chips for dinner as I hack at portions of a paper that were assigned to other people.

The Price of Beauty

Usually, when people talk about "the price of beauty," they're referring to some physical or psychological toll they're subjecting themselves to in the name of looks. You know, like paying your dues through sit-ups or sticking to the salad at the family barbecue. But I've been thinking lately, ruminating over clips from What Not to Wear or blogs toting the latest magic bullet for perfect skin, and I've come to the conclusion that it is virtually impossible to meet modern standards of beauty if you are not literally wealthy.

First of all, most humans do not wake up in the mornings with a supermodel's hair and face. Washing and regular brushing is usually enough to keep the former at a decent level of attractiveness, but if you want to look gorgeous it takes regular trips to the salon. And not just Great Clips...a good salon. This means $20-$60 every few months, or weeks if you have a short, trendy, or artificially colored coif. Then there's all the products you're supposed to use when you're at home: gels, sprays, serums, deep conditioners, and different kinds of brushes and irons. While they're at it, women also shell out enough on manicures, pedicures, or body hair removal to equal the cost of an exotic vacation each year.


There are also very few people who can wake up with a supermodel's skin. I doubt even supermodels wake up with a supermodel's skin. If you have a basically clear complexion, it's $7-$8 for a bottle of cleanser to keep it that way. If you have a problematic complexion (like me), it's more cash down the drain for benzoyl peroxide creams, salicylic acid wipes, moisturizers, clay/sulfer masks, and oil-free sunblock. Lately I've seen $200 electronics on Amazon with brushes on the end that spin very fast to exfoliate your skin...basically, they're like rotary buffers for your face. The women (and men) in the comments for these products insist it changed their skin textures forever, and they couldn't live two weeks without this costly gadget in their lives. Because you normally walk around letting everyone you interact with touch your face.

Though it's silly to spend so much just to make your face feel baby-soft, it is generally expected that it look smooth and healthy. Yesterday I went to CVS with a $5-off coupon in hand, with the intention to pick up some essentials and replace my diminishing supply of powder. A little bottle of Cover Girl foundation caught my eye that had reviews approximating the "raving" level of the aforementioned face-Zamboni. It was lacking a price sticker, but it was extremely small and all the bottles around it were 5-8 dollars, so I figured it would be reasonable. I brought it to the checkout register and watched it ring up at $15. Yikes. I walked out with a $6 stick of eyeliner instead, which at least will last for a year. But with that kind of foundation, blushes and bronzers, eye shadows, concealers, lip glosses and mascaras, I estimate the collective cost of 'stuff' on the faces of the girls walking around my university's campus totals more than $1,000 per day.

Say you think all that is a waste of money, or you were descended from Greek gods and don't need it. You still need to wear clothes, if you want to retain the label of a law-abiding citizen. If you want to land a job or earn the respect of those around you, they have to be good clothes. And unless you want to spend many hours trying to apply your latent fashion genius extracting a single well-constructed item from the racks at Goodwill, the most practical way to obtain good clothes is to pay up. $20 is baseline for a decent adult woman's blouse, unless you're lucky enough to be a size that appears regularly on clearance racks (which I am not). Jeans that aren't from the Juniors section will be at least $25; $60 if you want them to fit well without altering. Or you could just go to Walmart and choose between two basic styles: frump or streetwalker.

Granted, for all my complaining, I do not spend this much on any of the above categories. I usually just put my hair in a ponytail, apply face powder and lip stick on the bus, and wear the same clothes I did in college. Hence, when I told a classmate it was my 23rd birthday last month, she exclaimed, "You're so old!" in the shock of trying to reconcile my looks with my age. But when I show up to the SLA conference in June, I'd rather people recognize me as a participant, and not a student volunteer or a "real" attendee's tag-along. This will cost money. Lots of it.

How much do you spend on cosmetics? Does it feel like too much?

Good Girls Don't

Monday I wrote about how nobody wants to hear me whine, but today I feel like whining. I've been thinking of switching jobs come fall, not because I'm dissatisfied with my current one, but because I have nothing to do. I was hired to do your basic code-monkey fare...tagging up HTML mostly...but with regular expressions on my side that only took up a fraction of the hours I was assigned each week. So I've literally been making projects up as I go along: "Hey, wouldn't a custom search feature be nice for the manuscripts?" "This system is awful. I'm going to make it modular." "Integrated application for all the databases! Who's with me?"

My boss is happy that she's getting all of my pet projects for $7.90 an hour, but I'm running out of ideas and the amount of content waiting in the wings for staff approval is starting to overflow (can you say "feature creep"?) So I've been looking at my options for when my internship ends in August. Yesterday I received an email advertising a reference position for SLIS students...$8.55 an hour. More than half a dollar more per hour to coddle confused undergraduates than I get busting out fancy-looking code.

So today, I whine. I whine about how difficult it is for skilled goody-two-shoes like me to find work in pre-professional life.

Whine #1: Psychologists Don't Want "Normal"
When students are strapped for cash, they traditionally head to the blood banks or the psych labs for pocket change. There are advertisements all over the place offering $20 a pop to sit at a table and do arithmetic...if you're a heroin addict. The labs are not looking for nice girls who don't drink or smoke and have high GPAs. They want to know if compulsive gamblers can tell when a problem is futile or if heavy drinkers have lowered inhibitory mechanisms. "Normal" controls they can get aplenty from the captive undergrads enrolled in Psych 101.

Whine #2: Supervisors Want Dumb Drones
You know how the job ads always say they want someone with initiative who can self-direct? Bull. They want someone who does what they expect them to and doesn't make waves. As someone training to be a future manager, I can understand why--I wouldn't like it if I built my little library-sized empire and some uppity student came along saying, "I want to change this, this, and that, upend your workflow and leave in a year to do something else." Still, it leaves the future-managers like me, who want to do more than shelve books and edit some links on a content-managed page, out in the cold.

Whine #3: You Have to Be a Mean Girl Sometimes
I very rarely have to be a bitch. As far as I remember, I've only done it twice this year...three if you count wrangling innocent students into the life-draining project I wanted instead of the easy online survey all the other groups were doing. In the working world, being perfectly nice to everyone is like sticking up fliers with your home address and the dates of your pending vacation to telephone poles in the ghetto. There are simply times when you have to step on some toes before someone else breaks yours. I'm competent at being a bitch, but I'm not very practiced at it and there's lots of hand-wringing in the background. I would need a slightly lower conscience and larger arsenal of conniving schemes to survive in some of the offices around campus.

Have you ever made trouble for yourself by being too good?

Psych

During my undergraduate years, I went through at least one major per department. At first I was a Biology major. I added German because I tested well enough to skip a ton of classes and it seemed like a waste not to take advantage. Then I dallied in the Math department. That lasted as far as Linear Algebra, from which I barely escaped with my sanity. Anthropology, Comparative Literature, and Chemistry similarly gave way back to Biology as my desire to get a degree and get out of there took precedence over personal enrichment.

But for one full year, I was a dedicated Psychology major. I spent a semester each in a lab with rats, a lab with toddlers, and a lab with kids who were old enough to vote, but in most other respects resembled the toddlers. I still retain enough tidbits to make my armchair diagnoses of other people sound convincing. For example, I know from Developmental Psychology how to get kids under six all riled up: sit them at a table and form a line of cookies in front of them. Then take the same number of cookies and line them up in front of you, with double the space between each cookie. Then ask them who has more cookies. Mwahaha.

A more useful tidbit, though, is the following: most people think they're more important than they really are. In studies where people are asked to anticipate their impact on other people, they almost always assume everyone is paying more attention to them than they are to everyone else. Obviously, the math doesn't add up, which means most people are walking around thinking of themselves as the main character surrounded by NPCs.

There is one minority group, whoever, who can accurately predict how much they mean to other people: those with a history of depression or low self esteem. Whether something about depression makes them hyper-sensitive to others, or whether a natural sensitivity makes them prone to depression, is up in the air. When I say "them," I include "me," because I do have a short history of clinical depression, and a lifelong history of low self esteem (until the last year or two, that is).

This means that I know full well that to people who do not have a vested interest in my success (e.g. my relatives and significant other) most of my ramblings are inconsequential. To me and my Sweetie, the content of this blog is meaningful. To visitors, it is for information or ephemeral entertainment only. Nobody wants to read pages of me whining about how busy I am, how irrelevant my coursework is, or how I don't feel pretty. I know because I've read some whiny blogs too, and I don't give a damn about how betrayed they feel or how many cookies they ate last night.

What is of interest to other people, though, are posts that may have relevance in their own lives. For example, descriptions of my trip to Japan allow people to dream of what they could do in Kyoto, or new recipes plant ideas for a new meal or dessert to shake things up next week. Today, I will attempt to provide relevant content with an entry type I usually avoid: product reviews.

Recently, I can't stop spending money. Every paycheck I get goes straight to some car trip or doohickey. I drink overpriced juice bottles from the cafeteria at least once a week and a few days ago, I bought bread. Earth-shattering, I know. You know what else I bought? Organic things. If I have one opinion that hasn't changed since I started this blog, it is that "organic" is a marketing ploy, pure and simple. But sometimes, I end up getting them for other reasons. Exhibit A:


Dried Fruits: These were sitting directly in front of the spinach, deliberately placed in the path of health-loving people. There were dried kiwis. I saw dried kiwis for the first time on another blog a few days before, and was dying to try them. They do not sell dried kiwis in the "regular" section, because only organics-loving health types will eat them. Farewell 45 minutes' worth of pay.

Exhibit B:


Soy Ice Cream: thanks to genetically inherited lactose intolerance, I cannot eat regular ice cream. The one kind I can is Breyer's Lactose Free, which only comes in vanilla and is $5 per 1.5 quarts. This little number was on sale for $2.50 for a pint, which is about the same price but with actual taste to it. The consistency is denser and less creamy than the "real" stuff, but the brownie bits more than make up for it.

Exhibit C:


Barbecue Potato Chips: There is no justifiable reason to buy the more expensive Kettle chips over Lays most of the time. However, the only potato chips I like are barbecue flavored, and Lays barbecue flavoring is lame. The chips taste like barbecue for about two seconds before they're just plain potato and salt. Kettle chips, on the other hand, are coated with a thick layer of seasoning and have a substantial, definitive crunch to them. Three hours after snacking you can still detect the smoky kick on the back of your tongue. Plus, they don't get stuck in your teeth.

Do you ever bend your principles in the name of yummy snacks?

Essays

Tonight I must write an essay. Not an essay for a real grade, or one to win me $$$, but one that should have been written a year ago. Namely, the essay for my admission to the dual MLS/MIS degree program I have been taking classes in but am not actually signed up for.

When I entered graduate school, I was admitted as an MLS-only student. In order to sign up for the dual degree program, I have to submit a new "personal goals statement" of 500+ words on my "academic and career objectives." What is written in the essay is basically moot. I am literally signing up to give the school more money. So even if I wrote the essay in Pig Latin, Rhonda in Administration would add me to the list and send me on my merry way. This does not give me the best incentive to take my writing seriously. So I opened up Word to a blank document, tabbed the blinking cursor over to start a new paragraph, and looked at Sweetie expectantly to dictate my 500 words of greatness.

A smattering of his theses:

I was a silly person for enrolling in the library science program, for it is my dream to have a career that will not be obsolete in five years.

I dream of owning an onsen. In order to open this onsen, I have to make money. Librarians don’t make money. Systems Analysts do.

The End.

Libraries just aren’t enough of a challenge. I need to manage something bigger. Like programmers’ egos.

Most of my peers in the library science program say they entered the profession because they “love books” and “want to help people.” I hate books. I hate people more.

Obviously, this approach needs some tweaking.

And I have now written almost as much as is required in the actual essay.

Luck Magnet

I have a backlog of recipes I've made in the past few weeks, but don't have the energy to post them. Remembering references, detailing procedures, and cropping those photos so you can't see the dirty dishtowel off to the side is hard work. So instead, tonight I'm going to post about how lucky I am.

Remember when I won $30 in Amazon gift certificates by playing that game with the jumping cow car daily? And when I scored a free hat at Times Square on New Years? Well, I like to push that luck by entering a ton of sweepstakes whenever I get the chance (conversely, that's possibly the reason I seem to be so lucky, but let's not quibble). So whenever the companies who make my favorite products let me sign up for something, I do, and game the system by answering "no" to all of their subscription offers.

All of my makeup is by Covergirl, except for the mascara (which I only use when I haven't gotten enough sleep anyway). This isn't because I have a particular brand loyalty, but because it's the cheapest stuff on the market that isn't iffy. In February I made some silly candy heart thing on Facebook because they said they might send me a free product for doing so...then hid the heart thing on my profile and disabled the app. Well, on my birthday I received this message:

Tamara Marnell,

We're happy to let you know that you're a winner in the My COVERGIRL Promotion! You've won a COVERGIRL makeup product, which has an approximate retail value of up to $13.00. Congratulations!

There's nothing you need to do except look for your prize within 8-10 weeks. If we happen to need additional information from you, we will contact you at this email address.

Woohoo! Presents! And I'd only have to wait 8-10 weeks! I had an inkling that was an error, and have been stalking the mailbox ever since. I was torn between hoping it would be a new compact or lipstick, because I'm running out of powder in the former and the two I have of the latter I've been using since my second year of college (sounds sanitary, no?) Finally, today my little box from Proctor & Gamble arrived, thoroughly beaten up in transit. After cracking open the mangled lid and sifting through blindingly-shiny gold paper, I found my prize.


(Picture from Target.com, because my desk is way too messy to be taking real-life shots).

I couldn't figure out how to open it at first, because it has this weird colored square base which gives the illusion that it's the part with the pigment in it. But Sweetie managed, and I was relieved to see that the color will not clash horribly with my skin! Getting free makeup is a risky business, because you never know exactly what they'll send you. Fortunately, this "Soulmate" hue is pinkish, not too dark, and shimmery. I'm 23, so I like shimmery.

If I were a responsible blogger, I would post a picture of myself wearing my new lipstick. But it's 10:45 at night and I'm not putting on a lipstick that's supposed to last all day to point a camera at my face. So this is the best you get:


For the record, I am not Drew Barrymore. I will never look anything like Drew Barrymore. If I were ever to wear as much makeup as Drew Barrymore is in this photo, it would be because the funeral parlor hired a new girl to prep my corpse for an open-casket service. But she's advertising the product that is now in my bathroom (in a much more innocent shade, of course), so there you go.

In conclusion, yay me for winning things. Now, if only Lindt would cough up those "one of over 100 prizes!"

$1000 Poorer

This morning I went into the kitchen, and Sweetie informed me that there was no point checking my email. "It's all junk," he said, attempting divert my attention to a topic more worthy of it. Now, when a significant other goes out of their way to tell you not to see something, there are two possible reasons: 1) It's something you really don't want to see, which would ruin your day, and he doesn't want to be fending off the dark clouds for the rest of the morning. Or 2) It's something that you really do want to see and would promptly buy tickets for, and he doesn't want to get dragged along for the ride.

"Visit our blog for information on the SLA annual conference in Philadelphia."

Ka-ching ka-ching. That's the sound of the credit card companies rolling in transaction fees. It's also a sound that signifies that Sweetie wishes he had deleted those emails.

So for four days in June I'll be in Philadelphia. Three of those days will be spent at the conference, but one is a free day to see the sights. And by "the sights" I mean Independence Hall, because Sweetie's desire to travel goes as far as he can tick off items on the list of UNESCO cultural heritage sites. $200 of my money went to the Special Libraries Association for student membership and conference fees, but the rest went to hotels. Hotels that guarantee a microwave and a mini fridge in the rooms. We've learned from past experience that paying $130 for a room with a kitchenette is more cost effective (and pleasant) than paying $100 for a room and eating out twice a day, and/or subsisting on stale granola bars and lukewarm drinks when we want to stay in. Bad memories.

The problem with Sweetie and me is that we got used to the standards in Japan, where hotels actually care about customer service. They always had a fridge, electric water heater, bathrobes, and Internet for no extra charge. There was nary a speck of dust anywhere past the entrance doors. And unless you were staying at a super-fancy Western-style manor, the rates were the equivalent of $110 USD or less...in the heart of Tokyo. When we planned for New York, I took a lot of these qualities for granted, and didn't bother to investigate whether "Wifi Available" meant "Wifi Available" or "Wifi Could Be Available if You Have The Cash For It." So now that I'm more travel-savvy, I was careful to choose a hotel that would make this sojourn into a foreign city to sell myself, I mean "network," not much more stressful than it already will be.

Any suggestions for the City of Brotherly Love? Restaurants? Attractions? Things for lone males to do while their girlfriends are yucking it up in a convention center?

WTF Moment of the Week

40mph winds? Large hail and thunderstorms? Pshah. It's April in the Midwest. But no, not the sun! It burns!

Yesterday was April 1st, Today it is April 2nd, and April 3rd Comes Afterwards

An official notice: I am not pregnant. I stopped being pregnant at midnight last night. Apparently, the hospital switched up the charts, and not only am I not pregnant, it turns out I never even went in for an ultrasound. I'm thinking of suing.

Now, to calm anyone who might have had a heart attack yesterday, here's a video of a cat.

Surprise!

I've been keeping something under wraps lately. You may have wondered why I haven't been posting much (well, besides those things called "school" and "work" I'm constantly whining about). But there's something a little more long-term...


It's a girl! Well, that's what the OB-GYN says. I can't tell whether she's a human or a rabbit from this...all animals basically look the same at this point. Heck, she may still have gills. We just found out last week, so I haven't had time to feel out what this parasite latched on to my uterus really is. All I associate my bundle of joy with right now is the return of my acid reflux.

I wonder about the error rate for sex determination this early, because I was really hoping for a boy. I like little girls better than little boys (you know, sugar & spice vs. snakes & snails and all that) but come adolescence? All genders get into some sort of trouble as teenagers, but boys are obvious about it. They advertise their screw-ups. Teenage girls, on the other hand, are sly. They don't just rebel--the rebel and feel shame about it. So they hold secrets, think thoughts not even they know they're thinking. I know because I once was one. Hence, how I ended up with a rabbit/alien hybrid floating around in there.

I have no idea how we're going to pull this off. She's due around September 3rd (happy birthday, Dad!) but I was supposed to be starting my second year of grad school then. I don't want to raise a baby on government loans! We barely have enough to feed the cat! And to think, I stopped birth control to save money each month. Well, this is a good excuse to stop with just the MLS and not have to take any more classes with people like she-who-should-not-be-trusted-to-code-security-for-bank-accounts. I really need to come up with a shorter nick-name for that professor. But if I just truncate it to she-who-should-not-be-trusted she sounds much more sinister than she is. It would be more accurate to call her she-who-thinks-SQL-is-"actual code" or she-who-thinks-graduate-students-are-still-in-high-school. Grr.

Speaking of names, we have to come up with one of those, too. Sweetie's always been fond of "Rebecca," but that name makes me think of mentally unstable, superstitious wives covering up for their cradle-robbing, murderous husbands. Since she kind of looks like a rabbit, what do you think of "Usagi"? We've always been Sailor Moon fans. By the way, Radio Nintendo announced today that from now on they're shifting focus from video game music to Sailor Moon 24/7. Yay! Of course, the kid'd start hating us the first day of Kindergarten, when the teacher spends five minutes trying to pronounce her name and the other kids resent the attention. We'll use it as a middle name, then. Traditionally, my family gives the first-born a middle name from one of the grandparents, but both biological grandmothers have two-word first names and that could get awkward.

Anyway, we have five months to think about that. Since that's plenty of time, I think I'll put the baby on the back burner for now. Sure, I'll take those little vitamins and, like, save some cash for a crib, but women have been giving birth for centuries without all this excessive doctoring during pregnancy. A 20% infant mortality rate wasn't that bad. So I'll be taking a leaf from Sweetie's book for a few months at least. He's already forgotten about the baby. He's eating cup ramen and drinking Mountain Dew in his boxers while listening to Sailor Moon radio as I type. I too have more pressing concerns, like churning out a paper by noon Sunday and social drinking "networking" with ALA members at the bar tonight. I think I'll haul around some heavy furniture, too.

We're going to be the best parents ever.