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04/23/01
What It's Like To Be Me
because you might have wondered
I am an androgynous dyke. People call me "sir" and "mister" all the time. When I look in the mirror, I don't see a man, or a woman, I just see me. Some friends gasp in sympathy when we're out together and someone calls me "sir." Many rush to reassure me that I don't look like a man; in fact, that's the most common reaction.
When I was younger, I used to blush fiercely when people mistook me for male. Now I just laugh and tell the embarrassed party (whether it's my friend or the person who was mistaken) not to worry about it. I got a free dessert at a restaurant from a waiter who called me "sir" once. I briefly contemplated using my appearance to lead a life of crime.
J has a good phrase for what I don't have: gender beacons. Interesting that people default to the assumption that I'm a boy, despite my feelings that my appearance is quite gender-neutral, but that's another topic. I lack long hair, big earrings, makeup, feminine clothing. Understand--when I put on female gender beacons, it feels like a costume, as much as when I put on male gender beacons such as a suit and tie, fake mustache, slicked-back hair. Some mornings I go through agonizing fits of self-doubt just trying to decide whether I should wear a regular bra, which allows people to observe my breasts, or a sports bra, which smashes me flat.
Why is it important, you ask? Because people often look to my chest to decide what I am.
My voice is pretty girlie, so when people mistake me for a man, I often try not to say anything, in order not to embarrass them. I just nod.
Little kids often ask straight out, "Are you a boy or a girl?" I always say "Girl." But one time, this little guy wouldn't buy it. We went back and forth for a bit until he firmly declared me a "girl-guy," and wouldn't discuss it further. I liked it.
I've had good friends and even girlfriends try to remake me, to get me to identify visually with one gender or another, for their comfort, presumably. That's hard. And lord knows I've tried, again and again, until I'm tired of trying.
I'm getting old enough not to care, which is a truly lovely feeling. And I've found someone who likes me just the way I am--just when the idea that no one could was starting to calcify.
more reading
04/17/01
I am not a biological deconstructionist.
Every time I try to examine one small thing like, say, a gene, and to completely understand its function, I get messed up because my mind rears back and says, HEY. There are things connected to that gene! It's silly to isolate parts of organisms, to define what they are and what they're for. In fact, it's silly to isolate organisms from their environment.
I may be wrong about this.
This made grad school difficult for me. Modern biology students are faced with a broad and deep existing literature, the sum of which can make one feel that there's nothing left to study that will enrich humanity rather than just be adequate to score an advanced degree. So when I found myself working on a project investigating the toxicity of pesticide-laden irrigation drainwater on aquatic species, I struggled to find a meaningful piece on which to focus. Others chose to monitor absolutes, like how many Daphnia die when exposed to varying concentrations of the water? Or can Xenopus reproduce in the stuff? Or even, what are the various concentrations of various chemicals in the water and how do they compare to the published LD50 numbers?
After considering for about 15 minutes, I picked what might have been the most touchy-feely science project ever conducted on a National Wildlife Refuge (excepting the user surveys, in which drunken duck hunters are asked how many things they killed, and would they like more things available to be killed next year). I decided to monitor fish health.
Health. We know it when we see it, right? Stand a healthy human next to an unhealthy one, and we can tell the difference. Even in the absence of visible signs of illness, an unhealthy person will have some combination of lusterless hair, dull eyes, slack skin, bad breath, stooped posture... things like that. Believe it or not, I found a set of somatic indices that a fellow in Utah had come up with for assessing fish health. I killed (they call it "sacrificed" in biology) and looked at hundreds and hundreds of little fishes, gazing through dissecting scopes and marking down numbers that indicated my thoughts on how swollen their livers and spleens were, whether their gills were a little pale, any signs of spinal curvature, fin erosion, parasites, lesions, how good their slime coat looked.
My conclusion? They were all damned unhealthy fish. And I mean all, which included the little guys I had caught from a lake high above the agricultural areas, where the water was as clean and pure as possible for north central California.
I wrote a very unsatisfying thesis, explaining my method and what I saw. Without a valid experimental model (treatment and control), I was left with what amounted to naturalism--my conclusion was that all the fish looked sick to me based on an accepted somatic index, but that I didn't really know if they were sick because maybe that's how all of them look around there. Sigh. They gave me my degree, anyway, and one of my profs offered me a job making fish vaccines for aquaculture. I didn't take it.
Science has a hard time encompassing everything, but an easy time defining the tiniest thing, by its very definition. That's what makes it both fascinating and difficult for me. I see the HGP results, I know they'll have profound and meaningful effects on humanity eventually, but to me it sometimes looks like a bunch of scientific masturbation. I'll wait and see, and stay far away from research biology from now on.
04/10/01
Well, everything turned out as expected: disappointing rating, but with a nice little raise to confuse me. And the weirdest talking-to I've ever had. "Don't hold people up to your high standards. Everybody's different."
What a freakshow.
04/09/01
In half an hour, I'm going in to have my performance evaluation. I fully expect to get a middle-high rating, a small raise, and a handful of suggestions about how I might be more happy and productive at work. Might even be a verbatim repeat of last year's, the refrain of which was "Choose your battles."
Meanwhile, something keeps beeping in my office. Every couple of hours. And I can't find it! It's a high-pitched beep that I've never heard before. I've looked everywhere except my office mate's file cabinet, and I won't do that (she's not here today). Maybe it's the bottle of bourbon I have in my bottom drawer, warning me to drink it quick!
Reading Connie Willis' new book, Passage, has led me to think about the moment of death a lot. She relates a disturbing anecdote about Lavoisier blinking 12 times after being decapitated. But is it a true story?
My half hour's up. Off to the guillotine.
04/02/01
It's April now, and showery.
I just had a week off and it was great. I didn't do any writing, I didn't do much soul-searching, but I slept a lot and played games, and relaxed. Today, I'm back at work, and my back is back at work. Rob is right when he says ergonomics is the science of oppression.
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