Saturday, September 29, 2012
Why I love the story of Jane Eyre
One of the
best things I did last weekend was to watch the most recent film adaptation of
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from
2011 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1229822/) with Mia Wasikowska as Jane Eyre and
Michael Fassbender as Mr. Rochester. I was completely emotional by the end of
the film; I know how the story ends so there were no plot surprises, but the
quality and intensity of the acting by Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender were
just that overwhelming. Michael Fassbender was a wonderful surprise as Mr.
Rochester; I have seen him in Prometheus
and Fish Tank previously, and he is Mr. Rochester, David and Conor
respectively, all completely different people, a testament to his acting
abilities. He managed to impart a real humanity to Mr. Rochester, a humanity
that I have not felt as strongly in other Mr. Rochesters. You feel sorry for
him and for his predicament, even though you understand that he will suffer for
his willfully deceiving Jane about his being married to a mad woman whom he is
unable to divorce. By the time he tells her the truth, on her wedding day; you
are hoping that Jane will forgive him because you know he is truly sorry for
lying to her. But being the moral, proud and wise young woman that she is, she tells
him that she will not live with him without being married and she leaves him and
Thornfield Hall behind. As fate would have it, a tragedy occurs that ensures
that she will finally be able to marry Mr. Rochester, but it was not the tragedy
that made her return to Thornfield. It was her recognition of her own humanity
and need for love; she gained the insight (inner
sight) she needed to understand that she had found real love with Mr.
Rochester and that she could not live in a passionless marriage with St John
Rivers. She had to marry a man she loved. Her return to Mr. Rochester was actually
an acknowledgment that she would live with him regardless of his marital
situation as he had initially proposed once she found out he was already
married. As it turns out; during her separation from Mr. Rochester, his wife burned
down Thornfield Hall and committed suicide thereafter, but Jane is unaware of
this when she returns to Thornfield. Mr. Rochester has lost his eyesight due to
the fire and must depend upon those around him for help. When Jane returns to
him, you understand that he has gained the ability to be grateful, and is no
longer the proud and desperate man he once was. No matter how many times I’ve
read the book or seen the different Jane Eyre films and TV series through the
years, I am always moved by this story—it’s impossible not to love it.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Fundraising time at Adventure Center
Dear Blog Readers,
I have written about Adventure Center before in my blog (http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.no/2010/08/journeys-of-wonder-at-adventure-center.html).
Adventure Center is deeply engaged in fundraising now. Today I am posting a letter written by Elizabeth Mayer, LCSW, President and Executive Director, talking about the mission of Adventure Center and the success of its after-school Arts, Education & Adventures in Nature Programs, and how much the children enjoy and are helped by them. I hope you will support them in their efforts. No donation is too small.
Elizabeth writes:
----------------
Common to many of the students who walk
through our doors at Adventure
Center , Robert has been struggling with issues of injury and pain. Robert began classes here in 2008. His lack of belief in himself was palpable.
He had given up on school. His school
had almost given up on him, describing him as bright but inattentive, lazy, and
defiant.
Four years have passed and Robert has been immersed in Adventure Center ’s after-school Arts, Education & Adventures in Nature Programs. Now Robert speaks with enthusiasm and
wonder. Robert is now able to express
his bright, curious mind, and engaging personality, and with that he is even
serving in leadership roles at Adventure
Center . Over the last year, Robert has
said, “I used to feel mad at everyone. I couldn’t express myself and no one understood me. Hey; that’s not true anymore!”
Robert is one child of many that have been helped
by Adventure Center . The center is affiliated with
organizations like Lincoln Center Institute, Community Works, Symphony Space,
the Bronx Historical Society, and others (as well as the educators and
therapists who provide a learning and supportive environment). Adventure
Center is appreciated as
an oasis of innovation and creativity by all who pass through. We invite you to
join our mission as we celebrate four successful years as a nonprofit Educational Center
in Riverdale , New York .
As we approach this milestone we are stretching our scope and reach to
answer the growing demand of children, families, and other organizations
This
elevated level of activity brings Adventure Center to a new juncture in its’
journey; it will need to create the means to hire part-time and salaried staff
to manage the daily life of the organization, to support the artists,
educators, and group leader as we maintain a good ratio of adult/child in each
program/class. As we engage in the first
steps of this transition—fully volunteer to partially volunteer/partially
salaried organization— we will ensure that we continue a mission of high
quality programming in a nurturing setting for all of our children. The support of friends like you will afford Adventure Center the ability to remain self
sustaining and to continue to thrive.
Please help us reach our goal of raising $50,000.
Any amount will help us meet our ambitious goal and continue to help us meet
our mission. Your tax deductible gift of $50, $100, $500 or more—will
immediately be put to use as we add part time staff—persons who will directly
enhance the learning and growth of our
children.
There are several levels to this giving
opportunity—we appreciate consideration of your support. These costs add up, yet these are some
examples of the large impact your gift can make on children like Larry and
others at Adventure
Center .
Ø
$100 can provide the means to add an
additional group leader for 1 session of the group’s 10-weeks
Ø
$100 will purchase materials for 1
child for 1 ten-week session
Ø
$250 for 3-ten week sessions
Ø
$500 will
purchase materials for 1 child for six-months
Ø
$750 for
seven months
Ø
$900 will purchase materials for 1 child for a
year.
You may donate by check or online by clicking the
donate now button on the home page of our website: http://www.adventurecenterjourneysofwonder.org/index.html
Thank
you for partnering with our students!
Sincerely,
Elizabeth
Mayer, LCSW
President
and Executive Director, Adventure Center
Follow Adventure Center on www.facebook.com/adventurecenterbrx
Friday, September 21, 2012
Thinking about the future, reflecting on the past
Thinking
about the future, reflecting on the past, and trying to live in the moment--the
unending challenge. I try to make sense of past events, to learn from them, and
to use whatever little wisdom I gain to plan for the future. I suppose everyone
does this. It’s probably part of getting older, because of course the older we
get, the more ‘past’ there is behind us for us to reflect upon. I register that
I have changed a lot, just within the past several years. Unsettling workplace
events and family experiences impact on how one wants to live in the present
and plan for the future. I have finally learned to let go of how I wanted things to be and to accept
how they actually are. My work life was one of those things I thought I had a
firm grasp on, but it changed shape as I held it and became difficult to hold
in one place—like a squirming child. The work world has changed dramatically
and for a while the difficulty was just to hang on to the speeding car as it
careened forward. Now the car has either slowed or I have mastered running
faster to keep up. I definitely know that I absorb information and adjust to
change much faster now than I ever did before. And since that seems to be the
goal of modern workplaces—to get employees to adjust to constant change--I
guess the change is a positive one. But it is not my full-time job that has
produced that change, despite the constant pressure to change; it is my
consultant work for the UiO science library and for Liivmedia that have had the
greatest effect upon me. If I have ‘broadened my horizons’ and changed my
approach, it is because I reached out in a whole new direction when I decided
to work for both of them, and found a whole new arena in which to enjoy
science. Following the different scientific social media and internet sites,
reading, digesting, absorbing and commenting on articles I read in all areas of
science has been immensely freeing and exhilarating. I don’t want to just read
about what goes on in the field of cancer research anymore; I find reading
about astrophysics, the universe, global warming, nutrition, and bee colony
collapse disorder just as interesting. I have concluded after much reflection
on past decisions that I have no regrets that I pursued a career in science.
But I have understood that I don’t have to be just a research scientist to
enjoy science or even to work in science. There are many different careers that
one can have that utilize a science background—science communication, science journalism,
journal editor, patent law, social media, consultant. Even though I will likely
end my work life as a research scientist, it heartens me to know that I have
contributed successfully as a consultant as well. That’s what I would tell
young people these days; don’t limit your options. Keep all doors open. It
makes for a more dynamic career and an adventurous future.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Language and identity
After
living in Oslo and speaking Norwegian daily for over twenty years, I have finally
begun to speak English again. I try to do so as often as possible. Not that I
haven’t spoken English at times or when I struggled to find the Norwegian
words; I just didn’t use my mother tongue very much during these years. Now I
do. Why is this important to me now after so many years? One of the reasons was
that I felt I was losing my identity as an American, because English is my
mother tongue and when I speak Norwegian, I no longer feel American. I don’t feel Norwegian either when I speak Norwegian;
perhaps I just felt neutral, and for
many years, that was quite alright. Feeling American, identifying myself as
American—I was not conscious of these feelings when I first moved here. In
fact, it was fine to think and speak in Norwegian, even desirable, because
unless you learn the language of the country you live in, you can never fully
participate in its social or work life. I am fluent in Norwegian; I even write
poetry in Norwegian. In fact, I like to do that, because I feel like I am
another persona when I write in Norwegian, and as a writer, that’s both exhilarating
and adventurous. I’ve even written a poem about that aspect—about ‘hiding’
behind the safety of a language that is not your own. But the older I get and the longer I live here, the more I want to use my mother tongue; perhaps so I don’t forget it, but also
because I feel that I can state my thoughts and opinions more clearly in English
than I can in Norwegian. I felt the opposite to be true a decade ago. What
changed? I am not sure. Perhaps the experience of sometimes being ignored or not taken seriously in work and
social circles, despite my fluency in Norwegian, changed my mind about how to
approach specific experiences. Perhaps I thought, if I cannot make myself clear
or ‘known’ in Norwegian, there is no point in using this language as my main
language to communicate in this country. I can just as well use English, and at present, I feel it is necessary to do so, to communicate who I am at this point in time. The use of English guarantees that
people will listen to you and try to understand you.
I register
that people have different reactions to my talking English. My husband speaks
English back to me unless he needs to really express himself, and then he goes over
to Norwegian. But we have mostly communicated through the years using a blend of Norwegian and English that I call Norglish. I find that most of my Norwegian colleagues, with one exception,
will speak to or answer me in Norwegian. Among my friends, it varies. Norwegian
friends will speak Norwegian with me; non-Norwegian friends will speak English
with me, even though we normally communicate in Norwegian. I find that using
English is freeing for me; there are parts of me that have been released. It is
as though I am allowed to be myself again. I don’t mean that I have not been
myself these past twenty years; just that English puts me in touch with the core part of myself, and as I get older,
that core part of myself wants to make itself better known. It’s not just about
being or feeling American; it’s mostly about reclaiming me and my identity as a
woman in 2012, living abroad, an expat, working in science, with one foot in
Europe and one in America. I’m guessing that it is the core part of me that is
trying to come to terms with all of these experiences—how to piece them all
together--and I’m guessing that it is the core part of me that will be having
much more to say as the years move on. I’m happy about that.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Considering the pursuit of an academic career
A new
school year is upon us. For some students, it means starting the last year of
high school or college, with all of the decisions the last year entails—what will I do after high school, will I go on to
college, or if finished with college, what will I do after that, will I go on
to graduate school, medical school, law school, or will I try to find a job instead?
None of these decisions is trivial; in fact, what you choose to do with your
life in your late teens/twenties often determines the type of field you remain
in for the rest of your work life. It’s not impossible to move out of that field
in an attempt to change career path, and it’s entirely possible to shift to a new
type of job within one field. I just want to point out that it’s worth considering
what is available to you in terms of careers if you choose to, for example,
pursue a doctorate in the natural or life sciences.
I have
mentored a number of PhD students through the years, as both primary and
secondary advisor; I can tell you that for each year that passes, it becomes
harder for me to encourage college graduates to pursue doctoral studies. There
are many reasons for this; none of them have to do with money. Stipends for PhD
students are in fact quite good now, at least in Scandinavia, ditto for
postdocs and scientists, in contrast to the meager salaries for all of these positions
some fifteen to twenty years ago. The problems have more to do with why you
might want to pursue a PhD, and where you see yourself with that PhD in ten
years. It is a topic for serious consideration before you start a PhD program, not
during or after you finish. You would
think this would be the normal common-sense approach; I can tell you that the
opposite is often true. Students start PhD studies without a real understanding
of what they’re choosing or what it will lead to. They may have a friend who
has started on his or her doctorate; they may see it as a way to ‘postpone’
having to think about what it is they want to do with their lives. The fact
remains--it is much harder now to get a postdoctoral position after you finish
your PhD than it was fifteen years ago; if you are lucky to get a postdoctoral
position, it becomes that much harder to obtain grant funding to become a
research scientist, and so on. With each step, the eye of the needle narrows. Academia
is elitist; the higher up the ladder you come, the more elitist it gets. There
is no guarantee that you will be able to have a research career in academia, if
you define that as being an independent principal investigator with a small
research group. You will find that the doors close once you finish the
doctorate, doors that once were open to you. Where you were once encouraged,
you are now discouraged. It can happen very directly, when you are told that
you are not good enough to pursue a postdoc, or more commonly, you are simply
denied the opportunity to go forward because you will not get funding to go
forward. There is a long list of potential postdoc candidates each year that
wait to hear if they have gotten funding or not. And then let’s say for
argument’s sake that you get postdoctoral funding for some years; after you
finish that work, you start the real work—of trying to become an independent principal
investigator and scientist, one who has his or her own grant funding for
specific projects, technical support, lab space, and other such necessities.
You need these things, otherwise you get nowhere. So back to
my own consideration at the beginning of this paragraph--how can I encourage college
graduates to go down the PhD path when I know that doing so will most likely
not lead to career opportunities for them within academia or even outside of academia?
Many scientific and biotech companies consider job applicants with PhDs to be
overqualified. They would prefer that their salespeople are well-educated, but
not necessarily at the doctoral level.
So perhaps it
makes sense to just focus on and encourage the very few top students at all academic
levels. It would mean fewer PhD students overall, but perhaps that is best for
all concerned. In this way, academia can remain elitist—for the very few who
have made it through the eye of the needle. However, the focus nowadays in the
academic circles I wander through is that ‘the more PhD students, the better’.
This of course is from the standpoints of the mentors and group leaders, who
eye potential students as means to their ends—more publications and thus more
money, more hands for the inevitable and
time-consuming lab work, and so on. Research groups with many PhD students are
looked favorably upon. Those who manage to accumulate a number of such students
are considered successful in academia, because a large group generates grant
funding, whereas a small group does not. The trend nowadays is to merge small
groups into larger ones; doing so increases the chances of getting funding and
getting more students. This is all well and good for the large research group;
I’m just not sure it’s in the best interests of the PhD students who are
looking at a different sort of future when it comes to the job market. It may
just be me, but it seems rather pointless to invest a large amount of time and
energy in mentoring students who will not be staying in academia. Most of the
PhD students I have had the privilege of knowing finished their degrees and left academia for jobs in
industry; they are salespeople, application specialists, clinical research
associates, and the like. These jobs are all very good jobs, but they do not necessarily
require a PhD. Many of these men and women are glad they took their PhDs in
terms of having fulfilled a personal goal; some are not. The latter are those
who originally wanted (or thought they did) an academic career, and were tossed
around in the system by mentors who did not really care about their professional
advancement. Or they experienced the nightmare of being one of many doctoral
students in a research group, all of whom required their own research projects,
all of whom struggled with their group leader over how their projects were
defined and who had the primary responsibility for these projects. These few students were exceptionally
bright and talented, and in my estimation, were forced out by group leaders who
made it impossible for them to stay, because their intelligence and directness
challenged the group leader. Or because the group leader knew that there was
nothing to offer them in the way of an actual career. So wouldn’t it have made
more sense to have discouraged them at a much earlier time point?
Should you
pursue a doctorate and an academic research career? No one can answer that question
for you. Think long and hard about what you want out of life. If you choose the
academic route, know that you have chosen a career where you will always have homework or the feeling of not having
finished your homework, where you will work long hours in the lab or in the
office analyzing data and writing articles. Unless you are extremely bright,
talented and creative, you will not rise in the system. And even if you are all
of these, there is no guarantee that you will rise in the system—due to other
factors such as political jockeying, pissing contests, and the like. You’ve got
to know and understand, really understand, what it is you are choosing. If you
don’t, you can end up like many middle-aged and close-to-retirement academic
researchers in the current system who find themselves with little funding and
no students. The system changed and they were displaced. The small groups they
ran are not interesting anymore. They
hang on ‘in quiet desperation’. They are small-fish small-pond scientists who suddenly
found themselves in larger ponds, at the mercy of the larger and more predatory
fish. That is the current reality of many research academics. There are less
stressful ways to make a living.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Talking about loss and sorrow
This past summer
has been a reminder that life is fragile and that sorrow and loss are ever-present
parts of life. I have written several posts about loss during the past several
years; it strikes me how we can never really quite come to terms with loss and the
grief that accompanies it. It can be the loss of a friend or family member due
to illness; I know of several people who have ‘lost’ their spouses to Alzheimer’s
disease and to the slow descent into oblivion that accompanies it. The healthy
spouses live with a sorrow that they silently carry around with them. Sometimes
they are able to talk about their loss; mostly they do not. Others deal with
illnesses that may rob them/have robbed them of their mobility and physical
freedoms. Others deal with separations and divorce, or the loss of treasured
friendships. Most times it is death that takes our loved ones from us. We need
only listen to the TV news to know that this happens every day due to crime, war,
or tragic accidents (as just happened to my husband’s good friend who drowned last week after falling off his boat);
or just the inevitable progression toward old age where again, people we love move
into old age, forge the paths they are able to forge through that barren
wilderness, before they move on into the world where death takes them
physically from us. Learning to let go of those we love is probably the most
difficult thing we will ever be asked to do in this life. Wondering if we will
ever know happiness again, that question haunts us.
There are
other losses that are not spoken about very openly, despite the means for
communication that are continually available to us. We as a society seem to be
at a loss for words when it comes to truly describing how we feel about losing
our jobs, our identities, our pride or self-esteem, about how it feels to be
displaced or frozen out of the ‘good company’ at work or in school, or simply ignored
by our workplaces and schools. We talk about bullying in society and that it
should stop, but it doesn’t. People who are bullied and harassed experience a
loss of self-esteem and happiness that is difficult for them to deal with and
that may affect them for the rest of their lives, and they may grieve silently
for those losses. We are told to deal with constant change in our workplaces,
and while most of us adapt to the new changes and patterns, it is neither as
fast as management wishes nor as successful as they might hope. ‘Something’s
lost but something’s gained, in living every day’, as Joni Mitchell sings. That’s
true, but sometimes the gains don’t outweigh the losses. I would argue that it
depends upon what is lost and what is gained. Nonetheless, we cannot stand
still and we must live in the now. So we are forced to deal with loss and
change.
Our sorrows
are often right under our surfaces, but we are silent about bringing them to
light. I was at a summer party recently, and I met a young woman who told me
about her father’s quiet sorrow; he was born in another country and came here
to live many years ago, probably as a political refugee. He married and had a
family, but he never stopped missing his birth country. For her young age, she
was deeply reflective, and her love and understanding for her father were clear.
Her description of his sadness was something I could understand viscerally. For
I too miss my birth country; it is a tangible feeling of sorrow that I carry
around with me, and that I have done a good job of keeping under my surface
until now. But I cannot do that any longer. At the same party, I met a fellow
expat, who told me that he hated America and that he would never go back there
to live. I could never say the same. I love my country the way I love a person—we
are intertwined. I couldn’t tell you why it is this way; it just is after many years of living away from my birth country. So
I could not understand my fellow expat, although I registered his words and
opinions. It made me think of my grandparents who left Italy for America in the
early 1900s and who never once returned there, as they could not afford to do
so. What must it have been like to know that you would never see your father,
mother, or siblings again, unless they followed you to America? Loss and sorrow
on both sides. How their sorrows must have defined their lives, especially when
their lives took a downturn during the Great Depression when my grandfather
lost his pharmacy. I know that their sorrows colored their later lives because
my father told me a lot about his family life and how his father suffered. Not
all immigrants miss their birth countries; I know several people who have moved
from Europe to the USA, who have become successful and who would never move
back to their birth countries. But I also know immigrants to the USA who miss
their birth countries regardless of their successes. It is an individual thing—how
we deal with loss and the sorrows that accompany it. But it is good to talk
about it sometimes, because you find out that you are not as alone in this life
as you may think.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Soaring above the earth
As a child,
one of my recurrent dreams was that I could fly. If I was in any danger (I don’t
really remember what I perceived danger to be at seven years of age), I could
lift myself off the ground and soar a bit above the people whose hands reached out to
grab at my feet, which were always dangling just a few inches above their outstretched
hands. I remember how wonderful it felt to fly with so little effort on my
part. There was no fear there. I like to think that this dream is a metaphor
for my life, or at least for the way I wanted to live it growing up, and have
lived it to some extent thus far. I don’t want to be pulled back down to earth,
not when I want to soar into the clouds and fly free. Indeed, my dream symbolism
book tells me that flying may mean several things: ‘wishful thinking; astral projection; suggestion to rise above a
problem’. I often think that is why I have such an affinity for birds;
there are people I know who can just summarily ignore them or not even see
them. They are not conscious of these wonderful creatures flying about and
above us. How can you ignore them, I wonder? I cannot. I watch how they behave,
I watch how they land and take off. I watch how they watch what is going on
around them as they are going about their business, and I listen to them ‘talk’
to each other. It is no surprise to me, after watching birds soar majestically
toward a shining sun, that man wanted to fly, and set about learning how. When
you look at how far man has come in that endeavor, I can only say--hats off to
scientists, engineers, architects, and dreamers everywhere who helped make that
dream come true. I said it yesterday and I’ll say it again here—those who
dreamed big and made plane flight a reality for the common man—they are the
ones who deserve the Nobel prizes for science and engineering. I watched a
documentary program about the Concorde supersonic planes recently, and despite the
tragic end to the Concorde airline, they were beautiful planes—far ahead of their
time. It was moving to see how the Concorde pilots became emotional when
talking about their planes. I could almost understand how they felt, even
though I have never piloted a plane. But after listening to them, and after
watching the incredible air show here in Oslo yesterday (to commemorate 100
years of military flight in Norway), I could almost say that I wished I had
learned to pilot a plane. Even though I know that I would probably be satisfied
if I could sit in the cockpit of a large plane one day and watch pilots at
work. I would love to see what they see and to really understand how planes
take off and land.
I’ve never seen
an air show before in my life; after yesterday’s spectacular exhibition over
the Oslo harbor area, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of them. Watching F16s and
Alpha-jets roar through the sky, diving, turning, flying upside down,
accelerating, dropping, flying completely perpendicular to the earth, flying in
synchrony—it’s an incredible feeling to observe them, like watching birds flying in formation. The Patrouille de France aerobatics demonstration team performed at yesterday's airshow, and here is a link to a video (not mine) on YouTube that will give you an idea of how beautifully they flew.
The air show also featured demonstrations of two Norwegian helicopters--the Sea King that is used in search and rescue operations, and the Bell helicopter, both impressive to watch. The amusing thing was that the seagulls, geese and ducks were flying very low to the water yesterday, probably because they were wondering what sort of huge birds had taken over the skies above them where they normally like to be. I like to think too that maybe they were trying to impress us with their grace and flying abilities, since they had such big metal birds to compete with. I noticed them. And nothing will ever beat a bird for grace and beauty in flying. But the air show planes come close.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Doing my part to save some trees
I don’t remember the exact date I stopped printing out paper
copies of most of the scientific articles, manuscripts, grant applications and other
documents that are sent to me for review and editing. I do know that I have
been doing my part to save trees on this planet for many years now by not
printing out paper copies of every document or article that is sent to me or
that I come across during my online travels. I am always surprised when a
student tells me, as happened yesterday, that she has misplaced the only copy
of a manuscript draft that was edited as a paper copy and given back to her by
her supervisor. When I asked if she couldn’t just check her email to access the
edited document again, my assumption being that her supervisor does as I do—edits
and comments an article draft via ‘track changes’ in Word and then saves it as a computer file--the answer was that her supervisor
doesn’t edit/review documents on the computer. She edits and comments in the margins of
a paper version of the article and gives it back to the student this way. So if
that paper version gets misplaced, I understand how it could be a problem for
the student. One could hope that her supervisor made a paper copy of her edits
before she gave the edited article back to her student.
I know there are mixed opinions among academics about reading and editing manuscripts on your computer prior to their submission for publication. Personally, I like
doing both on my computer. I have no problems following an article’s logic and
buildup on my computer screen, and I love having ‘track changes’ available to
me so that I can edit manuscript drafts onscreen if that is the task at hand. In
the old days, an edited manuscript that you had gotten back as several copies
from your co-authors could be a daunting proposition to tackle; some of them
were a mess in terms of the pencil scribbles in the margins, the curlicue
arrows directing you to move this paragraph to another page or to a paragraph
below on the same page, comments at the top of the page telling you what to
consider to include in the next draft, and so on. It is no easier to go
painstakingly through such an edited manuscript than it is to correct a
manuscript edited through ‘track changes’. In fact, I think the latter is much
easier; you can choose to accept or delete inserted or deleted text, you can
accept or reject format changes, and you can move text around as you like and
still see where you removed text from in the final version.
I also no longer print out the pdf versions of published
articles; I read them online as well. It is a rare occurrence these days for me
to print out an article; if I do, it is usually an extensive review article. I
simply don’t see the point anymore of wasting all this paper. Additionally, the
articles of interest are freely available for the most part, so that there is
no danger of getting access to an article and then suddenly losing that access.
One can get around this problem anyway by saving a version of the pdf file on
your own computer to peruse at a later date. I am one of those people who welcome
a paperless workplace and household. Offices stay neater as do homes, a win-win
situation all around.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Buying it on Amazon (or how I avoid paying high Norwegian prices)
I thought
I’d put in my two cents concerning the discussion about how expensive it is to
be a tourist in Norway. There have been a number of recent articles about exactly
this topic—how expensive it is to travel in Scandinavia, and especially in
Norway—and some of them are pretty funny, at least to me, since I recognize my
own reactions (and a bit of shock) to much of what is written in them. Try this
recent article, for example http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/scandinavia-on-125-a-day/?hpw). Tourists are not the only ones
who are shocked at the high cost of living here; I’ve lived here for twenty-two
years and I’m still often taken aback at how much things cost. It’s not so much
housing prices (which are comparable to Manhattan and other large cities around
the world), but it’s other things, like cars, eating out, gasoline, groceries
and other necessities. However, a number of low-price supermarkets have sprung
up in Oslo in recent years; here you can find some bargains and that’s always a
good thing. Prices in Norway for different items can be shocking; you need to
take a deep breath at times and stop converting the prices to American dollars
if you’re an American expat. Because if you continue to convert, you will
realize how much money you are really paying just to live, and it’s not to
live extravagantly. For example, if you convert, you will find that you are
paying twenty dollars for one, I repeat,
one dental floss dispenser at local pharmacies. It doesn’t matter where you
are—in the rich or less rich city areas—prices are the same. And the dental
floss is not manufactured in Norway, it is imported. It is good old Johnson
& Johnson dental floss that you can find on Amazon for a fraction of the Norwegian
price. In fact, a package of six
dental floss dispensers (100 yards each, more or less the same size as what is
available for sale here), costs about twenty dollars on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Reach-Dentotape-Designed-spaced-Unflavored/dp/B003XDVERE/ref=pd_sim_hpc_1). In other words, you’re being
suckered if you pay that price for one floss dispenser in this country. So
guess who recently ordered dental floss from Amazon. Even if I pay
international shipping costs, which are not much, the total price for six
dispensers is still much cheaper than what I would pay for one here in Oslo.
And so it goes. Take aspirin. Genuine
Bayer aspirin (325mg 200 coated tablets)
on Amazon costs 9.47 dollars (http://www.amazon.com/Genuine-Bayer-Aspirin-Tablets-Coated/dp/B001LFG0OI/ref=pd_sim_hpc_1); at an online Norwegian pharmacy, I can get
a package of 20 aspirin tablets (440
mg) for 7 dollars. It borders on the ridiculous. Of course, healthcare
costs are ‘lower’ in this country than in the USA; but wage earners in Norway
pay for universal healthcare through their taxes (at present, the sales tax is
25%), as well as taxes on gasoline, liquor, and cigarettes. I don’t have a
problem with paying taxes to fund universal healthcare (something Americans
should think more about so that healthcare became more accessible to all), but
just so the point is made—healthcare is not free
in this country by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing in this world comes
for free. But it would be nice not to have to pay through the nose for some
basic items like dental floss and aspirin. So whenever I am in the USA, I stock
up on such things; it’s worth it. Norwegians pay their taxes willingly, but
never believe for one second that they don’t want a bargain if they can get
one. Those Norwegians who live on the east side of the country save money by
shopping for groceries and liquor in Sweden, where prices are much cheaper. And
when they travel, they stock up on duty-free items (e.g. liquor and tobacco
products) on their return. And duty-free prices are still expensive, just
considerably less expensive than the usual prices.
Why are
prices so high? Someone is getting rich, and it’s not the average consumer. But
if you take a look at the incomes of the owners
of the major supermarket chains in this country, that will shed some light on
the matter. They are quite wealthy; in fact, they are some of the wealthiest
people in this country. They control the food prices; the farmers who are
always being blamed for the high price of food do not. Farmers are subsidized in many
countries; it’s a tricky and difficult profession and I don’t begrudge them the
subsidies if this is what helps them to live and as long as the subsidies are
reasonable. I have a problem with the middlemen—that group of people who bring
the consumer goods to us. Again, I don’t mind paying a 15% or 20% markup so
that they can make some profit from importing goods for us to buy. I mind when
the markup is 300% or 600%. There is no reason other than pure profit that
dental floss and aspirin cost the exorbitant prices they do at present. It
reminds me of how middlemen have milked my own profession for years and made
huge profits. The suppliers of medical
research items like antibodies, buffers and other reagents have charged sales tax
on items that should have been tax-free because they were being used for
research. They also marked up prices for many of these items by 100% or more. So you had an insane markup plus 25% sales tax. Fair? No. They were finally forced to implement the tax-free policy and made it as difficult
as possible to implement. It always surprised me that hospitals and research institutions were not more aggressive and adamant about having this tax-free policy enforced many years ago already, considering the financial difficulties many find themselves in at present.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Some thoughts about the film The Burrowers
Apropos Kristen
Stewart—her recent film, Snow White and
the Huntsman, was not a movie I liked very much and I really don’t
understand the hype surrounding it. This film got a wide release and generated
big box office; I cannot imagine why. I think all involved did passable jobs,
but no more than that. The film is forgettable once you’re out of the theater. Charlize
Theron overacted/over-reacted and Kristen Stewart under acted/under-reacted
(few to no facial expressions in key scenes and so little to say; it was
sometimes painful to watch, especially the final scene. It almost seemed as if
she was struggling to get some words out, but they never came). Chris Hemsworth
did the best acting job if you ask me, within the limited emotional range of
the film. The entire film had a wooden feel to it. One can hope that there will be no sequel. I
cannot see how it would be feasible, realistic or even necessary. What more is
there to say about this story that hasn’t already been said?
The other
night I watched a film on Showtime called The
Burrowers, from 2008. This film was apparently never released to the movie
public and instead went straight to DVD. I don’t understand the rationale for
that move, since I thought it was a much better film than big budget Snow White and the Huntsman. Who makes
these decisions? The Burrowers was
actually quite a creepy little horror film, albeit a very unusual horror film
since it was set in the American Wild West during 1879. It is a bit
slow-moving, but the characters are interesting and well-developed, as is the
storyline. A family living out on the lonely prairie disappears without a trace,
and a posse is formed to try and find them/rescue them from the Native American
Indians whom they are sure have abducted them. How wrong they are. Their
discovery that entities other than Indians are stalking them, waiting for them
in the dark, is as I said, creepy, because they, like us, find it hard to
believe that such monsters could exist out on the plains. But they do. And they
are not just any monsters, they are burrowers, creatures that live underground
and who have a penchant for tracking and eating humans. But their mode for
doing this is quite unique, and I won’t spoil the film by giving this
information away, except to say that it is exploited in an effort to kill them
off. The creatures, which are CGI creations, are scary enough such that the
film works. The Burrowers is a clever
film, and while some people on IMDB have complained about the film’s ending, I found
it to be realistic, though unsatisfying. All the loose ends are not tied up.
The monsters are not completely wiped out. What the film manages to convey very
well is a sense of dread; imagine you are out on the prairie at night, sitting
around a fire at your campsite. Your vision is limited, the dark envelopes you,
you hear noises. Even if there were no monsters, the reality of spending the
night out under the open skies, exposed and vulnerable, could be
anxiety-inducing for many people. I am one of them. The film never plays for
laughs; it takes itself seriously, and that is one of its strengths.
Additionally, you get a real feel for what life must have been like in 1879—long
periods of isolation, no internet, no phones, little communication, mostly
rumors and innuendoes, and the constant threat of attack. I found myself
thinking of the X-Files, always a
good sign in my book, because some of the X-Files
episodes were quite scary. The Burrowers
brought to mind the X-Files episode Detour from 1997. Both the film and the
TV episode are well-worth watching.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Life in a fishbowl
Been
thinking a bit about the whole celebrity worship thing and the role of the
media in magnifying news stories of celebrity happenings. I know it’s all been
around for quite a while, but the intensity of the insanity didn’t really distress
me until the recent report that Kristen Stewart had cheated on her Twilight and real-life boyfriend Robert
Pattinson with Snow White and the
Huntsman movie director Rupert Sanders. Ok, so I know the names of all
involved. It’s impossible not to know that information these days. Everywhere
you turn, there was the same story. The story ‘broke’ in the media in a manner
reserved for invasions of countries by aggressors and the start of world wars.
All hell broke loose. You would have thought someone famous had died—a statesman,
the pope, a president. God only knows. I didn’t watch the major TV news
channels that day but I shudder to think of the news coverage of this trite infidelity
story. Of course we all know it didn’t deserve this amount of news coverage,
but heck, infidelity sells newspapers, magazines, and gets people to watch the
TV news. It gets fans to spread the story on Facebook, on Twitter, and all
other social media avenues available. I couldn’t believe how fans took the
news. You would have thought Bella and Edward from Twilight were real people with a real life. But alas, they are not.
Fans should try to understand the difference--Kristen is not Bella, Robert is
not Edward. Fans may want them to be, but they are not. Their movie marriage
was not real; they were not married to each other in real life. Rupert Sanders is a married man with children. It just
points out yet again that the celebrities worshipped by society are just regular
people who blunder along and fail like the rest of us, but who do so in a
fishbowl unlike anything we could possibly imagine. There has always been
celebrity worship (think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and their
affair during the filming of Cleopatra),
but the coverage was more restricted at that time. It’s another world now. It’s
all been written about before, analyzed to death, and talked about ad nauseum—that the celebrity hounding
and worship have got to stop, but they continue. They continue because the
profit motive remains the goal. But as a society, we have shifted off balance,
toward a world that cannot sate itself; there will never be enough news that’s
fit to print about any celebrity or film star. The fixation on dissecting celebrities and film stars into minute atoms and to report the results of these dissections—that will continue to snowball. I sense desperation now where before
there was just excessive curiosity. What is the natural end of desperation?
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Changing the way we work
So many
people I know or have met recently no longer work the traditional 9am to 5pm workday
schedule in a formal workplace. And they seem perfectly happy about this. It struck me more on this
trip to New York; that this trend seems to have become a major societal change
during the past few years--one for the better, if you ask me. A good number of people
I know in both the USA and Europe are working for private companies, but are
doing so from the comfort of their own homes. Many of them have home offices. Others
work from home one or two days a week. All of them arrange their workday according to what is suitable. Some of them work in the mornings, take the afternoons free, and then work late into the evenings. Whatever the arrangement, I like the
flexibility involved, as well as the trust factor. Companies must trust that
their employees are going to deliver the goods—that employees will be effective
and productive workers when they are working at home. It can be difficult—to get
structured enough so that you use your home time productively. When I was
starting out in the work world, I liked the more rigid structure and discipline
of a formal workplace; now I welcome the flexibility of my home office days. I
don’t need a formal workplace to make me a productive employee. I can do what I
need to do as a scientist (working in the public sector) from home for the most
part (except for the occasional lab experiments that require bench time)—read
and write articles, review grants, write grants, and design experiments. I have
changed, and I am glad for the change. I feel more creative when I work from
home; I am not as distracted by what is going on around me as I often am when I
go to my workplace. It’s easy to get lost in idle conversation with co-workers, and
as enjoyable as that social contact can be, you suddenly realize that a large chunk of time has been lost from the workday. That doesn’t happen at home; even though I am in close
contact with my co-workers should they need me. They only contact me, or I
them, when it’s absolutely necessary, and then it’s usually to ask or answer a
specific question. Sometimes we can do this via email; other times we need to
talk. However it transpires, it works, and it works well. Some of my more
productive years during the past decade have been years when I worked a lot
from home. I think it has to do with a ‘pared-down’ existence—no gossip, no
office politics, no superfluous meetings, less time wasting. It amazes me how
much time can be wasted in a workplace.
In any case, I’m glad to see that private companies have recognized the
need for flexibility in the way their employees work. By allowing for home
offices or home office days, they are changing the face of work and the definition
of the workplace, and they are welcome changes. The future of the work world is being created through these changes.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
New York moments
Each year I
return to Oslo after my annual trip to New York with so many impressions and
memories of what I have experienced and seen. I guess because I am now a
tourist in my home state, that each New York moment has become dear to me, no
matter how small, mostly because I am together with good friends or with family
when I experience them. I capture a lot of those moments in photos, as I am
wont to do whenever I travel. I have already written one post about wandering
around SoHo and lower Manhattan with Gisele, stopping in at small bakeries
and cafes, shopping at Tierra, and photographing graffiti. Other moments
included dinner with Debby and Eric on Long Island, lunch with Bernadette in Manhattan, visiting my brother Ray and his family, and spending time with Edith--my elderly woman friend who used to work together with me in my first Manhattan job. Photographically speaking, a major moment was photographing a large spider web (and correspondingly large spider)
outside the kitchen window of my friend Jean’s house. On one of the evenings I
was there, we stood watching the web and the spider’s activity for quite a
while. This spider has built a web a short distance away from a wasp’s nest;
nature doesn’t ignore golden opportunities. This spider was definitely big enough to tackle a wasp in its web.
Spider and its web |
Closer view of spider |
I also attended the Peekskill Celebration at the Riverfront
Green Park on Saturday August 4th (http://www.peekskillcelebration.com/) together with Jean and Maria; there was some
great live music—one of the R&B bands particularly stood out—New York Uproar (http://newyorkuproar.com/home/). Lots of great old songs from my growing-up
years from the likes of Average White Band, Blood Sweat & Tears, Chicago,
Ides of March, and many others. You can find the complete song list on the New
York Uproar website. The height of this evening had to be the fantastic fireworks
that went on for nearly half an hour, sponsored by Entergy (see my short film of some of the fireworks here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-wXGNf02vs). I’m including the
information from the website about this event:
The Entergy Fireworks Extravaganza is the largest
fireworks display north of the Macy's annual Fourth of July display and is one
of the signature activities that make Celebration unique in
the Hudson Valley. The pyrotechnic display is synced with music provided by
WHUD 100.7 Radio. Whether from land or on water, the fireworks are an amazing sight
to behold.
And then on
Sunday evening, Jean, her sister Barbara, Maria and I ended up at the beautiful
Boscobel Hudson River estate in Garrison (http://www.boscobel.org/) for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare
Festival (http://hvshakespeare.org/), which has been an annual event
for us for at least the past five years or so. This year Romeo and Juliet was on the menu—a modernized version of this
tragedy—and it was very good. Much of the first act was played for laughs, which
was unusual but not at all irritating. But I would guess that Shakespearean purists
might find some bones to pick with this production. Nonetheless, it has a lot
going for it, especially with the younger lead actors and actresses, who bring
their youthful enthusiasm to their roles. It wasn’t hard to remember, when
watching them, how absolutely overwhelming, giddy and confusing it was to
really and truly fall deeply in love. You never forget those moments even
though they get buried in the stuff of daily life, but watching this version of
Shakespeare’s play really brought them back, a testament to the fine acting
jobs.
View of the Hudson River from the Boscobel estate in Garrison |
Tent where the Shakespeare plays take place |
I always
enjoy my time in New York visiting friends and family. Friends have commented
on my packed schedule when I’m there, and the fact that I travel quite a bit
around from one place to another, but it doesn’t feel rushed or stressful. I feel
free, and that’s a great feeling. It’s summer, the sun is shining, the warm
weather beckons, I’m on vacation, and life is easy. I found time to walk from
Tarrytown to Irvington to meet my good friend Laura for lunch, and marveled at
the beauty of these two adjoining river towns. I know I was privileged to grow
up in Tarrytown, along the beautiful Hudson River. I talked about this with my
friend Stef on my recent visit with her and her husband John. (Stef also grew up
in Tarrytown but now lives in New Jersey, as I did for four years in the 1980s).
It’s not something you understand as a child; mostly you just want to get away
from small-town life when you are a young adult, and it wouldn’t have mattered
how beautiful any aspect of that life really was then. You need to get out and
see the world. I am speaking for myself, but I know of others who felt the same
way as I did when they were younger. Stef picked me up at the New Brunswick
train station in New Jersey, and drove me to where I used to live, an apartment
complex in Somerset; it was interesting to see how much has changed since I moved
from there. What was once open farmland that stretched for miles along Route
27, has been built up with shopping centers and housing complexes. I hardly
recognized the area. However, my apartment complex looked the same, if a bit older
and in need of a few renovations, but what I noticed most were the numbers of
trees that had grown up around it. Lovely tall trees, providing shade in the
summer’s heat. That’s the kind of progress I like, because it contributes to
the creation of beauty.
Somerset New Jersey apartment complex |
Saturday, August 11, 2012
The promise of summer
I could
just as well have entitled this post ’a taste of summer’. Either way, you’ll
understand what I mean about fleeting glimpses of summer—those tantalizing warm
sunny days that lead you to believe that real summer is right around the
corner. But somehow real summer never materializes. That has been the summer experience
in Oslo this year. Perhaps it is more correct to say that summer (as most of us
define it—sunny and warm days) came and went in May, which had some wonderfully
warm summer-like days (in fact, I wrote a post at that time called The Smells
of Summer: http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.no/2012/05/smells-of-summer.html). May was followed by two months of
gray skies and rain. Temperatures have hovered around sixty degrees Fahrenheit
since then. Summer has been struggling futilely to return. And then, it
happened. Today is a real summer day. Yesterday was also a real summer day.
Tomorrow is predicted to be a real summer day. I’ll believe it when I see it. I
trust nothing and no one, not the clear night sky of tonight, not the balmy night
temperature, not the golden moon, not weather reporters, and least of all the
newspapers that are constantly telling us that ‘summer is finally here’. No, it’s
not (well maybe it will be for the rest of August—hope springs eternal. I’m not
a pessimist). Real summer is what I just experienced for ten glorious days in
New York. So hot (temperatures hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit) that it
feels like the heat is rising up from the street pavements, so hot that you have to
throw off the bed sheets at night, even though the ceiling fan is on (can’t run
the air-conditioners 24/7—the electric bills would be out of sight). So hot
that my friend’s terrace is too hot to walk on in my bare feet. So hot that you
think about running through the sprinkler that is watering the plants that need
the water more than we do. But I am not complaining. My friends complained
about the heat. The New York media reported and complained about the heat. Not
me. I savored every chance I got to soak in the sun’s
warmth and the summer’s heat and humidity. I walked when others drove their
air-conditioned cars, although I enjoyed the a/c too, don’t misunderstand me. I
had my water bottle with me on my walks and sipped it when I got thirsty. I
rested when I got tired. That’s what the heat forces you to do—slow down. You
can do everything you normally do, just at a slower pace. And really, what’s
wrong with that? I took the train into Manhattan from Irvington, and sat on the
platform benches waiting for the train, breathing in the smell of the wooden
platform and the tracks. I see what I never saw before, because now I am a
tourist in my home state, and I get to appreciate what I took for granted
before when I was younger and lived there. I never get over how beautiful New
York State is during the summer months. It doesn’t matter if I am upstate (in
Tarrytown, Cortlandt Manor, Albany, or Pine Bush) or in New York City. New York
is a beautiful state; it has the Hudson River, the lovely Hudson River towns
and estates that I have written about many times, lakes, lush green parks and
forests, and abundant farmland. It also has the Catskill and Adirondack mountains;
I have not spent much time hiking in them, but it’s on my bucket list. Once you
get outside of the city, you come into contact with a myriad of insects—mosquitoes,
spiders, flies, crickets, and cicadas. You hear the latter two in the evenings, especially. Do I get bitten by mosquitoes? Yes I do, and the bites are
irritating enough so that I ended up buying Benadryl to alleviate
the itching. Ticks have become a real problem in semi-rural and rural areas; I
actually know several people who have had Lyme’s disease—hikers, golfers, and
fishermen.
Back in
Oslo. I hope for some continuous weeks of summer from now on. Why? So that the
feeling of anxiety disappears, that nagging, slightly frantic feeling of
wanting to pack a summer’s worth of experiences into one or two warm days, as
though we have gotten a reprieve from prison and have to make the most of it. That
feeling that you cannot waste a single warm day, because a real summer day
wasted is a summer day gone forever. It has felt like that for some of us this
summer. You make the best of it, you don’t complain, you live one day at a
time, and you hope for better weather. But many Norwegians decided early on to
abandon their country for warmer lands—and did so in droves. The charter trip
companies made out like bandits this summer. Financially-struggling countries
in southern Europe found themselves invaded by northern Europeans seeking sun
and warmth. So it’s not just me who misses real summers. And I can remember
real summers here in Oslo during the 1990s when I first moved here; the shift
toward cooler, shorter and rainier summers has occurred during the past five to
seven years. If this is what global warming is doing to our planet--changing
weather patterns to this degree--then I can only wonder about what future
summers will bring.
Friday, August 10, 2012
New York city graffiti (street art in New York)
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The Spinners--It's a Shame
I saw the movie The Holiday again recently, and one of the main characters had this song as his cell phone ringtone. I grew up with this mu...