Week 21
View from the houseboats
It was a good week. Entirely too many meetings (e.g. 2.5 all-day meetings on zoom) but also a lot of opportunities to catch up with a wide variety of friends and colleagues. Also a lot of mid-day and afternoon sun. Theo is pretending to be a gorilla or orangutan or chimpanzee most days, and though he asks if it’s really a school day (one night he said he should only go to school on weekends), it’s been easier to convince him to go.
Gratitude & appreciation
Four bike rides this week. Mostly in the fog, but glad I got out.
Two days this week I took a 30-minute break to sit on the deck in the sun having tea with Sam. He was having a harder week and so we had more of a “supportive friend” hang. It’s a nice perk of working at home without Theo and good for our mental health.
I got to catch up with a few former coworkers, now friends, and it’s so rewarding to see how people are thriving in their new positions, despite the pandemic.
Sam made more yogurt and granola.
I read 1.5 books on writing last weekend and took a StoryCollider workshop on storytelling in science – I’m recasting this as “career development activities” but totally did them because I wanted to.
There are some signals that a couple other grants that I am on may get funded; even if they don’t I’m learning a lot from just being part of the process.
(Re)Learnings and observations
The importance of surprise and delight: Sometimes thing arise at the right moment in your life. I have a few essays started that interweave my personal and professional lives, but I haven’t known how to finish them. I shared one with a friend, and she told me it was a short story. I know nothing about writing short stories! I wrote poetry through my early 20s, was an English major (and Biology) in college but writing short stories was never something I focused on learning (or found interesting). So, because I took a friend up on an offhand offer to look at something a few weeks ago, I ended up signing up for this StoryCollider workshop, then she sent me this book to read, then I remembered another book I had in the house to read because my father had loved it that turns out to be set in Marin, and I have thoroughly enjoyed learning a new style of writing and storytelling.
About sexism and forgetting the impact: During my Saturday bike ride, I encountered two rounds of mild casual sexism, pretty rare for the Bay Area but was a standard part of exercising in Baltimore (noticeable, but not a big deal). I spent what turned out to be my fastest ride of the year composing a witty title for the Strava post (i.e. cycling social media). A mentor commented “poor motivation, but nice speed”. And it took me hours to understand why it was poor motivation, because I was so motivated to leave those guys in the dust. It’s strange to realize when experiences of bias are so embedded in how you react to the world that there might be alternatives.
Actions to support Black and other people of color: If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading John Lewis’s last essay and watch President Obama’s eulogy or read the transcript. I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coats Between the World and Me, and Wendell Berry’s New Collected Poems. Finally, a an invited commentary I coauthored was published, and I’m proud of our ending: “Ultimately, we need to recognize that home health worker disparities [they are primarily women of color] are the result of structural racism and that this problem can be addressed through structural reforms. Just as COVID-19 has accelerated other aspects of medical and social progress, it is time to use the pandemic as an opportunity to engage in social justice for home care workers, recognizing the value of their work by investing in their health and financial security.”