Piercing: Why I enjoy perforating my ears

*This post is dedicated to my mother and my dear husband, who will never understand my desire to poke holes in my body.*

Piercings and tattoos seem to be one of the most divisive topics in fashion. Either you like them, and even if you don't have any admire them, or you hate them, and can't understand why anyone would poke holes in their body or in-bed ink into their skin.

My own anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a bit of a generational and gender divide on this. Members of my parents generation, at least the ones I know, seem to be largely anti-piercing in toto and tattoos are for sailors and rebels, therefore not for nice young women. My generation on the whole seems to be more accepting, but I find women are more understanding than men. I'm not sure if this is something deeply meaningful, or if it has something to do with the larger percentage of men who have a fear of needles and blood.

I've been fascinated by piercings and tattoos for a long time. I got my ears pierced (just standard earring piercings) when I was 8 after years of begging. When I was 10 or 11 I got a second set (it was all the rage circa 2000), but a bad reaction to a pair of cheap earrings ended up closing all those piercings. I redid the original 2, and then had them close up after I forgot to put earrings back in after an MRI. Got those re-pierced.  At the end of high school I got my second piercings back, and got my cartilage pierced. The latter I eventually let close in college when I started wearing headscarves full time and it just got in the way, even though I loved it. I had promised my mother that I wouldn't get a tattoo until after I graduated, or I probably would have gotten one as a substitute. After I stopped covering my hair, I didn't get the piercing back because I was looking at a wedding in the near future followed by a job search in a bad market. It didn't seem worth getting it back only to have to take it out again.

After I got diagnosed with PCOS last year, I needed to do something for myself. After getting my symptoms under control, I went and reclaimed my cartilage piercing and got my third set of lobe piercings (though they were just barely on my ear lobes anymore). Yesterday, as a reward to myself for passing the qualifying exam I got my fourth set which sit in a little valley in my ear where I have always wanted earrings.

So, why? Why on earth do I like putting metal rods through my ears? Why would I do it other places and in-bed ink in my skin if only I didn't want to upset my husband?

First of all, I like the way it looks. I don't wear make up, and most jewelry gets in my way. Fancy, sparkly tops take too much effort to keep looking nice. Piercings let my ears be silvery and decorated and I don't have to think about it once the piercings are healed. It doesn't matter how frumpy a day I'm having, my ears are shiny.

As an act for beauty, I don't see ear piercing (or tattoos) as being fundamentally different from the hundreds of ways women and men have sought to be beautiful through the ages, whether it's wearing a corset that distorts your rib cage, having overly elaborate hairdos you had to sleep sitting up for, or wearing toxic pigments. Dieting, in all its insane forms, is an attempt to modify the body. There are women in my parents' and grandparents' generations who can't walk flat foot from wearing high heels for so many years. Elective plastic surgery* is the most extreme and gruesome form of body modification, though somehow more socially acceptable.

Secondly, and this is a personal reason, definitely not applicable to other people who do body modification, it gives me a sense of control and power over my own body. I've had a series of long term health issues over the years, each of which made me like my body was in control of me, and not the other way around. Although I believe in psychosomatic unity, there were (and are) times when I feel like a soul trapped in a dysfunctional and rebellious body, that forces things upon me that I don't want. Piercings (along with cutting/growing my hair, etc) are a way for me to reassert that I am in control of my body, to say that *I*, the sentient soul herein, is capable of making choices and directing something about my body because I want to, not because I have to.

Lastly, and kinda branching off my second point, I use my piercings to mark victories. The first time I got my cartilage pierced celebrated the end of high school, most of which I completed from home, because I was unable to go to school, and marked the beginning of college, which I was hoping I would be able to do. It's piercing and my third pair marked the fact that I had come to terms with my new  illness, that I had it under control, and could now carry on with my life. This latest set marks a victory of something that had been terrifying me for months, the qualifier. They are like notches in a sword handle, a reminder that I can conquer.

Now, I know that no one who sees me in the street and sees my nine earrings knows any of this. They don't know my deep personal, aesthetic and philosophical reasons for poking holes in my ears. A lot of people tell me they don't really notice, since I don't wear particularly flashy earrings and my hair can cover them. What an observant, random person on the street sees I don't know. I don't dress like a punk or other stereotypical piercer. I also don't know what they think about the fact that I wear full floor length skirts, or that I am only 5 feet tall. Quite frankly, I don't care. I have never dressed to please others (though I do know how to dress appropriately on special occasions), and I don't intend to begin worrying about what people think of my appearance.

~PhysicsGal

*Reconstructive plastic surgery is a wholly different, and wholly admirable beast

Taco Night!

Every now and then, I get a hankering for tacos. Which is strange mainly because they aren't a childhood comfort/fun food for me. I can't remember ever having tacos as a kid, but in college taco bar Wednesdays provided one of the few genuinely edible meals in the week, at least if you weren't the kind of person who could live off frozen pizza and chicken nuggets. And thus did I come to appreciate the lowly taco.

A year or so ago I found an even better way to make tacos than with the usual ground beef. Stewing beef and a crockpot or low oven and a lot of time. Yes, it means that taco night is no longer a quick I-forgot-to-plan-supper meal, but it has its advantages. No browning-meat grease splatter. Stewing beef has an extra beefiness compared to ground beef. It clings to the taco sauce a million times better than ground beef, and it stays in the shells instead of falling out.

And of course it couldn't be easier. Put chunks of stewing beef into your slow cooking vessel of choice, plus taco seasoning and enough water to cover it 3/4 of the way. Stir it a bit  to make sure the spices are mixed in, and then let it cook for hours, checking occasionally to how its coming, or cover it completely with water and just let it go. Its done when you can stir the meat with a fork and it just falls apart until it looks like this:

Now THAT is tender meat

Then its mostly a matter of assembling your tacos however you like. I like a using a low carb tortilla, a dab of refried beans, guacamole, tomato and lettuce if I have it on hand. But the beauty of tortillas is customizability. And so easy to make low carb. Enjoy!

I passed!

Not much to say here, other than I passed my qualifying exams and am now officially a PhD student!

I am unbelievably excited, relieved and grateful to all the people who helped me study, or prayed for me.

~PhysicsGal

Marriage and Football

I was walking with a few of my fellow qualifying exam sufferers the other day when the subject of weekend football watching came up. My classmate was complaining that his girlfriend complained when he tried to watch football on the weekends, and I commented that I just ceded the television during football season. He joked that my husband had trained me well, and I rebutted that weekends = football was one of the first things I learned about my then-boyfriend, now husband. I was told he was lucky.

I have heard all the variations on this. The guys who complain that their wives never let them watch football and force them to watch HGTV. The women who call themselves 'football widows' and complain they never see their husbands during football season. There are of course the couples who are both passionate about football, but I have met one such couple in my entire life, so I can't say if that's really any less stressful.

I am not a football fan. I was never interested in sports growing up. Professional sports seemed pointless, and football particularly stupid, just a bunch of large men imitating rams and slamming their head together to get a non-ball shaped ball from one end to the other. Dear Husband on the other hand has been a football fan as long as he can remember. "Go Eagles" may or may not have been his first words. When football isn't in season, he pines for it. When it is on, he watches as many games as he humanly can, and reads about the rest. Given this dynamic, why am I not complaining every weekend from August to January?

Part of it is,  I knew what I was getting into from the get-go. I knew he was a die-hard football fan, and that football trumped everything else viewing wise. It took me a little while to accept it, and it sometimes irks me, but I can accept this as part of who my husband is. He'll still talk to me, help with things on commercials, pay attention to me and if a game is just terrible he'll sometimes watch something else with me. I never feel abandoned, or second place to football. I've known guys who treat football with religious reverence. Talking to them while the game is in play is sacrilege on the scale of gossiping loudly during the Lord's Prayer. I may lose the ability to watch my shows on the big screen during football season, but I've never lost my place to it.

So I'll sit with my husband, and watch football with him. Then I might go do my own thing, or sit with him and read while he watches. And so our house is at peace, even during football season.

Defeating the Wimpy Scientist Stereotype

Normally, I don't watch reality tv. Its like pop culture potato chips if its good, and just painful if its not. But when  a friend mentioned that Bill Nye the Science Guy was on "Dancing with the Stars", I had to see this.

Sadly, Bill Nye got eliminated week 3. He is a somewhat stiff dancer, not being able to do all the lithe movements the judges look for. That's not what I care about. 

In the 2nd week of the competition, he fell at the end of his dance and tore 80% of his quadricep tendon. Thats 80% of the tendon that connects big muscle on the front of your thigh to your knee. That is unbelievably painful. That's the kind of thing that sends football players to the ground.  Immediately after doing so, he got up, and stood in front of the judges before limping off and finally admitting he had hurt himself.

After hearing the doctor describe the damage and summarize his condition as "those few strands of tendons hanging on for dear life", Nye asks, "Well, what if I immobilize the knee entirely...and create some crazy choreography, peg leg fashion?" The doctor looks taken aback, and slowly responds with "Do I think you're going to be able to do much, no, do I think its going to hurt, yes, do I think you run the risk of worsening that tear or rupturing it completely, absolutely." and basically suggests a wheelchair.

And Nye went ahead with it anyway. Leg totally immobilized in a brace, lots of physical therapy treatments notwithstanding, he was obviously in  a lot of pain just standing up. Although he lost, the judges and the other dancers were in awe of the fact that he got up there at all.

So yes, he was a stiff white guy scientist, but he also shatter the perception of scientists as wimps (his background may be engineering, but he inspired so many kids to be scientists, he deserves the title). It's about as standard as stereotype as the social awkwardness and glasses. It's used frequently on things like The Big Bang Theory when the writers get lazy. And while I will readily confess scientists can have trouble with small talk around non-scientists, and a lot of us have vision correction of some sort, we are not wimps. Squeamish sometimes, but not wimps.

Scientists are tenacious. We have to be. We put in long hours, with weeks and weeks of frustration all for the hope of a few days of good data, or one right answer. Some will work years before seeing the fruit of their labor. And we will work through anything short of a coma. During the shutdown, memos had to be sent out to the scientists that they weren't supposed to work on their own time. Some of my colleagues have worked through medical conditions that most people stay home in bed or in the hospital for. I've worked with migraines, hand braces, and on crutches when I couldn't stand upright (which when you are doing experimental biophysics is challenging.)

We are not wimps.

So thank you, Bill Nye, for not only introducing us to how cool science is, but for showing we can tough it out with the best of the jocks.

~PhysicsGal

Cooking with 1 1/2 hands: Soup

After Sunday's experiment cooking with Dear Husband, I knew that would not be tenable long term until the fingers on my left hand heal.

 So I decided to tap into my experimentalist side. What can I do in the kitchen? Lift things with my right hand if they are balanced or light enough. Hold light things in my left. I could cook anything that could be cooked on a cookie sheet in the oven, or anything that could cook slowly in the few pots that wont move on my stove.

The epiphany occurred when I realized I could brown things in the oven, on the cookie sheet, instead of in a frying pan. Not the most efficient, but it works, and thats all I need at the moment.

So today I set out to make a minestrone-type soup. Lately, I've been wanting soup, despite never really liking soup before. I now deeply regret not liking soup when I lived in NJ, the land of delicatessens and their marvelous homemade soup. No one makes soup in NC, even if its cold.

Step 1: Accept help from the grocery store.

Yes, that is store bought, prepackaged mirepoix. I ditched the celery, because I never liked the taste of celery. I normally avoid these things like the plague, but right now chopping isn't in my tool kit.

Step 2: Brown ground beef on a baking tray. Parchment paper makes clean up one-hand friendly.

Browning ground beef in the oven works shockingly well. If I ever need to do large batch browning, this is my new method.

Sweat veggies in heavy bottomed pan, add beef stock, diced tomatoes, spices, and add in the ground beef. Let simmer for however long you like. Bam, a filling, satisfying soup.

I can't say that this is how I will cook soup from now on. And I honestly hope to never have to cook one handed again after this period is over, but its nice to know I'm not totally helpless and can work around it. Now, just need to keep this inventive streak going...

Ever have one of those days...

when everyone who knows you looks at you in confusion and pity?

I was not up to my usual form today. I'm still exhausted from the written qualifier, and desperately mustering my resources to study and conquer the oral qualifier. I got a bit of leaf in my eye on Sunday and so my eye is irritated and so I'm wearing my glasses, which I never wear and are out of date. My hair has been terrible since I had to start washing my hair one handed. It was cool and I was lazy so I wore my awesome geeky physics sweatshirt, which is huge on me. I'm-wearing-my-husband's-sweatshirt huge.

I'm not good at selfies...

Now, I'm not usually a high-fashion Pollyanna. I could not care less what Milan says I should be wearing this year. I usually wear full floor/ankle length, handmade dresses and skirts, with plain knit or tee shirts, but I look nice and I usually get compliments. My hair is usually frizzy/wavy, but its nicely pulled back and pretty. I can be  a cynical snarky person, but I am usually pleasant and friendly if I run into you.

Pretty much every conversation went something like this. *confused look as they approach* "You look different" I'm wearing my glasses *actually get close* "You look/[sound] exhausted. How'd the qualifier go?"

And then they would walk away to leave me to my misery.

I started teaching magnetism today. This is usually the best time of the semester for anecdotes. The unit for magnetism is the Tesla. You can easily get a good 10 minutes discussion of Tesla. MRIs, the weakness of the earth's magnetic field, the inefficacy of those magnetic wrist bands, there's tons of cool stuff for me to babble about and flesh out even the most untalkative classes.

Today? Got nothing. Mentioned earth's magnetic field, mentioned MRIs. Took maybe two minutes total. My students starting giving me looks of pity I was so clearly out of form.

Hopefully I can pull myself together before Friday. This is not how I want to convince my professors I am worthy to be their colleague in 4 years.