It Snowed Today!

Finally some winter weather in the oh-six. I am hoping for a big old Nor'easter for Springy's sake. He's got all this cold weather gear . . . and, in a typically Northeastern way, I am itching to giggle at him as he freezes his buttocks off. He thinks Americans are obsessed with weather and he's totally right.

I heart the lovely nice people at the computer services walk-in clinic who fixed my computer using something called a "ghost" which they said was a "compressed snapshot of a clean hard drive". I still don't quite understand what it means but I trust those Harvard computer kids. They have hard drives with the side panels removed so you can see the computer guts on all the desks.

Apparently, the evil virus had insinuated itself into the very immune system of my computer, so that the recovery process itself was corrupted. But the ghost, like a shot of transgenic hematopoetic stem cells into my hard drive's bone marrow, cleared it all up. Then the wonderful people gave me Firefox and re-registered me and everything.

I also heart the guy at the Comcast call center, even though he ultimately couldn't help us. He did his best, though.

Whew!

I also did a little reading on Carnival of Feminists today. (By a little I mean quite a lot.) I wonder - does thinking more about being a "woman in science" make me more self-conscious about being a woman in science? My argument, if someone else asked me this, would be that it does and that that is a good thing, because otherwise they might be oblivious to serious problems within the system. But I worry that I will start to think of myself as a female biologist rather than just a biologist. I am concerned that I could absorb the sense that I might not be constitutionally able to do what I want to do because someone might expect that I can't . . . whereas my native arrogance left me blissfully ignorant of that possibility. Does that make sense?

I mean that I might have been more cheerful living in my happy place where I took it as a given that people thought I was smart and capable and had little or no opinion of my sex/gender (aside from the odd, "Hey, she's kinda cute!"), and where discrimination was so unthinkable that it didn't even register on my personal radar screen. I used to be like that, I swear. And it was quite nice.

I don't know - I think grad school hacks away at anyone's self esteem enough that one has to watch out for any extra varieties of hacking. I don't like being sensitive and self-conscious. I don't think, really, that a burgeoning feminist awareness is to blame. But I do want to return to my happily oblivious, cheerful egoism. I think that might help me in my research. God knows I need it.