Dr. Shellie

I have lived in so many places since finishing high school. The friends I make are always moving someplace else– finishing their PhD’s or postdocs, moving on. As one of my friends said, "it seems like as soon as I make a new friend, I have to start searching for their replacement."

Select one of the many squashes piling up in your refrigerator from your CSA box. Cut in half. Place in oiled baking dish, cut side down. Roast at 375 until quite soft (45 minutes, plus or minus, depending on size of squash). Fry onion in pan. Add frozen tomato sauce, homemade this summer after handpicking tomatoes at your farm’s u-pick day, running them through a custom-purchased tomato mill, and cooking down the result for 3 hours. Wait, you have no such tomatoes? You may continue with canned tomatoes, though your sauce will lack the pleasant flavoring of moral superiority. Similarly, add unidentified dried herb (was that thyme? or marjoram?) from last season’s box, unless you absolutely must substitute the lame supermarket version. Meanwhile, boil cheese ravioli. Sadly, organic, local, sustainably produced ravioli made from the cheese of grass-fed, antibiotic-free cows may be hard to come by. Ignore the cognitive disconnect. Use available product. Last, scoop squash out of skin, add to tomato sauce. Mix lightly. Appreciate delicate flavors of tomato and squash; disregard less delicate flavor of supermarket ravioli. Yum.

1. I have, at last, caved in and joined Facebook. As promised, I have found several long-lost high school and college friends already. It’s nice to see their photos. I miss the blog-style musings and ponderings, though– to really know what’s up with someone, I’d like to read what they write.
2. Has anyone been in Banana Republic lately??!! How am I supposed to keep track of all the weird new style options they are imposing on us this season? For example: cropped jackets with cropped, flared arms and only one button, at the top? In crazy retro prints and saturated colors? Turquoise and brown houndstooth jackets with empire waist and pleats? Silky button down shirts with rounded colors and spherical plastic buttons? I swear, if you take one of these items out of the mall, away from the flocks of yuppie shoppers, and tried to wear it to work, people would think it was something last worn by your grandmother in 1961. Though, of course, there’s no use just buying one such item, you need the whole outfit, since none of it is going to go with anything else you have in your wardrobe. I found the one pair of standard-issue corduroy pants in the whole store and bought them. Oh yeah. Then there’s the horror of this season’s J. Crew catalog: purple tights with yellow shoes, plaid red and green purse, magenta shirt and a green sweater, anyone?
3. While on the subject of consumer goods, let me just say, I love Palladium shoes. Mail order through Zappos.

I am really enjoying the "Up Series," a British documentary series following the lives of kids from different social classes in British society. The first film ("Seven Up!") was made in 1964, when the kids were 7. Every seven years, the filmmaker returned to film the same kids, so you see them at age 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, and 49. When the series started, the premise of the first film was that by age 7, a child’s personality and destiny are already formed by their upbringing and social class. As the series goes on, you see that while social class is very important in shaping opportunities, people’s lives can change, sometimes in dramatic ways. (I don’t want to spoil the plot here, but if you want some examples, you can read the Wikipedia page). Not just that– people’s personalities can also change quite a bit. Though certain traits remain very much the same, other traits can change completely. People’s overall happiness can change a lot in 7 years as well. Me, I quit drinking coffee a few years ago in favor of tea, so I figure that already qualifies for a major life change. Now I’m trying to become a person who leaps out of bed in the morning to go running. The other changes are harder to see from the inside. It might be fun to dig out the video camera each year and record something.

Interestingly, one of the participants in the series, Nick, is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Wisconsin. At age 7, you see him running around the pastures on his farm, the only kid his age in his entire (tiny) village. At 14, he’s akward and shy, uncomfortable in front of the camera. At 21, he’s studying physics at Oxford, wondering whether he will be good enough and smart enough to do what he wants to do– have a research career in nuclear physics. At 28, he’s an assistant professor in Madison, hanging out on the Terrace and visiting the farmer’s market with his wife, Jackie. They’re talking about whether they’ll be able to balance two careers with having kids and the challenges of living so far away from their families in England. I’m halfway through the "28 Up!" film right now, and am looking forward to seeing what happens next. It’s amazing to me that the guy in the film is a "real person"– meaning someone I might actually meet someday, or who probably taught someone I know physics. It’s really cool that the people in the series volunteered for it. It can’t be completely comfortable to expose yourself to the world that way (and some of the participants did drop out part of the way through the series). But it’s amazingly interesting to see how people’s lives develop.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make an impact.

First, there’s my research. By now, I’ve written a lot of papers, and people have cited them a fair number of times. So that’s good. But I am surprised by which papers have become popular (=cited more that others). They weren’t necessarily my favorite papers, or the ones that I felt proudest of, or the ones that were most creative or required the most work. I couldn’t have predicted that they’d be popular.

Then, there’s teaching and mentoring. I haven’t done a lot of formal teaching, but I have done a variety of tutoring and volunteering here and there. For a year I tutored Spanish-language GED students. You would think that would be very useful, and yet I’m not sure that any of my students even passed the GED in the end. (Due to the way the class was organized, new students were constantly coming and going, and they had widely varying levels of formal education, making progress difficult.) Quite possibly, the most useful mentoring I’ve done so far only took one hour. A few years back, I ran into a classmate who looked a little down. We got to talking, and it turned out that she was really unhappy in her research group and wanted to switch. I gave her a few tips, and she found a new group. A few weeks ago, she told me that she is planning to graduate this year, and that she didn’t think she’d still be in a PhD program if it hadn’t been for me. I was really touched. I really didn’t do much at all! I just happened to help a tiny bit at exactly the right time.

I like it when I feel like I’ve had an impact on other people’s lives. As an aside, I do wonder sometimes whether that is gendered– why am I not as happy and proud about my paper citations as I am about helping others? Am I too timid to aspire to be a Great Scientist? (The male students writing to ask me for research positions all claim to be aspiring to this goal!)

But anyway, my biggest impact might be the least expected of all. Next week I will be a bone marrow donor. Before you all pat me on the back for my tremendous sacrifice, let me point out that this does not involve giant needles, "spooning" out of marrow, or excruciating pain. Thanks to recent medical advances, all I have to do (more or less) is get a few shots and then donate blood. Through no effort of my own, I happen to have the right genetic makeup to be compatible with my sister’s immune system. And so, right now, my cells might possibly (hopefully) save her life. Pretty dramatic. How’s that for unexpected impact?