A Cat Nap

Just thought I’d post a little something to say “I’m still here!” …I’m working on a post about the recent John Tierney column in the NYTimes on women in science, and I hope to have it up soon. In the meantime, I wanted to comment on the New Yorker cover with Barack and Michelle Obama - it seems to have upset many people. I’m not really sure what everyone is so bothered about - I thought it was funny.

So…time’s been passing - and I’ve been working. Playing with liquid nitrogen, teaching 10th graders about chemistry (with squishy and mushy materials like silly putty and home-made viscoelastic slime and personal care products like shampoo, hair gel, and lotion), occasionally analyzing nuggets of data, reading about things going on in the comics industry (T! relates to it), and talking and learning about business. I’ve found all of this to be on the whole enjoyable work, and that makes me happy.

Meanwhile, it’s been unbelievably hot in NYC! So hot, in fact, that the living room is regularly 92 degrees after having left the AC off over night, and during the day while the AC is working at full capacity it maybe brings the room down to 85. Yummy. Sticky. Unfun.

But it’s not all work…on Friday night I had the extreme pleasure of watching one of my oldest and best friends play Musetta in the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music’s Summer Opera production of La Boheme. In the second act, the character Musetta gets to control the stage, and my did she! She was amazing, and I got chills. Especially notable since we were in an AC-free high school auditorium that must have been a sweltering 90 something degrees. We all felt for the characters in the winter scenes with coats, sweatshirts, and scarves on!

I’ve also been playing World of Warcraft with my husband. For hours.

Partially because it’s fun, and partially because it’s the only entertainment that fits in our budget right now (at the amount of hours we play, it’s less than $1/hour of entertainment). And taking walks with the hubby! To get outside! Where there’s air, and exercise to be had!

And finally, I’ve been thinking about babies. Cute, cuddly, babies. Can’t wait for the family I’ve been working for with the 4 month old to get back from Israel so I can go play with him again!

Lately I’ve been really struggling with my sleep and awake schedule and with managing my health and exercise. A brief web search on sleep habits and cycles turned up a lot of hits about how to get more sleep, but what I’m struggling with is how to be more alert, awake, and energetic for a productive portion of the day. I feel sleepy, groggy, and tired a good portion of the time that I am awake. This isn’t really new - I’ve often struggled with fatigue - yawning repeatedly throughout the days even when I’m working or really paying attention to something.

I know some good tips that I can try to help feel more energetic and alert, but I am also struggling to make myself actually do these things. Lately, I would guess I’ve been sleeping about 8-10 hours a night. At least in the last week I’ve managed to keep myself from sleeping any stretches of over 10 hours. This is an above average amount of sleep to get, but it’s not clear whether it’s unhealthy. What I’m most concerned with is getting to a place where I have energy and feel alert during my awake time.

The national sleep foundation recommends waking at the same time each day, weekdays and weekends, to help establish your circadian rhythms. Additionally, they recommend regular exercise, and I have always found that to be helpful in being able to sleep when I want to. My current lifestyle could really use a lot more exercise, and so I’m slowly working on trying to get more of that. For now, I’m doing simple things like 10-30 minutes of yoga and walking around the neighborhood. It’s really hard, being able to do most of my work wherever and whenever I want, to work some routines into my day that allow me good opportunity for exercise.

I was able to find this information about sleeping too long on the national sleep foundation’s site:

On the other hand, some research has found that long sleep durations (nine hours or more) are also associated with increased morbidity (illness, accidents) and mortality (death). Researchers describe this relationship as a “U-shaped” curve where both sleeping too little and sleeping too much may put you at risk. This research found that variables such as low socioeconomic status and depression were significantly associated with long sleep. Some researchers argue that these other variables might be the cause of the longer sleep: the fact that individuals with low socioeconomic status are more likely to have undiagnosed illnesses because of poor medical care explains the relationship between low socioeconomic status, long sleep and morbidity/mortality. Researchers caution that there is not a definitive conclusion that getting more than nine hours of sleep per night is consistently linked with health problems and/or mortality in adults, while short sleep has been linked to both these consequences in numerous studies.

The link between sleeping a lot and depression is fairly clear, and I do tend to sleep more often and longer when I’m feeling depressed. But right now, I’m not sure if it’s depression related or just that I need to establish some new routines and patterns as my lifestyle and work have been changing. Mostly, I feel surprised by how challenging I am finding it to manage my own health and wellness.

I wrote this in response to a comment on a post I wrote a while ago about shared parenting, and then I saved it as a draft to come back and edit, and promptly forgot about it. Oops.

So the commenter wrote that he worked and his wife stayed home because it was what each did best:

Equal parenting is fine with us if we found ourselves one day to be equally matched. But I make 10 times as much as what my wife can do in her best year, and my wife has a much bigger gas tank for the energy in needing to handle children. We’ve tried to be equal, but have found its best to pull the most from our strengths and split up the rest.

I began writing a response but I decided I’d rather post about the rest of my thoughts on the article.

Even in sharing it all, Husband and I do the same thing…but we happen to be much more evenly matched. So the things we defer to each other on are smaller, more in the details - like the Vachons, I think. He takes the heavy laundry in the pushcart down the stairs and to the laundrymat and picks it up the next day, lugging it up the stairs. I happen to wash the dishes. There are definitely things that happen to fall along the “standard” lines, but we’ve talked about all of it and whether we want to do this or that and to what standards, and everything was a mutual decision. And I think that’s what makes our marriage so solid, even if the conversation can sometimes be a tad awkward (”It really made me feel bad when …”).

Regarding parenting, in my opinion “equally” shared parenting isn’t as much about the “equally” part as it is about the sharing - about both parents putting time into it and really being there for their kids. If you share it, then even if you work a full-time job and your spouse stays at home, you spend a significant amount of time with your kids while you are there, and you recognize that your spouse needs a break too. You do things your way when you’re with the kids, but you’re with them enough that you have a way down pat and you know what to expect. To me that’s the important part.

But I also think one of the points of the article might be that these people set different priorities. If you wanted to, you could both choose to live a little less luxuriously in terms of material wealth and comfort, take a pay cut, and have more time at home with your family. This could be working part-time or this could be a flexible or reduced hours schedule, or you might choose to stay home completely. But this is a choice that these people are making, to take less pay in order to both be fully there with their family and with their children. And it’s a choice that I’m passionate about, that I think needs to be available for parents of any gender if we are ever to truly move into a “post-feminist” era.

Well, it’s summertime, and somehow it seems that for me summer and home organization/improvement seem to go together.

Last year, I renovated the bedroom - painting the walls a lavish, dark red, and adding real bed and dresser furniture, care of my lovely momma. There are still a few upgrades I want to add to the bedroom - a new mattress, for one, a few more bins/baskets for some excess clothes we tend to keep out, and some wall art. I dream of getting this nice space-saving sewing workstation, too. Admittedly, it’s not the same color as our current bedroom furniture, but it folds up small (essential in a NYC apartment), and it’s on wheels, so I can easily wheel it out to the living room if the hubby is sleeping. Maybe I can get it later this year for my birthday (I’ll be 25!) or our 2 year anniversary.

This year, Husband and I are both spending lots and lots of time at home. He’s been working from home for a year and a half now, and now it looks like I’ll be joining him. I work from home many hours a week on T! stuff, and I also do data analysis for the lab from here too. If I start pursuing freelance science writing, I’ll be doing that from home as well.  This also means we use the kitchen more since I’m home more to cook and prep food. (Husband typically feeds himself, but rarely chooses to cook anything elaborate.) We’ve accumulated a fair number of things that no longer fit on our various media shelves, and we also have new business related things that we need to store. So I’ve been thinking mostly about how I can upgrade the living room and the kitchen.  Finally, I’ve also just been thinking about what our living patterns have evolved into and how we could make more efficient and fun use of our living space.

So today I made up an organizing list. I started by writing out everything I could think of that needs a place to store. I categorized them by room, including closets as rooms. Then I thought about what we actually use daily, monthly, or only seasonally, and planned the storage location accordingly - making the things we use most often the most easily accessible. Next, I considered what would be the best storage solution for each item - drawers, boxes, bins, or shelves. I chose drawers or open-lidded boxes or bins for things we use often, and boxes and shelves for everything else. Things used only seasonally will be stored in lidded boxes on high shelves, in closets and out of the way.

I’ve picked out items and made a plan for everything. Now to buy the storage furniture and containers - a little at a time. Even though I can’t buy it all right now, I enjoy planning and organizing so much that I don’t care. I ordered a little bit of it, some really cheap organizers from Amazon.com, and I’m on my way to more efficient living…

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine arrived from Netflix yesterday, and today we will be watching the premier episode, as we continue my education in the details of the Star Trek universe. Recently, we completed watching all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Even after a full seven seasons, I didn’t feel ready to say goodbye to Captain Picard and his crew. Luckily, I didn’t have to just then, because we then watched each of the TNG movies. I loved the whole “Next Generation” series, especially their vision of the state of politics in the future: a mostly peaceful universe, where the pursuit of knowledge really does often come before power through war.

Some of the movies featured the original cast of Star Trek. Speaking of the original cast of Star Trek, George Takei recently got married to his long-time partner due to the new California law. Congratulations, Sulu.

There’s a detailed article on shared parenting from NYTimes Magazine that I’m reading, and I’m so happy just to see it. It describes people, most older than myself, who are living lives in the way that I’ve been planning and hoping to live mine. This includes both equal parenting and the voluntary cutback of work hours, work responsibilities, and of course income in order to spend more time living your life and enjoying your family or whatever is most important to you.

Some stats on how the numbers still stack up on average:

The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.

But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.

As disappointing as these numbers are, particularly for families where both partners work full-time, the families described in the article so far are encouraging. I do find it interesting, though, that the author chose to talk about these parent’s own backgrounds - where they grew up and what their parents did - because it signals to me that the author felt these people’s choices needed to be explained. I guess it should be natural when talking about how one manages their family, to ask how their family was managed when they were children, so maybe I’m just being paranoid about the “otherness” of couples who choose to share parenting equally.

I can’t read the rest of the article, and I entreat my readers to go and read it and then tell me what they think. How do you plan or hope to share parenting duties? If you have children already, is reality living up to the plan?

p.s. here’s a great and amusing excerpt for my academic and medical friends:

She goes on to suggest that the perception of flexibility is itself a matter of perception. In her study, she was struck by how often the wife’s job was seen by both spouses as being more flexible than the husband’s. By way of example she describes two actual couples, one in which he is a college professor and she is a physician and one in which she is a college professor and he is a physician. In either case, Deutsch says “both the husband and wife claimed the man’s job was less flexible.”

So for the past few months, I’ve been a serious contributor to the work being done on the company, and I thought maybe I’d tell you all more about what I’ve been up to. I always was somewhat involved and my assistance varied, but more recently we formalized my role within the company. I am the Chief Marketing Officer, as well as Manager of Operations and Finance. I work directly with the CEO (my husband) and the COO (a close friend of his), as well as of course interacting with the others on the team. I also have now been directly involved in company conference calls and pitches to investors.

I’ve started a blog for the company which is geared towards investors and people interested in the progress of the company. After the launch, the blog will be made public so that any interested site users can read about the process that created our site. After launch, I will be greatly involved in the community on the site - welcoming new users and commenting on the things they do and share. I’ll be in charge of making sure the atmosphere is friendly and fun, which I am excited about. I’m very versed in web social networks (I was involved in a smaller-scale social campus site called Campus Network before Facebook was launched at a rival school, and joined facebook within months of its launch), and I’ll be using those skills for my job. Cool, right?

Currently, my duties are primarily in business management. I’m putting to use the project and time management skills I learned as an independent researcher. I’ve always been very organized, and now I’m helping my husband and the other company team members to stay on track and reach our goals. My husband says I’ve been a big help in managing the work that’s being done and keeping us moving along at a good pace. Mostly, I’m building our business plan in all its fine details. As a guide, I’ve been using a book used at many b-schools: The Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies, which I’ve found very helpful. Lately I’ve put a lot of thought into standard procedures for the company, such as ways to make sure information flows smoothly between all members. I’m finding that I can apply lessons I learned in lab group management to this. I’m excited to be helping to make the company work smoothly and I’ve been really enjoying my work!

One thing that I’ve been doing that I think utilizes some of the skills I honed as an academic researcher is the market research. While the methods of acquiring data are quite different (I scour the web’s reputable sources, like us economic census data and trade publications for our industries instead of mixing chemicals in a lab), after that it’s very similar. I compile and organize the information, and think about how best to present it. I think about how I might compare data and what stories the information I gather tells us. And then I create the web presentation or write up the document that we will share with our employees and investors.

Alright, back to work! We got a small investment from a investor who is also a family member today, so we can stop running on fumes and focus on work instead of how to get our next meal. Tomorrow, we will be showing him what we’ve done recently, and I’m making a presentation for that. I’m off to make a flow chart of production stages for new features!

I have been seriously craving an immersive gaming world for weeks, but am worried I’ll lose too many hours to it if I dare touch it. I’m thinking like a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) or a really well-done RPG.  I still have access to Lord of the Rings Online, because I paid for a 3-month subscription at once back before we were shit broke, so maybe I’ll play that…if I dare risk the addictive nature of these games at a time when I’ve got so many important things to do for the company (which I am now Chief Marketing Officer and Manager of Operations and Finance of).  I’m really, really enjoying working hard on the company that Husband started in early 2007, working together towards our dream of having enough success to provide ourselves with fun, self-designed jobs.

Currently, for my husband and I combined, we spend $1,200 each month on health costs and debt. For health costs, this includes prescriptions, doctor’s visits, and a minimum of tests. For debts, this includes credit card, student loan, non-loan overdue university bills, bank fees (many of which we wouldn’t get hit with or would be lower if we had more money), and back taxes (from when we didn’t manage to pay enough estimated self-employment tax during that period when Husband worked full weeks and unpaid overtime but was only a “consultant” - just so that his employer wouldn’t have to provide him with benefits). And the monthly costs may increase soon since we’ll no longer be able to defer payment on my school loans, probably to about $1,400.  We are 24 and 29.  I’ve read that people in my generation have higher levels of debt in their 20’s than most previous generations.

With regards to credit card debt, I think I definitely fell victim to some predatory lending, and now I’ve got a debt with a really high interest rate and high over limit and missed payment fees too. I think I should have known better than that, but it’s too late now to ruminate. Now that things have calmed down, I’m going to see if I can get the rate down or transfer the balance to a card with a lower rate.

And now, I arm you with knowledge from Co-op America’s Real Money about predatory lending:

Predatory lending: Predatory lending is a fast-growing practice in which financial institutions use high fees, exorbitant costs, and other unscrupulous lending practices to take advantage of targeted groups—often the elderly, students, and low-income people. In the case of credit cards, banks may market cards to these groups that “contain hidden transfer charges, exorbitant late fees, and exploding interest rates,” according to the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL).

It’s not just target groups that suffer from such practices. A Woodstock Institute report states that “the intricate web of penalties and fees implemented by the credit card industry may be one of the key factors for the high level of indebtedness among Americans. In January 2005, the average US household had seven credit cards and carried a balance of $14,000, the highest level of debt ever.”

I feel a little better knowing I have less than average credit card debt…

The last few weeks have seen an interesting hodgepodge of demands on my time, but I think I’ve managed to secure enough babysitting hours to stabilize the financial situation a little bit until we get our next cash influx, which should be a few weeks away now. Financially we’re in what Husband is calling a “famine cycle,” but I think I’ve succeeded in keeping it from getting as bad as it has been in the past. I pulled in all the cash from any savings account we had, enough to bring our bank account in the black again, and now I can put enough cash from babysitting into the account to keep from bank fees and bounced payments when some of our unavoidable bills are processed. This feels a little better, although it’s still really stressful as a significant portion of our bills are going unpaid, and thus our debt is just growing further.

I found a new occasional baby sitting gig, watching a 2 month old. I’m happy to be around a baby again, as the toddlers at my other gig are now 20 months and 3 1/4 yrs old. And so far, the baby seems to be a pretty easy baby, although I haven’t spent too much time with him yet. His parents are both musicians, and I’m going to be helping out while his momma gets some practice time in. So I get to listen to some great classical piano while I’m working, too! It’s pretty soothing. So far the baby and I seem to interact well - he likes my smile and my laugh.

So this is what my weekly schedule is shaping up to look like: 5-10 hours with the 2 month old, 10-15 hours with the toddlers, unknown number of hours in the lab (I’m a “part-time staff associate” for the summer), and 10-20 hours on the startup company. I’ve been taking time off from lab work the past few weeks to focus on helping to get the business pitch ready for our next attempts to secure funding, but I begin lab stuff again this week. We have some new summer undergrads who I will be meeting on Thursday and begin training on Friday. I’m looking forward to new potential mentees!

As for my mental and physical health, I’m struggling, but fighting hard. I’ve been a revolving door of various infections, viruses, and other stress-related sickness. I feel the pull of the bed, with the comfy covers and the promise of sleep and dreams, but I’m managing somewhat to get myself to do work. Last week I felt myself wanting to sleep an awful lot, but on Thursday I fought hard against the desire to stay in bed, and it was a good step. I went out and ran some errands in the neighborhood and then went to Starbucks and did some work there, and by the time I returned home I felt somewhat rejuvenated. When I get stressed out too much, I try to meditate and relax. When I feel like sleeping but know that I’ve had enough sleep, I try to get out and just do little things to get myself going. It’s these small skills that I’ve been cultivating to fight depression, and I’m definitely getting better at it. These struggles with depression and anxiety haven’t been easy, but I am definitely able to see progress in my ability to deal with everything and to fight my way out of the depressed state. I know that I’m dealing with everything that’s going on now in a much, much stronger way than I would have even two years ago, and for that I’m proud.