Don't Mean A Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing

Sometimes, I think I was born in the wrong era. Because I absolutely love swing dancing. I just can't get enough. Maybe I should have lived during a time where everyone was as obsessed with swing as I am.

I went Lindy-Hoppin' last night at a great monthly dance in Tucson put on by the University of Arizona Swing Cats. I tried to take some photos, but let's just say that for now, I'm a better dancer than photographer. (Hopefully I'll get some good dancing action shots for this blog in the future after I master my manual settings).

When two people swing dance together, one is the leader, and the other follows (usually a man and a woman, respectively). It took me a long time to get used to this format. At first I felt that as a follower, this left me little room for my own expression and creativity. But as I've matured as a swing dancer, I've realized that the dance is a conversation, and the leader-follower structure merely allows that conversation to happen. When you're talking to your friend, you could both just talk at once. But this modus operandi pretty much guarantees that your conversation won't be very interesting. You need to be able to hear one another so that you can play off of each others' ideas and achieve a unity in the topic and mood of the discussion. It's the interplay between friends' ideas that can make a conversation fascinating and engrossing and fun, and the same goes for a swing dance. The leader-follower scheme is the channel for this interplay.

Learning to follow well, so that you can feel and react to your partner's signals, is a technical skill that takes a lot of practice. The leader must be able to read, react, and adjust to the follower too. Getting to this point in partnered dancing can take on the order of a year of consistent practice after you've got the basic steps down. But after reaching this point, swing goes from "pretty fun" to something you're addicted to and want to do all the time. You dream about it at night, and get pumped up every time you hear about a swing band playing in your city. Because finally, you've got the tools to create and explore your own chemistry on the dance floor.

There's just nothing more satisfying than catching your lead's unexpected funky break, or feeling the synchrony lock in when you figure out his unique rhythmic gait and reproduce it in or your own steps. Or maybe it's most satisfying to surprise your partner by throwing in a double turn where he'd only planned for a single, or making him laugh as you add in some outlandish embellishment inspired by the saxaphone. Actually, with so many great moments in every swing dance, I don't really feel the need to choose.

Math Gives me Fever

The good and the bad kind, it turns out.

I sacrificed my whole weekend to study for a midterm I had today. Really, the whole weekend-- Friday day and night, Saturday day and night, and Sunday day and night. The exam was long and tough, but I do feel extremely pleased with having all these new techniques and methods solidified in my mind. That's the good kind of fever.

The bad kind is the actual fever and wet cough I came down with today. BLECH. So since I'm just lying here burning up in bed, pouring Vitamin Water down my throat like it's my job, and since Shel Silverstein is my preferred bathroom reading lately, here's a little poem I wrote to commemorate the day of my Math 583b midterm.

Professor, O Doctor of this stuff, come quick-
Advanced mathematics is makin' me sick.

Contours for integrals tangle my hair,
singular points fly like knives through the air.

Limits that threaten like time-bombs to blow-up
wreak havoc on guts. They just might make me throw up.

My codes iterate- IF WHILE FOR- so inane!
The looping forever short-circuits my brain.

Interior complimentations of sets
in this space may be dense, but they sure make me sweat.

Staying up late every night for analysis
Surely will usher in spinal paralysis.

Doctor, Professor, please tell me the cure.
I guess you know best. Better study some more.

Amateur Photographer Suz!

For my birthday, I got a new camera. It's not a super-fancy SLR, but it is a high-quality digital manual with a great lens and lots of options. This purchase was just in time for my one-week March vacation, and I took the camera on a road trip to try it out.

I still have lots to learn about taking pictures with my camera-- especially how to deal with different kinds of light and make the colors in my pictures come out true. Nevertheless, my photographic dabbling greatly enhanced my enjoyment of my trip. Here are a few of the shots I am most proud of.

Cholla Ghost, Joshua Tree National Park

Spring Training at Tucson Electric Park

The Pitch.

Tucson Bike Path.

Sarah's Break

Laguna Beach

Pure Beach Joy

The rest of my vacation photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/suzski/MarchVacation2007?authkey=mujQDUgCqt0

The Sparsity of Women in Science

Stop the abstract theorizing. Halt the heated debates in academic institutions everywhere. I've solved the great mystery of why scientific fields (in particular mathematics and physics) have such a hard time retaining women:

Because it sure can suck sometimes to be a woman in science.

Let me flesh that idea out just a bit. First, a young woman who dreams of being a scientist must sit through four years of being the only woman (or one of few) in her undergraduate classes. Let's be honest here: 9 times out of 10, being in the minority is just inherently uncomfortable in any situation. People tend to choose to spend their time and energy in environments where they feel they can be part of a community and a culture. Merely being a different gender than everyone around you makes it more difficult to feel you are part of the culture of science.

Then you get to grad school, where (and I don't care how smart you are) you are bound to run up against some serious academic challenges sooner or later. The kind that makes you wonder if you can hack it. Suddenly, you realize that you've got a choice between plowing through some of the shit on your desk, or keeping in touch with old friends/spending time showing your boyfriend you care/calling your family members once in a while. Not to mention taking care of yourself. Meanwhile, by this time, you're in your mid-twenties and starting to think about when in your life if ever you are going to be able to start a family, especially if you're living on a graduate student salary and time budget until well into your thirties. I don't think that I'm going too far out on a limb when I say that in general, interpersonal relationships probably weigh more heavily in importance for most women than for most men.

I don't know from personal experience how the story continues post-graduate school, but the statistics certainly seem to indicate that it's not "happily ever after."

At some point, no matter how much you love science and mathematics, there comes a time when the grueling uphill climb to establish a career in these fields makes you wonder whether it's worth the sacrifice. In my experience, this is true of both men and women. But with a much steeper gradient ahead of them, women seem to question it far earlier.

Anyway... time for vacation. (Deep breath.)

A Tucson Dive

On my birthday a couple nights ago, I went to check out a local Tucson dive bar called The Buffet. This bar sits under its flickering neon sign in the middle of a decrepit block next to only tumbleweeds, with no other businesses in sight. The windowless walls of the joint are covered with graffiti, and filled to the brim with the skeeziest low-lifes of the Old Pueblo. Thursday night, that included me and 15 or 20 friends. The Buffet features Happy Minute (11:00-11:01), free birthday shots and a birthday yard-of-beer, and surly bottle-blonde bartendresses with throaty, nicotene-glazed voices that wish you "a happy birthday, sweetheart."

The Buffet also has table shuffleboard, a game I have never played before. According to Wikipedia, the origins of this game remain mysterious. My brother tells me its trendy in NYC bars, though. The white dust covering the table looks like salt, but is actually a sea of tiny plastic beads that make the surface close to frictionless for sliding pucks across. (Ask my friend Brandon; as birthday queen I ordered him to lick it just to make sure.) The object is basically to slide your puck as close to the opposite side of the table as possible without having it slide right off the end. You get more points the closer you get. You take turns with an opponent who stands on the same side of the table as you, and you can slide your puck into theirs to whack it off the table, too.

If only I had known about this fabulous game when I taught conservation of linear momentum to my high school physics students last year. I have no idea whether I won or lost the game I played (mustuv been that free tequila shot), but I sure as hell had a great time.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

My Dad is:family caretaker, idea-lover, bicyclist, birthday-party thrower, armchair philosopher, armchair physicist, hiker, possessor of old-man strength, enthusiastic singer, sports commentator, political commentator, wooden-boat builder, wooden boat lover, puttanesca grand master, worthy debating adversary, joyful kitchen dancer, road tripper, information superhighway engineer, cold ocean swimmer, sailor, kite-flyer, Big Questions asker, sunbather, lifelong learner, fearless poetry-attempter, self-teacher, pancake man, tickler, balletomane, shark-attacker, a DO-er, 57 years old today!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!!!! I love you.

Obama: Not Black Enough?

I don't know much 'bout politics. But I was annoyed by an article in yesterday's NY Times: "So Far, Obama Can't Take Black Vote for Granted." The gist of the article is that many African Americans don't feel Obama is "black enough" or "one of us," and that as the son of a white mother and Kenyan father, he doesn't share the struggles and experience of a typical black American.

But, A: neither do most white presidential candidates share the struggles and experiences of the average white American. It seems to me that many white presidential candidates were born into wealth, often belong to families that are already politically prominent, and have enjoyed the benefits of private education and ivy league degrees. This is obviously not the experience of your average American of any color. Also, I know that my elected officials are supposed to represent me and my fellow "average" Americans, but they don't have to be "average" themselves. In fact, I hope they are a lot smarter and more educated than I am.

Secondly, I have a big problem with this analysis of Obama's lack of support, as given in the same article:

The black author and essayist Debra J. Dickerson recently declared that “Obama isn’t black” in an American racial context.

To me this is reminiscent of one analysis often given to explain the persistence of the achievement gap in schools between black and white students. In her book "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", psychologist Beverly Tatum expounds on the idea that as black adolescents begin to form their racial identities, it often seems "white" to do well in school, and that black students who do excel academically face being ostracized by their peers. Dickerson's analysis suggests to me whole masses of the kids in Tatum's book growing up without growing out of this mindset and thinking, "you know what else 'isn't black' in an American racial context? Being a politician. Therefore I don't think I'll support Obama."

It seems silly to me to think that anyone would decide on whether to support a candidate based on whether or not they fit into a certain racial paradigm, or whether they're somehow representative of any vague notion of the average American experience. On the other hand, I guess politicians are always trying to show us that they come from backgrounds "just like us" to secure our votes. And as a nation, we did vote for Bush, a non-intellectual cowboy, just like the rest of us Amuricans. So is my thinking on this naive and overly idealistic? I welcome your comments.