Long General Update:

Sharkboy is BACK! I drunk-dialed him last night, intending to leave a silly message on his voice-mail, but I got the real thing! Then it was awkward because he was really sober and hanging out with his parents. Haha. But we talked for a good while and it was great to hear about his trip.

Wine is horrible. I like how everyone always says, "Oh, this wine is so smooth, it goes down really easily." By this you mean that the wine that you usually drink goes down like burning gasoline and you are surprised and delighted when you taste a wine that you are physically capable of swallowing. But I'm in France, and drinking gasoline is part of the territory. Luckily a "delicious", "smooth" wine in France is like 80% of the cost of a comparable wine back home, so my strategy of poisoning myself to gain the social acceptance of my peer group isn't too hard on my pocketbook.

Last night I went out with some random french people including my co-worker and his girlfriend. I meet up with his girlfriend every Friday at a cafe. We drink hot chocolate or soda and practice speaking in English and French. She's actually really cool and I like her a lot. She was apparently talking to a friend of hers in Japan who said that she's having lots of fun because even though she's alone people invite her out practically every night. My friend was inspired by the story to invite me out with them because I was similarly alone in a big foreign city. Aw.

We went to a little bistro and drank red wine and ate an assortment of cheese and a charcuterie plate (assorted meats). They said that you really couldn't get much more french than that and that I should take a picture. I didn't, because I'm too cool and they were joking, but I wanted to.

Last week I had an "American" dinner for my friends. My new canadian best friend and I went to the American grocery store and bought a bunch of delicious items and then fixed them up for our friends. We wanted to serve things that were very American and that our friends hadn't heard of before. We ended up having Jell-O shots as an aperitif (served in champagne flutes, how classy!) We passed around a root beer so that everyone could try it, and to my great surprise not everyone hated it! For appetizers we had potato chips and sour-cream and onion dip, Nacho cheese Doritos, and little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I cut into fours and garnished with toothpicks. Everyone was sidetracked for a while admiring the jelly container, which was a squeezable type with one of those lids that dispenses jelly in a flat sheet so that you don't need a knife. I was so proud of the technical accomplishments of my fellow countrymen. For dinner we served a chicken and stuffing casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and another strange casserole with three layers: cranberry sauce, bacon, and mac n' cheese. The canadian said that she'd had it once at a restaurant outside of Boston, and while it wasn't strictly traditional American, it combined three things that were traditionally American, and it tasted fucking DELICIOUS. Holy shit it was so delicious.

After our guests had decimated all of these things, the Eiffel Tower started sparkling, and I told everyone that they should come and take a look. Everyone started moving from around the table, when suddenly my friend bumped the table and the entire thing collapsed. Considering that my tabletop is a giant slab of incredibly heavy wood, the collapse was catastrophic, breaking nearly all of my dishes and glasses and spraying onion dip, Doritos, and red wine all over the room. We were lucky that most of the guests had gone to look at the Eiffel Tower, or there could have been some serious injuries. Luckily we were finished eating, and the dessert was on the counter in the other room. For dessert we had cupcakes and a big cake with funfetti icing. The theme of the evening was "dinner from a box", so naturally we made nothing from scratch. Someone else brought Chips Ahoy, and the europeans brought macaroons and champagne and wine, so our dessert was a mix. Everyone was enchanted by the funfetti icing, and even though they all laughed and said they were full when I cut the cake after the cupcakes, they all ended up taking an extra piece anyway. The best part of the cake was that they only ate a third of it, so over this last week I have been pretty much eating the rest. We had a German, an Italian, an Ecuadorian, a Frenchwoman, a girl from La Réunion (french overseas territory in the Indian Ocean near Africa), a Canadian, and an American (me).

Work is going ok. We are working on an important project, and the only outstanding part is my part. This is naturally stressful, since I am new to this field and not well-equipped to solve any of the many problems that I encounter. I was really starting to feel like a huge idiot, but my director came in and sat down and explained a lot of things to me, which helped a lot. Now instead of watching random numbers go by on the screen I feel like I can watch numbers and see the atmosphere breathing. That's pretty cool. Still, everything I try to fix the problem doesn't work, and it gets me down. It always seems like the other post-docs are progressing at a faster rate than I am. I also occasionally see the whole group having a meeting that I wasn't invited to. They have been testing out Python as a potential better programming language and I'm the only post-doc that wasn't asked to participate even though I've actually taken an entire class in Python programming.

At the end of my PhD I really had everything together, and I was at the top of my game. Now it's like I'm a freshman again and I know nothing. I know that it's better that way because I'm learning, but it's tough.
It's nice to be able to balance challenges areas with comfort areas. Right now I feel like I am living my entire life in a challenge area, where I'm an idiot at work because I'm not an atmospheric scientist, and I'm an idiot in every other arena of life because I'm a foreigner. [If you are ever feeling stressed about dealing with repairmen or cable companies or the government, stop and thank your lucky stars that you at least get to speak in your own language!]

For this reason it was nice to talk to my coworker, who while French, is also from outside the field. We finally talked about how frustrating it is to work with our current model and how we're making hardly any progress. He told me that he's always having to tell our director, "Everything you just explained actually means nothing to me," and the director has to start all over again. I had an idea to make the model more idiot-proof and I proposed it to the group but nobody ever got back to me. My coworker told me that he thought it was actually a really great idea. Thank you! I also talked to my director and we determined that the problem that I'm having is actually really complicated, instead of just something stupid. That's bad news for the model, but at least it makes me feel better for not being able to figure it out.

I went for a free tour of the Louvre, and I was the only one that showed up, so I got a private free tour. The lady was really nice and she said she didn't speak English that well so I said that she could give the tour in French. She asked where I was from and I said "the USA," and then she said, "Oh, well then I guess I should give the tour in English." I said that it was really ok so she gave the tour in french. She spoke slowly and I already knew a lot about greek mythology and european history, so she was easy to follow.

Hmm... what else? Ah yes, there is a giant mystery novel unfolding in the hallway of my apartment building, but that is complicated so I will leave it to another entry.

Someone I know on Facebook posted this photo:



And for some reason it made me soOOooo homesick for the USA. Nothing better than a little American BBQ with babies. =)

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Captain's log, stardate 41147.3. It has been at least a million days since Sharkboy left for Patagonia. The crew maintains that our sense of time has been distorted by the massive black hole that has been left in his absence.

Since his departure we have been drifting aimlessly in space. Just kidding, we have been dining out with friends, learning parkour, and getting free private tours of the Louvre. We have also been eating delicious cake. But it still feels like drifting aimlessly in space, especially because we forgot when he is supposed to come back. He did promise to catch a fish in the captain's honor.

France, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Zanzibar. Its 2-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

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It is said that life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage (Anaïs Nin). [I had a friend who was so afraid of driving on highways that she never went to Target in Providence. Every time she talked about it, I would say something helpful like: "Are you going to live your life SHACKLED BY FEAR?"]

For this reason, I have been working on my courage through Random Acts of Bravery (RAB?)

Today was a big one.

Paris is the birthplace of the amazing Art du Déplacement, or "parkour". For the uninitiated:



As I have wanted to do this since I was able to walk on two feet, I was incredibly excited to find out about GravityStyle, a group that teaches the fundamentals of parkour in a not-so-jumping-off-high buildings kind of way. I was a little worried about going because:

1. The gym is located in a random place in the burbs.
2. It is run by the very gods of Parkour themselves.
3. Everyone speaks french. [This was actually the biggest fear.]
4. I haven't really been in shape since.... um... the fall of 2010? [The PhD thesis will do that to you.]
5. I'm old now. My bones don't heal as quickly. Don't laugh, in a few years all of you will be old, too. Lookin' at you, didi. Just kidding, I was looking at you, Middaymoon.
6. My friend said that she might come with me, but I couldn't get a hold of her.

Anyway, I thought of a half a dozen reasons that I shouldn't go today. But for the sake of bravery and for the sake of expanding my life here in Paris, I took the plunge.

And parkour, ladies and gentlemen, is AWESOME. Not only did the instructor look exactly like Shia Laboeuf, but he was very welcoming and great at teaching. There was only one other girl in the class, and almost everyone there was at least ten years younger than I was, but that meant that I was more coordinated than they were, and that I didn't have to worry about "fitting in", because I was essentially in a gym full of hyperactive adolescent boys. One of them even spoke English and took it upon himself to explain things he thought I wouldn't understand and to walk me from the first training session to the second even though he had a bike.

I think he was surprised when I let on that I was a Mars researcher....

There was also an "army" type guy with a buzz cut and army boots who also seemed new like me. He seemed about my age and he was clearly in great shape, but stumbled and tripped like everyone else who was new. I was aided by the fact that one of the fundamental moves of parkour is a front roll that you do to avoid breaking yourself when you fall, and I had already learned that move ten years ago in Tae Kwon Do. I have also spent my whole life practicing jumping over fences and balancing on railings, which gave me an agility +10.

The thing that sucks about going to the gym is how pointless it is. Sure, there have been plenty of times that I've gone to the gym regularly. I lifted lots of weights, I ran around the track a bunch, I did lunges and felt sore, but the big question always in my head was WHY? As soon as I stopped working out, my endurance would leave me and my body would go back to the way it was. I wasn't really learning anything. When I ran track, I lifted and ran because I wanted to WIN on Saturday. When I played sports, I wanted to run people down and steal the ball from them, and I wanted to play the whole game and never have to come out. When there was no more goal I had no more ambition. "Looking good" or "being healthy" are just not concrete or immediate enough to motivate me. {Being a badass like The-Muffin-Man was much more motivating.}

Parkour is all about gaining mastery over both your body and your environment. The better you become at parkour, the better you're able to judge distances, the better you know the limitations of your strength, the better you are able to move fluidly through your environment. Parkour removes boundaries. For example, our gym has stairs leading up to it....? We were just sitting there minding our own business, when a guy just leaped right over us and into the stairwell. No "going around to the stairs part" for him... he just jumped right down the stairwell, no problem.

"Pourquoi est-ce qu'il l'a fait??" "Why did he do that?" asked the incredulous preteen boys.

"Probablement pour draguer les filles." answered a sage 15 year old, looking at me and the other girl.

"Probably to pick up chicks."

More courage needed to make the necessary [french] doctor's appointment to be officially cleared to join the gym....

NO MORE LIVING OUR LIVES SHACKLED BY FEAR.

LET THE UNIVERSE EXPAND!

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Watching 6 PhDs try to figure out how to take a median.

J: "I think it's like a kind of average."
V: "No, it's different, like a middle number thing."
Me: "You write down all the numbers in the set, order the set, and then you take the middle number in the set."
V: "The number has to be in the set???"
Me: "Yes!"
V: "What if there are an even number of numbers in the set?"
Me: "......" ::consults Wikipedia::

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I invented a new hobby for myself. I have a year-long pass to the Louvre, so I decided that on Wednesdays or Fridays when they're open late I will go there and draw things.
Here are my œuvres from yesterday:



Originally a wooden statue of an angel, missing its hands.
It took me a while to draw that one, so I decided to draw some fast ones at the very end:



Another wooden statue, also supposed to be an angel.



This one was a marble statue of Neptune. He was killing a sea creature in a very awkward pose and the museum was closing, so I changed my mind about drawing the rest of his hand. I was trying to work on drawing mouths. Overall a fun hobby, but next time I'm going to choose a better lit part of the Louvre because it hurt my eyes....

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Saturn videos. I can't get enough of them. I'm trying to be really on task so I've only watched this video three times today.



I'm flying to Baltimore on Sunday but I have 8 million things to do between now and then. I'm on a NASA review panel... I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a secret or not. I won't tell you which one it is.

And now I bring you a landslide on Mars:



You can imagine how excited the scientists were when they realized how lucky they were to get this shot.

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