New York: Part Two

Posted on March 5, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

The first time we came to New York, we didn’t have a lot of time to take in the general ambiance of the city, as it were, since we spent most of our 22 hours sleeping, talking to people in cafes, and madly rushing between cafes. (And visiting Ground Zero. That’s about it.) This time we could slow down a little.

But only a little, because slowing down in New York will get you run over – by pedestrians or cars, take your pick. It’s a very intense experience, that’s for sure. Even outside areas like Times Square – which are visually overstimulating in a very serious way – there are ads, colour, sound, everywhere.

And a lot of pink, for some reason.

Well, not quite everywhere. We finally managed a walk through Central Park to get from the Met to our subway stop at the AMNH. The park isn’t what I’d call quiet – it’s very well-used, and there are people walking dogs absolutely everywhere – but compared to the rest of the city it’s positively restful, and full of cute little hills and surprises; just on that walk we passed an ampitheatre and a castle. I know there’s a zoo, further down, and several ponds and lakes as well as the main reservoir. I’m not sure how much of the park’s terrain is original and how much is landscaped – given its location, my money would be on landscaped – but it’s a stunning addition to such a large city. Christchurch actually boasts the third-largest center-city park in the world, after Central Park and Hyde Park, but let’s be honest, Hagley is mostly sports fields. (And the Botanic Gardens, and the Avon, but mostly: rugby and cricket.)

There was a sort of peace at the start of the morning, too, with the sun pouring down between the buildings and the streets quiet, but it was more like a pause.

You’d think a walk through Central Park wouldn’t be a particularly attractive proposition in late February, but remember that whole lack-of-winter thing we’ve been having? Also in New York. We strolled past green lawns and a decent number of daffodils. It was all rather unseasonable, frankly, but hugely to our advantage.

Daffodils. WHAT THE HELL, I ASK YOU.

And an enormous statue of a medieval Polish king, because that's...probably totally logical in some way I am unaware of. Yep.

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the things we were going to try and do in New York was eat food that we can’t get up in Western Mass without a) great effort, b) making it ourselves, or c) both, like, for example, pies. Which lose some of their fat-laden convenience-food gloriousness when you have to simmer your meat filling for two hours on the stove first. (Don’t get me wrong, they still taste good and have the bonus of containing actual meat, but it’s not like popping down to the dairy and grabbing one.)

We pretty much failed on the “eat interesting food” front, because we were so busy dashing from place to place that we ended up eating whatever was closest to us at the time, which had a definite bias towards pizza. Not that New York is a bad place to be eating pizza, mind you, we had some very excellent examples of the dish, but it isn’t like we’ve been deprived of the stuff since we got to America, and pizza is, ultimately, pizza.

The one place we did manage to get to was A Salt And Battery, a fish and chip shop in Greenwich Village run by actual British people. I’d love to tell you it was amazing and satisfied eighteen months of pent-up fish-and-chip cravings in a single bite, but I can’t, because while the fish was excellent, the chips were exceedingly mediocre. (My guess would be cold oil; it was a very small shop doing a very brisk trade, and their fryers didn’t look large enough to handle the volume. Mike’s mother worked in fish and chip shops for some of his childhood, so I have been well-educated in the causes of the mediocre chip.)  I ended up going online afterwards to moodily check whether our favourite fish and chip shop in Christchurch had been scheduled for demolition. It hadn’t. If I do one thing in Christchurch that isn’t catching up with people, it will be visiting that shop.

In particular, we ended up eating very quickly on the Saturday night, because we had a pretty short break in between returning from stocking up at Lush (my sister hooked me when she worked there and got 50% off on everything years ago, and I haven’t been able to kick the habit) and heading out to Broadway. I figured if we were going to do the whole New York thing, it should definitely include a Broadway musical. We were staying at a hotel about ten minutes’ walk away from most of the main theatres, so it was easy to do. We debated for some time about what to go see, but ended up settling on The Phantom of the Opera, because it was very nearly the only thing that wasn’t booked out for months in advance, not very interesting, or The Lion King. And, okay, because I’ve sort of wanted to go see it in the theatre for the better part of a decade. We had a terrible shock when we got to the theatre because there was a line halfway ’round the block; turned out that theatres are small enough in New York that there’s actually nowhere to put the audience when they aren’t sitting down. The line was for people who’d already bought tickets, to get into the theatre and be seated.

Broadway, being basically the same area as Times Square, has a similar overpreponderance of Lights! and Theatre! and Advertisements! and People!. And then you get ushered inside this theatre – I don’t know about the rest, but ours was pretty tiny – where everything is quiet and dark except for the rustling of people checking their programmes, and the occasional siren from outside, because, let’s face it, it’s New York and the soundproofing isn’t that good. We had seats about half-way down the Gods, because I didn’t fancy paying twice as much to be a few metres closer to the stage, but it didn’t matter; the show was spectacular. It’s a little paradoxical, places like that, coming to a major city to go to shows that try and take you away from where you are, but I suppose it’s the only way to get that critical mass of performers and audiences in the same place. Phantom had it’s 10,000th performance a week before we saw it, and I can only imagine how many more it’ll have, because it really was just a great show.

And that’s the thing about New York, all in all; I don’t think I could live there, or that I’d want to, not like some of the other big American cities I’ve visited – Boston or Seattle, for example – but for a weekend or a week, it’s a great show. We’ll be giving it an encore or two sometime, I’m sure.

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New York: Part One

Posted on February 28, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

One of the things I like to tell people about Western Massachusetts which is both strictly true and kind of misleading is that we’re “only three hours from New York”, which makes it sound like an exciting day trip we could do any weekend.

It’s strictly true because, sure, if you were to leave at a carefully selected low-traffic time (after midnight works pretty well, as Mike has found on work “day” trips) and drive straight from our house to New York City, keeping to road-safe speeds (which are not the same thing as the speed limit; my experience is that on the interstates you generally have to stick to about 10mph above the posted limit to not attract crazy driving) you’d arrive at the outskirts of New York in three hours. Maybe even a little less.

In terms of actually visiting, it’s rather more complicated, because you’re best off avoiding taking a car into Manhattan. On our flying visit last year, we took the bus; this time, we drove to New Haven and caught the train from there, which takes a little longer but is significantly less stressful. And, given New York parking rates, a little cheaper than trying to park your car in New York. (There is the caveat that you’re leaving it in New Haven, a city not precisely known for its peaceful, crime-free streets, but our car is just old enough that there’s probably always going to be something else more worth stealing in the same parking lot.)

I was determined to make this weekend the weekend in which we did ALL THE TOURIST THINGS in New York (or at least all the winter-appropriate tourist things). By late Sunday afternoon we’d reached the point where we collapsed in our hotel room and only moved to open the door for the pizza delivery guy, so I feel we achieved ALL THE TOURIST THINGS, and there will, hence, be several posts. The one thing we didn’t manage was visiting DUB Pies, because it turned out to be just one thing too many to squish into our schedule, but: next time.

The two big museums we hit were the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I crossed off the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim for this trip because a) time and b) modern art. (I know what I like, art-wise, and it mostly involves things done before 1800, 1900 at a stretch. I don’t have anything against all the rest of it, I just wasn’t going to spend limited excursion time on it.)

The American Museum of Natural History has its own subway station, which is pretty cool.

With fossils in the walls. And drawn on the floor tiles, but I didn't get any pictures of those.

The AMNH was amazing, but in a very specific way: Mike and I have both reached the point, age- and learning-wise, where science museums have ceased to be a big learning experience. The AMNH is clearly organised and built to teach people about science and natural history (the inclusion of displays on Native American populations is, um, well, the rest of the museum is basically things (largely rock-adjacent things), extinct things, animals, and dead animals, so that’s….I get the anthropology association, I do, but when that’s the only anthropology bit it’s…not a great look.) And I think it does a great job. We went to the planetarium show, and it was frankly incredible; it laid out stellar evolution in a really comprehensible and visually spectacular way. I would have killed to see it as a kid, I’m not even exaggerating very much.

But all of the actual science bit was stuff we already knew. I geeked out bigtime in the Earth History exhibit because they had bits of deep-sea hydrothermal chimneys from which my lab has cultured organisms, they had wind-sculpted rock from the Antarctic Dry Valleys which is where my Honours thesis organisms came from, they had pillow lava like I saw on last summer’s telepresence cruise, etc. It was stuff that’s important to my life as a scientist, but I knew what it was before I got there.

ACTUAL BITS OF ACTUAL HYDROTHERMAL VENTS. This picture does not adequately convey how much geeking out I was doing.

We spent most of our time in the museum taking pictures and going “ooooh, look at that” rather than reading informative placards, because it was a better use of time. I think my favourite bit – apart from the hydrothermal chimneys – was the African dioramas; they were so detailed and lifelike. Better than zoos, in a lot of ways – you’re guaranteed to see the animals!

The dioramas reminded me how many big, strange, and interesting megafauna there actually are in the world. (That aren't, you know, rapidly going extinct. Or that are.)

And, of course, the dinosaur (and other prehistoric animal) exhibits. Because dinosaur skeletons will never be not awesome. Never.

TRICERATOPS = AWESOME,.

LARGE CARNIVOROUS THERAPOD OF SOME TYPE = ALSO AWESOME.

The only other thing about the AMNH: the place is a maze, and it’s a maze that keeps bewilderingly leading you in and out of the ticketed areas. We must have shown our tickets half-a-dozen times without ever leaving the museum building. I’m usually OK if you give me a map, but it was really head-turningly complex.

By the time we got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was Sunday afternoon and we were both tired but soldiering gamely on (from bench to bench, I will admit.) As soon as we’d got our tickets (not actually tickets, but neat little badges) I announced I wanted to see the temple in the Egyptian section. When we got there, Mike was confused.

“They have a room with an actual Egyptian temple,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied, “you did hear me when I said I wanted to see the temple, right?”

“I thought it was a replica!”

The motto of Western imperialism: never build a replica when you can take a whole building.

The Met was full of beautiful and fascinating things, from Ancient Egypt to the nineteenth century, but I found it lacked context. Almost everything had bare descriptive labels and collection numbers; no explanation of where it was from, why it was important, why it was here. I suppose that’s what the audio tours or the guided tours are for, but I would have liked to see some more explanation in text. Then again, there were so many things that there was scarcely room for it, but you could have taken half of them away and still had spectacular exhibits. It was maddeningly, impossibly large; we only took on the challenge of two or three areas, and even that was more than enough. I think it would take a week or three to do the whole place properly.

A minute fraction of all the shortswords on display. Just the shortswords, mind, there's a lot more swords than that.

I don’t think we’ll be going back to the museums any time soon, unless we go with friends or family or there’s some particular exhibit we decide we want to see; but I’m glad we saw them once.

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Remembering

Posted on February 21, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

I was going to do a brief precis of the weekend we just spent in New York doing Tourist Stuff (very brief precis: sore feet, reasonable minimum of tacky souvenirs, a million photographs, success!) and then I remembered that February 22 is today in New Zealand, and that didn’t seem like such a great blogging idea anymore.

It has been eighteen months – give or take a few days – since I left Christchurch, and it’s likely to be close on two years by the time I see the city again. That’s not actually a very long time, in the scheme of things. It feels like forever, because, of course, I cannot actually return to, in Emma Hart’s turn of phrase, Christchurch-that-was. In a million photos, I have seen it come crumbling down. Some days, from all the way on the other side of the world, it’s hard to tell what’s left. If there’s been a collection, somewhere, of pictures of the things that are still there, I haven’t seen it. I hope there is. It’d be a good thing to have.

It’s easy, here, to not think about Christchurch and what happened, what’s still happening; the majority of people I interact with only vaguely remember there was an earthquake, let alone that there was more than one. They have no reason to remember, of course. One or two unfortunate individuals have unwittingly reduced me to helpless fury (“oh, wasn’t there an earthquake or something?”.) Some have remembered to ask about how it’s going back there – in particular a Chilean colleague, who’s coming from the same place. (When’s the last time you thought about earthquake recovery in Chile?) Life goes on. I could have spent today without ever seeing a mention of Christchurch, if I’d wanted – without even deliberately avoiding anything.

The earthquake happened late enough, East Coast time – nine minutes to 7pm – that by the next morning it seemed like no-one else had heard about it. It hadn’t been on the nightly news or very prominent on the morning shows. By some stroke of coincidence, I was the first and only person in the lab I was then working in for some hours; so I sat at my desk, and refreshed the news pages and Twitter endlessly, and cried. Then people started coming in, and I worked on not crying, because – as I have discovered over and over again this year – there is no more awkward conversation to begin than one that opens with “Did you hear about the massive, deadly natural disaster that just happened in the city I came here from?”. Unless it’s the one that begins “Please politely ignore me crying at my desk about the photos of the ruins of the city I came here from, really, we’ll all be happier if you do.”

I don’t think I will ever fully get what it has meant to all of my friends and family in Christchurch, this last year; the sheer, slow scope of it all, the long tail of the sudden events. But I remember. Every time I look at a map, or the stupid tourist teatowel I bought to give to someone over here and ended up pinning on my wall, the one with the Cathedral on it; every time I think about visiting home. Every time I eat some food I had and remember a shop that’s been torn down, every time I look at old photos. Every damn time. Some days it makes me angry; fried rice should not be imbued with nostalgia. But it is.

I’ll go back, and I’ll see the damage; hopefully sometime this year. I’m pretty sure I still won’t get it, quite.

But I’ll remember Christchurch-that-was, the city I accidentally spent six years in, became an adult in, got married in; I’ll remember it all, the lovely masonry and the old spaces made new, the dull hot nor-westers, the cycle tracks along the railway lines and rivers, the icy July mornings when the gutters freeze, the tall crumbling cliffs down at Sumner, the long straight streets below the Port Hills, all the bits that are gone and that remain, and I’ll look forward to seeing it become something new, something good.

I love you, Christchurch.

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Driving Issues

Posted on February 13, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

After much ado, I can now officially drive without supervision again.

This is, in fact, not the worst official ID photo I currently have. But it's possibly below the average. (It's a very low average.)

I got my permit back in December, but it’s taken this long to get my licence due to a number of factors involving a) winter b) the nefarious workings of the Massachusetts RMV c) the distance of every test-taking location from my home/university and d) the fact that taking a driving test after you’ve been driving for a decade is rather akin to that show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” (called “Are You Smarter Than A Ten-Year Old?” in New Zealand.)

Are you smarter than a ten-year old? Almost certainly. Have you spent the last five years going through the same schooling system as the ten-year-old? No. Similarly: after ten years of driving, are you an at least marginally competent driver? Probably. Do you indicate when you do a three-point turn (in three points, no more and no less)? Probably not. Can you be failed for this? Yes. Yes you can.

(In fairness, I feel compelled to note that every international student in the department has failed their first go at a driving test in the States, despite all holding licences from their home country. Or, let me rephrase: every female and/or non-white international student has. There are two things we could take away from this. I don’t imagine you need to guess which one we, as a group, take away.)

Conversation with other people in my position revealed that pretty much everyone who’d failed had had the same driving tester, at the same location. I took note of this and sensibly booked my test at a different location, some forty kilometres away from the first. I couldn’t re-book it for a month, due to point b), nefarious workings of the Massachusetts RMV, wherein one cannot re-book a driving test for at least two weeks after the first one but this information is not provided anywhere on their website, which just says is “please try again tomorrow”. I tried ringing. Turns out there is no way to speak to a live person on their phone help line. It’s like a special circle of hell. The one with the people who talk in the theatre.

My first test had been marked by a number of inauspicious events, notably me mysteriously but irrevocably losing my permit somewhere in between getting in the car and arriving at the testing location; this was solvable but involved a lot of me running around like a mad thing, taking everything out of the car to look for it, and being frazzled. Also, it started to snow. After all of that I probably wasn’t in a fit mental state to be tested on my times-tables, let alone driving, but I’d taken half a day off work (see point c) about distance) and so had my colleague to “supervise” me, so I could hardly call it off.

For the second, I put all the necessary paperwork in the glovebox the night before, and it was sunny. Everything was going perfectly until I walked into the RMV (forty km away, remember) and laid eyes upon the exact same driving tester. I had precisely zero hope of him not remembering me, because you know how many New Zealanders there are in the Pioneer Valley? As far as I can tell: four. Counting my cat. And my husband.

Fortunately, he forwent commenting on my expression until after the test. And I managed to overcome my NZ-driving-induced-instincts (I, at least, had it drilled into me that the most important thing in a three-point-turn was that every part of your car stayed within the roadway at all times and did not go over the footpath or into someone’s driveway not even a little bit, whereas here they focus on the When We Say Three Points We Mean Three bit) enough to pass.

All up, it was probably marginally less hassle than taking a day-trip to Canada and letting the magic powers of an international border restore my driving skills, but, you know. Marginally. On the third hand: having US-issued photo ID makes people much happier, and lets you get into a bunch of pubs around Amherst (not to be confused with The Pub) which have not fully absorbed the legalities vis-a-vis foreign passports being an acceptable form of age ID. So I think I’ll call it a win.

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Creditable

Posted on February 6, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

Yesterday we had people over for the Superbowl, because I still don’t understand very much about American football but the ceremony of the whole thing is highly entertaining (I have watched so many Republican debates I can critique the quality of the national anthem because I now know all the words, a vaguely concerning circumstance.) Even after actually paying attention to much of the game (which is difficult, in a sport which cunningly stretches sixty minutes of game time over three hours, in three to thirty second bursts) I’m still a bit fuzzy on the rules, but the half-time show was pretty good – whether you like Madonna’s music or not, she can put on a performance. The New England team lost, but my knowledge of teams is such that I had to clarify as the game was starting which colours they were wearing, so I can’t claim any deep emotional disturbance about that. Unlike the students on the UMass campus, who rioted, thus validating the ex-UMass player on the New England team who announced he’d attended “ZooMass” in the pre-game rundown of the teams. That whole side of UMass as a school is weirdly detached from my experience of it, because I don’t live on campus and I hang out with other graduate students; if it wasn’t reported on news sites (and I didn’t know people who know campus police) I’d find the whole thing hard to credit, it has so little impact on my life. But there you have it.

American football may be slowly wending its way towards comprehension in my brain, but the American credit system is not. The gist of the matter is that the nice people offering a major-bank-affiliated-frequent-flyer credit card chose to give one to me when I applied for it. This is good because it means I can stop using my Kiwi credit card, except to keep that account going, and sock our New Zealand savings into an actual savings account which earns actual interest, not the grand 0.5% we could get in an American bank. (For various reasons I haven’t had much need to pay attention to interest rates for the last, oh, two years or so, having more of a need to spend money than leave it safely away, so this shocked me a bit.)

What’s ridiculous, though, is that I now have a credit card with a limit several times that of Mike’s. It’s not totally out of line with my credit history in New Zealand, where I’ve had a card for some years and paid it off responsibly, but a) they definitely didn’t check my New Zealand credit history and b) Mike earns several times as much as I do.  I actually can’t come up with any factor that should tell banks that I’m a better credit risk than he is, considering us as individuals. I don’t have a credit score because I only became a real person, as far as they’re concerned, in October; he achieved that much earlier. I’m a student; he’s gainfully employed. The bills in our respective names have been paid equally diligently. He’s two years older. If they had taken the time to check our NZ histories, his NZ score is significantly better than mine, essentially because of that extra two years.

The only logical reasoning I can come up with is that because I am (on my own) a relatively poor student (though, let’s face it, doing OK compared to the median wage) I’m a greater credit risk and therefore more worth having as a customer because they’ll make money off me (but not so risky that they think I won’t pay it off at all.) But that’s still poor reasoning.

Frankly, credit cards are a necessity not because of the credit they provide per se, though that’s often important or vital, but because – in this age of internet transactions – they provide a way to make large purchases safely. Put thousands of dollars into a checking account, and have your card stolen, anything you lose is probably gone; have a credit card, you can block and reverse transactions. Stay at a hotel; they want a credit card on file, even if you have the cash upfront for your stay, and the card has to be able to cover the full cost of your stay. You are often punished financially for not having access to credit. But the rules of access to credit are well-nigh impenetrable.

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Getting Down To It

Posted on January 31, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

I’m staring down the barrel of this semester at uni with some trepidation. There are a number of major deadlines coming up, starting next week and not really stopping until mid-May. It’s basically like a preview of, you know, life outside academia.

Yesterday I submitted our abstract for  AbSciCon, NASA’s biennial astrobiology science conference. Attendance is not a requirement of my fellowship, but it’s where everyone else doing similar research will be and it’s a great chance to present our (preliminary) data to the rest of the astrobiology community. There also seems to be a lot of effort to get early-career researchers and students to attend, which makes it just about perfect as a conference choice except for time of year, but not much to be done about that.

My work isn’t really at the point where I can tell a whole story about my research, it’s more of a “Watch This Space”, but we’ve got a solid foundation. I’m really excited about the chance to talk about it to people in the wider community – I have a pretty good sense that this is data people have been hoping will be gathered for a while now, but science is inherently about communities; there’s no point doing great experiments and getting good data to just sit in your lab and clutch it to your chest. (Unless it’s commercially sensitive, I suppose, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of beans.) And I want to see what other people are doing.

Plus, this year’s AbSciCon is in Atlanta, which will be my first real chance to visit the South, if you discount New Orleans and Baltimore last year, which I think you can. I never considered any universities in the American South when I was applying to PhD programmes over here – for fairly obvious reasons involving the difference between culture shock and culture clash – but I figure it’s somewhere I need to visit at least once. It also, in a lovely piece of serendipity, means I can tack on some personal time at the end of my Atlanta visit and go to JordanCon, which I am very excited about (the Wheel of Time fandom was how I really got into this whole Internet thing, back in the early 2000s). So that’s going to be an awesome week.

Between now and AbSciCon in mid-April, though, I have to submit a renewal proposal for my fellowship in the 2012-2013 academic year, updating NASA on my progress and changes to our original research plan (which are few and mostly of the inevitable biological surprises variety), give a seminar to the rest of my department on my research, and start supervising the new undergraduate student I mentioned, who confusingly has the same first name as my PhD supervisor. (We’re working on nicknames that are acceptable to both of them, but it’s been an uphill battle, as most variants we’ve come up with involve things like “Young/Old”, “Junior/Senior”, and “Little/Big”, none of which are particularly flattering.)

After AbSciCon, I arrive back with two or three weeks to prepare for my preliminary PhD exams. One of the major differences between the American and Kiwi PhD systems is not just length – five years versus three – but gatekeeping. With the Kiwi system, once you’re in, you’re in, barring massive screwups or project failure. With the American system, after around eighteen months or two years you sit preliminary exams, which move you up from being a graduate student to a PhD candidate, if you pass them. In our department you’re required to submit a 20-ish page proposal on your research plan for the next three or four years (it doesn’t have to be your specific research, but it’s a bit silly not to) and give a talk on it, after which you are questioned by your committee. Generally people do pass, though not always the first time around – it’s not at all uncommon for the committee to require some adjustments or a resubmission after some period of time.

I’m in the process of asking people to be on my committee – you need three faculty, your supervisor just sits in. It’s the sort of thing one approaches with some trepidation even if you feel otherwise well-prepared, because your committee basically have free reign to ask you as many hard questions as they can. And Google is their friend, not yours. I think I’ll be okay by the time I get there, but this year is definitely divided into “before my prelim” and “after my prelim”.

And, before everything gets really crazy, Mike and I have planned a three-day trip to New York to do all the touristy stuff we didn’t get to do on last year’s twenty-two hour visit; museums, maybe a Broadway show, that sort of thing. And visit DUB Pies and have proper meat pies, of course. I’m stupidly excited about it – we haven’t actually had much of a chance since we came to America to just be tourists, together; we’ve done our trips to tourist places separately or not at all. I’m looking forward to being able to do a major tourist destination properly. Not that we can see everything in New York in three days, but it’s going to be the tail-end of winter; we can come back in summer for the outdoors stuff.

It’s going to be a pretty interesting few months, all in all. I’m just hoping to come out the other end in one piece.

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A Bit Meta

Posted on January 23, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

This being a Presidential election year, and us having cable, I have now watched more Republican presidential debates than I ever really wanted to in my life*, especially since the various candidates routinely put our television in severe danger. (There are things I can listen to with impunity, including wildly differing political views, but people suggesting they’d be happy with bans on contraception – i.e. threatening my ability to have a career – are not one of them.)

*I could turn them off, but I’d have to wrestle for the remote and there’s always the hope that one of them will say something exceptionally stupid or try to crowd-surf or both.

What I find just as interesting as the politics, though – which isn’t hard because the politics are more a matter of entertainment than actual information, at this stage – is the advertisements which go along with them. I remember blogging about the sheer bulk of pharmaceutical ads in this country, and that’s still staggering. But there’s also a lot of other groups which simply don’t advertise on New Zealand television – because they’re American-specific, and/or because their New Zealand counterparts just don’t attempt popular support in the same way – that range from the bewildering to the extremely very slightly insidious.

“Bewildering” definitely covers all the various stock-investment ads. Having never had enough money at any one point to consider investing it in anything more than a high-interest savings account (for what passes as “high interest” in this economic climate – I sadly remember the days when I was getting eight percent on one of my Kiwibank accounts) the range of investment ads is both curious and unnerving. It’s not just companies seeking to manage people’s “401Ks” (basically the equivalent of Kiwisaver, but tied to employers rather than the government and a staple of retirement planning here); it’s things like iPad apps for when you just have to trade that stock right now, which seems like an incitement to losing your money except under very specific circumstances, but then, the people advertising them are interested in brokers’ fees, not your long term savings. They all appeal, I think, to the American drive for independence, to the idea that everyone owns their future, financial or otherwise. The idea that, despite everything that’s happened to the economy, your financial stability is something you can control. Maybe because of everything.

Then there’s the plethora of fossil-fuel ads. These are carefully disguised as appeals to “vote for jobs” and “vote for America”, but all end up at one place: the declaration that the only thing that can solve America’s myriad problems is a renewed dedication to the use of coal, and oil, and natural gas. They’ve been around for the eighteen months we’ve been here, but with the election machine gearing up they’ve gone into overdrive. Phrases like “clean coal” are used in a way that would have the ASA driven to drink by the number of complaints they would engender. The viewpoint is pounded on, constantly, that to be against the greater use of fossil fuels isn’t just economic suicide, it’s somehow anti-American. They are counterpointed, entertainingly, by BP’s attempts to emphasise that everything on the Gulf Coast is just fine and it’s like Deepwater Hor- uh, that thing, you know, it never even – what thing was that we were talking about? Anyway, the Gulf Coast is just amazing, and BP is still there. And is always going to be there. Aren’t you reassured?

The one thing there aren’t many – or any, really – of, yet, is actual direct pro-or-anti-political-candidate ads. A little early for that, except in primary states, and Massachusetts isn’t due for its Republican primaries for quite some time and – in any case – isn’t likely to be much of a battleground, because all three Republicans in Massachusetts will vote for Romney. (I jest. All six.)

But in some ways it seems like what people say on the actual political programmes – whether the Sunday interview shows, the MSNBC/Fox/CNN/etc-style talkshows, or the debates – is matched in importance by the advertising that surrounds them. The ads aren’t just about selling things to a certain demographic; they shape a narrative, together, the ads and the shows. It’s almost hypnotic. None of these ads are directly political, remember. They’re not telling you to vote for certain people. Or even parties. A lot of them aren’t even “vote for” ads, that’s mostly the NATURAL GAS IS YOUR BEST FRIEND JOBS JOBS JOBS ads. They’re just – deliberately, carefully – shaping how you hear those people and parties in the bits in between the ads.

The problem with American TV, in terms of politics, isn’t that you watch it and become less informed (unless all you watch is certain channels, and no, I don’t just mean Fox – if all people watched was MSNBC they’d be pretty under-informed.) It’s that you need to be pre-informed by other media to watch it, because there’s a meta-narrative going on that changes the direct messages of the main narrative, if you’re aware of it.

Frankly it’s all a bit exhausting. Much easier to just go read something.

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Te Ao Nui

Posted on January 15, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

The non-graduate-student members of the department are gradually starting to drift back in from their winter holidays (the university shuts down for a month, but most grad students take about a week off, if that) to a slightly-more-snowy-but-not-really Massachusetts.

We have also been upgraded to Really Expletive Cold (a.k.a Too Cold To Go Outside Unless You Have No Other Options.)

Our lab has expanded precipitously in the last six months; over the summer, when one of my labmates was away for six weeks, it was possible for me to go days at a time without actually talking to anyone else in the department, despite being in the lab during regular working hours every weekday, because I was the only person in the lab. Since then we’ve picked up an exchange student, a new (to our lab) PhD student, a postdoctoral researcher, last year’s two undergrads returned for the fall semester, and a new undergrad is going on trial this spring. (Working with me. You may all sympathise. With him.) It’s put something of a premium on desk space, but is otherwise working excellently.

What is remarkable, though, is that even with this expansion, and although I am living in the United States it is also quite possible for me to spend a day at work without talking to an American. (See, sure; have a conversation with, no, if the extent of seeing is “passing in the corridor”.) The undergraduate population of UMass is overwhelmingly domestic, but the graduate student population – especially in our department – is highly international.

This isn’t that surprising, because science is, inherently, an international field. Your research may be most similar to someone at an institution on another continent. Your research may be done somewhere far-flung from your institution, for that matter; I remember that one of the biology lecturers at Canterbury studied African forests, and our lab’s main field site is off the West Coast of the US, thousands of kilometres away. It’s certainly common to go a respectable distance when you’re studying, or teaching. I got grilled by my Honours supervisor about why I wanted to stay at Canterbury for another year instead of going somewhere else. When I finish my PhD and move to postdoctoral positions, they will almost certainly be outside New Zealand.

The flags of all the countries from which people have come to our lab (except for NZ, Sweden, and South Korea, because we're lazy and haven't put them up yet.)

Between seven people currently working in our lab, we cover five continents. Our department covers them all, except Antarctica. (And Australia, technically, since the sole Australian postdoc returned home, but I’m going to call it “Oceania” and say I cover it.)  The vast majority of the faculty and a solid majority of the students are American, but it’s pretty mixed.

The positive in this is that there is always someone up for a round of What Were They Thinking (most common theme: healthcare, followed by visas). It also means that I’m not just being exposed to American culture, but a whole number of them; I’ve learned about what sort of sweets Swedes make for Christmas (tasty ones), how often it snows in South Korea (about as much as NZ), and how expensive magazines are in Swaziland (very). And it makes for some seriously impressive spreads when we hold potluck lunches or dinners, across the department or within the lab.

It also lends itself to a curious sort of banding together; we may have backgrounds less similar to one another than we are individually to Americans, but we share the experience of being Not From Around Here (actually, on that score, the Americans in my lab are in a strict sense Not From Around Here, but that’s not quite the same thing.) And if you want to look at it another way, it takes a certain level of socio-economic privilege to be able to come to America for a PhD or Master’s degree; we also all share the experience of being, relatively, in the top something-very-small-percent of the world’s population. Wherever we’re from.

Ultimately, I think, this is a good thing for America, in terms of the cultural dominance it achieves by being a centre of scientific research and training; we may be coming together from a whole range of countries and occasionally bonding over not being Americans, but we’re interacting through American culture – and, obviously, with American students as well as fellow international students. There are no more than two or three students in our department from any one country; day-to-day, we can’t retreat to our own cultures even if we want to.

I like this part of scientific culture, of being a student of science. Even if I wasn’t part of the Fulbright program – which obviously encourages and entails a lot of cross-cultural interaction – the international nature of science would still be part of my life. To go on to graduate study in the sciences, you have to have at least some innate curiosity about the world. When you’re headfirst in research, it can be easy to let that shrink to whatever small part of it you’re studying. (Because we rarely have time to read even the work that’s relevant to our studies, let alone other areas.) Working with people who differ from you in fundamental cultural ways keeps you paying attention to the greater world. And I like that, a lot.

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Reverse Psychology And Weather Systems

Posted on January 9, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

As far as I can tell from the Stuff and NZ Herald websites, it’s been so wet in New Zealand that you should all be thinking of ark-building. Sounds like business as usual for a New Zealand summer, then. Massachusetts, however, is having a most unusual winter – insomuch as it’s a winter at all.

You might remember that back in October it looked like this outside in Western Massachusetts (and large stretches of the Northeast):

Admittedly it didn't still look like this the afternoon of the day I took this picture, but two feet of snow did fall.

Well, it’s the first week of January – the coldest part of the year, normally, and by “coldest” I mean “generally doesn’t get above freezing for weeks at a time” – and not only does it not look like it did this time last year…

So technically this picture is from early February, but trust me when I say it's a good approximation.

…it looks like this.

Really. Like this. The blue sky isn't even cunningly deceptive. Some days have been actually genuinely warm.

There has been one day this winter when it has failed to climb above freezing. The lowest low has been about -13C. Last year it was around -30C. I’m still biking to university – no ice, no snow, and as long as it’s -5C or above it’s a perfectly pleasant ride. Nor is it just Massachusetts; high-temperature records are falling all over America, and ski resorts are barely keeping the slopes open, so little snow has fallen. Admittedly, there’s still a good three months left to go of potential winter weather, so panic is not yet due, but compared to last year’s record snowfall it’s bizarre.

It isn’t even that snow is falling and then melting; it isn’t falling at all. When it precipitates, it rains. This is somewhat vexing in that the great swath of newly-dumped dirt outside our front door which got trekked muddily into our house all autumn, instead of freezing and then being snowed over, is bringing forward the anticipated spring mud by about four months. Except without the possibility of grass growing on it. It’s like eternal late November. Thanksgiving aside, I’m not so thrilled with late November when it is late November. Late November all winter seems a bit much.

There’s also the bit when it is below -5C and I go to put my bike on the bus at the main road and discover the pull-down bike racks have frozen to the bus, which is not so much fun and especially not so much fun when it’s winter break and the buses are on the reduced forty-minute schedule. I could take a can of CRC (WD-40 to Americans) with me, but a) I’m not sure it’d work and b) I’m not sure how the bus people would feel about me oiling their racks. (And that doesn’t sound weirdly euphemistic at all. Right.)

Mostly, everyone has the thoroughly illogical but nevertheless creeping feeling that sooner or later we’re going to get a whole winter’s worth of snow all at once. I have an abstract due to a conference at the end of January and more than one experiment to do before I hand it in; if the snow could hold off until then, that would be brilliant. You hear me, weather? NO SNOW. NONE.

(Reverse psychology works on continental weather systems, right?)

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In Hindsight

Posted on January 3, 2012 by newenglandkiwi

2011 was, overall, a year the like of which we will not see again soon. I know most of my friends in New Zealand couldn’t wait to see the end of it. For various reasons, a lot of people I know over here couldn’t either. And there’s not a few parts of it – the economy, the election, the earthquake, the earthquake, the earthquake – that I will be glad to put in the past, even if their effects linger on.

But, bittersweetly, 2011 has, on a purely personal level, been one of the best and most successful years of my life, and I think of Mike’s, too. It’s been the year we settled in to our lives over here, the year in which, in so many ways, we got everything we could possibly have wanted – financial security, professional validation and achievement, new experiences. We transitioned from near-poverty studenthood to a secure existence; we visited, between us, many of America’s great cities; we made friends; we did good work. Mike turned his technical expertise into a job he loves, and I got a NASA fellowship for my research, something I’ve been working at, in some ways, for half my life. For all the small (and not-so-small) frustrations, America has been good to us in 2011.

And yet. Drunk on the cheap subscriptions here (The Economist, $70 a year!), we get half a dozen political and financial magazines, more than we can read, honestly; they pile up around the house in guilt-inducing drifts. I’d demand we get them in online format only,  but that’s either not possible or more expensive than getting the hard copies as well.

All of them had end-of-year summaries, forecasts for 2012. They didn’t mention Christchurch, or gave it only a single line. I had a conversation, two or three months ago, with an American scientist who has traveled frequently through Christchurch to Antarctica, which included the sentence “Wasn’t there an earthquake or something?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that. The quake fundamentally shapes everything that has happened in New Zealand this year, almost every conversation I have about home. Over here, it might as well have never happened – but it has changed New Zealand forever. (Don’t even bother asking about the Rugby World Cup. That didn’t happen either.)

In light of that, I finally went back and looked at my notes from a course I took in my first year at university, 2005: Environmental Geohazards. It focused, naturally, on Christchurch and its environs. I threw out the accompanying booklet when I left Christchurch, certain I’d never need a map of Christchurch’s liquefaction potential, or any of my other accumulated notes from five years of university. I was wrong, as it happens, but fortunately, in 2005 I was young and mad enough to type up all the hand-written notes I took in class. (This was – be shocked – before it was quite acceptable to take laptops to class, though only by about a year.) And so I know what I was told, six years before the quake, about what might happen to Christchurch. It makes for interesting reading.

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