Not cool.

Hey, guys - can we talk about something?  Namely, how NOT cool it is to lose your cool at work.  I don't mind swearing in some circumstances, and I certainly understand that you're frustrated that things aren't working, but really, it's not cool to throw a hissy fit at work.  It is so incredibly uncomfortable to sit there awkwardly while a grown man loses it in the lab.  There's a second coworker who swears like a sailor under his breath at the other end of the lab on a regular basis.  This happens so often I have to wonder if he has Tourette's or thinks I'm deaf and can't hear him.  Other, more level-headed coworkers have assured me neither is the case.  Anyways, just a friendly word of advice, if you can't keep your cool at work, step out until you've pulled it together.  Your coworkers will be so very grateful.

Random my ass.

I got summoned for jury duty.  AGAIN.  For the 6th time in the 10 years I've been registered to vote, when I know many people my age who have never been summoned.  That statement on every summons claiming that potential jurors are selected at random ("from a fair cross section of citizens" according to Maryland) is a load of bullshit.  I first got summoned 4 months after I registered to vote after my 18th birthday in Massachusetts.  Despite being summoned a second time in Massachusetts, thanks to a combination of being in college out-of-state, studying abroad, and luck, I never actually had to show up.  I was summoned three times while I lived in Arizona, once each for state, federal, and county jury duty.  I had to actually go twice, and the last time I was actually put on the jury (a poor decision on the DUI defense attorney's part).  I registered in Maryland 4 1/2 months ago and I've already been summoned.  Of course I was summoned for a date when I'll be traveling for work.  Let the postponement/reassignment/will-I-or-won't-I-have-to-go games begin.

Sleepless Ramblings

I can't sleep. It's quarter past 3 and I've been wide awake for the past hour and a half.

Aside from the predicted high of only 80 on Thursday, summer has hit in Tucson. We had a record high of 101 on Sunday. Overnight lows are in the 60s, so I suppose at least we're not to the worst of it when it stops cooling off overnight (lows in the 80s, which is still insane to think about after 5 years). But it's mid April, so the swamp cooler isn't on for the summer yet, I'm cold without my sheet, but hot with it, and not yet reacclimated to sleeping with a fan on me.

I've been dieting for the past 2 1/2 months with the help of an app on my iPad. It's actually been going quite well, except Saturday I got fit for my bridesmaid's dress for E's wedding in June, so I can't lose anymore weight before then of the dress won't stay up (the tailor is already taking it in 2+ inches on both sides...whoops...). So I switched the app settings to maintain my current weight, and after working out this morning and playing softball tonight I finished today 775 calories under "goal." After really not eating particularly healthy or skimpy today. I don't want to not work out between now and the wedding because that isn't healthy either and I don't want to lose all my muscle! This is going to take some getting used to... 

The anxiety in the office surrounding the move seems to have at least temporarily calmed as people are over the shock and looking into their various options, but my anxiety just seems to be getting worse. I'm getting more and more worried about my last experiments not working and not having enough (good) data to put on my poster for ASMS or the last chapter of my dissertation. ASMS is going to be a huge time suck between now and May 25th. I kind of wish I weren't going, but I argued my way into going because I was worried I wouldn't have a job by then and then I worked hard to gather more than enough outside travel funding, and got a poster abstract accepted and then had to convince the organizers to reschedule it for another day when it conflicted with Little Sister's high school graduation. So I have to go, and yes this means I'm taking the 5 am flight from Boston to Vancouver the day after graduation.

The whole not having a job yet thing is also a major source of anxiety. There's a potential post doc in northern NJ that looks promising - they've submitted an internal proposal for the project and if they get funded (they think their odds are good) I will have an offer. But the project would be a collaboration with The Queen, and the more the move situation unfolds the more I want to just cut ties and move on completely, and the outskirts of NYC/Newark is really pretty high on my list of places I've never wanted to live. I found a post doc opening actually in Lancaster last week that I am unbelievably perfectly qualified for and obviously applied right away, but I'm nervous I won't hear anything at all back from them (like most of the other jobs I've applied for) or that the salary will be garbage or that it will be another case of a company trying to save themselves $30k by listing a "real" PhD-level job as a post doc (yet another thing I've discovered I have to be wary of when looking at job postings). But speaking of "real job" vs post doc, I'd much rather have a real job than a post doc, but very few people seem to be hiring new grads and most want proteomics expereience, which I don't have and really hate anyways.

Then there's this weird pain in the lower right corner of my mouth. If it's actually something real I'm sure it would be super expensive to fix, and surprise surprise, the student health plan doesn't include dental coverage, and the thought of thousand(s) of dollars of dental expenses when I'm trying to save for a cross-country move and potential unemployment makes me nauseous. Not to mention I HATE the dental practice I've been going to and don't remotely trust 95% of what they tell me. And dental work = through the roof anxiety. Just listening to somebody in the next room getting a filling sets me on edge. I leave every dentist visit drenched in sweat and with achy back and shoulders from clenching my muscles so hard. God I hope my wisdom teeth haven't finally decided to make their presence known.

I'm terrified that between ASMS, mine and Little Sister's graduation schenanigans, and E's wedding (crap, have to figure out bachelorette stuff still) that I'll never finish my dissertation in time. Our group admin is trying to schedule my final seminar and defense for some time in July, because The Queen leaves in early August and I'm not sure I can be done any sooner, but The Queen is going to be out of town for like half of July (and who knows about the rest of my committee members...). On top of worrying that I won't finish in time, my best guess at the moment is that my dissertation will be about 200 pages, which looking at past dissertations out of my group seems inadequate. A friend commented today that she's at 236 pages and not even close to done. I keep telling myself that nobody wants to read even 200 pages of dissertation, never mind 300+ pages, but 200 pages just doesn't seem like it could possibly be representative of 5 years of grad school misery. And I'm quite sure I'd cry on the spot if they told me at my defense that it wasn't going to cut it (never mind that I'm not at all convinced that anybody - including The Queen - will read it and I've never heard of anybody failing their defense here, and my committee seemed satisfied at my 6 month meeting in December).

Great. Now it's 4. You can probably why see I'm having a hard time sleeping. Tomorrow/today is going to be a mess.

Why My Mother Should Not Have Text Messaging

It is entirely unnecessary to leave me a voicemail and send me a text message asking me the SAME THING.

Why Graduate School Was the Worst Decision Ever

I've worked 56 hours in the past 4 days alone (Weds-Sat...well, now Sun am). Probably for nothing.

That ridiculous talk situation? It got even more ridiculous, but I'll spare you the details and just say that I finally got "official" notice Friday that I am indeed presenting. I'd been thinking all along that this presentation is next Friday afternoon. Wrong. I realized Friday evening that it's actually Thursday.

The whole "go for broke" idea and lack of currently working instruments means I've been running mostly overnight to get as much instrument time as possible. This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also have stuff to do during the day. I'd actually been considering trying to switch over "night shift," in order to get as much instrument time as I wanted, but hadn't due to all the daytime meetings and such, ignoring the fact that I'm so not a night owl, and think 10 pm is a perfectly reasonable time to go to bed on a regular basis.

I went into lab when it was dark out, came out to discover it was light out.

I ate breakfast in my office (well, in the lab...shhh). From stuff I had in my office. We're not talking about a day where I had to be at school early, and grabbed breakfast on my way in. We're talking worked all night, was hungry at 5:30 am, went into office, found oatmeal and tea in a drawer and called it breakfast.

Unfortunately a lot more has to go into this than collecting an enormous amount of data for one week. The data has to be analyzed, literature searched, figures made, calculations done, presentation assembled. I can do stuff like lit searches and outline/gather/make the trivial stuff for the actual presentation while collecting data. Between the nature of the data, what I need to do with it, and the way my brain processes this data, I can't really get much analysis done while collecting more data. The best I can really do is quick checks here and there to try to catch problems and decide the next best step on the fly.

I have a bad habit of blogging (and pursuing other internet-driven-time-sucks) more just when I have less time to do so. We're going to call it mental health preservation. If it makes it sound like a slightly less terrible waste of my time, I have had a spectrum acquiring the entire time I've been writing this.

The better experiments are going, the harder it is to leave. Which is the trap I'm currently stuck in. I'm really hoping that my labmate who signed up for the instrument today shows up a whole lot earlier than I think he's likely to.

At this point you must think I've completely lost my mind, and maybe I have. Any normal person probably would have said f@&# that days ago. (Normal people are smarter than people who go to graduate school.) The seminar announcement has already gone out to the entire department, so there's definitely no backing out of presenting. I'd really like to win this stupid thing, especially because part of me feels like I got jipped last year. And I'd really, really like that prize money. There are plane tickets to be bought and student loans to pay down. Even though at this point I'm not remotely sure that it's even possible to get this done for Thursday, I'm too stubborn to give up and tell my advisor I just can't do this. It would be so humiliating.

Whatever happens it'll be over in 5 days, then I can sleep for a couple of days before getting back to the (less crazy) grind for ASMS. Maybe if I get lucky the data I'm killing myself for this week will be useful for that talk... Pretty sure a PhD isn't worth it.

Academia is Dumb

A few weeks ago I submitted my CV for a departmental scholarship competition - it's very similar to the one I gave a presentation for last year, but this one is meant for 4th year students (while last year's was meant for 3rd years, logically) and it's worth more money. The presentations are scheduled for May 5th.

Unlike last year, when I had over 2 weeks notice, I'm looking at having less than a week's (official) notice. That's right, the presentations are scheduled for 9 days away now, and I haven't heard a peep about whether I'll be presenting or not. Since I made it to presentations last year, it's a reasonable assumption that I'll make it through the initial selection round to the group of students that give 30 minute talks, but it would still be really freaking nice to know. If I'm not presenting, fine, it would still be really nice to know. It really drives me crazy that the chair of the graduate program committee doesn't seem to think students would like more than a few days notice before presenting to the entire department. I'm sorry, at this stage of my "career," the idea of giving a talk to the entire department still freaks me out big time. More so than the talk I'm scheduled to give at a national meeting the first week of June.

At subgroup today I asked the Queen what the hell the deal was. She said the deadline had been extended, so they hadn't decided who was presenting yet, but that they would Friday. Assuming whoever is presenting is actually notified Friday, that leaves them a week. Personally, I'd really like a little more notice than that. My labmate presented in this competition last year, and she said she definitely had more than a week's notice. Extending the deadline to submit your CV sounds to me like not enough people applied. I'd assume my classmate who won last year's competition submitted - it seems traditional for the 3rd year competition winner at least to present in the 4th year competition. My entering class was unusually small - only 25 students, as opposed to the 35ish that is more typical, and we had a couple people drop out, a couple people take masters degrees, a couple people transferred when a professor left, and one just defended last week. So there aren't that any of us who would be eligible, and when you consider that the current chair of the graduate program committee will insist that people have publications at least submitted, there is really only a small handful of us who already have stuff out the door. This unspoken stipulation is pretty well-known, so I know a number of my very talented classmates who have done really good work but haven't yet submitted any manuscripts (for a huge variety of reasons) didn't bother applying at all. Talking to my friends, none of us even knew one other person who had definitely applied, which is completely ridiculous.

While the rumored/inferred numbers may sound like they're in my favor, I can't help but think this is a huge waste of my time. There are an awful lot of departmental politics that goes into deciding these things. For example, a student from E's group has never been selected to present in either of these competitions, despite in some cases clearly being more qualified than other applicants. I know that I gave the best presentation last year. It may sound super arrogant, but I'm really not exaggerating. I'm a pretty decent public speaker, and I know I gave a strong presentation. My classmate who won (and whom I like very much)? She mumbled, didn't look up, used really casual, bordering on inappropriate language, and spoke negatively about some of her data. What probably hurts my odds most however, is the fact that my labmate won this competition last year, and another of my labmates won the 3rd year competition the year before last (i.e. also the year before I presented). I would put a substantial amount of money on them not giving it to yet another student from my group. The idea of spending an obscene amount of time and numerous late nights preparing for this thing when I'm really quite sure I have no chance of winning is incredibly frustrating.

Since this talk that I may or may not be giving (ok, probably giving) is not very far away at all, I went ahead and talked to the Queen about what material would be best to present. Last year there was a pretty obvious answer, but this year it's not so obvious. It really drives me crazy that her response was, "I think you should go for broke. Try to get 16.9 to work." It would be really, really cool if I could manage to collect the spectra that prove this protein behaves as we think it should, but it will also be really, really, really difficult to get those spectra.

As if these experiments themselves weren't already difficult enough, further hindering my odds of getting the data I want is the currently very high demand on the relevant instrument. The instrument that I did most of my earlier research on has been down for a few months. I've been working on it since the problem developed, but there always seems to be a new problem to address, and because I absolutely have to be still getting results, I can't work on this instrument all that much. There are 3 of us heavily using the instrument in preparation for the conference, plus about another 5 people who have less, but regular and significant need of the instrument as well.

Who's excited about lots of late nights, lots of caffeine, and lots of bad food????! Speaking of which, I'm starving, and at quarter past 12, there obviously isn't anything open. Time for a trip to the vending machine I guess. I've already eaten the dinner I grabbed out of the fridge before coming back to campus after softball.

As nice as it would be to have more time to prepare, I suppose I should be glad I'm only looking at a week or so of this...

You're Fired!!

One of my classmate and I are in charge of recruiting, scheduling, and coordinating all the driving for recruiting weekends. We use 15 passenger vans to shuttle the recruits where they need to go as well as out for social activities. The grad program coordinator give us a fair amount of authority in all this, including some say in who can and can't drive. For whatever reason, it's not uncommon to have people volunteer who are either supremely creepy or have a track record of being irresponsible. Since we depend upon them pretty heavily to show up where and when they're supposed to and we don't want them making the recruits uncomfortable, we've started being a bit more selective about who we allow to drive over the past year or so.

Apparently now we have to add terrible driving and general jack@$$-ness to the list of things to watch out for. There was one driver in particular who a track record for being a creep and a jack@$$, but he's a 3rd year and had never been a problem around recruits before, so we let it slide. However, Friday night I started hearing all sorts of complaints about what a terrible driver he is. Later that night he and Dallas took some of the recruits out to a bar. Dallas (having heard and witnessed the terrible driving) left him an easy parking spot when they got to the bar. What does Captain Dumb@$$ do? He decides it would be funny to pull his van around the other side of Dallas' already parked van so closely that the students in Dallas' van wouldn't be able to get out. Yes, hilarious, and oh so mature. Except he freaking sideswiped Dallas' van, leaving visible damage to both vehicles. What an idiot!! FIRED!!!

Let's say I took the keys from him when I got to the bar and removed him of his driving duties for the next day. Fortunately the students laughed about it and made fun of his stupidity for the rest of the weekend, although they were understandably reluctant to ride with him again.

Why You Should Not Bring Your Parent with You to Visit Graduate Schools

Bottom line: because it make you look bad. Sometimes, really, really bad.

Our first of two recruiting weekends was this past weekend, and we had not one, but two students show up with their fathers. Along with getting obliterated the night before and being visibly hungover at faculty interviews, being blatantly racist or homophobic, or being whiny and demanding, bringing your parent(s) with you on grad school recruiting visits is a giant "no-no." (I'm not the only one out there who thinks so.)

Every now and then we've had students come with a parent, but the parents have never before actually attended all the weekend's events with their child. For example, last year we had the crazy case of a 17 year old being admitted. I get that his mom came with him, he wouldn't have been able to check into the hotel room by himself. (Not that the understandable reason stopped us from mocking him behind his back.) Most of the time a parent comes with their kid to Tucson they come to maybe the first and last dinner of the weekend, but otherwise spend the weekend playing golf or something - not going to poster sessions and department tours!

The guy that came this weekend - he and his dad were actually ok. He was polite, interested in talking to grad students, and seemed to be able to function with out his father. His dad was friendly, and even though he wanted to attend all sorts of events, he made sure we knew that he didn't want to intrude, and had no expectation of attending the interviews with faculty Saturday morning. I think he just wanted an excuse to leave the cold, snowy weather and hang out with his son.

The girl and her dad however? Ho. Ly. Crap. I'll find out next week, but I'm 99% sure she's not going to get a financial offer. The students that we invite for recruiting weekend have already been admitted, however their financial offer is not determined until after we meet them. Not making a financial offer is (almost always) an effective way to discourage socially inept and/or terrible people from coming - basically to correct for the shortcomings that weren't evident on paper.

Her dad was the epitome of overbearing, controlling parent. When given the chance to chat with current grad students and ask questions (something at least as important as talking to the professors) she passed and sat in the corner with her dad. He actually got ANGRY when he was told (and he had to be told!) that he could not attend his daughter's individual meetings with faculty. Really dude? Are you going to attend her job interviews, too? Perhaps come to the lecture hall with her the first Thursday night of every month for the cume?

She was a stuck up little brat, too, for lack of a better description. Friday there's a poster session, after which all the recruits are supposed to list 6 faculty with whom they'd like to talk further the next morning. She only listed 2. As usually happens when students don't list 6 (but they're almost always close at least, sheesh), we fill in the rest of their schedule with other faculty from their division of interest. Saturday morning, she AND her dad both threw fits when they discovered that she had been assigned additional meetings! (Her dad still came to campus with her even after being told he couldn't attend the meetings. The guy's dad was smart enough to hang out at the hotel for the morning.) At that point our grad program coordinator had had it with them and said fine, don't go, but perhaps you should realize that these are the people that will be teaching your classes, writing and grading your cumes, and sitting on your dissertation committee. (i.e. It would be in your best interest to be polite and professional!!!)

At that point both she and her father tried to backtrack and hem and haw like "oh we didn't know that..." Like that's any excuse. First, if you don't at least realize that you will be taking classes from these professors, you're a moron and/or had crappy advisors in undergrad. And second, at the very least you should show some shred of professionalism!!! What is wrong with these people!? I'm guessing that this girl is sufficiently dysfunctional to have wound up without a financial offer even if she had come on her own, but bringing her overbearing, pushy, and rude father with her was shooting herself in the foot.

When prospective grad students come to campus, we (and by "we" I mean faculty, relevant staff, current grad students, and particularly the people from each category on the admissions committee) want to see that the recruits are interested and engaged in the science that goes on here, have the communication and social skills to explain what they currently do and/or are interested in doing, and are reasonably polite and professional in their interactions. Getting a PhD is all about becoming an independent researcher and scientist. If you can't get through this weekend without your parent half a step behind to beat up anybody who doesn't give you your way, you're not going to fare well in grad school. Do you think the professors are going to respond well to an angry phone call from daddy when you fail a cume? Even if you did beat the extremely low odds and manage function on your own, everybody around you will make fun of you mercilessly behind your back for being unable to make your own decision about this at age 20-something. This girl will forever be known as the brat with the overbearing father.

This rant doesn't mean that your parents can't be involved in your decision-making process. I included my parents, but by "included" I mean I called home a day or two after each trip I made to tell them about what I liked or didn't like and to hash-out general impressions. Once my parents realized I wasn't moving any closer to them, they didn't care where I went beyond my relative happiness there. When I had narrowed it down and was debating between two schools I discussed pros/cons with both of my parents over a few more phone calls. They both have advanced degrees, so they offered input where relevant, but other than declaring that a dry heat can't possibly be all its cracked up to be, never pushed me one way or another. Actually to this day I don't know if they secretly had a preference which school I chose.

After this ridiculous encounter with these people I actually wrote my parents an email thanking them for letting me do $h!t on my own and figure things out for myself. Thanks to their not holding my hand every bit of the way I came out of the grad school application process with a far better offer than I ever would have if they had.

Can it please just be over already??

I'm so over grad school. Yesterday was the first day I didn't go to work in two weeks, and that's really only because I had previously made plans.

My instrument has been down for a week and a half, I've been trying to get revisions done on my rejected paper to send it elsewhere, everybody and their mother needs stuff read, my advisor threw a group meeting lit presentation at me on a topic I've never even heard of, my collaborator wants to meet when she's in town next week but I haven't had a chance to figure out what to do with the data or what it means, and my advisor wants me to present stuff I haven't really been working on at a conference whose abstract deadline is in 18 days, and add to all that the imminent arrival of my period and I can't manage think about anything except how much I really just want to cry. And how hungry I am. But nothing sounds good.

I wish there weren't a first year sitting in my office so I could just sit at my desk and cry. I certainly don't want to explain to her what's wrong with me.

Peer Review

A colleague from my department came across this letter yesterday. Seeing as I've been frustrated by the publishing process (among other things!) lately, and I know I'm not alone, I thought I'd share.

Journal of Systems and Software, 54 (2000), 1.

My favorite line:

"Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them, the review process could be unduly delayed."

If you want to read the whole letter (it's only a page) and don't have access, let me know!

Seminar Notes

Yesterday I went to a seminar from a faculty candidate - we're trying to hire a biochemist and a biophysical chemist (I think there might be a third position, but I'm not sure). I'm assuming this was a candidate for the biophysical position, as he is a theoretical chemist. Not gonna lie, I don't have a whole lot of use/patience/interest for/in theoretical "chemistry." If you combine it with experimental data, ok. It has some value as support or motivation for experimental work, but in my mind means just about squat on it's own, especially when you say stuff like this:

"...transition states only a theorist could love."

"...the theory works really nifty swell."

"...which goes to show that in our country money can buy you anything, including an article in Science." [Apparently some company R&D division had an article in Science that I gather contradicted his conclusions.]

"If somebody held a gun to my head and told me to pick out the important vibrations by looking at a structure, I'd make sure my affairs were in order." [Ok, so this isn't completely absurd scientifically, but who says that?? Especially during a job talk. Actually, I'll tell you who. Somebody with a Napoleon complex who thinks he's a lot funnier than he is.]

And my favorite:

"I'm way too shy to show you these [experimental] results, but let me assure you it's working."

Seriously?? Right there you've just lost any credibility. You know it's bad news when I spend the seminar writing down the completely ridiculous stuff you say. It's like I'm back in gen chem writing down Chuck gems like, "now give yourselves a temporary partial lobotomy..."

Editing

So I've been working on this paper since, oh, about June. I know that sounds completely ridiculous, and it is, but most of the comments I've had from my advisor and collaborator have been only minimally painful. For the most part they haven't meant large amounts of additional work or rewriting. The most painful part of the whole process has been waiting weeks on end to get a round of comments back from them.

I've been working on the latest round of corrections this weekend, and it's got me thinking about editing.

Most of the comments from my collaborator were adding additional words that I found unnecessary for the clarity of the paper. If I weren't hard up for space already, they'd be fine. They're not ridiculously wordy additions. But in a 2-page communication, there is absolutely no room for words that are anything less than 110% necessary, so I ignored a fairly high percentage of his "corrections."

As I was getting ready to send the latest version to my advisor, I found myself worrying that my collaborator would be annoyed at me "ignoring" so many of his comments. (I really didn't ignore them, I considered all of them, weighing them for importance vs length added.) I know that when my labmates ask me to read/edit something, and then I see a later draft where a number of my corrections have been ignored, I know I tend to be irritated. But thinking about this further, I decided that most of the instances where I'm annoyed is when the author is a non-native English speaker.

Now I'm really not trying to rip on international students, some of them work very hard at improving their English, and have reasonably good grammar. I'm fairly sympathetic to constant corrections that are clearly a result of different syntax/language construction. For example, Sri Lankan students almost always omit articles (a/an, the), so I assume this is such an issue. But I get annoyed when I'm correcting things like subject/verb agreement over and over and over again I get annoyed. I've learned enough of a foreign language to know that you most definitely learn this sort of thing whenever you learn a language. Occasional slips, sure, but every second sentence? Good grief! Anyways, I know this sounds snobby, if you've specifically asked me to read/edit for correct English, you really shouldn't be ignoring so many of my comments/corrections!

Editing is particularly painful when the English is so jumbled that I have a hard time figuring out what you're trying to say. Really. Even in graduate school, it happens. (I have serious doubts about the TOEFL.) In this case I correct based on my best guess at their point/the correct science, and make a note that they should make sure it still says what they want. (Even worse is the occasional instance when you think the author is mostly an idiot and suspect that they don't know what they're trying to say/what's correct either.)

Anyways, hopefully my collaborator won't be offended that I omitted so many of his suggestions, and please please please please please let them both read this round soon and be done making changes!

Ugh.

I hate when I come to work on the weekend and wind up spending the day troubleshooting or worse, cleaning. When I work on the weekends (ok, so that's most weekends) I've either got a looming deadline (like today), or I'm hoping to get lots done while nobody is around to pester me. It's way less annoying to deal with instrument issues during the week. I also hate when instrument software settings "magically" uncheck themselves, especially when I realize that's probably the problem AFTER I've already vented. Time to reassemble the instrument...

Rant

So my roommate, and not that it should matter, but my kind, beautiful, fun, funny, smart, interesting, overall-awesome roommate, just sent me the following text message:

Ok I just had a coworker say, "I can't believe you're not married, what's wrong with you?"

Now before you tell me that you're sure this person meant well, let me tell you that comments like this NEVER, EVER leave you feeling good. Worst case scenario, they leave you wanting to jump off a cliff. Best case scenario, they leave you thinking, "What's wrong with me?! What the hell is wrong with YOU???"

I was at a wedding a couple of months ago when my friend's mom asked me if I had a boyfriend back in Arizona. When I said no, she asked why not. And not even as a rhetorical question, she actually looked at me waiting for an answer. I've never been on the ball enough to actually give a response beyond mumbling "I don't know" and sitting there awkwardly. While I'm fuming afterwards I mull over various inappropriate responses along lines such as, "Well my girlfriend and I..." or "I prefer to sleep with as many men as possible..." Maybe someday I'll come up with a polite response that still effectively puts people in their place.

I really, really wish people would think before saying crap like this. It's just so thoughtless and rude. There's no reason why she (or me, or any of the other 20-something single women who have heard this) should be married! Maybe she just hasn't met the right guy yet, or maybe she doesn't want to get married. There's nothing wrong with being single! Or maybe she was married, and widowed young - wouldn't you feel like schmuck then?? Yes, I would personally like to be in a relationship, and if/when I find the right guy, get married and have a family. But not every woman wants that or should want that. I know I'm not perfect, but just because it hasn't happened yet for me, or maybe won't happen, doesn't mean something is wrong with me.

Ugh. I really wish people would get over the idea that women should be in a relationship, should want to be in a relationship, and must be seriously flawed if they aren't. And if what they're really thinking is, "This girl is really cool, some guy would be really lucky to be with her," then they need to find a better, non-offensive way to say it!! I know I'm really defensive about this, and I probably shouldn't let this bother me so much. But it really irritates me when people say crap like that.

Alternate post titles:

WTF?!
Think Before You Speak!!
What is wrong with people?!
People Suck
Ugh