Extra points for having a penis

Various of my friends are apoplectic over the latest reports about the income gap between men and women, the lack of women at top levels of certain fields, and overuse of the word “apoplectic.” I generally don’t address those debates, partly because my field has a fair number of women in the higher ranks, and partly because I actually like working with more men.  They’re much easier to manipulate.

 But there are places where the difference between men and women seem to be harsher, and people don’t comment on those as often.  These can be summarized as follows: situations in which men get extra points for doing the exact same thing as women, presumably because people assume that the presence of a penis somehow handicaps the poor fellows, and thus their heroic triumph over their phallic burden qualifies them for beatification.

 Nowhere is this more evident than in the diaper arena.  A woman changing a diaper is a perfectly normal, almost invisible scene.  A man changing a diaper is often accompanied by the heavenly tones of angels playing trumpets.  Passing women will comment on it: “That’s such a good daddy, you’re a lucky little baby,” and if the woman is of a previous generation, she will stop to discuss this with the baby’s mother, pointing out that her own husband would never have touched a diaper.  Men just didn’t do those things back then.  Sometimes, the woman will go so far as to offer marital advice to the spouse of the man changing the diaper: “You need to hold on to him, honey.”  Oh.  Right. He changed a diaper on the child who bears his very DNA, whom he helped to produce, so I should hold on to him, even if he happens to be a serial killer who recently barbecued our family schnauzer over a bonfire consisting of photos of my mother?  Or is it just possible, madam, that what you’d actually enjoy is a time-travel moment in which I go bitch-slap your fossilized husband for being a sexist bastard?

 This came up again in the oddest of moments.  I was talking to a veterinarian about putting our cat to sleep.  I explained that I had hoped to keep the cat going long enough so that my husband could get home and be involved in the whole decision, because he really loved this cat.  I’m pretty sure I actually heard the vet melt like a Mississippi chocolate through the phone.  “Oh, yes, your husband does love this kitty,” she sighed – I mean, seriously, she SIGHED – “And isn’t it just so sweet when men love their pets?”  Not to get all Freudian on your sorry ass, but why don’t we just admit that it truly touches your heart to see a man express ANY emotion, possibly because your own father was one of those robo-freaks who saved all of his emotional energy for weeping during the National Anthem at the Super Bowl?

 I should include the obvious disclaimer that yes, I adore my husband, and I think it’s awesome that he somehow manages to express the full range of emotions, despite being hampered by a pesky penis.  But I don’t think he should get sainted for doing what’s expected of any woman out there.  Unless, of course, he manages to give birth.  Then we can talk.

Maudlin meanderings

Remember when you were in fourth grade, and some well-meaning, but obviously clueless visitor would ask, "And what do you want to do when you grow up, dear?" Honestly. What in hell were you supposed to say to that? My brother always said he wanted to be a truck driver, and I believe his ultimate goal was to own a Kenworth. I haven't a clue what I said, but I know the only profession ever to raise my curiosity was what I later discovered was called an NFL statistician. I was always amazed, when a quarterback trotted onto the field, that a huge array of numbers could be cited immediately: "This is the fourteenth time Bradshaw has thrown a screen pass during a Sunday afternoon game played east of the Mississippi." Where did they GET this shit? I was hooked. But I never would have known it was a career.

Try to recall what you said when you were asked that totally unanswerable question. Was it remotely related to your current job? Did you even know your current job existed? Do you think Einstein would have said he wanted to be a patent clerk, or a theoretical physicist?

I bring this up because of the dozens of AIDS researchers and advocates on the flight to Melbourne, Australia, the flight that was shot down by some person who believed that killing a plane load of people was somehow an acceptable act of war. I bet that not one of the people on that plane, when they were asked as children, "What will you be when you're older?" would have said, "I'm gonna work on AIDS."  How were they to know this disease existed? How could they guess what kind of world-distortions this one little virus could cause? They probably said they wanted to be astronauts, or doctors, or whatever their parents were. Chefs. Fashion designers. Who knows?

So how did they get there? Some of them were there because of a personal passion, an experience that shoved them to the forefront of a historical crisis. Have you ever watched a loved one die in pain? Maybe you have; it's not so rare as we wish. Have you watched that person die in pain while suffering the indignity of prejudice, ignorance, fear, and hatred? Assuming you survive that experience with any vestiges of your sanity intact, it could very well turn your ass into an advocate. Or a policy wonk, a field worker, a treatment coordinator.

Some of the passengers were there because they wanted to work internationally, to bring health care to places where it wasn't, to change policies to make AIDS work easier. Some wanted to create new treatments, cures, vaccines, systems for preventing disease. A lot of them were idealists, a term that unfortunately gets swept away into a bin between "dreamer" and "zealot."

But then there are those who, like me, ended up in this strange little niche of the working world through a series of utterly unremarkable events. I often wonder how many different places I could have ended up, had I gone down any of the roads not taken, but I don't ponder this with any regret or wistfulness. I like my strange, twisty road and all the characters along it.  And I'm thinking a lot about it, thanks to those passengers who are no longer here. So here is my little tale:

I knew from a very young age that I wouldn't take on certain jobs, because I'm half blind. I would never go into the military, or fly, or do anything requiring decent depth perception. It never occurred to me to regret any missed opportunities; they just weren't there.

I was always one of the smart kids in school, easily finishing my own work and half the teacher's grading in plenty of time to disrupt the class and irritate the hell out of people, cracking jokes. I was too good at school, really; I never learned to work at it, which would bite me in the ass later. I did everything I was assigned, did it well, and never gave it a lot of thought.

The smart kids were all supposed to answer the career question with high-paying career options like doctors, lawyers, presidents, astronauts. No one ever said they wanted to be a tax attorney or own a chain of paint stores. No one wanted to manage a software team or train people to give speeches. Nothing that real people ever did.  So somehow, I became the person who wanted to be a doctor. Was there ever a bigger cliche?

I got to college and was rudely awakened: some kids knew how to study. Apparently that involved opening a textbook and reading it. I always thought textbooks were things you flipped through, looking for the answers to hopelessly easy questions. A weed-out chemistry course ended my pre-med career, and nearly ended my scholarship. I was horrified that I could possibly suck at something so much, and for years I considered by subsequent change of major to be a cop-out. It never occurred to me that psychology grabbed my interest enough to make me want to read a textbook for the first time in my life, and maybe that was a valid reason to major in something.

All along this path, the other topic that consistently amused me was math. I loved math, everything about it, but especially the fact that you could work a problem, figure out the answer, check it, and go to the next one. I loved the instant gratification of getting a problem right. And I adored the fact that other girls hated math; what fun to be good at something that all the pretty and popular girls feared! Had I been born a great beauty, would I have cared about math? I don't know, but I loved being good at something that other people feared so much.

The psychology majors were pretty typical math-haters. They all wanted to "help people." I must have heard a hundred people yammer away in class about how much they loved to listen to people's problems, how they really felt they could help, how they wanted to heal minds...it was like listening to eight-year-old girls talk about the princes they would marry, and the unicorn that would fly them on their honeymoon. Revolting. I doubted I could help, because for the most part, I had noticed that no one ever listened to a piece of advice, no matter how sincerely they had begged for help and guidance from the offeror. I was totally disinterested in healing people's disordered thoughts.

Luckily, this was college, and the greatest thing about college was finding paths that you never knew existed. I could combine math and psychology, it turned out, in the field of psychometrics: literally, measuring the mind. Measuring height, or weight, or speed is easy; measuring anger or intelligence or happiness, not so much. Now that sounded like fun.

So I went to graduate school, and worked with wonderful people to learn all kinds of things I don't remember at all, but mostly I learned how to think. I learned about science, which is merely a structured way to ask questions and not a method of undermining family values after all, and I learned amazing ways of exploring the world of the mind with mathematical models. Part of this I learned in classes, but another chunk was learned while interacting with hundreds of other smart people: weird, quirky, poorly dressed, pizza-eating, cheap-beer, hilarious people. My kind of people.

I did a brief stint in academics, and I adored my job, but I never would have succeeded, ultimately, because I really didn't want to write esoteric papers about small-sample properties of statistical models. I just wanted to go play with numbers, and get answers to questions, and then get some more questions to answer. I was still the kid who loved getting the right answer, and having lots of numbers to cite. And it was Greg's turn to go tenure-track, so I followed him onto the job market, and landed at CDC.

The Division of STD Prevention was the first job offer I received at CDC, and I thought it would be the only one, because I didn't know the hiring process. Once I took the job, I felt I couldn't back out, and I should stay at least a few years to avoid looking like a job-hopper.

And I never left. I just can't. It's the same thing all over again: it's a topic like my high school math, something no one enjoys, no one likes to discuss, something that makes polite society desperately uneasy, and yet it's so common. So universal. How can I resist a chance to study a topic that disgusts people? My fantastically subversive nature is totally drawn to this. But more than that, the people who work in STDs are in many ways the same as I am: a sick sense of humor, a real joy in understanding things that people would rather keep hidden, and -- yeah, we can admit it now -- a desire to help somehow, even if it isn't by listening to people's problems.

And why would researchers want to study HIV? Because every scientist loves to find the problems that no one else has solved. Partly it's because you have to work, to publish, and have a field of research. You need to distinguish yourself somehow; but more than that, HIV represents a world of unsolved questions, and nothing is more  exciting to a researcher than a new question. I realize this is ignoring the human side of AIDS, and I don't mean that scientists devalue the humanity. In fact, some of the scientists approached this topic specifically because they cared about the human face of the problem. Some landed in this field because they are simply drawn to interesting problems of any kind.

I should probably point out, parenthetically, that I'm not a scientist in the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. I'm in STDs, which for many reasons is a different Division at CDC. But HIV is the best-known and most-publicized of any STD, and we all work on the same basic problems.

But this brings me back to how people can end up on a plane to Melbourne, Australia, and what kind of people are now gone from here because of those jackasses with missiles. The tragedy isn't a tragedy simply because they are AIDS conference attendees; it would be the same tragedy if they were veterinarians, or botanists. But the field of AIDS work is a niche that I understand, to some degree, and I wanted to explain how the fourth-grader with no answer to the career question could end up in this crazy corner of the working world. This corner is a lot less bright now.

I know I'm memorializing them by babbling about myself, which is both narcissistic and ridiculous. But I did not know them personally. I just know that they were all devoted to this fight, and I wondered how they all got here, to this field. And why they're gone.

Mental notes of a mental mother

Leave house 8am. Attempt to locate Nicky's camp on Agnes Scott campus in a blazing inferno of summer morning. Walk around campus wondering why no college campus is ever even slightly intuitive in design.  Where in hell is Winship Hall? Why, it's next to McCain Library. Terrific.  Have you people heard of numbers on buildings?

Find where the hell Nicky's camp is meeting 9:15am. Hand him over to nice people who take him to a place called Buttrick Hall, which is probably a memorial to fart literature.

Mental note: donate a building to a college campus on the condition they name it after a sexual risk behavior.

Arrive at work in time for sweat to evaporate slightly before 10am meeting. Not that it matters, as colleague's office is covered in smell of hand lotion anyway.

Work all day. Successfully avoid making anyone cry. Nice guy in the cafe keeps the grill open long enough for me to get some lunch at 2pm, because he is aware that I will cry when blood sugar is low.

Mental note: don't use the crying thing too much. Consider faking seizures instead.

Pick up Nicky (half an hour late) just before 6pm. Sign him out while self-doctoring the bite/sting that was generously provided to my arm by some hungry bitch of an insect.  Get late-fee amnesty from kind and concerned camp counselor.

Mental note: when picking up child late from camp, always show a repulsive, swollen bug bite to the counselor to avoid late fee.

Drop Nicky off at dojo. Sigh and proceed to hardware store to buy enormous garbage cans to replace the ones gleefully flung all over the culdesac and destroyed by our trash collectors. Tell cashiers, who are slightly surprised that I'm buying such enormous trash cans, that I'm using them for disposing of bodies. Random store worker explains that I do remind him of a woman on "Snapped," which is apparently a TV show about women who snap and kill people.

Mental note: sue someone over the rights to that show.

Purchase large amounts of caffeine at Publix, and develop momentary paranoia about people judging my grocery purchases, which are Diet Dew, raspberries, strawberries, potato chips, orange juice, milk, and a giant cup of ice.

Mental note: grocery paranoia is a little, tiny sign that you're losing it.

Return to dojo and call Cassie in Spain so she can talk to dojo peeps, whom she misses. Glad she misses someone, even if that someone is not me.

Pick up dinner for Nicky and me, reflecting on the number of restaurant staff in Atlanta who know our orders by heart. Sigh.

Home, 8pm. Subsequent hour spent washing dishes, folding laundry, medicating cat (twice), dialysing cat, feeding cats, feeding fish, more laundry, take trash out, take the recycling to the curb, and clean up the raspberry smash created by cat leaping into newly purchased box of raspberries.

Mental note: single parents do this shit every day. It amazes me no end.

Money

I try not to talk much about money; for that matter, I try hard not to think about it. Partly that's because money is such an impolite topic, crass even, and partly it's because no one is ever happy with the amount of money they have, especially when someone who is (choose one or more of: dumber, uglier, a bigger jerk, more selfish, amoral, dickish, insensitive, uneducated, weak) makes a lot more. If I think too hard about the salaries of teachers compared with the salaries of mid-level managers at Coca-Cola, I will turn into one of those rage-filled monsters from a horror movie, or worse, I'll go into politics. No good can come from those mental meanderings.

But with Greg in Spain, my main life-support backup system has been wiped out, and sometimes that leaves me floundering for how to keep our lives moving forward while he is gone. I'm not saying I depend on him for money (that will not happen); I'm saying I depend on him to pick up Nicky if I'm running behind, help me take the cars to get serviced while we are at work, pick up an ingredient for dinner at the store, or find an extra flash drive for Nicky to take to nerd camp. He figures out what's wrong with the remote (hint: I'm using it wrong or it needs batteries; those are the only two options), and he finds the band whose latest track Nicky wants on his iPad. He disposes of insects. He hangs out with Nicky in the pool and takes the cat to the vet and feeds the fish. He says things like, "Hey, this unopened bill has been sitting here since the Clinton administration...do you think we owe late fees by now?"

And that doesn't even get into the whole sappy-emotional-support stuff, which you certainly can't buy. Maybe you can rent it, but that's a whole other story.

So while he's gone, I find myself solving problems with money more than I normally would. I'll just buy Nicky a new flash drive rather than sift through the desks. I'll get ten extra things at the grocery store so I won't need any more trips this week. I'll buy a new pair of cheap reading glasses instead of trekking my ass back home to get the real glasses I forgot. I will buy a new, long-handled algae scraper for the aquarium, rather than sticking my hand in that damn fishy-stank water. Ten bucks here, twenty there, and life is far, far easier. I'm not spending fortunes because I don't have fortunes to spend, but those extra tens or twenties have solved a couple of life-management problems.

Oddly, that means I'm not asking people for help. All in all that's okay, because I don't want bother people, but sometimes people actually WANT to help each other. They want to hang out and sit by the pool with kids or wait with me for the car to get fixed and have some coffee. They want to laugh at my issues with the remote and maybe witness that moment when I go totally batshit and fling it into the rain barrel. By throwing money at problems, I avoid asking for help, but I also avoid being helped. And I'm being utterly dishonest and pretending I can still manage our lives as-is. No one likes a super-woman, especially a phony one.

In the end, I'm finding myself totally awed by the people I know who are raising a kid alone on a small salary, figuring out all their problems without being able to cushion any of it with those little buy-out moments. I don't know if I could find the strength and perseverance to do it. I take my hat off to them, and I know even that much respect isn't enough. I wish I knew a way to conjure up some cushion-moments for people who so completely deserve them. I wish I could create a system in which money never had to be discussed.

Meanwhile, I wish Greg would get home. These fish tanks are nasty.

What's it like to work there?

Disclaimer: this is what my life is like in the nation's public health agency. It doesn't reflect anyone's view but my own, which is guaranteed to be warped.

A lot of folks ask what it's like to work at CDC, and whether it's like the movies, which is a good time to stop and ask yourself, "Is my own job depicted accurately in the movies?" There are zillions of exciting things happening every day at CDC, but every exciting event is a direct result of all the tedious, exacting, slow-moving things that would put any self-respecting movie audience into a death-spiral coma.  We spend a lot of time counting up the health-related things that happen to people, and you only see us on the news when one of those counts shifts enough to make it past some news editor's desk.  But in this mega-important organization, you run into a set of archetypes, a cast of characters that form the basis of a thousand great stories. This is one offbeat characterization of the types you find in our hallways.

First, the overlords, generally MDs, usually with an ancillary degree like an MPH. It's medical organization, after all, responsible for the health of the United States, and no Congressional or Cabinet staff will be impressed by anything less than a "real" doctor in the top ranks. Naturally, there are those who say the medical doctors are arrogant, clannish, spoiled and demanding, forever issuing edicts as though the rest of us are their serfs. All stereotypes start somewhere, but overall, I've had a great experience with our docs.

The problem comes in when people don't understand the differences in how people are trained to think and act. Doctors are much like military veterans in some ways. They go through a training process designed to break them. The obstacle courses might not be purely physical, but the demands of medical training are just as intense. They are trained to work through immensely complicated decisions about which body system to adjust for what reason, and they have to present their decisions with an air of assertiveness and certainty that forms the basis of their reputation for arrogance. Ask yourself if you would trust a doc who admitted she didn't know what the hell was wrong with you, but said a z-pack will probably keep you alive. Nope. That uncertainty has to be removed from doctors, the same way uncertainty about blowing something up is removed from infantry soldiers.

The analogy goes even further, because like soldiers who are uncomfortable with civilian colleagues, medical doctors -- or any kind of people -- prefer to deal with people who were trained in the same way they were. They are fellow survivors, veterans of the same ugly-ass boot camp, and it's hard for them to realize the value of other people's thought-training. Some of them are more self-aware than others, and try to extend their minds to other points of view, but some of them aren't there yet. But judging them all as narcissists with god complexes is hugely unfair.

Then there are the PhDs, my level, and our training is so different than medical training that we tend to clump together in our own circles, too. We are just as guilty of cluelessness as to the mental workings of others, and it makes us just as clannish. We are the people who run studies and experiments, carry out large- and small-scale analyses, and develop research plans. We are the biochemists who direct the lab work, or the social scientists who try to understand developmental disabilities. We tend to know a topic area like zoology really well, but we might not know a damn thing about other scientific areas. We are experts, but not at everything. Our knowledge is usually deeper than it is broad. To be successful and useful at CDC, we have to figure out where our deep expertise can be used broadly, not just during an outbreak of a horrible new virus, but also during the times when we are just trying to keep the nation healthy.

The MPH and other master's level people come to us through a few pathways. Sometimes they are nurses or other medical folks who went back to get a degree in public health. Sometimes they are fresh from undergrad to grad school to public health. And there are many who went from undergrad to the Peace Corps to grad school; those people tell competitive latrine stories and compare malarial experiences. Going to lunch with them is an experience.

Most MPH students, and probably a lot of other master's students, have spent some amount of time working for professors in their public health school, interviewing patients, gathering data, writing reports, and doing the grunt work of grant-funded research. In graduate school, they are usually someone's work horse, and sometimes they fall into the same roles in their professional lives. That can be great for them, or a bit on the demeaning side, because many of them are at least as expert as the doctoral level people; they just didn't have the money, time or inclination to go for the "higher" degree.

And then there's our real work force, the public health advisors. You've never met a group of people who are as dedicated, or who have the kind of experience they have. They've all been to college and some to grad school, some on the GI Bill, but others in the more direct way. They usually start their career in a county health department, helping run clinics or programs for anything from bedbug infestations to restaurant inspection to testing for water safety to vaccine programs to STD case management, to TB directly observed therapy...usually all at the same time. County health departments don't have the money for specialists, so these folks do EVERYTHING. A good many start off in the infectious disease programs, knocking on doors and telling people, "Hi, I'm from the health department and you've been exposed to an infectious disease, so we need you to come down to the clinic and get tested." They with junkies, tweakers, sex workers, crack whores, school kids, frat boys, rent boys, hustlers, runaways, homeless, and pretty much anyone else that you wouldn't want sitting next to you in a fancy limousine. Know where the best place is to find a lot of disease? Jails. So guess who gets sent to the detention centers to find cases? The public health advisors have seen everything. They can spot a bullshit artist or someone hiding a needle or a person who needs help, and they are trained to treat them all as people worthy of respect.

Those people work their way up the public health ladder, and many find themselves at CDC, working with the rest of us. All those people form teams to solve a problem, and there is not one person on the team more or less valuable than any other.  If you don't have someone with medical knowledge, how are you going to figure out what's making people sick? If you can't figure out how to help the states contact the sick people and get them into treatment, what good is the health program? If you can't gather data, analyze it, report on it, put it into the context of larger issues, how are you going to figure out what's going on? And how will you know you did the right thing, in the long run, without the people who can test hypotheses and build the evidence base?

Nothing can be done without the whole team, which makes it sad that I can even order this list by people's degrees and backgrounds. But it's as good an organizational system as any of the others, as long as people understand that the degree and the salary are not the same as the value that people bring to the team.

And I haven't yet mentioned the enormous administrative staff that we need to keep all this running. The biggest mistake anyone could make at CDC is insulting or demeaning the admin staff. Apart from being generally an obnoxious and dickish thing to do, belittling the admins will run you an excellent chance of having a front-row seat at your own funeral, assuming they mercifully let you die someday. On the other hand, building a good and respectful relationship  will mean your life at CDC is infinitely easier. Considering the skill and experience level, and the fact that there are truly great people on the staff, why would anyone treat admins as lesser career people?

Why would anyone on this team treat anyone as lesser or better? Well, some of the folks are bosses, and most aren't. Some are in charge of teams of people doing projects, and when work loads get bigger, tempers get shorter. People stop thinking, hey, this person has a different skill set and training, and they start thinking, "Why doesn't this person just get this stuff done?" It's easy to lose sight of the fact that other people don't know how to test behavioral theories or why the hell that's important. People forget that they were new to this career at one point, and they need to stop and mentor the people who are newer. People forget to ask how the wedding went, or how someone's mother is feeling, before they rush in and demand some new product. We get caught up.

Which is why, after being gone for five weeks and only after being gone for five weeks, I can take a breath and think about how this whole team works, or how it should work. I can remember why I do this.

I can remember why it is a good thing I landed in this career, as opposed to that whole violin-playing strip-tease gig I thought about so seriously.

Work, career, and my very lucky husband

Sometimes, I envy my husband so much that I'm surprised my hair isn't green. Of course, I envy him for the same reason I adore him (or one of those reasons anyway): he knows what he wants to do for a living, and he does it. He does it extremely well, and never runs out of ideas for projects and students. When he isn't working, he reads a lot, and he reads stuff that feeds his brain with new food for his work-thinking. I'm reading Pat Conroy novels, and he's reading Richard Dawkins.

Early in our relationship, it was clear that Greg would need his work, and all other life plans needed to accommodate it. You think I'm kidding. Anyone else have children specifically designed to be born outside the SIGGraph schedule? And that careful timing was decided *after* he did enough thinking to be truly sure he could live a life that included more than just his work and his wife (and he's a brilliant dad, by the way).

After some serious jealousy of his work-love at the beginning, I figured it was easy enough to work around Greg's career plans, because I didn't really have any of my own.

I still don't.

I started working at CDC nearly 18 years ago, so you'd think I would call this a career. But always in the back of my mind is the fact that I backed into this career; to be honest, most people do, as there aren't many known career paths that lead to government work in sexual health. Someday I will write about how I got here, but as I'm preparing to go back after a five-week absence, my real question is why I stay.

Partly it's a golden cage. I've got a great life, colleagues who understand when I drop everything and race across town to get to Cassie during a migraine attack, and a certain level of both respect and accomplishment that have accumulated over the years. And most of the work is interesting, though the assignments vary with new bosses and realignments and various ego wars. But until the kids are out of the house, there's not an easy way to give up all the comfort and familiarity of this long-held job and start on a new life path.

What would I do, anyway? I don't know. I've never known. I have never had Greg's undying love for any one topic, any mental compulsion to dive into a brain zone and stay there for life.  I have never figured out what to do when I grow up. I like a lot of types of work; I'm just not sure I love any of it, at least not the way Greg does.

Are there more people as lucky as Greg? Are there people who manage a grocery store who can't wait to get to work every day? Are bike repair people in love with their jobs? What is it that makes people get up and want to work each day? And conversely, are there more people like me, who really should have been born into royal and wealthy families?

Well, regardless, I will go back to work tomorrow. Because the alternative is depending on someone else for my income, and that will never happen.

You asked for it

Now that I'm back from Europe, I've had a couple of people say that they wish I would keep posting. That is flattering, but...about what, exactly, would I post? The suburban working-mother angle is well and tediously covered online, and I'm confident that blogging about life as a government hack would (1) get me fired; and (2) bore even a British historian to death. The fact that I'm a sex researcher is good fodder, but it is also my job, and there is a limit to the time I'm willing to spend organizing my thoughts on it outside the office.

So what could the theme be? What am I better at than anyone else I know? The answer, of course, is a fat lot of nothing. No, I'm not being modest or negative. I'm assessing this realistically. I'm not the smartest person I know, though I'm a damn safe distance from the dumbest. I'm pretty funny, but I don't have the ruinous emotional scars that are the jet-fuel of real humor. I don't have a story to tell. I'm not an artist, a writer or a DIY geek. I haven't survived life-threatening events and I'm fresh out of conspiracy theories. I don't even have any party tricks. I'm a good wife and mother, but I don't have any advice on the topic, not that anyone actually takes advice when it is offered.

So here's what I'm left with: I'm the absolute best person in the world at being me. Not only that, but I can be me -- a relatively ordinary human being -- and observe myself being ordinary, and find every day vastly amusing. Or absurd. Or inconsistent, or maddening, educational or ridiculous. And coming back from a tour of extraordinary places and stepping out of my own life for a month has made me even more appreciative or respectful of the ordinary, and the tiny revelations and insights that are present where people rarely look. I see the ordinary through my own lens, and it might not be your view, but it keeps me entertained.

So, this new blog, more than anything, is about keeping me entertained with my own reconsiderations of the ordinary. And if you're entertained too, well so much the better. Welcome.