And they’re looking for submissions for their second issue. They want to know how you got dragged, kicking and punching, into video games (or tabletop games, or LARPing):

Do you have a story to tell about an experience or two that shaped your identity as gamer? Do you want reflect on the good and bad of being a young gamer, or talk about what games helped get you into gaming, or think about the first character in a game that you really got attached to and why?

Submissions are due May 15.

I have enjoyed our electronic correspondence

Whenever my terminal notifies me that I have mail,
I eagerly check whether it is from you.
If it is, my heart races as I read and reread it.
It annoys me officemates that
I laugh aloud at your witticisms
and audibly groan at your criticisms,
But I care about you more than them.
I fondly remember the times we used “talk”.
I confess that I saved away phrases of yours
that I was unwilling to let go.
I think we should meet each other in person some time.

I also slipped in some feminism:

You don’t belong at MIT (to most students)

I don’t know anything about your intelligence,
your grades, or your experience,
but that won’t stop me from telling you
that you don’t belong at MIT.
You were only admitted because you are
a legacy/woman/underrepresented minority/Iowan.
I realize that by saying this without knowing
anything about your abilities,
I imply that no member of your group is qualified,
but I say it anyway.

Not that crying is something that anyone plans on doing. And actually, with the exception of Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry” on Free to Be… You and Me, I got the message growing up that crying is most definitely a huge no-no. And I knew that because I cried easily. I was the kid of whom teachers would say, “She’s very sensitive.” I didn’t really understand the phrase at the time, but I figured it wasn’t good, because I was the weirdo and the kids who called me “crybaby” were the norm.

And it is those kids who grow up to define the unofficial rules of the workplace, too. The book The Highly Sensitive Person points out that though having highly attuned senses is actually a good thing, it’s not a trait that our culture by and large recognizes or rewards. And it can be a pretty cruel and insensitive world out there, especially when you’ve been told that you are free to be you and can grow up to do anything you want, but when you are grown up you discover that actually it’s not as simple as all that.

As Jenny F. Scientist writes:

My mentor is a woman in her forties who has left academia; I am in love with her, she is wonderful, and I wish I’d met her years ago. Be advised, o women scientists: go ye forth and find women mentors, for verily, thy quality of life shall improve.

It was such a pleasure to connect with someone who has experience!! and useful advice!!! So we were talking about the need to be tough and on guard all the time, and I said, ‘It’s just been really hard…’ and burst dramatically into tears.

Of course she was wonderful about it.

But here’s the thing: I could not under any circumstances cry in front of my advisor, or any of the male professors; they would never take me seriously again. This is true of some of the female professors, but on the whole, I would expect it to be less career-destroying.

Nobody wants to cry in the workplace; we all know the rules. But regardless of popular notions of science being this entirely rational and emotionless endeavor, that simply isn’t true. In graduate school you have young high-achievers thrown into a situation where success is far from guaranteed—major research discoveries are so celebrated because they are so rare. The rules for success that worked for problem sets don’t necessarily work in graduate school, where not every problem has a guaranteed solution. There are personalities to deal with, because many scientists avoided the normal types of socialization. In short, it can be very stressful. And at some point you’re sure to run into a situation that will make you want to cry.

I definitely tried not to cry in front of my advisor, but it did happen. And I think it was only fair that my advisor should see the impact that the debacle of my first project had on me (though now I think I see that failure as a blessing in disguise, precisely because it did ultimately lead to my leaving physics).

And then there was the time when I cried in front of my advisor’s postdoctoral advisor, who was female, when I visited her lab. This was right after my project imploded, and I’d also just won a fellowship, and the cognitive dissonance of being congratulated just as I felt like this huge failure was too much. But I didn’t expect any sympathy from her, because she was of course close to my advisor, and how could I complain to her about her star postdoc? Cry and you cry alone, indeed.

But astronaut Lisa Nowak just did Gavin Newsom a big favor by doing something even more bizarre and of even greater national—nay, international—newsworthiness. After all, Newsom may be the mayor of a major American city*, but being an American astronaut carries global cultural cachet. Astronauts are international cultural icons. We all read or saw The Right Stuff. American astronauts were first to land on the moon. Astronauts Sally Ride and Judith Resnik inspired me during my formative geek years as the first and second American women to go into space.

And just as the space program captured the imaginations of people of my generation when we were younger, back when landing on the moon wasn’t a memory enshrouded in the mists of time and before space shuttles blew up, astronauts still have this lingering mystique. That mission to Mars that Bush announced three years ago may or may not ever happen—we’ve got some problems to sort out in Iraq first—but astronauts still represent something cool and futuristic.

And the popular image is of astronauts as being these people who are completely in control, because they need to be prepared for every contingency. If something goes wrong in flight, they should be able to respond to it effectively and without panic. Which is what makes Lisa Nowak’s passion-driven actions all the more perplexing—and fascinating.

I mean, here is a highly accomplished woman who’s got a career to be proud of—admitted to the United States Naval Academy, advanced degrees in engineering, astronaut who completed a space shuttle mission—and she snapped. This article indicates that all may not have been well with her marriage, which could have been part of why her feelings for the pilot she trained with had grown so strong.

I’m wondering whether she had access to talk with a therapist about these things, or whether that’s just not something that people in the NASA culture do, or after years of being in that culture it wouldn’t have occurred to her to even try to process these feelings and channel them in a more productive way before it got to this point. I mean, in the aftermath of both of the space shuttle accidents it became clear that there is a groupthink dynamic there that can lead to overlooking problems until things literally explode. (And this doesn’t just happen at NASA, of course—it also can happen in the White House or Enron or many other institutions.) I wonder if the very left-brained, analytical, rational sort of work done at NASA begets an institutional culture in which introspection is given a lesser value.

Lisa Nowak is no Andrea Yates, but Yates was certainly a victim of the lack of empathy of her then-husband—a NASA employee—for her depression. And at a place where the success or failure of a mission hinges upon cold calculations, I would think that the tendency would be to value the hard rational skills over the softer, human-centered skills. And in many places, admitting to needing some psychological help can threaten your career. But we really need to keep on destigmatizing this: you don’t have to be mentally ill to get therapy; therapy helped me get through graduate school.

I don’t know if not getting the therapy she needed was Lisa Nowak’s problem. I can definitely sympathize with feeling emotional in a culture that minimizes it, though. I hope she gets the help she needs. And maybe Gavin Newsom’s openness about confronting his personal problems might encourage others to seek out help rather than letting their emotional problems fester until they explode.

*Hey, SF is the fourth largest city in California, after all! That counts for something, doesn’t it?

Even though I wasn’t reading, I decided to go anyway because I thought it would be cool to meet as many of the other contributors as possible and get them to sign my copy of the book—which is an appropriately geeky impulse, is it not? Besides, my husband was off on Easter Island and I had some serious procrastinating to do on some writing. So off to North Beach I went.

The cozy poetry room upstairs filled up with a crowd of nearly 100 people (I’m guessing) split pretty evenly between male and female. For some reason, my initial reaction was to be surprised by that—I guess I was expecting a more exclusively female turnout—but it just shows how I need to realize that there are more and more people who realize that feminism is not just a women’s issue but a human issue. So it was great to see the broad range of support.

Dressed in trousers, shirtsleeves, tie, and fedora, Annalee introduced the book and the first speaker. When lead-off reader and comic book writer Devin Grayson took the microphone she deadpanned, “All I can say is, gaming at my house afterward.” Devin then read from her essay “Sidekicks” about how as a kid playing pretend Star Wars she insisted on being Han Solo even though that meant a boy would have to play Leia, and she went on to analyze the characteristics of sidekicks in comics.

Whereas Grayson is a veteran of comic book conventions, Michelle Villanueva took the microphone to read before an audience for her first time. She shared passages from her essay “Neville-mania” about writing a blog in the persona of a character from the Harry Potter books, and she gave us the most dramatic moment of the evening when she read the words, “Although I haven’t told my boyfriend that I role-play a male character…” Then she interrupted herself to point out that he was there, so the secret was out—but he took it all in stride among all the laughter. Afterward, Annalee commented, “We had a fan fiction outing tonight!” You can read Michelle’s take on this, too.

Charlie read next from her essay, “I Am Wonk, Hear Me Analyze,” which begins, “I became a wonk about the same time I became a woman, so the two transitions have always been inseparable to me.” She described some of the cultural differences between working as a “just the facts” macho reporter versus getting into the minutia of healthcare policy, and after her piece commented, “This is like the gender fuck reading tonight!” (Indeed—could a SSAG production of Twelfth Night be next?)

In her introduction of journalist and gamer Quinn Norton, Annalee said, “We seem to be veering a little more towards…hobbies.” Quinn began to read partway through her essay, “Dreaming in Unison,” about being a rare woman in the computer gaming world:
The things I learned in gaming turn out to apply beautifully to real life. Here is a helpful checklist:

• Expect fights in bars and taverns.
• Go on, check the door. It’s unlocked more often than you’d think it would be.
• When all else fails and all hope is lost, it never hurts to choose to disbelieve.
• Sometimes in life, narrative trumps all other rules.
• The dice favor style.
• When you’re hopelessly lost, the right-hand rule will get you out.

But what resonated with me, a non-gamer, was this: “Boys get better fantasy lives. Go steal them.” I was right there with Annalee when she commented afterward, “Quinn is my dungeonmaster.”

By chance, Morgan Romine had wound up sitting next to me, and she was up to read next from her piece, “Fantasy to Frag Doll: The Story of a Gamer Princess.” She told about how—and this is so different from my former neck of the woods in physics, where I downplayed my femininity—she used her feminine wiles in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, for short) to become queen and then empress in their fictional worlds. (Morgan made me feel old—when we chatted before the reading, she was telling me about how the first computer that she played on when she was six years old was a Mac SE. Yep, and that was the first computer my then-boyfriend-now-husband had, too—in college! I couldn’t restrain myself from crying out, “Ohmigod, you’re a babe!”)

Finally, Annalee read from her essay, “When Diana Prince Takes Off Her Glasses.” For the one or two people in the audience not properly educated in ’70s pop culture, Annalee added: “Diana Prince is the secret identity of Wonder Woman.” “DUHHH!” Devin called out, to which Annalee responded, “I love you guys!” Annalee talked about how Wonder Woman in the TV series fascinated her as a girl because of the transformation from geek to fantasy when those glasses came off, and how these issues of image, gender, and geekiness became a thread in her life from hanging out with hackers in high school to becoming a writer navigating the worlds of science and technology.

In the Q & A (and Annalee invited me to come up, too), most of the questions were about pop culture and gaming, about which I have not a clue, though I did answer one question about the significance of blogging in the female geek dialogue (I think all of the anonymous female scientists and engineers out there describing their experiences is invaluable, because sometimes they are telling truths that could be dangerous for them to admit with known identities, because the culture of science has not been as fair or as self-examining as it is ready to admit to itself).

Lots of books got passed around and signed—it kind of felt like the last day of school that way—and it was really cool to chat with some of the longtime geek women who came, including a woman who started out in hardware engineering years ago and switched to writing when she got replaced by a computer to do her job. I’m hoping that with the even greater publicity for the Feb. 1 reading it can be an even larger female geek lovefest!

All good stuff, and I hope these tidbits may have stimulated an appetite for the book out there! There’s more good stuff to come at the February 1st reading, which includes yours truly.

Annalee: Kristin, your recent blog posts have been great! We’re looking forward to more!

Me, with a shrug*: Aw, well, I’m just picking at a wound that’s been festering for the past ten years.

Annalee: Well, if that’s the case, then let the blog be your lance!

And you know, Annalee had taken the metaphor about as far as it could go.

But I should have known that a woman who wrote an entire book about monsters and capitalism would have some grotesque imagery at her fingertips to parry with.

I will blog more about last night’s reading later….

*Of course, from all those years of being called a brain accusatorily as if it were a crime, I learned to be modest and self-deprecating about receiving compliments. Part of the acculturation!

But the trouble with narrative is that the writer has to select the details that support the major arc of the story and leave out the extraneous bits. I didn’t tell you in the essay that my particular research group was exceptionally gender-balanced. There were actually three women in my research group, out of six or seven grad students total. The undergraduates who came in to do thesis projects also had a fairly even gender ratio.

50:50 gender ratio in physics! That’s pretty darn utopian, isn’t it? I suppose so, except for the fact that whatever the gender ratio, people are still people, with their ambitions, jealousies, and all the rest. Back before I had to put this notion to the actual test of experiment, I’d once thought that when I met another woman in science that we’d have this automatic bond. But that was naive, because for one, I was very competitive, and I’d kind of gotten used to monopolizing the female geek crown through my high school years. My ego didn’t actually want to be friends with anyone who could threaten that. And for two, sharing a gender and a general area of interest does not actually an instant bond make. As if all male scientists get along just great! (I remember an admin at the Princeton engineering school tell me about how she had to keep track of which faculty members—all male, since there were only a couple of women faculty in the late ’80s—she had to keep apart because they just didn’t get along when she had to draw up seating charts for special luncheons.)

As I said, people are people, and the three women in my research group had three completely different personalities. I like to think that I was the “normal” one, but I have to admit that I was neurotic and a bit of a snob, too, fancying myself some kind of sophisticate (isn’t a sophisticated nerd an oxymoron anyway?) since I’d gone to fancy schools and lived abroad—part of the annoying upper-middle-class entitlement thing that I’m much more aware of now than I was then. I’m sure I came across as insufferable to the other woman who was very quiet and had grown up in less cosmopolitan and financially humbler circumstances. Our interests were different, and though we worked civilly in the lab, we weren’t drawn to seek each other out beyond that. And even if our personalities had been more similar, I think that the fact that we were competing for the scarce resource of our advisor’s time and interest would have precluded a friendship anyway.

The third woman couldn’t have been more different. She had a big personality, vivacious and a ton of fun, someone I could talk about shopping and girl stuff with as well as science. Actually, I would say she had a HUGE personality, which cut both ways—it seemed like every conversation wound up being about her. Her extreme social ease made me kind of wary, reminding me of queen bees from junior high school who had ostracized me. And I was also envious, because I’d thought the tack to take as a woman in the field was to blend in as much as possible—dowdy boxy turtlenecks were my stock-in-trade through graduate school, though I did wear some decidedly feminine floral outfits from time to time.

But Big Personality played the game differently, and it wasn’t by working harder at science than I was doing. (And no, it wasn’t because she knew more or was brilliant. Even my advisor once admitted to me that he gave her extra help because she didn’t know much when she joined the group.) Big Personality didn’t hide who she was at all, and in fact her networking netted her many tangible rewards that my strategy didn’t. I felt like Ferris Bueller’s younger sister, resentful that I had chosen the “nobler” path of tackling a more independently-initiated project didn’t get me publishable results as quickly as her less-independent project, didn’t get me an invitation to join a committee for consulting with industry, and didn’t get me a first paper in an extremely high-impact journal. No question, she was savvier about picking a project that was already in my advisor’s field of expertise and insinuating herself into the good graces of the professor involved in setting up the industrial consulting committee before I even knew that it existed.

And unlike the quiet woman and myself, this person was unmarried, which gave her further networking opportunities with men, whom she happened to like very, very much. I didn’t find it appropriate to flirt, being very much married, but she could—and did. She went way beyond flirting, too, with a few graduate students in and out of the department, at least one postdoc, and a professor (though of course I’m only going on gossip and self-reported data, not having been in the bedroom to bear witness myself). Actually, I still had enough of my repressed Catholic upbringing to be somewhat stunned when she bragged to me about sleeping with the professor—though when the Monica Lewinsky affair broke a year later, I was by then aware that there are people who do not consider it too much information to brag about their sexual conquests.

So I thought of Big Personality as the department slut, although that’s really kind of sexist, isn’t it? But hard as it may be to believe, male physics sluts exist, too, as I heard some fairly recent gossip about some Big Name who had been canoodling for several years with his female postdoc while both were married to other people, but after a couple of divorces they’re finally married to each other.

Anyway, Big Personality rocked my notions of how to play the graduate school game. Maybe nobody respected her much as a scientist, as we who delighted in gossiping about her reassured ourselves, but she certainly seemed to be showing up in the right places, on the consulting committee and in the high-impact journal. I resented it because there was no way I could compete at her level—unlike her, I didn’t have the presence or self-assurance that I’d be accepted without also having to be brilliant. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to be burdened by the awareness of her own weaknesses, if she had that awareness.

As I write this, I think, surely there were male counterparts to her who also seemed to be disproportionately rewarded for their modest achievements. But somehow Big Personality loomed larger in my consciousness, partly because I think I had a fear that she didn’t represent well for my gender. And if anyone was going to be Queen of the Geeks, it would be her, not me. She charms you from minute one; I’m more reserved, preferring to feel out a relationship as it goes along. But most of all, she had better political savvy and competed better in grad school than I did.

Were we sisters in science? Yes, I suppose so. But we weren’t friends, and I don’t know if we could have been.

Zuska suspects that the “inappropriateness” of the book is due the fact that several essays have to do with sexuality and the female geek and perhaps some frank language. And she goes on to argue that you can’t have an honest discussion about women and science without acknowledging these issues. Here’s an excerpt of what Zuska writes:

A “role model” book for young girls has to address sex and sexuality. It has to show what it’s like to deal with the vast majority of boys who are intimidated by smart women; what it’s like to deal with the ever-present comments on your sexuality in the workplace; what it’s like to discover your sexuality within and because of your geekhood. I think these are the kinds of true life stories that can help girls, as much as or more so than one more nicely varnished volume about the handful of women who’ve won the Nobel Prize.

Writing about the intimate and personal lives of women geeks, and putting that writing into the hands of young girls, is a political act with the possibility for great reverberation. So it’s no wonder some people are going to be reluctant to find such writing “appropriate”.

Of course, you should read her complete entry.

Zuska is right that the truth isn’t very easy or welcome, because it can be a threat to the status quo. She’s talking here about the discussions of sex in the book, but I also think it’s important to talk about how science and technology careers are sold to girls as well. The thing is, the thinking seems to be that to inspire girls to keep up with science and technology, you have to keep it relentlessly positive, talking about how many opportunities they have and how great it is to be someone who’s succeeded in one of these fields. And it’s true—girls really do have lots of opportunities in the scientific and technical fields if they stick with it, and many women do succeed there. Inspiration most definitely comes from having good things to aspire to.

But not every female science/technology career thrives, and for a variety of reasons that can be very different from why men leave. It could be said, with apologies to Tolstoy, that happy careers are all alike, but every unhappy career experiences its own set of obstacles and setbacks. And I think that we shouldn’t sugarcoat the very real issues that a girl could face in her future if she’s considering going into some of the tougher technical careers.

For example, physics is a very beautiful science that can see some very ugly hierarchies, competitiveness, and people who don’t consider their effect on other people, among other things. (I’m sure it’s the case for other sciences as well; I just happen to know physics from experience.) But growing up in suburbia and hearing about the corporate politics that my dad had to deal with in the insurance world, I made the mistake of thinking that, because science seemed pure and beautiful, the scientific working world would be, too. (Back then engineering didn’t seem sexy enough to me, being so damn practical and prosaic, with its coefficients for this and all that focus on how things worked, not why.) And because I felt in my element at college and did well enough to be rewarded with fellowships as further encouragement to continue on to graduate school, of course I continued my education, extrapolating that things would continue to come up roses.

But they didn’t come up roses, partly for reasons that I was unprepared for. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that graduate school would be hard—no, I’d seen and talked to the graduate students around my undergrad campus. What I didn’t know at the start was how it’s better to take on a “less ambitious” problem that will get results and build your confidence as a researcher than to be the student to help a new advisor pioneer a new avenue of research. The latter might get you glory if it works out—or else lead to a world of frustration if it doesn’t. I didn’t know that one advisor managing two graduate students working on a single project is a very tricky situation, even if one of the students isn’t feeling a little paranoid about whether or not she belongs in graduate school since she can’t make even the least bit of headway in getting her part of the project to work even after a year and a half of effort. (Note to advisors who choose to tread into the dangerous 3-person dynamic—always make sure all three people are present whenever any change in the project is decided upon so that everyone can buy in to it. Decisions made in casual meetings of two people without informing the third are sure to breed suspicion.)

There’s lots of mistakes I made—and I’m sure many others have done as well—which are obvious to savvier people. But how savvy about the scientific world can you be in your early 20s—or teens? That’s where sugar-free books like She’s Such a Geek come in. Even though I didn’t get the physics career that once upon a time I had my heart set on—and though it took a while to get deprogrammed, now I see how leaving physics after my Ph.D. was the best decision for me—I still thought it would be important to tell my story. Because some young women may come up some of the same setbacks that I did, but at least I don’t want them to make my same mistakes.

Mine is not the happiest, most inspirational story, but I think it’s a necessary one for a bright, eager young woman: just because your math and science classes have been smooth sailing so far doesn’t mean that some weird political situation or other misstep couldn’t happen to you. And it can befall at any time: a good friend of mine who stayed in physics ten years longer than I did recently quit an industrial research job which from the outside looked quite enviable. But she wasn’t allowed to work on projects that she proposed and had the background to do, was ordered to launch a new research program in a field in which she had very little experience, and wasn’t given the resources to attack this in any meaningful way. And since the guy running the lab is a Very Big Name in the field, she didn’t have any recourse. If you were in the lab, who would you want to be aligned with—Marginalized Female Scientist or Very Big Name? And I don’t know what her chances are for getting hired elsewhere as a mid-career scientist in her specialty without Very Big Name’s letter of recommendation. This is how it can be in physics, my friends—and this isn’t the only story of that ilk that I personally know of, either.

And that’s why I participated in the discussion further down in the comments on Zuska’s post, when a poster named Carpenter mentioned how it was sad to read the essays in the book about the women who left academia (this includes mine). I responded to Carpenter that most everyone who enters physics, male or female, winds up leaving academia, because there are more prospective physicists than there are eventual jobs for them. Until people know this, plenty more will get sucked in to physics by the beauty, elegance, and intellectual cachet, only for an inevitable exit. Just like lemmings over the cliff.

I’m not saying women can’t do physics—I did, and I did so respectably well, getting two papers into the journal Physical Review B (and I was a single author on one). If you are disciplined and willing to do the work, you don’t have to be a genius to earn a physics Ph.D. at a good school. But I want all those bright young people—I’m talking to guys, too—to answer for themselves why they would want to go into a shrinking field. And I hope that the sort-of downer essays like mine help to give a more rounded picture of what to consider that goes beyond the sales pitch you’ll probably get at any physics department desperate for the next wave of warm bodies to do the grunt work in their labs.

(P.S. Just so you know, I still love science and technology. But I’m a lot more cynical about the system.)

I wrote my essay for She’s Such a Geek because I wanted girls who were considering science as a career to learn from my mistakes. I believe my main mistake was that I didn’t talk to enough people to learn what a physics career really entailed before I committed to that path. Partly it was because I didn’t really give enough thought to issues pertaining to balancing work and personal life as an undergraduate—academic achievement had been priority #1 for me up until then, and I didn’t see anything changing any time soon—and also it was partly because I didn’t feel like there was any faculty member I could have opened up to and ask these things if I’d even known to ask them. Talking to a professor (and they were all male in the engineering and physics departments where I was) felt so intimidating compared to talking to the secretaries and admins there, who despite being warm, fabulous people, couldn’t give me the mentoring that I didn’t know I needed.

So my advice is, find female scientist mentors any way you can—and until you do, read these female scientist blogs. If you’re in a department where there’s only one or two female faculty members, you still can’t expect them to be able to mentor you. Those women have their research to do, just like every male professor in the department, and they probably have to work even harder to make sure that their work is perceived as equally competent to their peers’. Until you find the professor or postdoc or senior graduate students who you feel some chemistry with and who can give you practical, caring advice, you could do a lot worse than read these blogs telling the good, the bad, and the ugly about the lives of female scientists in academia today.

(Also note that this Dec. 19 NY Times article about some of the issues that female scientists are discussing today. It’s definitely progress that people are discussing issues such as unconscious bias, which weren’t even acknowledged when I was an undergrad and graduate student. I’d love to discuss this in a future post, because if I’m honest I internalized some of these biases myself—it would have been hard not to, being raised Catholic.)