For the past three weeks, I’ve been going through a lot of emotional upheavals. I’m in the verge of a break up with a man I’ve been with since high school, I’m being rejected by the girls I’ve started an anime club with this year and on top of that, I’m in the middle of Fall finals.

I’ve been questioning who I am because of all this. However, despite the fact that I’ve been feeling like utter crap lately, I’ve found my solstice in my geekiness. I felt like this was the only thing that hasn’t changed about me and the only thing that hasn’t been questioned. I just received my copy of the book and it really reminded me of this. I’m still the geeky gamer girl and I’m so happy to read about other women who are just as geeky, if not more.

So, I’ve been immersing myself into gaming as a means of empowerment. I just beat the first boss in the game, Okami, for the Playstation 2 and I felt so much better because I just overcame a challenge. Beating small challenges made tackling much bigger ones more comfortable, like writing a 12 page paper or dealing with a break up. When bigger challenges become too much, I go back to my games. I’ve come to see this as my geeky therapy- letting out frustrations on demons in Okami, I think, is better than taking the anger out on another person or a good piece of furniture.

My geekiness has kept me afloat through some rough times. Now, I really want to work harder to make my geekiness the best it can be—mastering my games and becoming a successful web designer. I’m even thinking of starting a female gamers club on campus or at least, finding a group of girl gamers around UCLA to play with. Hopefully, somewhere in this process, I can reaffirm who I am and not feel so beaten down.

Does anyone else have a form of geeky therapy?

I never wanted to be a professor. That’s why I didn’t go to graduate school immediately from undergrad; academia was not calling me. When I did apply, I had a whole metaphysical argument mapped out for why an education in science would perfectly outfit me for a career in humanitarian aid. I firmly believe I will be just as much a scientist no matter where I work or what I do.

But I’m starting to feel personally responsible for fixing the gender gap.

Over 40% of the students and post-docs here are women. The faculty seems to be roughly 12% women. We talk about this discrepancy privately (in equal parts anxiety, anger and resignation). We talk about it publicly (at meetings for the new grad women in science association, at departmental retreats). The questions are always: “How do we change the ratios? How do we ensure more women make it to the top?”

What is the answer if not “By staying in academia yourselves”?

Am I doing a disservice to all girls and women in science if I drop out of academia? Am I merely contributing to the problem? Most of all, after all my ranting and raving about the gender inequities, how can I justify not staying to fix them?

Tonight I’m supposed to meet my two new undergraduate mentees – matched with me by the aforementioned grad women’s group. What do I tell them? “Yes, stay in science! Girls can do it! (But actually, I’m leaving)”? What kind of role model does that make me?

Every city over a certain size has a bar like Divas in San Francisco. Dark, somewhat threadbare and self-consciously glitzy, it’s known far and wide as the place for men to meet transgender women. Men visiting from out of town swing by Divas in the hope of meeting a tranny girl, and some local men go there regularly. A significant proportion of the women who hang out there appear to be working girls.

I’ve been to Divas maybe half a dozen times in the eight years I’ve lived in San Francisco, but I had never been there alone. But one evening I decided to put on a cute dress and strappy shoes, and swing by there to see what it would be like to be on my own there. But whatever I was expecting, I didn’t expect to be meeting other health policy wonks there.

(more…)

I’ve had Valerie D’Orazio’s blog Occasional Superheroine in my blog folder as a live bookmark for the past few months. Unfortunately, the RSS feed hasn’t worked in ages, so I totally missed the fact that she had erased all the previous blog entries and replaced it with a new, extremely revealing, story of her life in comics. An incredibly difficult life, judging from the account in her blog.

The main shocker in D’Orazio’s online memoir is the fact that the rape, and later murder, of longstanding DC Comics character Sue Dibny in Identity Crisis came not from the needs of a groundbreaking story, but rather from the DC editorial honchos sitting down and saying “we need a rape” to boost sales. There’s a lot of stuff you can excuse on the basis of good storytelling, but the picture changes when it’s clearly just a publicity stunt. On the other hand, D’Orazio’s blog is being discussed in the comics blogosphere as an indictment of the way the male-dominated comics industry treats female employees. Having read the entire thing, from bottom to top, I didn’t really see a clearcut indictment, partly because the details (and order) of events isn’t always very clear. She does, however, offer a pretty grim view of the world of male comic book writers, editors and fans. Definitely worth reading, although it will probably leave you as depressed as it left me.

I was finishing up my big college search when I realized why this book was created. But more on that later. It all started the same weekend I needed to finalize my college list. My entire family was celebrating my grandpa’s 80th birthday by the ocean, so I wandered off for a few hours with my college list to try to choose a college list. I found this amazing place where the water had cleared out a tunnel, leaving a narrow bridge of rock over the open gully. The way the waves thwacked against the back of the cave was *so cool*. I could hear it a half-mile away (at night I thought it was a pile-driver. Fifty miles away from the nearest city). Anyway.

So I sit down with my list, and I center. I think roots and branches, very California new age. Since I haven’t been accepted anywhere I am merely choosing where I want to try to get in. So I try to decide the course of my life. And then I get stuck. My mind is blank, I stare at some birds and am non-productive. So I tried a different tact. I think “Who do I want to be when I grow up”. I could think of musicians, politicians, and teachers who I would love to grow up to be, but when I tried to think of women computer scientists I drew a blank. Ok, I know Grace Hopper and Radia Pearlman, but I did not have as clear a vision of what life might be like to be a computer scientist.

It’s not the all-male environment: I love wrestling and most of my friends from middle-school are boys, so I’m ok with that part. But the stories are what I miss. I have stories about singers, about politicians and teachers giving me a potential road-map for my future. But I was missing the stories about women computer scientists. I wanted to know what other women had done when working in a team where all of the men assume you’ll be the secretary. What the justifications for being ultra-fem in a masculine environment are. I could not think of any role models for how to live fully as myself in a challenging environment.

Amazon mailed me the book two days ago. After an embarrassing session with dancing and singing “I’m published, I’m published” I started reading everyone else’s essays. And I now I have those role models. I can’t wait to read the rest of the essays.

I am about to send in a large sections of my applications. I chose only schools with strong computer science and music, and where I could see myself matriculating. I’m glad I now can see how other geeks have dealt with college and life-after before me.

Anyhoo, that’s my tryptophan induced rant, hope you’re having a great turkey day!

It’s a daily morning ritual between First Cup of Coffee and Brushing Teeth: Check Livejournal Friends List. When habits get thrown off-kilter, a kind of disconnect develops. It’s like an older pair of glasses you keep around as your spare. When you put them on, they still bring everything into focus, but you get a little dizzy trying to adjust.

Livejournal is down (or running extremely sluggish) at the moment, and the void it left in my life is tremendous. Where will I read my RSS feeds? Where will I find the latest fanfics? Where will I complain about my NaNoWriMo wordcount? What will I do while my main social network is missing?

Users flee to other networks in the interim. We have our usernames reserved on GreatestJournal and JournalFen and even Vox, and you know what? It’s not the same. The vibes of online community and discussion and yes, even the flame wars and the wank don’t feel right on these other sites. And that’s because the communities and the friendships were forged on LiveJournal. The people and the source code might be the same, but not the URL. For some, that’s enough to make any other site a shallow knockoff of the original.

Users complain about LiveJournal “selling out,” and yet when crashes occur, we miss it. Livejournal is not only a major social network; it’s a measure of Intarwebs Zeitgeist, of what’s on the minds of thousands of people at a particular time. Load up a random community’s friends page and take a snapshot of the thoughts and lives of dozens. Ultimately, it’s voyeurism. Unfortunately, I’m addicted. And desperately waiting until those guard monkeys report no problems.