Yale Said I Was Brilliant or Was It the Coffee Down My Dress?

The aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ence I was at was for soci­ol­ogy. I am a soci­ol­o­gist. My Dad has a joke about my degree it goes like this:

First, my daugh­ter was going for her Lib­eral Arts degree. So she’d be able to ask “Would you like fries with that?”

Then, I thought she was going for a psy­chol­ogy degree. She’d be able to ask “Why do you want fries with that?”

Finally, she became a soci­ol­o­gist. Now she can ask you “How many peo­ple in your fam­ily want fries with that & why?”

In all seri­ous­ness, he is proud of what I do & how much work it has been to get to this point. As is my Mom. But Dad can be a real Shecky Greene & I think he likes giv­ing me a hard time.

Alright back to why I was in San Fran. There were actu­ally mul­ti­ple con­fer­ences that over­lap & I attended two of the many. Both are national & pretty large, one is about Social Problems(3SP) and the other for the ASA. I nor­mally present at the 3SP (I have also run a ses­sion too) which is large but not mas­sive. I really like it.

ASA is a lit­tle intim­i­dat­ing because is a HUGE con­fer­ence, it is MASSIVE. Think a 1000 or more soci­ol­o­gists descend­ing on your city type of thing. It hap­pens every year, I have been try­ing to attend for the last few years of my PhD pro­gram. This year was in San Fran & given I have never been there before I was excited to go. Hubby was really excited to go with me, but ner­vous about tak­ing D-man & as I posted so was I. I have taken babies with me before just not on a flight across coun­try with a big time change.

The first con­fer­ence was 3SP & that was the high­light of the trip.

I bought 2 dresses to wear for the trip. Tech­ni­cally the same dress in 2 dif­fer­ent col­ors, from Tar­get. I got up early because I was still on East­ern Time & the 3 hour dif­fer­ence was a hard adjust­ment for me (harder for D-man the first night & full day). Hubby helped keep my on sched­ule, because I very eas­ily was get­ting dis­tracted by the TV. I ironed my dress, got ready & we were leav­ing on TIME!! My Black­berry even buzzed the reminder to leave as I was walk­ing out the door. It was an amaz­ing feat for me. I AM NEVER ON TIME. But that day every­thing fell into place.

Before we left there was cof­fee avail­able in the lobby. I need cof­fee to func­tion in the morn­ing, it’s like air for me. With­out it I will die. This is where my day had a shi­tas­tic moment. While there are sev­eral folks get­ting their cof­fee with their ASA badges already on, I start mak­ing mine.

It seemed to be going OK until I went to put the lid on. It was slow motion, the lid in my hand going toward the cup & then just slightly miss­ing the cup knock­ing cof­fee onto the table, floor, & down the front of my dress. I tried to keep my cool, get­ting nap­kins & wip­ing every­thing up. I could see the pre­pared ASA folks with small smiles & inner laugh­ter. Great I’m being laughed at before I even make it out to the street, just great. I would have liked to have got­ten fur­ther than the lobby before falling into a true tirade of over think­ing my abil­ity to man­age the impres­sion of self before a group of peers.

Hubby was all like “It’s OK, it’s just some cof­fee on the floor wipe it up & we’ll get going” Until I turned around and he saw it was ALL DOWN THE FRONT OF MY DRESS. The expres­sion on his face was jaw hit­ting the floor & eyes bulging out. Not the most reas­sur­ing. We need to work on his abil­ity to com­fort in times of cof­fee dis­as­ter. And given I had timed every­thing so I had only enough time to now get to the pre­sen­ta­tion or be really late I had to go as is & hope no one would really notice.

After walk­ing up hills that made my thighs burn & real­iz­ing I am SO out of shape we got to the con­fer­ence. I went up to my ses­sion while Hubby & D-man got a paper. The ses­sion went well. My co-author pre­sented the paper we are work­ing on, she did a great job. It got a lot of good dis­cus­sion going from it, which was a pos­i­tive. I ran the ses­sion (basi­cally intro­duc­ing pre­sen­ters, tim­ing pre­sen­ta­tions, & run­ning Q & A) because my co-author & I were also the ses­sion orga­niz­ers. The other papers were really inter­est­ing, I appre­ci­ated the insights offered, & every­one was nice.

Best thing of the entire ses­sion hap­pened after when Yale, that’s what I call her because she has a posi­tion there & it sounds cool, said I was bril­liant. Yale said I was bril­liant, that I was impres­sive. And hell she’s from Yale so it must be true.

OK she could have just been blow­ing smoke up my ass (com­mon at con­fer­ences) but it was nice to hear with cof­fee down the front of my dress & my anx­i­ety run­ning high. It was nice to have some­one find any­thing I said or did to be even remotely inter­est­ing. She was also unbe­liev­ably sup­port­ive of the fact that D-man came there.

ASA was just mas­sive, I pre­sented at a small ses­sion right before catch­ing the flight home. It went OK, inter­est­ing papers at my table, & again every­one was nice (mostly). I pre­sented based on my early dis­ser­ta­tion find­ings, now the dis­ser­ta­tion is almost done. And I’m start­ing to look at a defense date, I also have 2 book chap­ters that are com­ing out next year based on it. More work after doing a ton of work. But part of me doesn’t mind because after giv­ing such a large por­tion of my life to this project it really feels good to be at this point. Now I have to fig­ure out what to do after this. Oy, another deci­sion for another day. Today I’m just going to attempt to enjoy where I am now.

Over­all it went well.

Still there were some com­ments that did grate my nerves at both con­fer­ences. The com­ments were about women who are moth­ers in acad­e­mia & moth­ers in gen­eral. The assump­tion still is that being a mom means you aren’t seri­ous about what you do, if you aren’t seri­ous then you must not be pro­duc­tive (even if you are both seri­ous & pro­duc­tive mother negates these), and if not pro­duc­tive you must not be tal­ented. This assumes that tal­ent is mea­sured by amount of crap you put out there, not what the crap is.

Acad­e­mia is not very fam­ily friendly, moth­ers fall to the bot­tom of the heap. Us “breed­ers” don’t get a lot of sup­port. It just both­ers me as a mother (of many) that this is still out there, we aren’t as qual­i­fied because we must get stu­pid when we have a baby.

I also HATE THE TOTAL BS of show­ing off at the expense of oth­ers, which is big any time you get that many peo­ple in the same gen­eral field together. It seems more intense when peo­ple find out I’m a mom & these assump­tions come up, along with snide com­ments. Then I have to do the whole piss­ing con­test thing to show I belong. I don’t want to piss in pub­lic, I’m a shut the door kind of gal. Plus the whole my big brain ver­sus theirs IS petty. We are grown adults & no one else out­side of acad­e­mia really cares all that much. Seriously.

Best thing about ASA is that I got SWAG the day before my ses­sion there. Joy­ous swag, the stuff leg­ends are made of. In my case, I walked away with sev­eral USB flash dri­ves. Yep, that was the big swag there USB dri­ves. What did you expect some­thing more? It’s not BlogHer peo­ple. And besides the dri­ves will get lots of use.

I also got a book at a good dis­count (very good) & talked with some peo­ple. I had lots of down time because what I wanted to attend was either dur­ing the ses­sions I had to be in or hap­pened on Sat­ur­day before my flight got in. I’ll post more about that because that’s the fun what I did in San Fran stuff.

Tagged as: academia, family, san francisco, school, work