• Boheman
• IUPAC nomenclature of organic chemistry
• Cahn-Ingold-Prelog rules
• semiochemicals
• olfactometer
• Tig Notaro
• Taylor Dayne
• Hannibal Buress
• grandisol
• fog machine
• alkene
• E-Z notation
• flat feet
• Eärendil
• Dagor Dagorath
• Silmaril
• Arkenstone
• Galadriel
• Magic (Middle-earth)
• Gimli
• Legolas
• Celebrimbor
• Gandalf
• Secret Fire
• Maria Bamford
• Akt
• insulin
• basic fibroblast growth factor
• epidermal growth factor
• Student’s t-test
• Bcl-xL
• zwitterion
• Varda
• A Elbereth Gilthoniel
• Elf (Middle-earth)
• Sundering of the Elves
• Lindon
• Cirdan
• Red Book of Westmarch
• Elanor
• Orc
• Christopher Tolkien
• polyethyleneimine
• Corduroy
• collagen

My gentleman and I rode our bikes to Roosevelt Island this week, AND WE SAW A DEER. A legit buck. WITH ANTLERS. It was amazing. And then we rode back through Rock Creek Park AND SAW FOUR MORE DEER! It was pretty awesome.

I applied for five jobs this week AND went to a career fair! GO ME.

I am rereading Lord of the Rings for about the jillionth time, and it is making me so happy. When in doubt, just go and read those books and let the surprising beauty of the language improve your quality of life.

The tree outside of my living room window has gone completely golden in the past week, and it is so gorgeous against the blue sky.

While we were in San Francisco a few months ago, we stopped into a store called Vital Tea-Leaf in Chinatown. I came home with some Blue People Ginseng Oolong, and it was one of the better purchases I’ve ever made. I love tea.

I mean, first: wow, NYT, way to be completely brutal about how horrid my job prospects are and how I made terrible life choices. I’m going to go cry in a corner now. Yikes.

Secondly, though, I’m getting a little tired of the articles that attempt to justify women’s career choices based on things that sound suspiciously like BS pop evolutionary psychology. All the ladies major in biology instead of ‘harder’ sciences/engineering because they don’t like math and they want to help people! Because they are LADIES! It all makes so much sense! …if, of course, you buy into bogus socially-constructed notions of gender essentialism. Look, math anxiety is definitely a real thing, and it’s experienced more by girls and women–I’m not arguing that. Math anxiety is a problem. However, if women are trying to avoid college majors and future careers based on how much math they’d have to do, it stands to reason that maybe they would avoid things that require several semesters of calculus, just sayin’. Also, if we were so interested in helping society through our work, maybe we’d all be teaching in inner-city elementary schools or joining the Peace Corps or running nonprofits, not pipetting alone in our labs in the pursuit of knowledge that, objectively, probably won’t help the world any more than research done in any other science/engineering field.

Folks like the author of that article tend to think they can come up with a handwave-y hypothesis that fits comfortable notions about women’s place in society and then apply it to All Women, an approach that comes nowhere near to making sense. I think it’s probably just as valid for me to take my experience as A Lady in Science and apply it to All Women, so I’ll go ahead and talk about my path to the biological sciences. I didn’t go into biochemistry because I didn’t want to do math. I’m very open about the fact that I’m not crazy about math. However, this has much more to do with my preference for studying real, tangible things rather than the theoretical (and, let’s face it–when you get right down to it, numbers are a concept and math is a complete invention, albeit an incredibly useful and vital one). It has nothing to do with thinking I’m bad at math–in fact, I’m really good at it. I won awards in high school, and did very well in college with the four semesters of math I needed to take. Rather than pin this major life choice on some imagined fear of numbers, let’s tell it like it is: I went into biochemistry over physics because I thought physics was boring while biochemistry was fascinating. From my perspective, it seemed that many of the big questions in physics had been answered, and the things that were left were highly theoretical questions that were nearly impossible to test (without going through the hassle of getting time on a particle accelerator, at least). With biochemistry, on the other hand, I could stroll into my lab in the afternoon and spend 30 minutes running experiments, and I would come out with actual data that provided new insights into the function of an enzyme that had been studied since the 1850s but still wasn’t fully understood. How cool is that? It’s pretty cool. It was so cool that I stayed with it and eventually got a Ph.D. in it.

And let’s talk about this ‘helping society’ bit. I’m sure there are some people who go into the biomedical sciences because of a deep-seated, altruistic desire to cure cancer or AIDS or Alzheimer disease, etc., and that’s certainly admirable. However, for a lot of us, we research things that we think are interesting and then come up with potential health-related applications for them because we need to get NIH funding, and if we can’t get the funding, then we can’t do the interesting research in the first place. Also, traveling down the biomedical-sciences-are-here-to-serve-society road starts to sound a little too St. Kern-y for my tastes.

In sum, women don’t go into the biological sciences because of our biology. We do so because the inner workings of life are fascinating and still largely mysterious, despite decades of intense study.

• concanavalin A
• Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
• Brenda Lee
• Vince Vance and the Valiants
• bicalutamide
• trypan blue
• nucleophilic aromatic substitution
• DAPI
• fuchsia
• berbere
• korarima
• Ethiopia
• early Homo sapiens
• Homo sapiens idaltu
• Title IX
• pectus carinatum
• pectus excavatum

That’s right, we had the most badass costumes imaginable:

Marie and Pierre Curie in the house! Observe our Nobel medals and our glowing vial of radioactivity (YES, I am aware that radium glows blue; give us a break!)! People trying to guess our costume were highly entertaining. We had a few people who thought we were American Gothic, but most people pretty much got it: “Oh! You’re Marie Curie! And……her husband?” Poor Pierre. Get run over by a carriage, get left behind by history.

I also taught a Halloween-themed yoga class! After class, my students said that they were a tad bit apprehensive when I said that I’d be playing all Halloween music, but that it ended up being festive and fun and they really enjoyed it. WIN! Here’s my awesome playlist, for posterity:

• Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Science Fiction Double Feature”
• Michael Jackson, “Thriller”
• Talking Heads, “Psycho Killer”
• Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, “I’m a Ghost”
• Belle and Sebastian, “Sukie in the Graveyard”
• Rocky Horror Picture Show, “Time Warp”
• Tegan and Sara, “Walking With a Ghost”
• Link Wray, “Hillbilly Wolf”
• Stevie Wonder, “Superstition”
• Santana, “Black Magic Woman”
• Peter Adams, “Ghost in the Fen”
• Jonathan Richman, “Vampire Girl”
• Creedence Clearwater Revival, “I Put a Spell On You”
• Rocky Horror Picture Show, “I’m Going Home”
• Kip Tyler, “She’s My Witch”
• Jackie Morningstar, “Rockin’ in the Graveyard”

• Wolf Parade
• A Little Princess
• The Secret Garden
• Sarah Bernhardt
• Little Golden Books
• Redux
• post-positive adjective
• knight errant
• The Faerie Queene
• arbitrageur
• La Belle Dame sans Merci
• Lucretia
• archon
• cognomen
• Lucius Junius Brutus
• The Mikado
• Gnosticism
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
• The Thick of It
• In the Loop
• In-N-Out Burger
• zeolite