Summer Sunday

Oh, hey, you know what happens when you go over to your friend's house on a Friday night and let your kids run around wild with their kids all night, and they end up staying up until 11:30 p.m. because all the parents were having too much fun drinking wine and beer? We get one totally unaffected child, and one complete mess of a child. Nora was fine on Saturday and even skipped her nap. Milo was a disaster - anything less than his daily 14 hours of sleep and he falls apart completely!

Funny phrase that Milo has learned that he uses in a totally inappropriate way: "Doubt it." So, like, I'll say, "Nora, what'd you do in school today?" She'll say, "I made a painting." And Milo will say, "DOUBT IT."

Tonight Jake grilled some black bean burgers on the grill and then we ate dinner outside on the patio table, which the kids thought was the most fun ever. I do enjoy listening to the cicadas just getting started and looking around at the sky and the trees while eating dinner.

I had a very interesting conversation with my friend, my friend who is super powerful and impressive in a way I'll never, ever be. (She's on leave from our department to do a stint in the white house - she's on the President's advisory panel.) Anyway, she and her husband are kind of ticked off at the lousy treatment my area is getting from our department, and her take on it was that I have a choice. Choice one, I can continue to eschew the political bureaucrat's lifestyle and just hunker down and do my stuff and, at best, cultivate a culture of personality where I'll have my own cohort of grad students every year but not much more. Choice two, I can be all political and shit, having strategy meetings with key members of the department, meeting with them one on one and sucking up to them before important votes to make sure I've got the votes on my side, and focus on building not just my career, but a program. In other words, thinking programatically instead of individually. Because in our department, that's how you have to operate in order to make any real progress at all. This includes things like going to certain public meetings and lectures when the dean will be there, sucking up to her and provosts and other administrators, and basically building up a cache of goodwill over time.

The reality is that as the senior member of my area, this should be Mentor's job, but he's not going to do it. So I can either choose to do it, and think big, or choose not to do it, and accept that I'll probably keep running into the same roadblocks year after year after year.

So...do I want to build a career, or do I want to build a program? Do I want to build and maintain an individual lab, or do I want to build and maintain a system?

I have been reflecting on the past year or so that I need a different kind of mentor now. Not a research mentor, but more like a mid-career mentor who can teach me how to deal with bad deans and frustrating bureaucracies. My friend's year and counting at the white house has taught her all of this stuff, and now I am getting this advice that is probably true and valuable advice. Of course, it's not at all what I want to hear.