The Unsubstantial Bubbles of Citronella

For quite some time I have liked the simplicity of using Blogger, not having to worry about my own hosting or about tweaking technical details.

But I already have hosting (for a variety of projects).

And I like technical details (when I have the time to properly address them).

And Blogger is getting annoying, for the following (and very personal) reasons:

• I'm not willing to have my blogging account related to my usage of Google. In case someone is, you know, using my laptop. Which happens pretty often.
  
• I don't like the editor all that much. It's easy to mess up with the little buttons in the WYSIWYG (sorry, "Compose") window, and I don't like writing html directly by hand. I like composing my posts with a wiki syntax, actually.
  
• I like being able to go play with all the little details. With Blogger, you can entirely set up your theme yourself, but the way in which it is done makes it a real pain.
• I have chosen a pretty long blog name. I am tired of typing .blogspot.net on top of it. Even though I use the InFormEnter add-on for Firefox, which remembers the values I typically enter in text fields.
  

So I've decided that I am a big girl now, and that I can host my own blog, under my own domain name.

Further bubbles will follow at:



RSS and atom feeds for posts and comments will be at:



(Note for those of you who wouldn't be very familiar with regular expressions: square brackets denote an optional member of the string, while a vertical bar denotes an alternative between two possibilities. Hmm... what? Me? Being dorky? Oh, no, that could not be.)

And I have a brand new e-mail address here:




Please update your bookmarks, blogrolls, address books, and feed readers!

It is also a side effect of being totally knocked out by the medication, even though after talking to the nurse I reduced the dosage to the tiniest possible amount. You are supposed to start with two pills a day, suffer from side effects for one to three days, and then regularly up the dosage until you reach four pills a day, which is the actual therapeutic dosage, meaning that below that threshold, the medicine is most likely not doing anything else than inducing dizziness, drowsiness and mouth dryness. I am currently taking one pill per day, before bedtime, and I feel it until around 4pm the following day. I am still not really able to function.


There was a symposium on Tuesday. I was just sitting there, picking at my little plate of fruits, drinking from my water bottle, listening to the talks and taking a few notes. Each time I raised my hand and starting to participate in the discussion, I felt like I was going to fall off my chair. This is was prompted the call to the doctor's office and the conversation with the nurse.

But even today, when my physical therapist saw me, she wondered if the side effects were worth the potential therapeutic effects. "Especially now that we seem to have a neurological lead", she added. (I have to go and see a neurologist who will evaluate whether or not her intuition is correct. I do not want to go. I am tired.) After my session I had lunch and went back on campus. I went to the post office to send my Mother's Day gift home. (Mother's Day, in France, is on May 25th this year.) I was planning on going back to the office and do some work. But I just couldn't face it. So I went home and lounged aimlessly all afternoon, until the dizziness started to clear out.

And was not really more efficient after that.

I am giving it until Sunday to get better. Then, if I'm still feeling the side effects of a pill that has no positive side eighteen hours after I swallowed it, I'm off the dreary thing.


The bad taste in my mouth is also due to the following story.

When the Fabulous Feline completed his MS and that it became clear (on the first day of the Fall quarter, with very little warning signs, except for his gut feeling) that he would not have any fundings for pursuing towards a PhD and would have to either pay for his own tuition or drop it, he took a leave of absence. He put the time to profit by working with a former professor at developing their own little start-up based on something they had developed together, outside of school time and resources, during his undergrad. It is a good product, pretty trendy, that in my opinion would easily find a market.

I have seen the project grow. I have helped finding the company name. I have provided unrestricted support, and enthusiasm at each new step. I have participated in shopping for the components that would eventually form the first prototype. I have listened a lot, learned many things about businesses, and done my best to understand what was going on. I have believed in it.

But now the bank refused the loan (arguing that the Fabulous Feline had less than 96 months of credit history. That's 8 years. He's in his early twenties. I'll let you do the math.) And the venture capitalists are not interested, even though the guys went pretty far in the selection process. And the Fabulous Feline is running out of money.

Now that his leave of absence is almost over, and that he definitely do not want to go back to his PhD (not in this department, not in this lab, at all costs), he cannot pretend to student housing anymore and needs to move out.

He has to take on a job. A full-time job, because a part-time one will not be enough to rent an apartment. A job that will not leave him time to go meet with bankers and potential investors, discuss with subcontractors, or even work hard at improving the product.

The adventure is over.

Nine months of gestation just came to an abrupt and bitter end.


The bad taste in my mouth is getting stronger and stronger, for I took the pill just before writing these words. It is time for me to go to bed. No proof-reading tonight.


Does anybody here have a quarter million dollars to invest?

The doctor prescribed a new muscle relaxant for my rebellious pelvic floor. And the side effects are kicking in big time. Mouth and eye dryness, dizziness and drousiness to name a few. It's driving me quite insane.

The Fabulous Feline thought vicodin had interesting effects on my body and mind. But he had not seen the muscle relaxant. "You're goofy" is the sentence he pronounced the most today (while suppressing a laughter induced by my now unbridled childlike mentality).

And now I am alone in my bedroom, giggling at myself while remembering the earlier wanderings of my mind and wishing very much that the desk would stop swinging.

I think the week is going to be... interesting.

I found this little thingie at N@ked Under My Lab Coat and thought it amusing. It is a list of books people put on their shelves for show rather than because they've read them; I am bolding the ones I've read from start to finish and italicizing the ones I've started but could not finish (or finished by omitting large portions of the book). You are supposed to note which ones you have read for school; but in this list, The Iliad is the only one I ever read for school and it was after high-school so it doesn't really count. Instead, I am putting in red the ones I have never heard of...

Before you start jumping and screaming and asking in horror how come I have never heard of this book and that book, let me remind you that I am French, and that we do not have the same literary education ‒ the Fabulously Feline was surprised indeed to realize the other day that I have never studied Shakespeare in class (before after high-school) and haven't heard of The Canterbury Tales before rather late in my life... until I started speaking very fast about Rabelais and Molière and La Fontaine.

I have just finished reading Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. It is a pretty decent detective novel, with a surprising absence of corpses, and rather nicely doubled for once with the hints of a (long developping) love story.

But moreover, it takes place in a women's college in Oxford, presumably around the time at which it as been written, which would be 1936. And they are debating the exact same issues that women in academe are still struggling with today. The exact. same. infuriating. issues.

1936, in case you had not noticed, was 72 years ago.

One woman (who is a scout, that is to say, a servant, in Oxford language) claims that women should be happy with being good wives, rather than stealing men's jobs.

Journalists make fun of the women students, calling them "undergraduettes".

And, all along the book, women scholars (who are, by the way, mostly non-scientists) debate how to balance their families and their work. Are they even morally allowed to marry and have children, not being willing to devote the entirety of their life and time to them? Should the Dean be so accommodating to women with children, allowing them to take leave each time the little ones are sick? Can the mind of married women be fully on their work? Do married women lead a fuller life? Can one have both brain and a heart, or must she chose one over the other? Should one be fully devoted to one's intellectual task, forgoing any flickers of other interests, to be a scholar of value? Are women doomed to be seen either as overly feminine and soft (if they don't raise their voice) or harpies (if they do)?

I am rather inclined to think that the best way to show that, yes, women can do the job, is simply for us to do it. Get all excited, demonstrate, ask for quotas... mostly, you will annoy those who are already on your side, and will get the others to call you a hysterical feminist, suggest that you go burn your bra, and keep on with giving women as little consideration as possible. So just get on with it, do your job, and do it as well (or better) than any other man around. Of course, the skeptics* will just claim that you are an exception. However, if the number of exceptions get big enough... they might have to modify the rule.

Yes, I do realize that if you do not hire women to start with, you will never witness how good they can be at the job, and all kind of other complexities. But as a general rule, when someone hints that I am not where I should be, I just react by showing them that they are the ones who are out of place. (The only man I have ever worked with who suggested I was not fit for the job because of my gender actually got fired because of his inability to produce valuable work. That was immensely satisfactory, I must say. I showed him!).

So I just keep on showing them.

But how long is it going to take?


* I originally wrote septics...