Culture Tremors
I've gotten enough done on my tasklist this weekend (and still have time to do more this week) that I've decided I earned spending the rest of the evening on things I actually wanted to do. So here's a post about little bits of culture shock I've experienced in Bloomington, presented as a short list of things I would find perfectly reasonable to say in my social groups in Boston and the responses they garnered here.
"I do support for a geographic text search software product, so I mostly spend a lot of time talking to oil companies and intelligence agencies."
My expected response to this is generally "Oh, that's cool! I do X." For the most part, I haven't gotten that --- I have found a couple of people whose responses have been that and I have gravitated toward talking to them because it's comforting and familiar. Most of the other grad students I've talked to have other hobbies, interests, and occasionally even jobs, but I haven't met anyone else with as serious of a sideline, or one that they intend to continue on with like I intend to continue my work with MetaCarta/Qbase. I think this sort of thing would be more common if I knew more grad students in science and engineering, but most people who have studied English or Gender Studies or something as an undergrad mostly do... more school, or maybe some teaching. The other thing is that there isn't much tech industry around here, or around the places some of my fellow students are from, and so when I tell them I do this it's not something that's part of their core experience. This isn't bad! It's just weird, since I am used to a different breakdown of what jobs the people around me have or have had.
"Can you use the 'Paste from Word' button in order to paste from, say, OpenOffice?"
I was at a training for IU's OnCourse system, which is basically a course website tool that IU uses. They have a rich text editor that you can use for entering a syllabus or something similar, and if you paste from Word, you have to use a special button to keep the formatting intact. I wanted to ask about attaching PDFs or uploading raw HTML, but I didn't want to seem like I was being snarky, so I asked about OpenOffice instead. Damn did that backfire. Everyone in the room looked at me like I had three heads --- and then the presenter, when she caught her breath, suggested maybe I attach a PDF or upload the raw HTML. *sigh* I will do this one better next time! Hopefully. (Also, I've gone from around a minute to thirty seconds for how long it takes to realize that the person I am talking to not only doesn't care about what I am saying but gave up trying to understand already. Hopefully I will get this down further soon.)
"My boyfriend's girlfriend draws furry porn for money." [0]
...honestly I kind of liked watching the gears in people's heads turn when I said this. ^^;; But it was actually germane to the conversation. (I try to not be closeted about most things, but also not go around blasting them at high volume. So depending on conversational topics, one person might never learn that I am or do X, while another person might find it out the first time they meet me. It works-ish?) I was relieved that I didn't get a negative reaction and the conversation went on to talking about how furry porn is selling not just, well, porn, but an eroticized vision of the self embodied artistically, and how this was related to this whole somatechnics thing. But I'm used to just saying this sort of thing and not having anyone bat an eye, and it was a little weird to have gender studies students be like "Guh?"
"It doesn't bother me if students have their laptops out in class."
This is an interesting one. At MIT, I was used to half the class being asleep or surfing the Internet or, you know, whatever in big lecture halls. I brought my laptop to a lot of classes and used it to take notes, work on homework, look things up for class discussion, and screw off instead of paying attention, probably in equal proportion. We had an orientation exercise where they asked all the new graduate instructors how disruptive they find things, and we all mostly agreed, except when it came to laptops and cell phones and sleeping, where everyone else was like "That's super disruptive and unprofessional" and I was like "Couldn't care less, only hurting themselves, may not even be hurting themselves, their priorities are their business."
The really different thing is that, to me, having a laptop out and doing work on it while talking about something else is professional, at least in that it's what happens in my profession. It is what everyone does in our work meetings, and I was pulling extra hours I didn't need to until I started doing it. Especially working Support, sometimes I need to answer the phone or an email while I'm in another meeting. That's just how it is in my job, and how it is for people in upper management in my company, and no one bats an eye. Someone running a meeting who insisted everyone turn their laptops and phones off would be unprofessional and out of touch in my tech world. I was glad this training was on Tuesday because I was planning to pull laptops out at things on Wednesday and Thursday and apparently that's rude here! I can understand and roll with that, it's just very different...
...especially because of the things that I would consider unprofessional that I've already had happen. The example I'll talk about is a professor assigning as part of class reading a piece including details of her kinky sex life. At first I was like... couldn't you have gotten someone else's first-person account of this? Now I'm thinking about my professor's crotch. Great. Isn't that kinda unprofessional? But part of the assignment was to think about the writing of the pieces, and how to use first-person and/or creative work in theory and criticism, and so as I made my lunch today, I thought about this a bunch. After doing so, I think it's important that it be her writing, not just someone's, because when I go to write something first-person in class as an assignment and open myself up in a similar way [1], I'll know it's safe because she did it first.
So that's pretty badass. And now I should make dinner, and then I think I have some time for pokemon since I don't have technical permissions for the work task I was hoping to do.
[0] Speaking of not saying things unless they're germane, uh, y'all already knew I was dating Rik, right? And have been for most of a year? Good.
[1] I'm probably not going to write a paper about my crotch? But who knows!
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/42962.html.
"I do support for a geographic text search software product, so I mostly spend a lot of time talking to oil companies and intelligence agencies."
My expected response to this is generally "Oh, that's cool! I do X." For the most part, I haven't gotten that --- I have found a couple of people whose responses have been that and I have gravitated toward talking to them because it's comforting and familiar. Most of the other grad students I've talked to have other hobbies, interests, and occasionally even jobs, but I haven't met anyone else with as serious of a sideline, or one that they intend to continue on with like I intend to continue my work with MetaCarta/Qbase. I think this sort of thing would be more common if I knew more grad students in science and engineering, but most people who have studied English or Gender Studies or something as an undergrad mostly do... more school, or maybe some teaching. The other thing is that there isn't much tech industry around here, or around the places some of my fellow students are from, and so when I tell them I do this it's not something that's part of their core experience. This isn't bad! It's just weird, since I am used to a different breakdown of what jobs the people around me have or have had.
"Can you use the 'Paste from Word' button in order to paste from, say, OpenOffice?"
I was at a training for IU's OnCourse system, which is basically a course website tool that IU uses. They have a rich text editor that you can use for entering a syllabus or something similar, and if you paste from Word, you have to use a special button to keep the formatting intact. I wanted to ask about attaching PDFs or uploading raw HTML, but I didn't want to seem like I was being snarky, so I asked about OpenOffice instead. Damn did that backfire. Everyone in the room looked at me like I had three heads --- and then the presenter, when she caught her breath, suggested maybe I attach a PDF or upload the raw HTML. *sigh* I will do this one better next time! Hopefully. (Also, I've gone from around a minute to thirty seconds for how long it takes to realize that the person I am talking to not only doesn't care about what I am saying but gave up trying to understand already. Hopefully I will get this down further soon.)
"My boyfriend's girlfriend draws furry porn for money." [0]
...honestly I kind of liked watching the gears in people's heads turn when I said this. ^^;; But it was actually germane to the conversation. (I try to not be closeted about most things, but also not go around blasting them at high volume. So depending on conversational topics, one person might never learn that I am or do X, while another person might find it out the first time they meet me. It works-ish?) I was relieved that I didn't get a negative reaction and the conversation went on to talking about how furry porn is selling not just, well, porn, but an eroticized vision of the self embodied artistically, and how this was related to this whole somatechnics thing. But I'm used to just saying this sort of thing and not having anyone bat an eye, and it was a little weird to have gender studies students be like "Guh?"
"It doesn't bother me if students have their laptops out in class."
This is an interesting one. At MIT, I was used to half the class being asleep or surfing the Internet or, you know, whatever in big lecture halls. I brought my laptop to a lot of classes and used it to take notes, work on homework, look things up for class discussion, and screw off instead of paying attention, probably in equal proportion. We had an orientation exercise where they asked all the new graduate instructors how disruptive they find things, and we all mostly agreed, except when it came to laptops and cell phones and sleeping, where everyone else was like "That's super disruptive and unprofessional" and I was like "Couldn't care less, only hurting themselves, may not even be hurting themselves, their priorities are their business."
The really different thing is that, to me, having a laptop out and doing work on it while talking about something else is professional, at least in that it's what happens in my profession. It is what everyone does in our work meetings, and I was pulling extra hours I didn't need to until I started doing it. Especially working Support, sometimes I need to answer the phone or an email while I'm in another meeting. That's just how it is in my job, and how it is for people in upper management in my company, and no one bats an eye. Someone running a meeting who insisted everyone turn their laptops and phones off would be unprofessional and out of touch in my tech world. I was glad this training was on Tuesday because I was planning to pull laptops out at things on Wednesday and Thursday and apparently that's rude here! I can understand and roll with that, it's just very different...
...especially because of the things that I would consider unprofessional that I've already had happen. The example I'll talk about is a professor assigning as part of class reading a piece including details of her kinky sex life. At first I was like... couldn't you have gotten someone else's first-person account of this? Now I'm thinking about my professor's crotch. Great. Isn't that kinda unprofessional? But part of the assignment was to think about the writing of the pieces, and how to use first-person and/or creative work in theory and criticism, and so as I made my lunch today, I thought about this a bunch. After doing so, I think it's important that it be her writing, not just someone's, because when I go to write something first-person in class as an assignment and open myself up in a similar way [1], I'll know it's safe because she did it first.
So that's pretty badass. And now I should make dinner, and then I think I have some time for pokemon since I don't have technical permissions for the work task I was hoping to do.
[0] Speaking of not saying things unless they're germane, uh, y'all already knew I was dating Rik, right? And have been for most of a year? Good.
[1] I'm probably not going to write a paper about my crotch? But who knows!
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/42962.html.