I was scrolling through Twitter last night and I happened upon quite a bit of back and forth about Robert Mueller’s investigation, about how liberals are putting all their eggs in one basket (huh?) and how it’s a nothing burger story. 

I really don’t know what, exactly,  Mueller’s capabilities are, granted that so many people have decided he’s not responsible for anything he does, he’s just their big man, or what people think Mueller’s investigation will tell us that we don’t already know about Donald Trump as a compromised president. 

So much of his administration’s strategy in the Middle East and Iran hangs on their backing of the Crown Prince  Mohammed bin Salman. It’s clear he’s the heir apparent.  It’s also clear he’s a very dangerous guy, and that the president won’t upset him for a number of reasons, including their redrafted Iran deal (redrafted unnecessarily due to Republican hatred of Barack Obama more than anything else.)  

Do most Americans even know what Hezbollah is? They should. I suspect they do not. (I do not write this with any happiness.) 

Those are the somewhat defensible reasons why Donald Trump won’t respond to the Saudis. The shadow reason is, naturally, his business interests globally. 

Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Lisa, don’t buy into the fake news.  He’s fine. 

How would we know that? He’s hired legal teams to argue that the blind trust strategy can’t, simply can’t, apply to him because he and his businesses are just so special .  

The arrangement they have forged says no international deals while the president is in office. But the organization is being managed by his family, and they are not arm’s length managers,  and the very same issues the tax attorneys are using to claim Donald Trump can’t, simply can’t do a blind trust are the exact same reasons why he can never really divest himself in office of his business interests, either.  

We’re supposed to believe that he is such a man of good character that he will put the country first. 

Uh-huh.  

I’m burying the lede here in some ways, but before he stepped into office, Donald Trump’s business dealings with Russians speak to a long, long association of former KGB (read, today’s mafia) are a matter of public record going back decades. Craig Unger compiled 1300 transactions.  In 2005, Donald Trump went from being $4B in debt to…not being $4B in debt because Russian investors “franchised his brand” with no up-front money from him.  I get it, the brand has  value. How much value? And how close were/are those Russians to Kremlin? 

Pretty close.  Do a Google Search of Trump and Bayrock. This is, of course, after Donald Trump said he has no business deal with Russians. 

And there’s the alleged pee tape. I doubt it exists. And even if it does, his followers are crude enough to be entertained rather than disgusted by it. 

What did the president know?  Who knows?  Intelligence assets often do not know they are being groomed. They aren’t agents. They just dupes. 

Besides all this, he’s been a lousy president, antagonizing needlessly the intelligence community and undermining his own ability to govern, in addition to the mess at the border and his cronies have created for ludicrous reasons. 

 

 

 

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter and Facebook.  For the past few months, I’ve been posting my watercolors, which are amateurish, and interspersed with draft data graphics.  There are a lot of graphics that I use for my own  learning and no other reason, so I don’t always finish them. Or I am doing them to derive a graphic for students to finish off in order to get them more accomplished with R.  I’m not always looking to communicate, and I’m not posting looking to be treated like I’m special or a star in data viz or anything of the sort any more than my posts saying “I’m at a Bach concert” are designed to make you think I am some sort of magnificent patron of the arts.  I’m not a consultant selling my data manipulation services.  I’ve already got the cookies I need, thanks. 

What is interesting to me with this experimenting is that my little draft graphics bring Twitter dudes to critique rather than discuss.  I realize this is unscientific, but I have lot of women in computer science in my feed, including some who are accomplished in fields like AI and OR.  Not a single one of the women, after months of me posting draft data visualizations, has *ever* come at me with “you need to fix X” or “this is wrong do it right.” 

Not. A. Single. One. 

Not. One. Not. Ever. 

Whereas if I post a graphic that is just drafty, I will get all the boys in the yard telling me what’s what.  I’ve never had anybody—despite have tons of architects in my followers—tell me with my watercolors that I should use do things differently (I ought to, but I like just splashing around, thanks.). 

Do any of you really think I need somebody to tell me how to use data? 

On Facebook, I posted a graphic I had thrown together in Excel which wouldn’t allow me to designate a x-axis label for some reason I couldn’t suss (I think it was just some glitch that would have gone away had I restarted but meh).  I posted it on Facebook, told people about the x-axis issue, and asked if they could think of other possible display formats. OMG, the drama! THERE’S NO X-AXIS SO I CAN’T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAAAAAND THIS YOU AMATEUR.  I repeated in the comments what the x-axis was.  BUT THERE’S NO X-AXIS.  

Not a single woman on my Fboo commented on it. Only men. One of my colleagues (one of my favorite colleagues) and one of my *students* (a beloved one)  were in the mix talking down to me like *crazy.* 

After that, I started letting partially done graphics out in the world more often and keeping track of who commented negatively. After two years, I have 10 graphics and about 30 comments, none from people who present as female on social media.  Insta is a bust. People don’t seem to be too critical on Insta and I don’t have many followers, both of which makes me like it very much. And it has pretty pictures.  

On Fboo and  Twitter, I have a bunch of comments, all from men, just about all negative. 

 

Yesterday evening I posted this: 

 

With the clear indication that I was diddling around, that it’s a draft graphic. A student gave my class some BART data and some people have done a lot with it, others haven’t done anything with it, and I’ve been looking for ways to show them that they can use both the O-D data. I’m also messing with Sankey diagrams.

I got everything “every graphic deserves a legend, I don’t know what’s going here” (Fair enough, but I’m not sure if I am going to bother with making a legend or just using proper station names in labels) to “Well, Berkeley students did this first!” Along with some comment that I wasn’t showing much originality using a chord diagram. Christ, nobody is taking *anything* away from Berkeley students,  I didn’t claim to invent anything here, and *I’ve* never made a chord diagram before, so it was fun and new for me. Isn’t that enough? 

But no, it’s not enough. 

All from dudes. 

Guys, knock this shit off.  This is a way of trying to sanction a woman for participating in high-status places (data viz, computer science, etc) you want to reserve for yourselves, and it’s not ok.  Graphics do not need to be perfect to be instructive, and—believe it or not–nobody asked your opinion. This is a form of mansplaining, and it’s not welcome.  “Tell me how to improve this” is an invitation. “Hey, I screwed around with data”  is not a invite for all y’all to come along and tell me I DID IT WROOOOOOOOOONG. 

I repeat: knock it off. Make space. Don’t police it. 

I would contrast this last experience with a graphic I posted two Sundays ago that mixed watercolors and data: 

Now, this son of a bitch is hard to read, and the photograph chopped off the source AND the last station. It’s a mess, from execution to data display. Did I hear a peep? No.  Not a peep! In fact, the train nerds began a super-long discussion about the forecasts, etc, so much so that I finally told them to go outside. (One of my students helpfully pointed out that one can tweet outside.)

Bottom line: watercolor is not a prestige space the way data viz/science is. Nobody need police these creations to assert status and power-knowledge. 

All of this is conjecture, based on a limited run in one person’s social media. But it’s solid enough that it’s probably worthy of a bigger field experiment. Maybe I’ll do it. Maybe somebody else—by all means, I’d love to see what others came up with.  Either way, people are welcome in the yard. Just behave yourselves. 

 

The answer is, of course, suck it up.  Randy Crane, before I left UCLA, gave me the best advice on teaching I have ever received: students never really understand what you are trying to do for them. They understand their own goals, but often do not understand how to achieve those goals or how the context works.   Students often do not have a lot of power, especially graduate students, and they generally do not know how much they can harm others during job talks, classes, or in other contexts.  Professors OTOH have way too much power over the lives of graduate students. We should be reviewed and acceptable for our mentorship, not in any bean-county way but in the “are you being an abusive jackass?” kind of way.

That’s all by way of saying I’ve usually been pretty good about limiting my emotional responses to students, being patient, and getting over things quickly.  It’s something in my teaching performance over the years I’ve been relatively proud of. 

So….weirdly, in the past few weeks, I’ve had something happen that logically I can say is not a big deal but is *sticking* with me in ways things have never stuck before.  It’s me: students have said far, far worse things to me and I’ve not thought anything of it. 

But for some reason, this one, stray comment really hurt me, and I’m worried it’s going to affect how I relate to this person. It’s a comment I’ve heard over and over and over in my scholarly life from economists, from engineers, etc.  I’ve brushed past it a many, many times.  But this time it landed home, and I’m utterly shocked at my own reaction and my own inability to just let it f*cking  go already. 

I feel like I’ve been good to this particular student, and that I deserved better. But…things like this have happened many, many times before. 

Am I finally vested in my dignity as a scholar? I’ve always been plenty thin-skinned in other contexts, but never with students.  Whatever it is, I don’t like it.  Advice? 

 

I had one of those reminders yesterday that I am not very good at taking care of myself, even as I often do quite well at caring for others. 

1) I was late for my morning class because I went to take a shower, my husband went to buy paint, and the painters showed up and began working on the hallway outside my bathroom. I was naked and needed to return to my bedroom for clothing, and all I had was a washrag and a cellphone. (I finally managed with broken Spanish to explain I needed them to go downstairs.) 

2) I hadn’t eaten any breakfast since I was running late, and during class I started feeling weaker and weaker.  I told myself I’d go get something during the break, but students came up during the break and wanted to talk about their projects, and so I figured I could wait until later to get something.  By the time lunch and the end of class rolled around (class runs from 9 until 12:20), I was disoriented and weak; I was so weak that pushing the elevator buttons seemed hard and I was having trouble thinking.   I had some rice crackers in my office that worked nicely enough as a boost to get me over to the cafe for an actual lunch. 

I’ve never actually pushed things to where my thinking clouded. It was un-good, and it happened much faster than I thought it could, and I’ve not felt fear like that in a long time.  I am unused to feeling my mind not work. 

I asked for help from the wrong people, and I was afraid to ask my students for colleagues or help.  You are supposed to be strong and in charge for students.  If you ask your colleagues for help at a place like USC or any academic workplace, you risk…a lot. 

3) I have no idea where  any of my medication is after I traveled and I haven’t take it in some time. This is dumb and dangerous and yet I still can’t find it.  I know what I would say to a student or colleague who engaged in such nonsense, but here I go. 

4)  I am, once again, being backed into my data monkey corner, and it’s causing a lot of anxiety.  I started out in professional life as data person, a person who made a living because other people couldn’t program, didn’t know how to handle data, or didn’t have my gifts with it.  That moved into my assistant professor life, with plenty of senior faculty who wanted to “collaborate” (aka take credit for what I could do). By then I was twigged to it, so the people I did collaborate were cool.

 I wrote a theory paper out of my dissertation and one of my senior colleagues at USC sniffed when they hired me “well, at least you show some potential for thought in THIS ONE paper.”  It hurt so much and reinforced my belief that I was an empiricist, a decent one, perhaps,  but not one that would ever change how anybody thought about anything, nothing really super duper special like our departmental darling. 

Then after tenure, I got nice roundhouse kick in the face as my colleagues chose somebody else for a leadership position I wanted, and I went into a tailspin, doubting everything about myself and the value of my scholarship. Why give me tenure if you don’t think I’m capable of leading? I decided, after a year, that I was tired of data, tired of the same old tropes in transit and transportation research. I didn’t have any questions there. And I began reading political philosophy, from the pre-Socratics onward. I loved it. New ideas, new challenges, lots of new books to read. 

I got pushed into teaching planning theory, and I was good at it.  I got ideas above my allotted station as data monkey. I began writing about theory, sometimes getting published even. I decided to wander a bit.  I started writing a book that turned into three books because it got bigger, as is the way of my projects. 

I even got promoted to full doing that, which surprised nobody more than myself. 

And yet, the box comes back, and it comes back in a major way.  Each time I think my teaching schedule settles, it doesn’t.  I prep and prep and prep and prep and prep.  This was supposed to get better as my career went on. It hasn’t.

I decided to try to move some of my time over to USC’s gender studies department.  They are a reborn place, with tons of bright people, and if the forces hostile to planning in *every* university finally win at USC, I wanted an exit option other than retirement or being shoved back in with the economists.  More than anything, their classes fill fast, and they need another horse in the harness.  

But the reality is, our new little planning department can’t afford to let me wander off, either. I am, I believe, the only one of us who isn’t a director of something or whatnot that serve to lighten teaching loads. I teach and teach and teach, and I understand why. I’m good at it, I mostly enjoy it, and the department has to have full-time faculty teaching required things. 

Our chair, Marlon Boarnet,  rightly frogmarched us through curriculum reform for several years, and we have a really nice curriculum as a result.   We have committed, however,  to urban data in a big way, and I’m the only one on the regular faculty who can program.   They need me to stay put, teach two new classes centered on data, period. That leave me with my undergrad teaching and the mass transit, another class my colleagues are unlikely to be able to teach. 

Part of me says that now I can go back to my data monkey life entirely differently; I can bring the critical theoretical capacity I have developed and teach about urban data like few other people do, and I might be able to write from that perspective, too. Every other time I’ve taken up new teaching challenges for any length of time, I’ve always done so. Ideas come;  I have always been able to trust that, and I’ve been itching for a new challenge here late. 

But the old warrior is tired. My body is taking its revenge for years of neglect I gave it as I obsessed over building a career.

I am now a full professor, something that in my mind always carried with the possibilities to get more free to do the things one wants to do, the way one wants to do them.  And yet, my relationship with privilege or power is not like that, innately.  I am full professor, something I have worked my entire career for, and instead of feeling like I’ve find motored my way onto easy street, I just see unmet needs around me, needs I may have some capability to meet. 

How does one “full professor” ? I thought I knew and I didn’t.