no boys allowed in the room!!!!

I think of it in terms of "Thanks for relocating to a location not of your choosing and taking on more of the financial burden of keeping us sheltered and fed."

ljub, do you have a support network? even it's just people to call and vent to from time to time? if not you should at least complain on ilx. all the time!

i totally feel your frustration; when i was trying to finish a ph.d. i was single and it seemed like most people who had stuck it out in the program were coupled off. i wondered if there were someone to cook me dinner sometimes if it would have kept me from...disappearing from my own life for long periods of time, with no work done and no way to account for my whereabouts. but i have no evidence that this was true. single women did complete the ph.d, including dear friends of mine. it was hard, but it was hard for everyone and at least they didn't have significant others getting in their faces about how remote they were and how they didn't do the dishes enough or whatever.

io is completely otm, Ph.D. candidates' significant others are generally sick of their shit. she is also correct about differential gendered labor taking place within heterosexual academic households, at least in my experience.

Same with partner track lawyer households.

I didn't know Jeff could cook.

I'm not a partner track lawyer.

thank god for that 'cause ilx needs you

jk jk

I've been billing out the wazoo for the last two weeks or so and let me tell you, partner track is for the birds.

xps to horseshoe - my support network is mostly a couple of people in the lab, plus a couple of other student friends here who aren't very close but with whom I can vent and have fun once a month or so. I don't tend to vent to friends and family back in the UK because when I manage to Skype with them I just want happy catch-up conversations, and not to comb over what feel like failures! Sometimes I moan to my dad as he's an academic and 'gets it', when he can be bothered to listen.

The trouble with locating your support network in the lab is that when issues come up between you, as they did this week, you feel really cast off. That happened this week (somebody getting more and more obsessive about little details of the way we do things and appearing to accuse other people of being lazy). So I'm down to a support network of one, really - it's just me the other student in the lab that I'm really close to, bitching about our colleague :/ That won't last, we'll figure it out with the other person, but it feels shitty.

Once a month! My god I would never make it as an academic. I'm feeling shut in NOW and I was out til 3am dancing.

Or whatever kind of movement you can manage in a 17 foot wide bar with 200 other people.

sorry to hear that about your internal lab politics! it makes sense that you wouldn't want to talk about grad school stuff with friends and family--i tended not to either. if it's not too personal a question, do you have a therapist? i only ask because i wish i had had one back in grad school. more essential than a significant other to survive the experience imo!

i also feel like UK people are more stiff upper lip about emotional support, so maybe you don't need these things the way i did, and i am being terribly nosy, so ignore me if i'm prying too much. i just have lifelong fellow-feeling for women in graduate school.

Two different people in my fb feed got engaged today and I am feeling some kinda way about it.

Although I feel p garbagey in general and I'm prob PMSing so whatevs.

xps - no therapist. I'm not against the idea at all, apart from the cost. If I had one, though, I'd take up every minute of my weekly hour or whatever with family stuff for weeks and weeks before I ever got to the lab! Things aren't so bad in the lab, and nowhere near as bad as a year ago. But yeah, the fear of doing poor work, dealing with my supervisor and occasional politics can get very overwhelming. At the moment I dream most nights about letting people down. Last night I dreamt I organized a conference, turned up and sat around doing nothing and not going to sessions. A lovely woman from our sister lab upstairs was my co-organizer and she looked so disappointed in me but she didn't say anything.

horseshoe, I was just thinking of you the other day because I was thinking about what I would do if I graduated and couldn't face doing an academic job (which is a possibility) and the first thing that occurred to me was high school teaching. And then I remembered the levels of stress radiating from the teacher thread and thought of you and thought, well, grad school may be stressful but I bet it doesn't touch teaching!

Engagements don't make me feel much, but the pregnancies of the early 40s crowd do. Sure this came up on some other thread recently but can't remember where.

just wanted to follow up on an old topic --

i am pleased to report that i think that i have made a new female friend and we have hung out twice, both times top notch fun and larfs
she has time to spare and a worldview similar to mine, and we have lots of things in common (but also some things not in common, a nice blend) i feel optimistic.

That's awesome! It feels good to connect to people.

yeah it totally does and has historically been somewhat challenging for me

Congrats!!

I have a friend moving to Chi in about 4-6 weeks who I would also like to connect you to if u want, just to see if you might enjoy each other? No pressure obv.

maaaaybe

She is a v kind person who also loves human connection but has found it sometimes hard to cultivate, and long ago gave up satisfying societal norms. And she bikes and runs and is a great cook and tends to be activity oriented so you can get her to do p much anything w you!

xp haha don't worry, your call/your speed.

that is good news LL

have had a week of almost daily interaction with a couple of girlfriends due to hospital craziness

it is def v restorative. as a naturally-inclined-hermit it is a bit of a shock to the system but in a good way

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6319

Sewanee: The University of the South will unveil a giant golden clitoris statue that will reside in the school’s library with a luncheon and reception this afternoon.

From Feb., 25 to March 11, a giant golden clitoris sculpture will be on display in Sewanee’s library to promote feminist artist Sophia Wallace’s “CLITERACY” project. Sewanee’s Women’s Center has promoted the event on social media with hashtags such as #SolidGoldClit and #yeaSEWANEEScliterate.

“By occupying public space with information about women’s bodies, CLITERACY destigmatizes the information itself, facilitating open dialogue,” the event description states. “Wallace’s work reveals the “phallic as neutral” bias in science, law, philosophy, politics, mainstream and even feminist discussion, and the art world. Her art will be displayed in DuPont Library as a means of mirroring the cultural silence surrounding issues of female sexuality in today’s world as well as throughout history.”

behold the yoni power

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B-jYXENIUAAIR1c.jpg

Nice.

is that a crack in the wall or the power cable from the sign? i'm sorry but i spent over a decade installing media art in galleries and museums.

it looks like the cable?

Tampon string? (Sorry)

irl lol

unless it's meant to resemble a tampon string, it's poorly installed.

Is there where we were talking about female friends? I think so. Anyway, my awesome girlfriend from work is still the best. This friendship reminds me of two I've had where we just clicked instantly and those others are still best friends to this day. This is so silly but I'm worried about being too much or messing it up somehow! I'm just so glad to have a new awesome friend and I don't want to ruin it. lol @ me. Also, we're supposed to hang out tonight and I really want to but I have a horrible cold and feel awful and don't know if I'm up to it. :( I don't want her to be mad at me but she's a total germaphobe so probably wouldn't want to be near me anyway. Hi it's super early and I feel like crap/am a little delirious but my new friend is the best.

just tell her now that you are feeling crappy and try to work in plans to reschedule.

if she enjoys yr friendship as much as you do hers, i doubt she'd be mad! disappointed to miss yr company, but not MAD :)

imo, she'll appreciate you cancelling, even if disappointed. i have immune probs & anytmie someone cancels b/c sick, it may suck, but a relief that i don't have to worry about prolonged immune-weirdness/sickness after being around someone who's sick. & it's v. understandable anyway, sucks for you to feel awful.

it's so great to have good female friends!

Yeah the older I get the less I tolerate people giving me colds if it's avoidable :)

Yeah, she was totally cool with it. I'm silly. :)

i just finally started watching broad city and i love it so much but if i had read the ilx thread on it before watching it i would never have watched it. what is it about dudes talking about tv shows and them totally ruining everything? like 99.9% of the posts are just dudes being ruinous. let's analyze this until it's bad.

loool otm

also see p much every ilx tv thread. comedy in particular seems to bring out the worst in 'ilx dude boring analysis'

Haaaaa yes. I've learned it's unwise to read ILX threads about anything I actually like.

how do yall feel about cutting ties with friends whose friendship or lack thereof consistently makes you feel bad vs ... the alternative, "working on it," agreeing to consistently feeling bad?

related: do you think its natural to gain a new batch of friends in your late 20s/30s that replaces your teenage/early 20s friends? feeling weird cause im only still friends with like 5 people from that era of my life. mostly as a conscious decision of mine (one or two made decisions of their own that i respect, and wasnt feeling those friendships anyway).

there is one friendship from that time that i didnt really cut ties with, but just said "you make me feel like garbage and i feel like you never have my back when someone is treating me like shit" and he was just like "youre right and im sorry", but i feel like the friendship ended after that came out. the lines of communication are open though. i'm just really lamenting the loss of that one today, because we were v close friends. but there's the flipside that's like...he was kind of a jerk, and i have much better friends now. but the memories are killing me. the good ones and the bad ones.

also just can i acknowledge that we talked about basically exactly this a month ago

related: do you think its natural to gain a new batch of friends in your late 20s/30s that replaces your teenage/early 20s friends?

I basically dumped every single person from home when I went to college, and then again when I moved to NYC, and I've only ever regretted it w/r/t maybe like 3 people total. Lots of those friendships were matters of survival, based on being slightly more similar to each other than the horrible ppl around us, but they had their time and served their purpose and then people moved on. Fine w me.

i am totally for cutting ties with anyone that causes bad feelings. life is too short, we all have our own personal bad shit in our own heads to deal with, who needs that crap from other people??

i'm facebook friends with the 6 other girls i was tight with in highschool, but only 3 of them are still really my actual friends. we all grew up to be very different people from the kids we were, and that profoundly changed the intimacy we all once had. although my bff from that group is my bff.

related: do you think its natural to gain a new batch of friends in your late 20s/30s that replaces your teenage/early 20s friends? feeling weird cause im only still friends with like 5 people from that era of my life. mostly as a conscious decision of mine (one or two made decisions of their own that i respect, and wasnt feeling those friendships anyway).

"natural" is a weird word, but it's common. esp if something about you or your lifestyle or your general worldview changes dramatically during that time, and you no longer have anything fundamental in common with those people. i am still close (emotionally, not geographically) with my friends from hs and college and pretty much every era of my life, but i'm also still basically the same person, and those are the people who know me best. i don't jibjab/chitchat with them much because we don't have a lot in common in terms of our interests/the way we spend our time, but as someone without siblings, those ppl are my siblings. they have known me the longest, and we love each other the way i'm told that siblings do. not that i would know, but it seems easier to get rid of/grow away from friends when you have siblings you're close to. my old friends are the people who knew me when i was young. i can't say goodbye to them without saying goodbye to the only people who know my whole story and still like me. i really appreciate that about old friends.

in new friend news, my new friend and i have been hanging out regularly and i am taking special care not to annoy her.

i should say, siblings or family (cousins, etc)

yeah idek what i meant by natural. normal, or something that just tends to kinda happen.

I have spent the past 2 years kinda shedding away people who are hardcore partiers, or have too different a schedule than me, since I got a career where I am a role model-ish person who is tired by the end of the day. Not what I want but it just kinda happened due to lack of propinquity & shared interests.

I have a friend who is a severe flake & passive-aggressive as shit on social media. She has depression & anxiety, and so do I, so it was making me way mad when she would cancel basically WHEN we set things up, with some phony pretense. Like – you can be real with me! If u r depressed just say so. But I was also hating hanging w/her when we did. So I blocked her on fb to avoid too much drama & I am wishing I'da done it like a year ago.

I don't know where to put this so why not here if we are talking about old friendships.

I just found out a friend from high school writes paranormal romances!!

I also found out a college friend died, and if I am reading his obituary correctly, it sounds like suicide.

my old friends are the people who knew me when i was young.

This is what I appreciate about my relationship with my friend W, I don't have to explain certain parts of my history.

tr, I'm sorry about your college friend.

That's v. cool about the paranormal romance writer, though. Can you say who it is or the name of one of her books?