A Free Man

For the last decade or so, and up until the last couple of months, my work in science has been in academia’s ivory towers. Working as an academic, particularly as a student or post-doc with little responsibility for bringing in grant money, allows for a lot of high minded philosophizing (hence the Ph), grand rhetoric and remarkably little gray for all the black and white.

For example, not so long ago I wrote in response to a post by cyber-friend Maggie about animal research. In the post, I zealously defended the ethics of high-minded scientists performing life-saving research. Funny thing is, and in my defense I stated this clearly in that post, I’m not now nor have I ever been an animal researcher. I’m a plant geneticist, which means that the closest I ever got to animals was chasing the occasional raccoon out of my corn field.

Until now. One of my two current jobs brings me a step closer to the world of animal research.  You’ll have to pardon me if I’m not specific enough for your inquiring minds, but it’s all about self-protection. This job involves writing up research for a company that is within the broad umbrella of the “Pharmaceutical Industry”. Sitting at my desk in a building downtown, I’m still not  any physically nearer the animals than when I was fannying about in corn fields or greenhouses full of Arabidopsis. In fact, I’ve been intentionally avoiding a trip down to the animal house as I’m a bit squeamish about  blood. But in the reports that I write up on a daily basis, I’m exposed to a bit of the reality of animal research and, out of the abstract, it’s not particularly nice. Sometimes these mice don’t have it easy. Sometimes they’re exposed to what turn out to be toxic chemicals and all sorts of unpleasant things happen to them. Sometimes, technicians make mistakes and the mice deal with a bit more than they should have to deal with.

But, and this is a crucial but, these things happen so that they don’t happen to people. It’s a decision that we’ve collectively made as a society. The alternative is either we test drugs on people or that we don’t develop drugs at all.  My company, like most of them, is not one that is working on cosmetics or things to make your erection function. They’re, quite literally, trying to ‘cure cancer’.

Nonetheless, Big Pharma is no place for an animal loving socialist botanist. Sometimes I just have to put my precious, delicate academic morals in the cupboard and get on with the business of business. And sometimes I just have to laugh at the disconnect of it all.  In a recent report I wrote the following sentence in the “Results” section:

“X days after treatment one of the mice suffered a rectal prolapse.”

Which prompted a visit a couple of days later from my boss who reminded me, “Chris, mice don’t suffer. The ethics people get very unhappy if the mice suffer. ‘The mouse developed an rectal prolapse.’”

Reallllly? Shall we ask the mouse?

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You’ve got to love happy endings. In what could be Dr. O’C’s final post here on A Free Man, we get just that…

At some point my attitude to motherhood started to improve.  I don’t know when that happened, but it did.  I am a better mum than I thought I would be.  For the first few months, I would tell Z that I loved him, over and over but I don’t really think I meant it.  I said it more to convince myself of that fact.  I know that I was meant to feel this unconditional love for him.  Instead I didn’t really feel anything for him.  Sure he was a cute baby and it was nice when he smiled, but it could have been any baby.

Initially we had planned that I would take 4-5 months off work, but when February loomed I couldn’t go back.  I couldn’t put this helpless individual into day care 10 hours a day.  I didn’t know how it would work.  How would I get up, walk the dog, get Z and myself dressed and out the door.  Plenty of people do it.  I just didn’t know how it would work for me.  It comes back to my fear of new things or a new way of doing things.  A fear I never knew I had before Z was born.  I walk the dog the same route every morning.  I get up, walk dog, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, dry hair and leave for work. In that order, every morning.  I don’t think I ever changed it.  It was the most efficient way of starting my day.  But looking back, was I inflexible and stuck in my ways?  With Z, although it took a long time to establish, I was used to doing things a certain way and couldn’t imagine fitting work into it.  I also couldn’t imagine that I would be comfortable leaving him with anyone else.

The irony of the situation is that before I got pregnant and even during my pregnancy I worried if I was capable of taking a whole 4 months off work.  I thought that would be pushing the limits of my sanity.  I am a social person, I love to talk, interact with people and find out about them. But mostly I knew that I would go insane if I stayed at home with a baby (and I kind of did).  If Chris could have taken paternity leave, I think that we would have both jumped at the chance.   And now here I was, not wanting to go back to work because I was both afraid of the logistics of doing what millions of people do every day, getting themselves and a baby ready and out the door in the morning and I was getting attached to this little person, whom I had had very little emotional connection with so far.

Chris and I had been discussing a move to Australia for a while.  Well to be honest, Chris was ready to go, but I loved my job and had negotiated a promotion for when I returned from maternity leave.   Problem was this promotion almost certainly required me to travel internationally every month.  Not something that was going to work with a small baby.  I know my company would have worked with me and changed the job, but to be honest I was probably looking for an excuse not to go back.  An excuse to not change my finely tuned routine and put Zach in the care of strangers.  Pathetic I know.  Instead of getting into a new routine of going back to work, I embark on a trans-continental move, involving two adults, a baby and a dog.  What the hell was I thinking?

I was thinking that it would be nice to be home after 8 years spent overseas.  It would be nice that Z has family around. A Nana whom he adores and who gives him sups of tea and biscuits, who he goes crawling half way across the house to when he hears her saying ‘Nana Nana Nana’. (She is determined that they be his first words).  It would be nice to have someone to tell me how to do things.  Simple things like when it is safe to give Z a piece of bread and not choke, when he is sick enough that he needs to see a doctor.  Someone to baby sit so Chris and I could have a night out, go see a movie, have a meal.  Someone who cares and loves him as much as we do.  It would be nice to be around friends who are having babies who Zach will grow up alongside.

Don’t get me wrong, the move was incredibly stressful.  I was moving home, but Chris was moving to a place he had never visited, a place where I grew up, knew people, had extended family.  I didn’t really know what the job market was like for either of us.  I didn’t know if Chris would like it.  I felt like if it didn’t work out for us that it would be my fault, that we would have wasted the better part of $15K moving our life here and worse still, we wouldn’t be in the financial position to do anything about it.  Dealing with importation of a dog into Australia is not an easy thing, not to mention importing Chris!  It might actually have been easier in hindsight to stay in Oxford.

But things have worked out so far.  Chris has got two jobs, both in areas he wanted to explore and on Monday I started a new job, a good job doing exactly what I had hoped I could do when I came back to Adelaide.  The next few months aren’t going to be easy, getting up, walking the dog, getting myself and Z fed and dressed, and out the door.  Not to mention establishing myself in a job that is challenging and WAY out of my comfort zone.  But I have more confidence that it will be ok.  That I can do it.  That Z will adapt.

I really didn’t think that having a baby would teach me anything about myself, that it would reveal numerous faults.   And in those early few months, I didn’t ever think I would get to the stage where I would look at my baby, my son and say I love you and actually mean it.

Now, about that final post thing. I can’t convince Dr. O’C of anything, not for lack of trying. But maybe you all can. I’ll leave it in your hands to persuade her to keep writing.

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I. Am. Tired.

The two job situation in which I find myself has ramped up to the point that I actually have to do two proper jobs. Properly. I spent nearly eight hours teaching yesterday and while my acquantainances who are real teachers may snort derisively, that’s a lot of teaching for a slack university lecturer. Worse, it’s a lot of me for my unfortunate students. My lecturing style is a lot like my writing style - long winded, unnecessarily pedantic and filled with asides that only I find interesting. Imagine if you will, fifty sets of eyes rolling in unison when I pause mid-thought and say:

“Actually, the discovery of semi-conservative DNA replication is an interesting story…”

When did I become that teacher? The one that I used to laugh at from the back row of the lecture hall and make fun of  to the entertainment of my fellow students? Is this some sort of grand karmic scheme?

But being the doddering science lecturer isn’t my biggest problem. Now that the semester has started. I’m burning the candle at both ends. On any given weekday I’m in my office at the university, in my office at my writing job and if I could do so, it would be helpful to be both places at the same time. Instead, unable to circumvent the laws of physics, I wander back and forth along Adelaide’s North Terrace in a state of semi-consciousness. I make a lot of mistakes at both jobs, and my mood is detioriorating at a rate directly proportional to the number of hours that I’m working.

Grrrrr.

The good news is, with Dr. O’C gainfully employed, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. If I can keep it together until Christmastime, I’ll hopefully be able to settle back into the mundanity of a single job. I can’t imagine what I’ll do with my time.

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Dr. O’C is the latest member of A Free Man’s household to crack the job market. After what will be nearly a year in the purgatory of stay-at-home motherhood (she would quite possibly use a different word), Dr. O’C will re-join the ranks of the gainfully employed next month. This is the latest in a string of successes in our new Antipodean home and reflects one of the reasons that we came down here. And looking at things as a whole, and knocking exuberantly on wood, things are going pretty good in our new home.

A fellow American in Adelaide who stumbled onto my site wrote a post the other day that got me thinking about immigration. Her point is that most expats (and other people for that matter) relish and toss around the word ‘expatriate’ but ‘cringe’ at the word immigrant. ‘Expatriate’ carries with it images of glamour, worldliness, champagne on the Seine and first class round the world flights. ’Immigrant’ conjures images of huddled masses in steerage, midnight dashes over the Rio Grande and closed doors.

I prefer the word ‘expatriate’ myself but the Australian government, probably rightly, would use the word ’immigrant’ to describe me. Maybe it’s time I started to use that word as well. Both Dr. O’C and I come from a long line of immigrants and maybe it was natural that we followed in their footsteps. Dr. O’C’s family emigrated from Ireland to Australia when she and her sister were quite young in the hopes of making a better life for their family. My great-grandparents emigrated from Europe to Canada in the early part of the 20th century to escape a continent that seemed to be in a state of endless war. My parents moved from Canada to the U.S. in the late 60’s to ride the tail end of the post-war boom. And I emigrated from the U.S. through Europe to Australia in the early part of the 21st century in search of a life that I didn’t think was available to me in the U.S.

I suspect that all of the immigrants in our bloodlines had the same goal when they picked up and left their  home - a better life for our families. All of them achieved that goal - they succeeded beyond what they thought possible in the Old Country. Now, with the unemployment rate in the Free Man household reaching 0%* we’re well on the way to that better life that brought us Down Under.

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* We’re going to give Baby Z a few years before including him in employment statistics. 12 or 13 maybe?

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The normally reserved Dr. O’C speaks. This week, pregnancy…

So I am pregnant.  Without wanting to be.  I spend the next two weeks traveling around the U.S. for work.  I get back on a Wednesday, am expected in London for a meeting first thing Thursday, get out of bed, throw up, miss the train, go back to bed and spend the next 10 weeks feeling sick morning, noon and night.  This does nothing for my attitude towards impending motherhood.

My brain is programmed to eat when I feel nauseous. I don’t know why but it is. I found myself eating constantly. I would wake at 4 a.m., feel sick and go eat a banana or a biscuit. I called my sister, mother of two fabulous boys, told her my news (she was excited to be an aunt) and asked for her cure for morning sickness. The bitch (is that a bit harsh?) never suffered morning sickness.

I am still in shock.  I haven’t even been to see a doctor at this point.  It would somehow make it real.  When I finally do go she is a bit shocked I haven’t been to see her earlier.  Scans are booked and the pregnancy progresses.  My family is very excited by the news.  Some are shocked - one cousin said noone else getting pregnant would have shocked her more.  I am assuming she is excluding all male acquaintances and those well under child-bearing age.  We laugh and joke about this, and still the pregnancy doesn’t feel real.  We have the ultrasounds, see the heart beat, the hands, feet, head.  A little person on the screen.  The tears role down my cheek, but it isn’t joy, it is fear, a little bit of disbelief and realization that the pregnancy test wasn’t a false positive.

The next few months go by and I get bigger (at one point Chris uses the word huge, not something he will ever do again!).  I don’t really acknowledge the pregnancy.  Chris has started his blog by now and my friends contact him surprised at the news of my pregnancy.  It’s not that I didn’t want them to know, I just knew telling them would make the whole thing more real.  I continue to get up at 6:15 a.m. to walk/waddle the dog for 45 minutes.  I bike into town and back up the huge hill to our house whilst 6 months pregnant and nearly pass out as my blood pressure skyrocketed with the exertion. I work long hours and it becomes a struggle to fit my expanding waist line behind a microscope or a desk. Chris has to draw the line at me going on a work trip to Guatemala.  My mum flies in from Ireland to drag me shopping for the baby essentials. Apart from the pram, which cost more than my first car, I have no interest in pottering around baby stores and getting things like a cot or a car seat.

Chris dragged me to antenatal classes, and would bollock me on the way home for questioning the spaced out hippy who was conducting the classes in a ‘snarky’ way. When I made a ‘stork is going to bring me my baby’ joke, she didn’t even smile!I continue to push myself way too hard, ignore the fact that I am pregnant. Chris thinks I am trying to be a hero, one of those women who try to do everything just to show how hard they are.  I am not hard. I am in denial.  I continue to be in denial when my waters break walking the dog, 45 minutes after getting home from work, 9 days before my due date. Not sure how much longer this denial can last.

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Not thinking things through is sort of the story of my life. I prefer to call it charmingly impulsive, others (the glass half-empty gang) call it recklessly impetuous. Either way, I’m here today with all limbs intact, so who are you going to side with?

When I was setting this blog up, my friend Nichole was my model and I pretty much fashioned everything after her site. This meant being very open about who I was, no mask of anonymity for me to hide behind, no sirree bob. I’ve regretted that once or twice since then largely because I have to be nice. I can’t slag people off like some of you are prone to do. I can’t moan about my family, or Dr. O’C’s family, or Dr. O’C for that matter - not that I would want to, of course. It would just be nice to be able to do so with immunity. Alas, in addition to not thinking things through, I’m also just lazy. That is why I can’t be bothered to change things up to become reasonably anonymous. One day…

My letting it all hang out style also means that I don’t blog much about work. As that is pretty much all I’m doing these days, it means my material is fairly limited. I really don’t know how either of my employers would feel about being the subject of a blog post. But I do know that some employers have been rather humorless about their portrayal on the interwebs.

Which is really a shame, because I would love to tell you about one of my employer’s (not mentioning any names) recycling policy. Before you think I’m some sort of vandal or Republican, let me just say that I’m all for recycling. In fact, I spent most of my time in Britain digging out all of the non-recyclable things that Dr. O’C used to put in our recycling bins. She’s got many gifts, my lady, but reading the side of recycling bins isn’t one of them. She didn’t seem to be able to grasp that putting a shitty nappy in the plastic recycling might gloop the system up a bit. (Brings a whole new meaning to the “This Bottle Made from 100% Recycled Consumer Waste” label, doesn’t it).

But I think sometimes people take the whole recycling thing a bit too far. At this unnamed employer, they basically run a zero tolerance recycling program. You recycle. End of story. The cleaners double as detectives and if they find anything in your trash can that could have been recycled, then a yellow card is placed on your desk. As well as the offending item, presumably. If it happens again, you receive a red card. It’s not entirely clear to me what happens then, but I’m fairly certain that I’m going to find out. I mean, in the spirit of scientific inquiry and all.

If I had a little bit more of a veil of secrecy in place, I could also tell you about another one of my current employers, who operates a strict no food or drink in the lobby or elevator policy. Strict to the point that some of my new co-workers have regaled me with stories of being called to the building superintendent’s office where they receive mind-numbing lectures on the costs of cleaning dried cola beverages from marble floors. Each of the employees have asked the obvious question - how did you know I was eating in the elevator? The answer - surveillance. Surveillance that makes the Bush Administration drool. Security at this building is not watching for thieves and terrorists, they’re watching for people eating lunch on the fly. So, now when I go to work I get that same warm feeling as I do when I’m unlucky enough to have to fly through the U.S. - that comfort that comes with excessive and ineffectual surveillance. The same part of me that wants to shout “oh my god he has a gun” in the TSA line at the Orlando airport wants to take a big old bite of a jelly and cream filled donut as I’m stepping into the lobby.

Actually, jobs aren’t easy to come by these days, so I’ll probably repress my spirit of rebellion and just accept. The problem will come when I get them confused. With two jobs I run the risk of forgetting where I am at any given time. I’m pretty sure it’s all going to blow up in my face on the day I dump my recyclable food waste in the elevator.

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The whole two job things is great, in theory. That was, until I walked out of the house yesterday morning. He followed me to the door with an expression of hopeful confusion and just wrecked me for the morning.

Working two jobs with a long commute, there will likely be days that I go to work before Z gets up (today, for example) and days that I get home after he’s gone to bed. This wasn’t part of the plan. But it’s for a finite period of time and hopefully allows me to have more time with the boy, in the long run.

I can’t abide anymore Eagles, so rather than their long run, how about Emmylou’s (courtesy of Steve Earle) ”Goodbye”.

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Regular readers may remember about a month of whinging and hand wringing about my lack of employment, demoralization and general shittiness. Funny, that. Just a week or so after taking on one job I’ve now been offered, and am likely to accept, a second. The writing gig is only part time, so I’ve been looking around for little bits to fill in the gap. Well, the little bits turned out to be fairly big bits when I got a phone call today offering me a full-time teaching position at one of Adelaide’s universities. So, in a couple of weeks I’ve gone from a state of panic about my potentially permanent unemployment to having one and a half jobs. I am a hugely relieved underwhelming correspondent today, folks. There was a fairly loud voice in the back of my head seeking to convince me that once I walked out of the lab that I was doomed to a life of McJobs.

One of the things that I learned during my somewhat less than successful post-doc was that the traditional academic career path wasn’t for me. It wasn’t just the creeping feeling of dissatisfaction that greeted me every day I walked into the lab. One day, I was looking through our departmental website and realized that there were nearly four times as many post-docs as there were lecturers. I’m no mathematician, but it doesn’t take one to figure out that there are not a lot of jobs out there for your average Ph.D. In fact you’re pretty much waiting for the rare new faculty position or for an emeritus professor to wake up dead one morning. Even when a position opens up you’re competing with scores of other desperate Ph.D.’s, most of whom want it worse than you. From that moment on I pretty much new that I would never hold a faculty position and I started thinking about alternative careers in science.

That’s scary business. One of the many problems with getting a Ph.D. is that you get institutionalized. You spend so much time in academic institutions, dealing with academics that you may as well tattoo on the leather elbow patches. You’re not really prepared to work outside of the university environment and in many cases are discouraged from doing so. When I told one of my Ph.D. supervisors about my decision to abandon the tenure track toil, there was a definite air of disapproval. It’s hard to even know where to start. Apparently, a good place to begin is to move continents with a family to feed and house and no job prospects.* Necessity is the mother of invention, or is it Frank Zappa?

As I write this post, I can say with some relief that I might have nailed it. I’m in a position right now to explore two of the aspects of science that I’m passionate about - communication and education. I’m going to be able to make some decisions about my career path and hopefully, in the long run, tailor a position for myself. I’m going to get a taste of the “real world” while still being able to relax in the cozy arms of a university. Best of all, I’m going to be able to support my family at the same time. May not see them much for a while, though.Nonetheless, right now, for this moment in time, it’s pretty damn good to be me.

*A good suit doesn’t hurt.

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The weekend, for most folks, is usually a much anticipated time reserved for leisure and pleasure - time with the family, time with the friends, time at the beach, you get my drift. When you’re not working, and you’re as prone to fruitless anxiety as I am, the weekend means no chance of progress on the job front and just a couple of blank days of stressed hand wringing. And when the clock struck five on Friday and I still had no job offers on the table, I prepared myself for a solid 48 hours or so of sulking funk.

But despite my pessimistic inclinations, this weekend has turned out pretty damn well. I wrote a few days ago of my obsession with the local fauna here in Oz. Well, we ditched Z for our first trip into the bush and he missed out on the roo sightings. To rectify that, on Friday we took a trip up into the hills east of Adelaide to Cleland Wildlife Park to give him an up close and personal look. I know that it’s really little more than a souped up petting zoo, but feeding and petting kangaroos and wallabies in their native habitats is slightly more compelling than feeding an overweight goat behind a gas station. Z, disturbingly, didn’t seem to appreciate the difference between a six foot tall marsupial and Timmins. It’s probably a good thing that he’s a handsome lad.Also this weekend, Z’s started to crawl - something that I’ve been pushing him to do for the last several weeks. Something that I would now like him to stop. I once heard someone, a comedian or something, describe toddlers as being programmed to destroy themselves and our role as parents to stop them from doing so. Well, that’s coming pretty close to home as I’ve spent the weekend pulling Z away from dog water, power outlets and the gas fire.

But what made my weekend was a surprise phone call on Saturday afternoon. I had been to what I thought had been a successful interview on Thursday. The interviewers said that they were pleased and that they would let me know one way or another by the end of the day on Friday. That deadline passing is what had thrown me into such a spiral of grumpiness to begin with. But they came through on Saturday with apologies and a job offer. I think (and I write this whilst knocking on wood with crossed fingers, a challenge) that with a contract in hand to consider that I’m beyond the threat of jinxes, so I can tell you that I’ve got an offer to work as a writer. It’s not particularly glamorous work, nor the most fascinating. But it’s work. As a writer.

If you had asked me two-ish years ago what I would like to be doing today I would have said something about living near the beach with Dr. O’C and our first child and writing for a living. Well, we’re getting there.

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The more observant among you may have noticed that I did a bit of teasing about suits and flirting with job possibilities about a week or so ago and then left you hanging. (I’m talking to you, Maggie.) Well, I can pony up the suit picture that some of you requested, though I’ve fannied it up a bit by adding the boy. As for the job prospects, I can tell you that I’m still unemployed. I won’t get much more specific than that because of my newly developed irrational fear of jinxing myself if I even think too optimistically about a job prospect.

It’s all a bit demoralizing, this process. It’s been a long time since I was on the job market like this - answering ads in the paper and cold-calling. Most of the jobs I’ve had in my life have come from knowing someone or just blind luck. The pool of people that I know in Adelaide is pretty small, so I’m relying on the latter method. I’m hoping that one day, hopefully very soon, I’m going to stumble in to the right place at just the the right time and find myself spontaneously employed. Until then, I’m going to strive to keep my ever weakening grip on sanity and hopefully keep that boy from puking on my suit. Again.

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