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terselylove · 4 years ago

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30 Weird Careers You Never Knew Existed That Might Help You Find Your Calling

1. I work in QC (Quality Control) for media.

In one company they occasionally paid me to watch porn to make sure it was in sync and in good quality for video on demand distribution.

In another company I spent years watching movies before release in secure theater-like rooms, to make sure the files are ready for distribution (subtitles and audio in sync, no picture corruptions, stuff like that). I always got to watch the biggest movies of the year in a giant screen weeks before they were released (sometimes months!).

I got the job by going to film school.

2. I spend about 80% of my day designing those large overhead signs you see on the highway.

3. I design water parks. I went to college for Graphic Design and Advertising. In my last year I had to do an internship, so I took one at an aquatic engineering firm to help organize photos. 10 years later I am a project manager and create resort deck and water park programs.

4. My boyfriend is a high rise window cleaner. There are only 4 in our city. He loves his job! Sometimes when he is working, I will go to the city to the building he is cleaning and look up at him on the street. So cute.

5. I used to work on a lavender farm! It’s totally unrelated to my field of study and incredibly difficult in terms of manual labor, but man was it a beautiful place. I tended to the plants, took care of goats, and did processing for the herbs and honey. My grandparents are farmers and so I grew up with mediocre knowledge of field work and beekeeping and when a friend’s mom decided to start a business centered around lavender she asked me to help out for the summer.

6. You know when you’re watching a sports program and you see the little pop-graphic in the corner (ie. a baseball players stats, or an advertisement for easy-mac, or “stay tuned for Saved By the Bell @ 9!”)? Yeah. That was me.

7. I work in a lab where I raise moths! I got it by telling my lab partner that I love bugs and he hooked me up.

8. I’m a chyron operator. I trigger motion graphics on live TV. I was an art student and also was in stage crew in high school. These things got me jobs backstage in theater, which got me a job in TV doing normal stuff like cameraman and stuff like that. Since I was an art major I asked if I could do graphics and they let me on the weekends, and my specialty eventually turned to the chyron which ingests the graphics that artists make and plays them back through the switcher that controls the news broadcast. It’s not technically an art position but at my job specifically I could make the graphics in after effects and photoshop during the day (if I have a computer free) and in the afternoon I play the chyron. Usually you are one or the other, because chyron operators don’t need art skills, it’s just another tech job like audio operator or camera operator or stage manager or whatever. These kinds of jobs are getting rarer because they are being automated. But since I’m also an artist I get to keep my job because if someone leaves I can take their job.

9. I used to be a hand model.

Apparently I have really really good looking hands. Although they look completely normal to me.

People were always asking me how I got into it so it was fun to bullshit people I was “discovered” on the street, now I moisturize 15 times a day and sleep with my hands in plastic bags….

The money was great but I’d have to spend long days on set being careful not to wreck my manicure. (Which they paid for of course! Also paid for the time it took to get the manicure.)

Mostly did TV commercials.

Now I tell people at parties I’m a retired international hand model but gave up show business for the much more worthwhile and rewarding career of teaching kids to read….

10. I’m a Hostage Survival Trainer.

I was working in international development within IT, and was asked to go and sort out the finance system in Iraq back in 2007. The ministry I was working in got attacked by a militia and myself along with my 4 guards got captured.

Over time the guards were killed and I got released in an exchange deal after being held for over 2.5 years.

11. I spent a year on a team reclassifying the Duke University Library system from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress. Had to learn like four different alphabets just to label them properly.

12. Official court stenographer. I type everything everyone says in court. I was told about it in high school and thought it sounded cool so I went for it. Took 5 1/2 years in college, but I’m nationally certified to type 260 WPM and regularly push above 300 WPM in court.

13. Cameraman for Live PD. Went to film school to make movies then slowly worked through Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men, Boston’s Finest, and Nightwatch. Found out I have a perfect blend of art and athleticism that can be hard to find.

14. I make whiskey. It took a shit load of time, luck, skill and perseverance to get where I am.

15. Stagehand. I set up everything from huge concerts and Broadway shows to small private events and interviews. It’s a wonderful job and I love the people I work with.

16. I was a puppeteer for many years and I actually got that job from an ad in the classifieds. It cracks me up that there is a scene in Being John Malkovich where he tries to find ��puppeteer” in the classifieds and fails.

17. I have been an online Community Manager for over 20 years.

I started in video games and moved into technology companies. I’ve worked on everything from Star Wars to telecommunications networking equipment and software that help companies move data fast.

It started as a hobby. I was a web developer so very fluent with the web. Started a fan site and grew up it large. Moved on to volunteer for another game company who eventually hired me full time.

18. My parents are escape artists and escape consultants. My dad started as a magician doing birthday parties as a teen, then got really into escapes, then became the #1 guy designing and consulting on escapes for famous top magicians.

19. I have a job tracking rodents in restaurants. I set up cameras, movement sensors, IR sensors and other gear, and get an idea of the problem and how to fix it.

20. I used to cut pictures of weewees and hohas off packaging of adult toys. All day every day. I got the job by being able to pass a drug test.

21. I mix fire retardant for fighting wildfires. A lot of people know that airplanes drop retardant on fires but don’t think about the millions of dollars of infrastructure that is behind that operation. Everyone who works at my base started by working at the local ski resort. It’s a good way to earn enough money in the summer to coast all winter so we keep the jobs among fellow ski bums.

22. In the summer I guard and clean the toilet units (not the toilets) for festivals. I got the job trying to find a cheap way to go to the big festivals and this organization was looking for volunteers.

So all I have to do is stand in front of the units, make sure the ground stays clean, everyone had toilet paper and clear a block of units so the cleaning team can do their job.

Another part of the job is making sure no one dies or passes out in such a unit. You can’t imagine how many drunk (often naked) people we need to get out of these units and escort them to the First Aid.

23. I’m a potter. I used to be the manager for a museum art school, and began taking classes there years ago. Eventually transitioned into being a full time potter and pottery teacher.

24. I work as an Air Traffic Controller. Not weird but not many of us around.

I pretty much fell into it after passing an aptitude and it’s just been swell since.

Albeit, the classic phrase from strangers: isn’t that the job with the most suicides?

It might be, but I don’t know anyone. It’s actually super chill and rewarding when you get it right. (We always try get it right, but when you get it super right you’re dead pleased.)

25. I’m a welder. But what I do isn’t very common. I build Virginia Class Submarines.

26. Water Quality testing. I go around and collect samples for various testing to ensure the water meets the state standards. I got lucky and met someone who was volunteering at my previous job and she told me to apply. Was not the direction I saw my career going but it was definitely worth it.

27. I cleaned grills for super rich people in Palm Beach. Even got to clean Michael Jordan’s at one point. And it was recommended to me from a friend who was in sobriety with me after I got clean.

28. I’m a House Manager for a family of four, basically I’m a female butler. I’ve worked for them for 14 years starting as the kid’s Nanny, they’re my second family pretty much! I organize trades people, holidays, birthdays, daily meals, dinner parties, housekeeping, the list goes on… It’s challenging at times but keeps me on my toes and I enjoy that.

29. Concrete petrographer. I just started this month. I studied geology in college and now my job is to look at concrete using petrographic methods I learned at school and conduct ASTM tests to determine quality of concrete. Very interesting work because concrete is engineered rock and there’s A LOT more to it than you think.

30. I work in a clinical lab where I get to play with baby sweat for a bit of my day. We are testing for chloride level. Increased chloride in sweat is one of the diagnostic markers for cystic fibrosis. I am a clinical laboratory scientist. Not all clinical labs perform this test but I am lucky enough to work at a lab where we do a couple interesting low volume tests.

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liliannorman · 5 years ago

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Weight lifting is this planetary scientist’s pastime

A love of magnetic rocks, old machines and space recently led Beck Strauss to a dream job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The path to that career wasn’t always clear. Yet it’s a perfect fit for someone who has studied everything from the cave formations called stalagmites to lava flowing on the planet Mercury.

Strauss is a planetary geophysicist who studies the magnetic fields of planets and how those fields are recorded in rocks. Electric currents deep within the Earth’s rocky core form a strong magnetic field. (That’s what causes magnets in compass needles to point north.) Understanding how magnetic fields change over time can tell researchers not only about the surface, but also about what’s inside a planet.

At NASA, Strauss is zapping rocks with laser beams to figure out how old they are. This scientist also is developing sensors to detect the moon’s magnetic field.

Like a compass, Strauss has helped guide other researchers too. Strauss identifies as both transgender and non-binary and uses the pronouns “they” and “them.” A transgender person’s identity doesn’t match the gender they were assigned at birth. Instead of male or female, non-binary people can feel like they’re both genders, neither or somewhere in the middle.

At first, Beck Strauss wanted to study English in college. But an exciting lesson about how the continents are moving and a funny professor convinced them to study geology instead. Courtesy of B. Strauss

A few years ago, Strauss began working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. They wanted to join an LGBTQ+ employee club. They figured such a club would help them to make friends and be supported at work. But the club no longer existed. So Strauss formed a new one for employees and ran it for 18 months. The group helped get gender-neutral bathrooms on the campus. And it made NIST more welcoming to a diverse community of scientists.

In this interview, Strauss recalls their experiences and shares advice with Science News for Students. (The interview has been edited for content and readability.)

What inspired you to pursue your career?

Getting to this very specific career has been a long journey. When I was in high school, I wanted to be an English major because I really liked writing and I really liked reading. Then I got to Oberlin College in Ohio and took a couple of English courses. And it turns out I really didn’t like it very much.

But I was taking a class at the time that was a geology class for non-majors. (By that, they mean the class was for people not majoring in geology.) The professor in the class told us how the continents got to where they are today. He described how the Indian subcontinent slammed into the continent of Asia and is continuing to move northward. And this is why the Himalayas are growing.

Explainer: Understanding plate tectonics

I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever heard. So I basically agreed to declare a geology major. I signed up for the intro class. It was taught by a professor who, if science hadn’t worked out, could have been a stand-up comedian. I had a fantastic time in that course. So it’s been a series of decisions where I’ve just kept an eye out for the things that I found surprising and exciting.

How did you get where you are today?

During college I did a summer internship in a lab at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis that was studying rock magnetism. I decided to do that internship because I read the description and it sounded cool. After I did that internship, I decided that I wanted to go to grad school.

Scientists Say: Stalactite and stalagmite

At the University of Minnesota, where I got my PhD, I was in this rock magnetism research lab. I noticed when I went over to the chemistry department that a lot of the professors had stickers on their doors with a rainbow or triangle that said that they were LGBTQ allies. I started hanging out in the chemistry department more because I felt comfortable and welcomed there. I got to talking with a professor who was also interested in magnetism and [we] ended up deciding to collaborate to do some research on stalagmites.

More recently, at that university, I was in the right place at the right time when someone said, “Hey, I have a project that we need someone to do. Are you interested in looking at Mercury?” And I said, “Absolutely!” because I’ve always thought space is cool. I also noticed that planetary science as a community seemed really excited about diversity and really excited about inclusion.

Beck Strauss organizes a collection of granite samples that a student used to study the Chicxulub impact crater that formed when an asteroid or comet hit Mexico about 66 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.Courtesy of B. Strauss

How do you get your best ideas?

I think my best ideas come from two places. One is that I really like having friends who are not scientists because they have really good questions about the science that I do. Sometimes my friends ask questions that they’re afraid are silly. Or a waste of time. But it turns out they’re getting at things that are actually really incredibly important to the kinds of work that we want to do. If I only ever talked to scientists who do the same thing that I do, I wouldn’t hear all of these cool, weird, exciting ideas that come from all different places.

The other is I actually get a lot of ideas from movies and TV shows. I watch a lot of science-fiction movies and a lot of fantasy movies. And there are a lot of ideas about what a world could look like if it didn’t have the same rules that we have. I think that’s a really fun thing to try to apply real-world science to. It can turn from a silly, fun exercise that you do with your friends into a, “Hey, wait a second! What if we actually…?” kind of question.

What’s one of your biggest successes?

Beck Strauss adjusts a magnet power supply with a screwdriver. Strauss has fixed many old lab machines to help them keep revealing important information about magnetic rocks. Courtesy of B. Strauss

Some of the work that I’ve been the most proud of is the work I did as a postdoctoral researcher. I was at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. I worked at the Paleomagnetism Lab in 2016 and 2017. (In paleomagnetism, scientists use old rocks, sediments and other materials to study Earth’s magnetic field.) When I started at that lab, it was basically one big empty room and a second room with some old instruments that needed some love. And when I finished at that lab, it had six or seven totally operational research instruments. By the time I was done, they were spitting out data, basically ready for publication.

Part of my job was working on this one machine that’s nearly as old as I am. I had to figure out a way to get it to start working again in a way that would let not just me, but also the students in the lab, run it from a modern computer. I’m really proud of that work. That’s not only because of how many instruments I was able to get running again. But also because this was a lab that was taking students for the first time. With the instruments I worked on, the very first grad student has been able to present her work at a couple of conferences and has been working on papers to publish in journals.

What’s one of your biggest failures, and how did you get past that?

My philosophy as a scientist is that we need failures in order to learn how to succeed. I do a lot of lab research. And I work with a lot of machines. And sometimes I make mistakes.

I broke almost every instrument in my PhD lab at least once. One is called a SQUID magnetometer. SQUID is an acronym that stands for Superconducting Quantum Interference Device, which sounds like it’s from a sci-fi movie. I also exploded a sample in an oven one time. But I helped fix everything that I broke, and that meant I got to learn how the instruments really worked and what was going on inside them.

It can be really frustrating when you break one of these instruments. They’re really complicated and they’re really expensive. And it makes people really nervous. But every single time I would run into a problem like, “Oh, no, I dropped my sample,” or, “I flipped the wrong switch,” it was an opportunity to learn how to get better at doing my job by figuring out how to fix the mistake.

As part of a weightlifting competition, Beck Strauss pulled a car across a parking lot. In training, Strauss did the same with a truck.Suzanne Witt

What do you do in your spare time?

I have two main hobbies right now. One hobby is that I make art: I draw and make collages. And I got to show my art in an art show this summer for the very first time, which was really cool. I really like scientific illustration. This is art focused on creating useful depictions of things like acorns and shells and hands and things that you find in the real world.

My other hobby is that in the spring of 2019 I got into weightlifting, which is not a sentence that I ever expected myself to say. But I have a friend who is a chemical engineer. She posted a video on social media of her pulling a truck. She said, “You know, I bet you could pull a truck if you wanted to.” I thought she was kidding. But it turns out she was right. So this past October, I competed in an all-gender competition, and I pulled a pickup truck across the parking lot.

What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you were younger?

The two pieces of advice that I always give are, number one: It’s OK to make choices about your career based on what feels good. By that I mean things like, it’s OK to decide who you want to collaborate with because they’re fun to work with or because you feel comfortable around them. It’s OK to decide what kind of science you want to do because it lets you go to the places you want to go.

The other one that I would tell myself is: Run toward the things that you are nervous about loving. If you are so excited about something that it scares you, you’re probably still going to be excited about it a decade later.

This Q&A is part of a series exploring the many paths to a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It has been made possible with generous support from Arconic Foundation.

Weight lifting is this planetary scientist’s pastime published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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MIRANDA'S REBELLION( This is an excellent article from the perspective of a southern white evangelical woman in the deeply conservative south where most of the white population are 'MAGA' supporters. I could identify with her and have tremendous empathy for Miranda. PLEASE read and share, it's well worth the time.)

By Stephanie McCrummen | Published

Feb 29 at 8:48 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted March 01, 2020 |

It was Sunday, the day that Miranda Murphey always took long hikes in the woods with her best friend. She looked forward to them, and when she heard Liz pulling up the long gravel driveway, she came downstairs and out through the garage, past the deer heads on the wall, the rifles in the gun safe and all the things that led her to call the home she shared with her husband “manly land.” Phillip Murphey was working on a truck outside.

“Hey, Liz,” he said, as Elizabeth Hahn got out of her car.

“Hey,” she said to Miranda’s husband.

In the unfolding life of Miranda Murphey that afternoon, any number of people claimed to know her best — Republicans, Democrats, presidential candidates and all the strategists and pollsters looking to her as a key to winning one of the most consequential elections in recent American memory. But none were more certain they knew Miranda than the two people watching her toss her hiking gear in the car and pull her long blond hair into a ponytail.

“Tame the mane,” Phillip said, watching his wife of 12 years.

“Okay, babe — see you later,” Miranda said to him, and soon she and Liz were heading down a two-lane road on the suburban fringe of Augusta, Ga., where Miranda had grown up absorbing the conservative values that had led her to vote Republican in every presidential election except the last one, when the rise of Donald Trump had forced her into a reckoning that often took the form of conversations with Liz on Sundays like these.

“Was it raining last time?” Liz said now, looking out at the blue sky.

“No, it was cold though,” Miranda said.

They passed farm fields and a sign that read “Does your life please God?” They passed the church Miranda no longer attended, a subdivision where her pro-Trump in-laws lived, and a gas station where a man usually stood selling President Trump flags and posters of Trump as Rambo holding an M-60 rifle. This was suburban Augusta: mostly white, mostly evangelical, mostly Trump. The rest was Target, good schools and prayer groups at Panera.

Miranda played some music from her phone. Randy Travis, Weezer, Tupac, and soon, she and Liz were pulling into the empty parking lot alongside the woods where they’d talked their way through the past three years since Trump’s election. They stood at the edge of the pines, deciding on a path they had named the Robert Frost, after the meditative poet. Miranda adjusted her backpack; Liz got her water bottle.

“You ready?” said Liz.

“Yep,” said Miranda.

*****

She is 39, a high school English teacher with a PhD and part of a voting demographic whose rebellion could upend the political map of the country: not just suburban women, not just white suburban women, but white suburban women in the South, whose loyalty Trump will need to remain in power.

It is the kind of loyalty that has always been expected of white Southern women, who have long played a role as allies of the status quo. This was true during the days of slavery, then the days of segregation, and held true when the women’s rights movement arrived and white Southern women joined the conservative movement instead, rallying to the slogan, “Stop Taking Our Privileges.” In all the decades that followed, it has been the votes of white Southern women that have defined and shored up the modern Republican Party.

Black women and Latino women consistently deliver huge margins to Democrats. And in the 2016 election, 52 percent of white women outside of the South voted for Hillary Clinton, according to a study by the University of Arkansas’ Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society.

It is white women in the Deep South who have remained the loyalists, the research showed, giving Trump 64 percent of their vote in 2016, a figure that did not include Miranda Murphey, who had first started reevaluating her politics after the election of Barack Obama, even though she had voted Republican.

“It was all the comments I kept hearing, like, ‘Change the channel, I don’t want to see that black face,’ ” she said. “It was always that he was black, not that he was liberal, not that there was a problem with some policy. I always thought being a Republican meant supporting the military and lower taxes, not being racist and ignorant.”

Then came Trump, who Miranda found so morally repugnant that for the first time in her voting life she wrote in the name of the Libertarian Party candidate and went to bed expecting that good and decent conservatives would do the same. She woke up realizing she was wrong. Church members had voted for Trump. Her parents had gone for Trump. Phillip: Trump.

And then came Liz, a new English teacher in her district who was outspoken and had a sticker on her cellphone with an image of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the word “Dissent.” She was not like anyone Miranda had met before, a Republican who’d become a Democrat and who described her Trump-era self as a “full-on rage machine.”

Miranda was not sure how to describe herself anymore, other than at odds with a world she thought she knew, in an America that felt more fragile than ever, and now, a mile into the woods with Liz, that is what she began talking about.

“You don’t find too many marriages around here where the husband is one way politically and the wife is another,” Miranda said.

“Living outside expectations is like running a marathon — it’s like being exhausted all the time because you have to work so hard,” Liz said.

They trudged through damp leaves, and Miranda brought up a recent dinner with a relative who’d said that Trump should just “drop a bomb on the entire Middle East” and how hard it was for her to remain polite.

“It’s those kinds of conversations. I’m looking around thinking, ‘Am I the only one who thinks this is not okay?’ ” Miranda said.

“You just want to scream!” Liz said. She brought up a confrontation she’d had at school, over a white speaker who she felt was unfairly criticizing black activists. “I was like, ‘Oh hell no.’ But it’s painful not to fit in. There’s one woman I know at school, it’s clear she questions things, but she is still in captivity.”

Miranda listened. She was by now used to how Liz talked. Women in bondage, the white male establishment. Liz, the daughter of a minister, now described the evangelical church as a “fear-based cult permanently intertwined with a patriarchal power system.”

Miranda was surprised by how often she found herself seeing what Liz meant. She had come around to Liz’s view that being pro-choice did not mean being pro-abortion, for instance. She had stopped attending church partly because her Sunday school had turned into one long baby shower and she did not have children, and partly because of the day a teacher had gone on a rant about the growing Muslim population.

“The message to me was, ‘They’re here to out-populate us,’ ” Miranda said now. “I took it as: ‘Wow, I guess I’m not doing my job having white children to add to the fight.’ ”

“It’s like this way of life is threatened,” said Liz. “This white way of life.”

They stopped for a moment for water, and Miranda thought about that. She thought about how her husband’s friend had kidded her about her friendship with Liz, and kidded Liz about the bumper stickers on her car — “Tolerance” and “Coexist” and “READ” — and how she had laughed it off until one day it wasn’t funny anymore.

“Exactly which one of those do you disagree with?” Miranda had said sharply.

“It’s like they’re wondering, ‘Are you changing?’” she told Liz now. “It’s a subconscious thing of, ‘What’s next?’ Meaning, if my mind can be changed, what else could happen?”

*****

She didn’t enjoy making people feel uncomfortable.

“You were always a rule follower,” Miranda’s mother was reminding her one day when they were having lunch, as they did most weekends at a place near where she had grown up.

Her father was a retired drill sergeant. Her mother was a special-education teacher who had taught Miranda what she considered the most important lesson of her life: to always try to understand someone else’s perspective, even if that person was antagonistic, even if Miranda herself was at the heart of the conflict.

“Especially if you are,” her mom said as they finished lunch.

She had gone to public schools, joined the ROTC and earned the nickname “Commando Barbie” for her ability to cross a rope bridge and dreams of becoming a military intelligence officer, which asthma cut short. She went to college at Georgia Southern, where she was ambitious and studious and earned a new nickname, “Bombshell,” which is what Phillip called her when they first met in a geology class. As she tells the story, the teacher asked a question, Miranda answered wrong, and everyone in the class laughed — except Phillip.

“He was the only one,” Miranda said.

He was from a prominent Augusta family whose parents had once lived in a wealthy Augusta neighborhood called the Hill, before moving to a house with a swimming pool in a subdivision called Camelot. They had cocktail hour every afternoon and tickets to the Masters golf tournament many springs. His mother was the sort of Southern woman who was aghast when Miranda wore a skirt that she deemed too short to a reception at the Pinnacle Club, one of Augusta’s elite venues. Miranda was by then the sort of woman who called the Pinnacle Club the Pineapple Club; she could ridicule Southern pretensions even as she conceded to them.

The wedding was beautiful. Black tuxedos, red roses, a Southern Baptist church. Miranda relented when the preacher insisted on “obey” in the vows, which Phillip had laughed off, saying he was “definitely not in charge” of Miranda, and this was why she had chosen him.

He did not chafe at her independence. He never complained when she decided to pursue her doctorate instead of having children. Never asked where his dinner was. He was kind to her older sister, who was born with mental disabilities, and who Miranda referred to as “my heart” and “my girl” with an air of fierce protectiveness.

They settled into life together in the house at the end of the long, pine-shaded driveway. Phillip had his own construction business. Miranda felt a sense of deep satisfaction teaching literature to students including some so poor their shoes flapped open, and for 12 years the assumption had been that their days together were based upon shared values, right up until the arrival of Trump. For the first time, Miranda felt what she described as “resistance.”

They used to talk about everything, and now Miranda began avoiding politics. They used to watch Fox News together, and now Miranda was recording the Democratic presidential debates to watch when Phillip wasn’t around. They used to attend church together and now Phillip went alone to a men’s prayer group each Sunday, and Miranda and Liz went for their walks in the woods. Her interior life was changing; their exterior life was the same.

“Hey babe, I was going to pick up Olive Garden,” she would say driving home.

“Sounds good,” he would say.

“Love you,” she would say.

“Love you,” he would say.

Phillip listened to Rush Limbaugh at work. Miranda had been rereading “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the dystopian Margaret Atwood novel about a near-future America in which women are subjugated in a theocratic, patriarchal state, and thinking that the reason it was so frightening was that “there wasn’t some cataclysm that changed everything.”

“It all started with a return to conservative values, with a rejection of what the world is, and a return to what they thought the world used to be,” she said.

Phillip’s friends had been the same since high school. Hers had expanded to include a group of female teachers that Liz called “the coven,” who often met at Liz’s house to drink wine, and talk about school and how stifling life could be in suburban Augusta.

“Love you,” Phillip said, dropping Miranda off on one of these evenings, pausing for a moment to wave at a group of women he barely knew.

“Love you,” Miranda said, and the wine was poured.

They talked about codependent female characters in movies, which somehow led to a conversation about the actor Tom Hiddleston, and Liz played a recording of him reading a racy E.E. Cummings poem.

“Y’all,” said Miranda. “I’m going to have to take a shower.”

There was more wine, and they talked about the night they all went to a downtown Augusta club to see a fellow teacher who moonlighted in a burlesque troop called Dirty South. She had performed as Marie Antoinette and smashed cake all over her body.

“Liz kept saying, ‘Look at Miranda’s face!’ ” one of the teachers said now.

“I kept pouring wine for Miranda,” Liz said. “I joked that she was out of her comfort zone, but actually it was me — I still have that evangelical Christian girl in there.”

“I would just like to clarify,” Miranda said. “I did not go to a strip club. I went to a burlesque performance.”

She went along with the jokes but at times wondered where all this was going.

More wine, and they talked about another burlesque show based on Disney princesses, called Distease, and not long after that Miranda decided it was late, and headed home.

***

When it was Sunday again, she and Liz went hiking.

It had rained the night before, and now they crossed over flooded gullies and fallen limbs.

They talked about what it meant that Amy Klobuchar’s voice seemed shaky in the last Democratic debate. They talked about a short story they’d both read, in which a woman finds out her husband has died, feels devastated, then exhilarated as she realizes she is finally free, then finds out her husband actually survived, and then dies.

“All the promise of life without him,” Liz sighed.

“Yeah,” Miranda said, and soon the conversation trailed off as Miranda walked ahead.

They had talked about so many things in three years, including some things they’d hardly told anyone else.

Miranda had told Liz that she felt she’d never really fit the mold of what a woman was expected to be in Augusta. About her internal debate over having children. About men she dated before Phillip, including an African American man, and how she had gotten spit on when they were in public. She had told Liz about the minister who’d slid his foot up her skirt and then warned her to keep her mouth shut about it. She had told her about a time before that, when she had been sexually assaulted by a man when she was 8 years old, how she did not want to be defined by that, and how she still walked across parking lots with keys in her fist like a knife. She’d told Liz how all that had rolled into her feelings about the president, and how hard it was keeping those feelings to herself when she was around Phillip, his friends and his family, and how she wondered if that made her a strong, understanding woman or an enabler of Trump.

Liz had listened. She had told Miranda about growing up in a strict evangelical Christian home believing that being anything other than a dutiful wife upholding conservative values would lead to eternity in hell, and how the tension between the person she was expected to be and what she was had made her suicidal at one point.

She had told Miranda about her first marriage to a conservative Christian man with whom she had two kids and “this cute little family,” and how it started falling apart when she began reading Dostoyevsky, pursuing a teaching career, making different friends, having different thoughts, and how “this internal voice got louder and louder saying, ‘this is not a role I can play anymore’ ” until she finally got a divorce, after which she felt guilty for years.

She had told Miranda about how the rise of Trump had forced her not only to clarify her values but to start expressing them, and what she felt that expression had cost her. Her father, a Trump supporter, wrote her out of his will. Her oldest son, a Trump supporter, left Augusta to live with her ex-husband, a Trump supporter. Her pastor had avoided her when she asked to have a meeting about her moral problems with Trump, a situation that culminated on the Sunday before the election, when he all but exhorted the congregation to vote for Trump. Liz was in the choir then, still feeling guilty and afraid in some corner of her old mind, and now she was supposed to stand up in front of the church and sing “God Bless America.” Only when the music started, she found herself shaking with anger. She raised the microphone but instead of singing she looked out at the faces of a few people she knew had the same unspoken reservations she did, then put the microphone down and walked out.

She had told Miranda how unimaginable this new life of hers had once seemed. Her new husband was a libertarian from Delaware who took her to death metal concerts. She joined an Episcopal church. She had become chair of the county Democratic Party, gone to the first Women’s March in Washington, and although she was sure that this had cost her a teaching contract at a private Christian school, she had decided her freedom was worth it.

She told Miranda what she told herself: “I will not live in fear anymore. I am not going to be that person in the room anymore that hides who I am so I don’t have to be uncomfortable or people around me don’t have to feel uncomfortable.”

Miranda had listened. She admired Liz’s bravery, even if she was not sure whether she wanted to follow her example into the unknown, and she was thinking about all this as they hiked deeper into the pines. They stopped to catch their breath.

“Should we keep going?” Liz said.

*****

At times, Liz felt Miranda was somehow hiding from her true self. She wondered if she was pushing Miranda too far, such as when she asked her to walk with the Democrats in the county Christmas parade.

When Miranda declined, Liz decided to let it go, and on a bright afternoon lined up for the parade with the only other people in the county who said yes: an African American woman, a married couple, an Indian American man, a retiree from Nebraska, a gay woman, a 12-year-old transgender boy and his nervous father who kept saying, “It’ll be fine, it’ll be just fine.”

They held up the blue banner of the Democratic Party and when Miss Columbia County Fair gave the sign, headed toward the waiting throngs lining both sides of a two-mile route.

“Merry Christmas!” Liz began, waving to the crowd.

“Booo!” yelled a man in a Santa hat. “Booo!”

“Snowflakes!” yelled a woman in a plaid shawl next to him.

Liz kept waving and smiling.

“MAGA! God Bless! Make America great again!” yelled a man in a visor stamped with an American flag.

“Bunch of retards,” said a man under his breath.

Another raised his right arm straight in front of him, palm down, fingers stiff.

“Troll! Troll!” yelled a man in a fleece vest.

“Is that a jackass on your shirt?” said a man cradling a baby, and through it all, Liz kept smiling, and kept waving, and meanwhile, Miranda was home with Phillip.

She was grading papers; he was working outside, and it was the kind of quiet and predictable day that gave Phillip the feeling of contentment he prized.

“It’s just — easy,” was how he described his relationship with Miranda.

They’d been through so much together — her graduate school, his new business, the deaths of his parents, serious illnesses, a thousand good times — and of all the things he was sure of in his life, he was surest of Miranda.

“I know I didn’t marry a traditional woman,” he said. “She’s not Southern Living. She’s very career-oriented. She’s not lazy. She’s a worker. She’s a go-getter. I tell her all the time, ‘Miranda, you are determined.’ ”

He accepted her, and he knew she accepted him, as he had always been accepted as the favorite son of parents he admired and never wished to disappoint. He had been a Boy Scout. He had never had a curfew because he never got in trouble. He had never lived anywhere but Columbia County, Ga., except for college and a brief stint after, which left him so out of sorts that he moved back into his boyhood room and saved money until he and Miranda married. He had never touched alcohol because he didn’t want to like it. He had become a man who said of Miranda, “She’s the only girl I ever kissed.”

“I didn’t know I had any feelings until I met Miranda,” Phillip said.

Besides her, his world had been a world of men. He kept the deer heads on the garage wall because they reminded him of some of the best times of his life hunting with his father, his brothers, his friends and the bonds they formed then. He went to the Sunday men’s group at the Baptist church and prayed the prayers of men who wished to be “godly,” by which Phillip meant “honest” and “responsible,” the sort of man a neighbor could call if a limb fell on his driveway and he needed help removing it. He kept guns not just because he liked to hunt but because he felt that being a responsible man meant protecting his family, and protecting his America from a rogue government if things came to that.

“All it takes is for the wrong guy to get in there,” he said. “I want to be in control. I don’t want to be defenseless.”

He preferred an America that left him alone: one where government was small, gun rights protected and borders secure, all of which he had felt was threatened during the presidency of Barack Obama, and all of which he felt was restored by the election of Donald Trump.

“I feel like I got somebody on my team,” Phillip said. “Someone to look out for me in the world. I feel I have someone on my side, helping me look out for the safety of my family.”

He knew that Miranda had some issues with Trump’s behavior.

“She finds Trump sometimes a little off-putting with his personality,” he said. “She does get kind of like, ‘I wish he wouldn’t say that.’ But I’m more of a results guy. I’m not as concerned about his brash statements as Miranda. I think he’s probably grown a lot as a man in a good way. I see him as being a gracious man.”

He thought about why he and Miranda might see things differently.

“She tends to run on emotion,” he said. “Not to make a sexist statement, but a lot of women do. I run more on logic. I think that balances us well.”

He was not worried about Miranda’s worries about Trump, Miranda’s friendship with Liz, or whatever they were talking about in the woods.

“As long as she and Miranda get along, I’m happy with it,” Phillip said.

And so on another Sunday, he watched Miranda heading off to hike with Liz, and he watched her come home later in the evening, when he was outside under a carport, showing his nephew how to gut a deer carcass.

“Hey Miranda!” he called out to her across the yard. “What’s the best part of a deer?”

It was dark, and she looked at him for a moment under the light.

Things Miranda had never told Phillip:

That she thought Trump was racist, and when he questioned the legitimacy of the first black president, she thought about her black students and how wrong it was to rob them of pride.

That she thought Trump was cruel, and when he mocked a reporter with disabilities, she felt the same surge of blind rage she had once felt when a boy called her sister a “retard.”

She thought Trump was immoral, and when she heard Christians defending him, she wanted to say, “How? How do we worship the same God? There are so many things that we as human beings should not condone, should not excuse.”

She had told Phillip about being sexually assaulted by a man when she was 8 years old, but she had not told him that when she heard Trump boasting about how he could kiss women “without even asking” and “grab them by the p---y,” he had reminded her of the man who had grabbed her when she was walking to school, and the feeling of hands forcing themselves on her, and the feeling of struggling to break free, and the feeling of running for her life, and of “exactly that fear, that helplessness,” and that when Trump got elected, she felt none of that mattering.

She had not told Phillip that when she saw Trump smiling on a screen in her living room, she felt physically ill. That she found him “revolting” and “vulgar.” That Trump was the opposite of everything she had always believed her husband to be: decent, honorable, Christian, the sort of man who would find Trump offensive.

She had not told Phillip what she wanted from him: “I want to hear him say, ‘The way he talks about women is not okay. The way he talks, period, is not okay.’ ”

She had not told him what she wanted to say to him and all Southern men who believed in some chivalrous ideal: “I need you to stand up for me.”

She had not told him any of those things because she was afraid to hear what he might say back, and what that might reveal, so when Phillip asked about the deer, she answered as the woman he knew her to be.

“The backstrap!” she yelled across the yard.

***

“I tell you, it was vastly different from the Christmas parade,” Liz was saying. She and Miranda were having dinner, and Liz had just gotten back from walking in the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in downtown Augusta.

“I think we were the only white people there,” she continued. “People were shouting ‘Democrats, woo!�� A woman yelled ‘Dump Trump!’ and I’m like, ‘Get that man out of the White House! Woo!’ ”

“Really?” Miranda said.

“Yeah,” said Liz. “I’m telling you, it was great. This woman was like, ‘I love your shoes! You look so cute out here today!’ I’m telling you, I was beloved.”

“That’s funny,” Miranda said.

“Yes, I was beloved for my politics,” said Liz, and as their dinner went on, they drank sangria and talked about work and books, and Miranda told a story about her grunge music period, confirming Liz’s view of her as a closet rebel. They talked about how Liz always positioned her phone when she met with parents, so they wouldn’t see her Ruth Bader Ginsburg sticker, and about the most recent Democratic debate and the candidate Miranda would vote for — Warren, probably; Buttigieg, definitely; Sanders, maybe; Klobuchar, interesting; Biden, sure — and they continued talking, seeming in harmony about all of it, right up until Miranda began taking issue with a candidate’s position on gun control, which struck her as too extreme, and as she continued, she noticed Liz’s face changing.

She stopped herself.

“I’m not making you mad, am I?” Miranda asked.

There was a pause.

“No,” Liz said. “You’ll never make me mad.”

Later, on her way home, Miranda was still thinking about the pause.

It was dark, and she passed the empty parking lots of strip malls, the neon signs of chain restaurants and the quiet of so many subdivisions on a Sunday night in a place where there were so many expectations of a woman like her.

Maybe Liz was mad at her, she thought. Maybe Liz thought she wasn’t liberated enough, or brave enough. Maybe she was disappointed.

And what about Phillip? If she finally told him what she thought about Trump, maybe he would feel she was judging him. Maybe he would judge her. Maybe he would think she was “crazy” and “off the deep end.” Maybe he would not understand at all, and then what?

She looked out the window at a place that had felt so familiar for so long, and which now looked so different, so accepting of cruelty and racism and vulgarity. She exited the highway and drove along the two-lane, a white, Southern, suburban woman who was not accepting of that. She was lost to Trump, lost to a Republican Party still embracing him, and for the first time in her life, she was thinking not about what was expected of her, but what she expected of herself.

The inner thoughts of Miranda Murphey about Miranda Murphey:

“I struggle with this,” she said.

She passed the familiar fields, and the church lit up in the dark, and soon she was turning onto the long gravel driveway.

“So,” she said, not finishing.

She pulled up the little hill and glanced at the yard.

“One truck, two trucks,” she counted.

A light was on upstairs.

“Phillip’s home,” she said.

*****

#u.s. news #politics #president donald trump #politics and government #trump scandals #trumpism #republican politics #donald trump #us politics #maga cult #maga #women's rights #women's health #Women's issues

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liliannorman · 5 years ago

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An accident didn’t stop this geologist from doing field work

A career in geology often involves hiking boots or a hard hat. Sometimes both. A geologist often spends at least part of her time in “the field,” as opposed to in the lab. And that field work is one of the things Anita Marshall loves most about geology. She wanted to hike across mountains and climb rock walls — all while doing science. But that work suddenly got much harder when she was in graduate school. A drunk driver hit her while she was unloading her pickup truck.

Marshall needed six surgeries and used a wheelchair for about a year. Then she had to learn to walk again. She still has nerve damage and other effects. Yet she didn’t let that stop her from becoming a geologist. Now, at Florida State University in Gainesville, she works on ways to help others with physical disabilities learn about geology.

Marshall, a member of the Choctaw Nation, has taken some dramatic turns along the way. She recently shared her experiences and advice with Science News for Students. (This interview has been edited for content and readability.)

What inspired you to pursue your career?

When I started college, I wanted to be a high school band instructor. Then I took an intro-to-geology class. I had loved a similar class in high school. One weekend, it came down to learning how to play the clarinet or hiking with the geology class. I chose to go hiking. And I’ve never looked back. I changed my major to Earth science. After that I worked on my master’s degree.

Then a drunk driver hit me.

Until then, all the work for my graduate-research project had been physically intensive. My graduate advisor asked if I wanted to do a computer-based project instead. But I wanted to finish.

I had been using GPS (global positioning system) equipment to track how the ground was sinking in part of eastern Arkansas. Farmers were rapidly pumping out groundwater there. My project was the first to measure that change on the ground surface. My advisor said, “OK, we’ll figure out how to make the rest of the project work.” And we did. I used a walker to help me get as far as I could in the field. My sister and my dad went the rest of the way. They helped get the data I needed to finish. And I graduated a year behind schedule.

Originally my passion was to be a field geologist. But I felt I couldn’t do that after my accident. Instead, I taught in a community college for seven years. I loved it. But I missed doing research and tackling tough science questions.

A video I used in class showed geologist Stanley Williams of the University of Arizona. He was badly hurt in a volcanic eruption. Some of his injuries were similar to mine. And he still got out into the field. Seeing that gave me the push I needed to go back to school.

How did you get where you are today?

I started out studying volcanoes for my PhD. But for someone with limited mobility, hiking a volcano is very difficult. I was going to put a chapter in my final research paper about making field work more accessible. The same week I put that in my outline, I learned about a research project along the same lines. The researchers were looking for college-level geology students with disabilities. I emailed them and asked if I could work on the research as a grad student. They said yes. This completely turned my whole career around.

Anita Marshall hasn’t let a physical disability keep her from doing field research in geology. Here she is at the crater rim of the Masaya volcano in Nicaragua. “The clouds are gases coming out of the lava lake about 500 feet down,” she says.Christine Downs

That GEOPATH project field-tested ways to let college students with disabilities take part in field work. We took students to places like western Ireland in the United Kingdom, northern Arizona and Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. That project has ended. And now I’m continuing to work in that area. I’m starting a lending library of technology tools to make field work more accessible. Students with disabilities will be able to borrow drones (robotic aircraft), iPads, GoPros and more.

How do you get your best ideas?

Instead of seeing each project as starting from scratch, I like to see them as building blocks. When you complete a big project, there’s always some need or some question that wasn’t answered. That is always the best place to start for your next project.

For example, the GEOPATH project only targeted people who are mobility limited. There are so many other types of disabilities. In future projects, I’m looking at how to throw the net even wider and help even more people learn about geology.

What’s one of your biggest successes?

Finishing my PhD. It was very difficult. A lot of it had to do with confronting social barriers — people who felt like I didn’t belong there. There were people who made it clear to me that I was not welcome, that if I couldn’t keep up physically, I was no kind of geologist.

One time I was out in the field and was tired. As I sat on a rock, students walked past. “I don’t even know why she bothers,” one of them said. That moment was sort of a game changer for me. After that trip, I thought, there’s got to be a better way of doing this. We can’t keep this up, this idea that if you’re not some hale-and-hearty Indiana Jones type, you can’t be a geologist. It just doesn’t make sense.

youtube

Anita Marshall filmed and narrated this video about testing new ways to help people with physical disabilities do field work in Ireland. She worked on the project as a graduate student.

I felt really alone on that rock in the middle of nowhere while people were making fun of me for being there. It turned out I wasn’t alone. There is a huge unmet need for finding ways so that everybody who wants to be a geology student and who wants to study the Earth can do so.

What’s one of your biggest failures, and how did you get past that?

One time on the GEOPATH project, we set up little Wi-Fi hot spots out in the field. The idea was that everyone could talk to each other just like you would on a cell phone. So, students with limited mobility could stay in touch with everyone else. It colossally failed. It just didn’t work at all. And the students felt very left out.

We regrouped the next day and got the system to work really well. But I take those failures really hard, because they don’t just affect me. They affect the students, the ones who deserve to be part of what’s going on.

In research science, you have to learn to change your mentality and look at all these failures not as something you failed at, but just as part of the process of science.

What do you do in your spare time?

My first love is photography. There’s nothing more relaxing to me than a great photography session, either landscape photography or taking portraits.

I do a lot of crafts, too. Usually it has to do with figuring out ways to use rocks in something, because you come back from field trips with an awful lot of them. I take little rocks and wrap them with wire and make necklace pendants and other jewelry.

Anita Marshall and her husband Ed pose as happy campers for a National Parks-inspired Halloween costume contest. Their one-eyed dog Cooper was a “Bark Ranger.”Courtesy of A. Marshall

My husband and I like to cook together. I’m really good at stir-fry. And we have a one-eyed basset hound. Cooper is amazing — and amazingly spoiled.

What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you were younger?

Find mentors or people you look up to who want to make you the best version of yourself, and not a miniature version of them.

My academic career really took off when I stopped trying to make myself fit that mold that people told me geologists fit into. I mean, I was hurting myself trying to pretend I didn’t have a disability. I was physically causing myself harm trying to fit in. And I wish somebody had sat down with younger me and said, “Don’t do that. No part of this is a good idea.” You have to find a way to make your own path.

Also, when we talk about inclusion of people with disabilities in science, this is not a new thing. There are scientists doing great work with all kinds of disabilities. They had to overcome enormous hurdles. My colleagues and I are trying to break down some of those hurdles and make it easier for everybody to do that kind of work. But people with disabilities have been contributing to science for a long time.

This Q&A is part of a series exploring the many paths to a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It has been made possible with generous support from Arconic Foundation.

An accident didn’t stop this geologist from doing field work published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

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