#whether that means getting a job or trying to find a phd program i don't know

[starrycereal]

is now a bad time to mention that i currently hate my thesis, the semester i'm supposed to be actually sitting down and writing it?

[jyajumin]

A first post! My, oh my. Had some thoughts about being in Academia and Industry at once, every day is a battle of ambition and reality. It's basically me being sad about not being able to do a PhD lmao

I've been doing a lot of research (well, very relatively speaking) about PhD programs lately. I think i'd both love and hate it, and I feel that realistically I wouldn't be able to do one unless I suddenly lost my job and I found myself having no income and a lot of free time. I'd make half of what I do now as a PhD student, have much less time, and much more stress. In all, it's a terrible financial and lifestyle choice. I could do the research without doing a PhD, but yet I feel like the PhD would mean something. I'm a yapper, but I want to make sense. But maybe I just don't like being gainsaid and I feel like this would give me ammo in arguments with myself :P

I'm obviously conflicted about whether or not I really want to do a program. I've been warned not to if I love my job, which I do. If I could do both at the same time, or better yet have the blessing of my company to do both (maybe even have them fund it, in a blissfully perfect world), I'd probably be stressed out but also over the moon. When I think about what I'd concretely research, what kind of knowledge I'd like to "push the bounds of" (the goal of a PhD dissertation being original research that "pushes the bounds of human knowledge through thorough independent research that is in discussion with history of the discussion of the discipline until that point), I can't help but feel that it would always be informed by the work that I do. Therefore, I would find it difficult to do that PhD scholarly work without brushing up against it at work first. As an MA student, although my literature courses often have no direct correlation to what I do, I am constantly trying to find those through-lines that connect the two areas. Informed approaches, intentional thought. That's what I'd like to be the bedrock of my work.

Where could I even hope to do such a thing? My intersection of scholarship history is kind of niche, and who could advise me especially if I want to focus on translation and games! You usually have to move for PhDs, and while I was suggested to apply to <insert very prestigious R1 school 6 hours away here> and it'd be a pretty big flex to say that I got a PhD from there, realistically I can't swing it. Even if I got accepted and flew in every time I had to be on campus, it's really not feasible considering the course commitment required. That leaves me with local universities, and I can really only think of two reputable institutions that have faculty in an area that I could probably make work.

But as long as I'm talking of ideals, I don't think I'm at the ability I need to be yet linguistically. My Japanese isn't bad but I'm not satisfied with it (a feeling I think will only increase as my English skills improve and my ability to express myself in Japanese decreases relatively by comparison), and I need to get a third language to a certain proficiency to satisfy entry requirements for most(?) comp lit programs. Spanish is likely the closest of the ones I know, but I don't see myself doing a lot of English-Japanese-Spanish work. If I had a few years to dedicate to Korean (which I'm barely starting), I feel like I could get somewhere, though I doubt close enough. Same with Vietnamese. I wish my Japanese courses were 3 units in undergrad; I could have fit so many more language courses in (or graduated in 4 instead of 6). I fear I just don't have the chops, even if I have a "noble" drive—but don't all academics.

Don't even get me started on family stuff. PhD work is rough on women, more so on women with family. And I would like a family. I don't want to wait forever. I don't want to count on their support if I were in a PhD program, I want to be there for the tot's milestones.

I wish academia wasn't the way it is. I generally feel lucky and blessed, which may be some fortunate blend of optimism and naïveté, but I think I'd need some cosmic alignment of stars for this to come together. I dislike compromising on my personal goals, but some things I'll just have to learn to accept... :(

If anyone's willing to fund me tens of thousands a year to pursue a degree very slowly, please let me know. lol

[random2908]

The thing to bear in mind is that while the NIF isn't any good at making power, it's brilliant at providing a situation close enough to an H bomb going off that you can validate your numerical models against it. It's a greenwashed MIC facility.

This is a take I've occasionally heard before. I have a lot of thoughts about it, and about the slightly tangential issue of funding and intellectual purity.

Yes, you're right. The NIF has been involved in H-bomb stuff in the past and probably will be again in the future. Let's get that out on the table where we can all see it first.

But that doesn't mean that that's what this project is about, necessarily. And even if it is, that doesn't mean that the results are unusable.

Because you'd be hard-pressed to find any physics lab in the entire US that you couldn't call a military-industrial complex facility in some capacity. My doctorate was basic experimental physics, just pushing knowledge forward, trying to get journal publications--typical university stuff. The professor wasn't even a US citizen! And neither were about 1/4 of the students. Nevertheless, the lab was funded by an NSF grant, an Air Force grant, an Army grant, and a Department of Energy grant. That's half military funding. Which of those paid your tuition and stipend depended on which project you were on and whether you were a US citizen, but any one of them might be buying your experimental equipment. For that matter, professors needed to get military money because they were only allowed to have one NSF grant at a time, and one grant can only support about two graduate students--you couldn't even hope to get tenure at an R1 school with only two graduate students.

Hell, my dad's PhD on, like, frog embryology was entirely funded by the Army back in the 1970s/80s. Why? The stated reason was that during the Cold War they had a program to pay for as many US citizens to get PhDs in science and science-adjacent fields as possible, and they couldn't care less what those people were actually researching. Who knows what they actually wanted, although I think they funded my dad before even knowing what he'd be studying. But in any case, there wasn't any obvious military use to my dad's research.

At my last job, the company's revenue came from NSF, various defense agencies, a major private defense contractor, and then maybe like 0.5% our own sales since we were just a startup. In total I think about 80-90% of our revenue came from the Department of Defense, one way or another; we were unambiguously MIC. But we were making safety-testing equipment and communications equipment. Of course the military cares about both those things, but it's not as though we had an exclusivity contract with them, and we were making it with civilian customers in mind.

So, yeah, nearly all science in the US exists within the MIC. And the reason for that is that Congress allocates a hell of a lot more money to the military than to science. The vast, vast majority of science, worldwide, is government-funded, even in private industry. (Maybe this is less true in pharma? I really don't know, but certainly more of it is government-funded than they like to let on.) So, in the US, if you want to do anything science-related--commercial or academic--sooner or later you're going to talking to the military.

But in the end, that means you can't necessarily judge science from where its funding is coming from. When I was getting my PhD, my attitude was, if the Air Force was paying for me and my lab partner to go to school, study basic science, and publish in academic journals--great! That was money they were spending on completely innocent work and the advancement of human knowledge instead of on drones. Congress may have misallocated the money by giving it to the DoD in the first place, but here it is, coming back to entirely civilian endeavors. That's a win, as far as I'm concerned.

It's different at the NIF because they do have a history of genuine weapons research. I absolutely agree with that, you can't say it's a fully innocent project. But given how entangled (no pun intended) literally all physics research is with the MIC--due entirely to Congressional funding priorities--I personally think we should take the win when there are potential civilian applications.

Also, write to Congress about allocating more science funding! Every little bit of extra funding helps in disentangling basic science from the MIC.

[girlinthespecialeconomiczone]

the box itself is an afterthought, cuban cigar label describes its intended contents and yellowing paper blend cardboard is easy, yields itself to open and close, the opposite of a lock. The real contents, at first glance: a piece of bright green cardstock with "Good Job Y" inscribed in a child's handwriting, a chanel lipstick, several ziplock bags containing a single tooth each, some accompanied by more paper with child's handwriting, an altoids tin sharpied with the words "Mia's Hair," 5-10 loose teeth, skittering across the bottom of the box like rocks in the surf or compact, frightened arachnids. At second glance, several christmas wishlists belonging to child, the chanel lipstick is in fact a travel-size perfume, the altoid tin does contain my hair, two almost identical notes written on separate occasions expressing love for my mother -child handwriting- then what appears to be some kind of personal ad, small pink and rectangular, reading: 

"YOUR STORY/ HAS TOUCHED MY HEART / NEVER BEFORE HAVE I MET ANYONE WITH / MORE, TROUBLES THAN YOU HAVE. PLEASE / ACCEPT THIS EXPRESSION OF MY SINCERE/ SYMPATHY. 

NOW FUCK OFF AND QUIT BOTHERING ME."

then several newspaper clippings, including an obituary for someone with my father's full name, they were born within a few years of each other and he died just a county over. 

A dilbert strip about getting catfished by a supermodel.

Then, a headline that reads "Police: Wife ran down husband with vehicle," and goes on about how after he looked at another woman during church service it took her three tries until she "succeeded" to run him over with a car 

A Simpsons-themed daily calendar page:

"Apu: Is it me or do your plans always involve some horrible web of lies? 

Homer: It's you."

This is less a revelation about the nature of my childhood and moreso laughing @ my mom's freakish way of memorializing it. Maybe I am pretending to not care that my mother wanted to kill my father. What would it have meant for me to uncover these items in a different order? What does it mean that I had to peel back layers of my own corporeal detritus to find my mother's homicidal fantasies? what kind of armament is a baby tooth, a lock of hair?

i spend the day looking at memory boxes, and have the same problem i always have - i forget what belongs to my mom and what belongs to me. we go back and forth, and try to remember the origin of things, smug when we convince each other the thing was actually ours to begin with. i do this with my sister, too, and when i invoke the hypothetical child i might eventually have and want to pass my clothes onto, she says indignantly "i am your child"

later, alone, i go to my mom's memory boxes, again with the problem - i can't remember which necklaces she beaded, i can't decide whether i can take confidently take credit for my precocious aesthetic sensibilities or whether she was picking the beads out, placing them in my hands, placing my hands on the wire, i go through boxes and boxes of jewelry like this, like i might find an answer. i find the murder box instead. 

Years ago I wrote a list of things which were "not actually mine but my mother's": dead friends, Mao's little red book, the bedroom closet, beer cans, baby teeth, phone voice, mopping floor on hands and knees, phd program, stalkers. I'm wearing all the jewelry pilfered from my mom's jewelry boxes this last visit home, watching true blood and drinking rum straight out the bottle (not my first choice, it was leftover from a party), and thinking about how in her drinking days, my mom probably also liked to sit herself in front of the tv and cry. Many people don't get to have families. With my mom there is a kind of cannibalistic sameness that actually, while to most people it appears like an ideal "home," is placeless, not actually mine but etc

perhaps this can explain my recent interest in my father's side of things, there is little to no inherent risk that i might find myself collapsed under my fathers particularities and interests, as our relationship is primarily defined by my sense of alienation. Through him and his parents I can construct something of a history, a "why" I am the way I am. Close but not too close, like when someone takes a picture of you you can barely recognize. Me and my mom used to joke that I was born asexually or through divination, a simple reproduction of her

There is of course a long lineage of crazy ass white girls, of bougie white women who choose to be addicts, or bad mothers, or writers, or waitresses, or communists. In 2015, my mom commented a picture of Patty Hearst with an automatic rifle on my facebook profile picture, and I learned who she was. I haven't been in therapy for six months but if I was, I would ask my therapist if she believed my mom wanted me to find the murder box