an organization dedicated to righting the gender imbalance in astronomy

• Hanging out with smart, interesting people
• Learning awesome facts about the universe and really trying to get your head around the reality of things that seem entirely fantastic
• Being paid to learn about something you find interesting
• Not working in the food and beverage industry (much as my two year stint at SBUX after college was good for me at the time)
• Motivating and wonderful teachers and advisors

Things that are not cool about getting a Ph.D. in Astrophysics:

• Imposter Syndrome
• Feeling like there is not enough time to manage all of your obligations well
• Realizing that some classmates from your college graduating class already have incomes that are triple or quadruple yours, and that this probably won’t change with age
• Realizing how dismally odds are stacked against anyone starting out in this field ending up with a secure career in the field appropriate to their end education levels
• Unaware or unintentional sexists

I love fall more than any other season and it always makes me feel a little ache. The smell and colors and cool air bring me back to so many different places. I remember being in preschool and my game of trying to catch the falling leaves all recess as they fell through the air. I’ve been in school for most of my life and associate fall with new beginnings. It’s always a new school year, often a new place, a chance to do better, to grow, and to be surprised by new things. A new nostalgia makes me remember being a Starbucks barista in autumn, the return of pumpkin flavored everything, the heat and smell of steamed drinks, and the renewed influx of customers (usually returning college students) looking for warmth and comfort.

I love orange and brown and yellow and red.

Autumn also makes me feel that my knitting is once again useful and inspires me to all new kinds of projects. Currently, I am knitting a scarf for a new friend of mine, a fellow graduate student. (He said he thought that scarves were pretentious! If you say the wrong thing to me, you get a scarf. That’s how it works.) But I dream of legwarmers, gloves and mittens, lace and felt, alpaca and wool, and needles of all shapes and sizes.

The last major knitting project I undertook was a couple of years ago, when I lived in Rhode Island and knitting was much more useful than in South Carolina. I knitted a series of 11 scarves, all meant to represent the person who was going to receive them. Alas a major life upheaval brought by that particular fall meant that I never delivered most of these scarves to their inspirees (who never knew I was making them anyway). And as a result, I still have many of them to show off.

This scarf from that project is particularly fall appropriate:

a scarf called Hope

I wish I had kept notes on all of these scarves, but alas I did not. While I can’t be totally sure, I’m about 90% certain that I used Madelinetosh DK weight yarn in the color “Moss.” What I loved about this yarn was its beautiful and subtle hand painting and variegation. It’s also super-duper soft and warm, made of 100% superwash merino wool.

I wanted to knit it into an interesting texture without detracting from the beauty of the yarn itself, and because I had so many scarves to knit, needed something uncomplicated that would knit up easily into a good width and length and would be reversible and maintain a roughly flat shape.

I decided to knit it up in a pattern similar to a 4×4 stitch rib, but with the ribs shifted horizontally by one stitch with each row so that instead of getting vertical ribs, I’d get diagonal ones. This keeps the full 26 stitch width of the scarf. (I always slip my first stitch, hence why it’s not a 28 stitch width.)

For the curious, here is the pattern. It is simple in the extreme, and therefore a nice scarf to knit when doing other things. I’m calling it “Hope” after the person who inspired it.

HOPE

This scarf is 28 stitches across, I’m guessing I knit it on size 10 needles. ** With 225 yards/skein and size 10 needles, I was able to make a good sized scarf with just one hank.

The basic pattern is
Row 1: k3, (p4,k4)*3, p1
Row 2: k2, (p4,k4)*3, p2
Row 3: k1, (p4,k4)*3, p3
Row 4: (p4,k4)*3, p4
Row 5: p1, (k4,p4)*3, k3
Row 6: p2, (k4,p4)*3, k2
Row 7: p3, (k4,p4)*3, k1
Row 8: (k4,p4)*3, k4

Repeat the above sequence of rows until the desired length is achieved. (Personally, I think scarves should always be at least 5 ft. in length.)

**The suggested needle size for this yarn is size 6-7, but in addition to trying to get away with the largest possible needles on all of these scarves to make them knit up more quickly, I also find that it’s nice to use slightly bigger needles than suggested for scarves to make them more soft and flexible. I don’t think it hurts the warmth of the scarf at all. In fact, I think the increased air-pocket size in addition to the increased width and length from knitting on slightly larger needles probably adds to it’s functional warmth.

I have no rights to this picture whatsoever.

I can expect that I will never return to my childhood home to live ever again. And I can’t take everything with me. In fact, I can’t take anything with me that Cecilia, my little blue Honda Civic, can’t cart 2000+ miles across the country with me.

So, after much delaying, I have begun the task of trying to purge all of the things that I don’t need, beginning of course, with the obvious and necessary task of deleting music I collected in college that I will never listen to.

A stylish project for every room

After I made it through the bands beginning with ‘A’, I moved on to my bookshelf where I got stuck.

As I look through all of the things I collected over the years, I’m left asking myself many questions. Why did I use binders and nice folders for all of my reports in elementary school?  How does one properly dispose of beat up, broken ringed binders without just adding to landfill waste?  What was I planning on stencilling with this kit?  Why did my parents spend so much money on me?

What am I supposed to do with the journal I kept in second grade or the one I kept in fifth grade?

March 1, 1994,

I love my pet kitten.  I was lonely when I didn’t have her.  Her name is Alexandra Millbur…She is a beautyful white and orange striped kitten…One of my favorite things to do is to play with her…She is a regular sized kitten.  She sleeps on my bed with me.  She is very cute.  My kitten is special because I love my kitten and she loves me.

[2nd grade drawing of orange and white striped kitten]

But I never had a cat. I only wanted one, so I wouldn’t be lonely, so I could love her and so she could love me.

Maybe I’m afraid that if I throw this away, I will be choosing to cast that little girl to oblivion, no record left of her, no images and bits to call her forth from the land of memory.

I formed all of my letters so carefully.

Here is an astoundingly artistic and beautiful little book on Honduras I made as a 4th grader.  This is clearly not something worthwhile to anyone else, so Goodwill is out of the question. Here’s an extensive report on the contents of two Charleston museums from 7th grade. Written by my teacher (one of my favorite teachers) in the report:

This is beautifully written and neatly and colorfully presented.  You must have put in hours and hours and hours.

Yes, I too think I must have.  Do I just throw it away now, purpose served?  Thoughts, opinions, collages, pictures, feelings, now irrelevant?

Here are newspaper clippings about me.  It’s all old news now.

Niecy Nash

Am I just going to leaving this all for someone else to take care of when my parents sell this house, or when they or I die?

Now, I love me some Clean Sweep.  I know exactly what Miss Niecy Nash would say. It’s just stuff, right? And yes, most of it is. The stencil kit is going to Goodwill along with old textbooks, puzzles I finished (and didn’t finish).

But some of it feels like the last vestiges of my life and the many girls I have been and have wanted to be, scraps of myself that I’m being asked to condense, store, choose between, trash or save.

Other Indians like to decry my parents’ failure in not speaking solely in Punjabi to me at home.  But long before we moved to SC, I had already started refusing to speak my parent’s language because as an overly sensitive child, I couldn’t endure the teasing I received from my father’s Indian friends, and simply pretended I could no longer understand.  And now, I am unable to speak and can understand only the kinds of things that are commonly said to children “let’s go upstairs”, “what do you want to eat?”, “look at that black cat!”

I’m told that as a little girl, I would sing along to Indian music, but now I can only just pick out the meanings of some of the words.  Bollywood movies have rarely met my standards as a worthwhile use of my time, but perhaps I would like them better if I could understand them without subtitles.  And whenever I have gotten together with my Californian cousins, I am completely unable to relate to them.  To them, I am just another “gori,” or white girl, even though they are fair skinned and have light hair, because I do not idolize Indian movie stars, know nothing about Indian clothes, cannot speak to our family, and cannot play the word games they play with Indian songs.

Indian people have thus always made me uncomfortable because first they assume that I can relate to them in some way in the Indian or Indian American experience…and usually I can’t.  And their assumptions just make me uncomfortable.

But more, I think I avoid them in order to avoid that moment of realization that they will inevitably have, the look of sudden distance, perhaps a tinge of pity, and the slamming wall of politeness that comes down over their faces when they realize that I am not like them.  It is even more a wall than they would have in interacting with white Americans, I think, because they do not expect those people to have access to their Indianness.  But somehow, I am a traitor to my culture, I am somehow wrong, I willfully rejected things that were important to them by not being more Indian.  Or at least, that is how I feel people sometimes think of me.

Indians even have a word for people like me.  ABCD.  It stands for “American Born Confused Desi.”  For those of you who do not know, ‘desi’ roughly means ‘countryman’ and for those Indians who use the term ABCD, the only country of which to have countrymen is India.  It is a derogatory term for those of us of Indian descent who do not speak an Indian language, do not actively practice an Indian religion, do not want arranged marriages, may not even marry another Indian, and do not preferentially choose Indian friends.

Moreover, ‘ABCD’ carries the mild connotation of a lost soul who has given into Western hedonism and immorality, someone who does not dress or behave modestly, and is therefore a binge drinking, drug using, godless slut.  I have even been accused of hating India by somewhat backwards family members.  I was so shocked, I didn’t know what to say.  How can I hate India when I do not know India?

I cannot even read books about the Indian American experience, books by Jhumpa Lahiri and the like.  It seems a new crop of authors has arisen, describing the experience of those people torn between cultures.  But even these books just seem intrusive, like they too cast me in a position that I am not in, do not relate to, and cannot understand.  Like I am not even Indian enough for the conflicted experience of a first-generation American.

But even as I never could feel comfortable with other Indians, Americans too expect me to be more Indian than I am and sometimes speak to me in ways that are well-intentioned, but somewhat racist.  I just do not know how to answer someone who asks me how I like America.  “I was born here,” I say.  “I have lived here all my life,” I try to explain.  “My parents lived here for 5 years before having me,” I add, as if to increase my authenticity as an American.

But these protestations are often followed by the question “Do you think you would ever go back home to India?”  How am I supposed to answer that?  India has never been my home.  I’ve barely even visited.  And yet, when I introduce myself to people and they hear the sound of my name, the next question is always “Where are you from?” or occasionally the less graceful “What are you?”  When I am in a good mood (usually), I say “I was born in New Jersey, but my parents are from India,” though I have before been known to say “I’m from New Jersey.  Where are you from?”

I appreciate the accommodation of people who ask if I eat beef (I do, not being even remotely Hindu), but am uncomfortable with people who make the completely uninformed assumption that I am a vegetarian.  And I do not know how to answer the electrologist who, while zapping some of Indian inherited hairiness off my face, asks “So, are you parents finding a nice Indian doctor husband for you?”  No, no they are not.  Are yours finding one for you?

And there was always a cultural in-between area, the space in which I didn’t know the appropriate conventions of behavior for my situation.  In my home and in the homes of every other Indian I know, shoes must be removed prior to or just upon entry to a house.  Some more Americanized Indians wear shoes on vinyl, tile, or hardwood floors, but never, never, never on carpet.  And most keeps stacks of chappals (flip flops) by the doors to wear indoors.  But in the houses of my white friends, I never knew what ettiquette to follow.  Shoes, or no shoes?

There were other dilemmas.  Is it rude or wrong somehow for me to drink my milk out of the bowl when I am finished with my cereal? (I still don’t know the answer to that one.  All I know is that many of my white friends just wash the milk out of their bowls when they are finished and it seems a terrible waste.)  I’ve gotten over the fact that I eat with my hands more often than others do, though I used to worry that I would be percieved as uncouth, reaching for things with fingers instead of forks.  I only recently (like after age 20) learned that one is supposed to tip when one gets a haircut.  Tipping ettiquette is something that Indians often seem to be lacking in.  And I don’t know any Indians who tip over 15%.

But even with all of the feelings that would lead me to avoid my connections to India, I do not want to do anything of the sort.  Over the past several years, I have wished that I could speak Punjabi.  I have wished that I had had the opportunity to visit India more.  I wish that I were not so terribly awkward (and sometimes hostile) to other Indians when I first meet them, and they are clearly enthused to meet another Indian.  I wish that I had anything to share that I could pass on to my children who will most likely be half-Indian.

But I know that any knowledge will end with me.  I can only sort of remember the rhyming games my mom would play with me when I was small.  I mostly remember the rules to a game she showed me how to play with rocks, similar to jacks.  I take solace in the fact that I will be able to cook a solid Punjabi dinner for my children any night I’d like.  But I worry I won’t learn how to make all of the small food things, barfi, samosa, rasmali, from scratch before there is no one left to teach me.  I know that if I ever took my future children to temple, I would not be able to sufficiently translate anything for their benefit.  I will never have the skills my mother had, in managing a farm, plowing fields, milking cows, weaving blankets and rugs, sewing fine Indian clothing from yards of fabric.

This is my reality.  So I practice my Indian cooking, the one thing I know I will be able to pass on.  And I imagine crazy situations where I become fluent in Punjabi.  And I insist to my mother that she must move in with me when I have kids and teach them what I cannot.  I shove my mother out of the way when making roti’s out of corn flour “It’s too hard, Amandeep, you have to put your hands in boiling water.”  But I will never learn later, Mom.

And I prepare for my upcoming trip to India, possibly the last one I will ever take.  I will never be able to go on my own and will not forever have people to take me.  And I prepare to record everything I see and learn what I can learn, so I can take with me what I can.

Now obviously, keeping knowledge is a useful task for the advancement of any primitive civilization.  If nothing else, it allows a society to learn which things are good to eat and which things are not.  But Manuans valued knowledge for it’s own sake, drawn by insatiable curiosity to store it up in large houses, built solely for holding knowledge, in all of the central cities, next to their stores of grain.

The most direct example of Manuan love of truth and the seeking of it was the  existence of their Stargazers, even in times when farming was a novel concept.  Until relatively recent times, when off planet travel became possible for Manuans, they had no justification for their Stargazers other than the need to pursue the truth behind the beauty they observed in the world around them.  Nevertheless, Stargazers have always been held in high regard in Manuan society, as seekers of knowledge.

You might be wondering what this has to do with the Happy Stone.  But I am telling you all this as background, because it was from a Manuan Stargazer that I learned about the Happy Stone, and so their perspective on it is inextricably interwoven with mine.

The Manuans loved it when certain principles repeatedly appeared in their description of and understanding of the universe.  Imagine their joy when the combination of the purely invented ‘imaginary number’ with the sinusoidal wave equations naturally predicted the phantom particle trajectories of quantum mechanics.  The Happy Stone was a similar jewel in their knowledge troves because of it’s usefulness and poetic and philosophical significance.

An unassuming white substance that can be cut with a knife, Happy Stone is often combined with water by young chemistry-curious Manuans for the resulting dramatic explosion.  Like the cause of this entertaining reaction, the Happy Stone’s most obvious usefulness came from its physical properties as a Yortha-lalka metal.  In its ionic form, Happy Stone (or Hs), was useful for it’s ability to act as a battery anode, allowing for the technological revolution of small wireless battery powered devices, eventually becoming the battery type for all power storage on Yortha.

Hs+ also had the other curious feature of providing mood stabilizing effects in Manuans with mental imbalances, hence the name ‘Happy Stone.’   It was at this point that some Manuans began to think it peculilar, as a pure element, which with natural combination with the water present in Manuan bodies, could combat both manic and depressive behaviours.

The simplicity of this tiny atom (smaller than everything else except for hydrogen and helium), combined with it’s effectiveness in Manuan life made it seem almost as if designed by gods.  Manuans particularly loved these discoveries of great coincidence, in part because the unsolvable conundrum of the existence of god(s) is one that will forever draw them onward, curiosity unsatisfied, like a lover that always keeps the Manuans wanting more.

But it was the Manuan Stargazers, again, that found the least directly useful and most philosophically exciting significance of the Happy Stone.  A small amount (less than 1%) of the matter created in the beginning of time was Happy Stone (in addition to the hydrogen and helium that made up almost 100% of the primordial universe).  And further, all of the Happy Stone in the universe came from the beginning.

Each and every atom of Hs stood as witness to the universe’s transition into translucency, to those intial millenia of darkness before the first star shone.  And each technologically reliant Manuan, and the many who drank the carefully measured Hs droplets to find peace of mind were all accessing this rare substance, created only in the beginning of time.

With this discovery in hand, the Stargazers sought to measure how much of the Happy Stone existed in the universe, to further test their models of universal evolution.  And they found that certain stars, in particular, stars like Sola, the star Yortha orbits, contain far less Happy Stone than the rest of their systems, than the rest of the galaxy.  And here they discovered something both enlightening and saddening.

The Happy Stone was slowly being consumed to the point of almost nonexistence in the atmospheres of stars, the universe’s life and light givers.  Not ones to waste measurements, the Stargazers used this Hs depletion to more accurately model stellar atmospheres, to better understand these life giving giants who had provided all of the higher elements necessary to the formation of Yortha and for life.

But as for Happy Stone, these small droplets of joy, tears from phantom gods of creation, were slowly being eaten up.

Now, obviously, these processes take millions of years, and so Manuans, and universal inhabitants everywhere, still had plenty of time to enjoy the properties of Hs and Hs+.

But to the god-seeking Manuans, everything beautiful that must eventually end is both wonderful and slightly sad.  It is to this notion I attribute their ridiculous attention to the cultivation of the exotic and extravagantly colored and petaled plant reproductive organs (flowers) on Yortha.  At some points in Manuan history, Manuans sold their families’ entire belongings and means of income for single flowers.  But that’s another story entirely.

I have 2 favorite signs on I-95.

One is in Maryland and the towns it names are “North East” and “Rising Sun.” When I passed that sign a few days ago, I considered what it might be like to be someone running away from her life, stopping in a town to start a new life, begging a job, living out of her car if necessary until she had gathered the necessary capital to live elsewhere, just because she found the exit sign on I-95 somewhat interesting or inspirational.

The thing about place names is that someone had to name them. I wonder what the namer of Rising Sun thought or felt at the naming. I just googled “north east rising sun” and interestingly enough found this youtube music video of a Trans Am song called “North East Rising Sun.” Did Trans Am see this same sign? It can’t possibly be a coincidence, right? (There’s something about this song by Trans Am that makes me want to sing ‘sweeeeeeeeeeeet emoooooootion’ along with it, like from the Aerosmith song ‘Sweet Emotion.’)

My other favorite sign, in Virginia, is pictured to the right. So, I think this is “Carmel Church” and “Bowling Green” although because of the odd spacing, it could also be “Carmel Bowling” and “Church Green.” Carmel, obviously, is not the same as ‘caramel’ but that’s definitely what it evokes for me and the image of a caramel church juxtaposed with a bowling green always makes me smile inwardly as I pass.

Every time I pass the “Ni River” (in Spotsylvania County, VA (‘Spotsylvania’ is a hilarious name too)), I hear the Knights of Ni in my head.

For the first time on this drive, I noticed one of the roads I was passing under in Virgina that was called “Dry Bread Road.” Now, you know that there has to be a story behind a name like that. No one says, “oh, I think ‘Dry Bread’ would be a nice solid name for a road.” I spent some time trying to imagine stories behind a road named ‘Dry Bread,’ but my good friend Google provided a good one as the real story.

Apparently, this road used to be called “Old Fort Road” for a fort that was built there in 1714, in pre-Revolutionary times. Apparently, as British General Cornwallis, in May of 1781, lead the retreat out of the South a few months before the British surrender in the Revolutionary War, an advance guard of the British army was sent foraging to appropriate rations from the locals along Old Fort Road. However, the locals, forewarned of the approaching troops, hid all of their food and livestock and nothing could be gotten from them to feed the British army except for dry bread. Hence the name of the road, given by the complaining British troops.

It’s little stories like that that aren’t important enough to make it into history books, but are important enough to get passed down in oral tradition, important enough to be recorded in names.

I have often found the idea of this uncle intriguing, in particular because flowers have no practical value to humankind, beyond the purpose served in pollination. But flowers that we cultivate to grow in front of our homes, for florists to sell, have no purpose at all – except for beauty.

And yet, somehow that is enough. It is justification enough for a man to devote his life to growing and tending these plants, and justification enough for the thousands of purchasers that support his life’s work.

We don’t ever seem to have to explain to each other why there is an industry around something as impractical as flowers. We don’t have to explain why we pause for the sunset or for a snatch of beautiful music.

Somehow, it is universal and axiomatic, this understanding we all have of the common yearning in all our souls.

It seemed they were all impelled to fly across the creek for food – directly into a strong wind. Tiny as they were, though they beat their wings furiously, they sometimes seemed hardly to move and occasionally disappeared, only to reappear a few meters back in the air, having recovered control after being tumbled over. And once righted, they persisted in moving forward again, back into the wind, as if it were just a matter of course, and one by one, eventually made it across, though pushed sideways and oft buffeted and tumbled.

Watching these bats just made me think about how amazing it is that this isn’t amazing, that forward is the only direction to go and that starvation from fear of seeking nourishment is just as sure a death as drowning.’

-an editted excerpt from a letter I wrote recently

Every time I travel, some part of me is amazed at how quickly we can go from one place to another. The journey to California by airplane has been reduced to 6-7 hours of air conditioned, well lit, beverage and snack supplied sitting. It completely blows my mind that 150 years ago, that same journey was the journey of a lifetime, a dangerous journey of several months, which hundreds died traversing.

I sometimes imagine that Benjamin Franklin or John Adams is riding with me in my head as a silent passenger and I play the disenchanted host, smiling at the predictable incredulity as I go from the home of Rutledge to the home of Adams in the space of a morning, while I comfortably read an airport purchased novel, ignoring the view of my window seat, of clouds that no colonial man ever saw from above.