Transition

I think when I look back on this past year, I will most associate it with transition. Indeed the position of postdoc is transitory in nature, designed to help scientists bridge the gap between grad school and their permanent careers. As someone who naturally experiences anxiety, it hasn't been great for my psyche. But it has been great for forcing me to figure out who I am and for Dean and I to realize what we want out of our life together. Turns out we really want air conditioning and a few nearby chain restaurants. Who knew?

Yesterday was my last day at Brown. In one year I went from a relatively new Ph.D. eager to experience scientific life outside that lab I "grew up" in. I came away with a firm resolve with how science should be done, how I can contribute to that with my own skills and how I can cultivate scientific relationships to help me succeed in my goals while helping others achieve the same. This is no small feat in such a large community with such a wide range of styles and attitudes.

I am still digesting many of my experiences and I think many of the benefits of this past year have yet to be revealed. For now, I'd like to put a little distance between myself and this year before I try to describe my feelings on it any more.

Right now, we're looking to the future and it is coming at us like a freight train. The movers are coming Friday to both pack us up and load our things onto the truck. Friday night we'll drive to Maryland. Before then, we are taking a couple days of much needed rest before getting things in order. There isn't too much to do, mostly getting the cars serviced, getting organized and cleaning up. We'll have a week in Maryland before my new job starts, which will consist of hopefully getting new furniture and getting unpacked. We're ridiculously excited. I'm not sure how much writing I'll do before we leave, but per Jenn's request, I'll definitely take some pictures when we get there and as we're settling in. Before then, I'll just share my impulsive haircut I got yesterday. I thought I had turning 30 out of my system, but the 20s-to-30s transition coupled with my impending grown up job made me decide to cut 5 inches off my hair and get serious about looking professional. What do you think?

Impulsive Buying for Geeks

One thing we have been doing a lot this past year is going to baseball card shows. I know, WAY nerdy. It started in the winter time. If I say nothing else about Red Sox fans, it is this: they know their baseball, and they love their baseball memorabilia. So during the long winter, there are frequently baseball card shows within an hour drive of us or so. We usually do it on Sunday mornings, there is no traffic and we breakfast at a diner we find along the way. It gets us out of the house and there is some superb people watching. Dean isn't a huge baseball card guy per se, he likes autographs so he usually gets a ball, a photo or a card signed by the old retired Red Sox player the show hires to come sign. Then we giggle over the crazy Sox fans and the big fat card collectors that probably live in their mother's basement. Plus, I get an ego boost being one of the only women there and likely the best looking. I'm not usually vain or self-promoting, so the fact that I can state that with confidence is an indication of the clientele.

My biggest complaint about these shows it that all the stuff is Red Sox stuff. I mean ALL of it. I knew I probably wouldn't find any cards of obscure Twins players from the "dark years" (mid- to late-90s), but I expected to see some Mauer stuff or some Rays stuff. They were, afterall, the AL champs. Nope. Nada. But they do occasionally have non-sports related memorabilia, and after I become saturated with Sox stuff, I gravitate to those tables.

Last weekend we knew would be our last show in Massachusetts. As I said before, Dean always gets the autograph of the headliner. He occasionally also finds some cards he wants like some cheap sets from the 80s. (He likes to mail them to retired players' homes to sign and send back, but that is a different blog post.) But I have never bought anything for myself. I'm not opposed to some self-indulgence and I know the sports collectors circuit has been hit hard by the economy. I just haven't found anything I wanted. Until Sunday. My one memorabilia purchase from a Massachusetts collector show:

A rare Bobby Kennedy presidential campaign button. This particular one was only produced for one campaign stop (I actually believe the guy because he seemed super nerdy like me and was thrilled to talk about political memorabilia in a sea of Sox talk). I thought that with my recent obsession with New England history, politics, and all things Kennedy, it was perfect. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. But I'll probably display it along with my rare Kucinich for President button, which was eventually replaced by my not-so-rare Obama button.

Because it's Friday

Supper time in the MB house. One of the only times you will see peace and tolerance. I'm soooo going to miss my gigantic kitchen. Dean has heard just about enough of my worrying over where the feeding spot will be in the new apartment. A cat mom has to have priorities.

Bewitched

My life right now is a broken record. Excited to move, feeling restless at work, blah blah blah. So that's why I'm going to write another book review. But rather than recommending this book or not, I think I'll write a little more about what I learned from it in hopes the topic, more so than the specific book, may grab your interest.

I bought Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum while visiting Salem, Massachusetts in April with my mom and step dad. The town as it is now is rather disappointing, having over time opted for kitch over actual historical significance. We did visit the Salem Witch Museum, where we were shown some mannequins re-enacting some key events of 1692 but overall the lack of artifacts and access to historical sites made it difficult to fully grasp this strange piece of American history. So at the Salem Welcome Center, I decided to buy a book to help me better understand the Salem witch trials, and decided on Salem Possessed because I thought that not only would it explain what happened there in 1692, but also shed some light on the reasons why it happened.

Most everyone is aware that between 1692 and 1693 nineteen Massachusetts women and men were executed for witchcraft. While allegations of witchcraft were not terribly unusual in colonial New England, the scope of the epidemic that began in Salem and spread radially across several towns clearly remains an aberration in our history. However, it is still unclear exactly what caused the initial outburst to gather momentum and become a full-fledged phenomenon. What made Salem different?

It turns out there were a lot of things that made Salem different from your average New England town in the late seventeenth century, which is the premise of this book. Now, from what (admittedly little) else I have read on this topic, the common consensus is that a perfect storm of political, religious, and socio-economical factors combined in Salem in the 1680s and '90s and continued to gather strength until it erupted in a flurry of accusations (over a hundred total), convictions and ultimately executions.

It is widely believed that the first witchcraft accusations made by a group of young girls was likely due to the overall lack of intellectual stimulation afforded to adolescent Puritan girls of the time. While adolescent boys were allowed to hunt, fish, and play games, young girls were taught to sit around and act pure until they found a husband. It is thought that it was likely sheer boredom which brought about the strange behavior-either as a manifestation of neurosis or simply out of some desire for attention from the elders. Alternatively, it has been speculated that the girls themselves were the ones dabbling in witchcraft by attempting to tell each others' futures (who they were going to marry and how much money they'd end up with) and interpreted their visions as them being bewitched. This is still highly speculative.

If this theory is true, then why did grown men and women chime in and start making accusations? Because Salem itself was a town deeply divided during this time. Salem started out as a small town which eventually grew and naturally split into two factions. "Salem Town" remained where the town center was including all the businesses, the meetinghouse, the church and the port where goods were imported and exported between the colonies and Europe. Meanwhile, as families grew, they began to buy farmland further out (to the Northwest) so as to add both land and the crops they sowed to their own incomes. Pretty soon, "Salem Village" wanted its own church because they were tired of riding their horses 15 miles into town on Sunday mornings. Then they wanted their own representatives in the meetinghouse to negotiate their taxes so they didn't have to pay city taxes for services they didn't regularly use. The request for a church was granted, and the people of "Salem Village" suddenly had a geographical place to gather, and a leader (Samuel Parris) around whom to rally so that they could fight for their rights as a distinct faction. As an aside, which is still very important, the governor might have stepped in at this point to try to diffuse the growing factional tension and try to come to a fair resolution to this problem. However, he was busy being overthrown at the time as a result of the dethroning of King James II, effectively leaving New England with no central government for a period of time.

This is the context for the witch trials laid out in Salem Possessed. And Boyer and Nissenbaum's central thesis is that the rampant accusations of 1692 and 1693 can be explained as a result of the tensions between the two factions. Interestingly, in 1695, a petition was circulated to oust Samuel Parris as reverend of the Salem Village church, and from this petition, they put together two "camps", the pro-Parris and anti-Parris camps, comprised of people whose names show up in several other Salem documents. With the petition as well as the other historical documents from Salem at the time (tax records, marriage records, land deeds, etc), they convincingly piece together a story in which the people in Salem Village feel frustrated, threatened and cheated by those in Salem Town. The evidence? Nearly all of the "accusers" resided in Salem Village. Some of them were people who were cheated out of their inheritance by step parents and an increasing average family size. They all belonged to the same tax bracket, namely they didn't make a whole of of money and were upset about what their taxes were being spent on. And they all went to the Salem Village Church where Samuel Parris preached sermons that began as suggestions of injustice towards the village and crescendoed to incendiary accusations of betrayal and witchcraft. In fact, it was much easier for Boyer and Nissenbaum to build a generic profile of a witchcraft accuser than of the accused.

Who were the accused? This is much more difficult to pinpoint. The "witches" lived in various towns around Salem, and in Salem Town as well as Salem Village. But for the most part, they lived in Salem Town. While they were mostly women, there were some men. You had your usual "witch" suspects for the time: the spinsters, the promiscuous, the social outcasts. But you also had rich people, powerful people, and very poor people. They infrequently bore any direct relation to the accusers at all. This is where Boyer and Nissambaum's thesis gets interesting. They found two patterns for the accusers and the accused:

1. The accuser felt some personal wrong in their lives and in many cases the wrongdoer was readily identified, but not accused. The accusers, in general seeing Salem Town as their "oppressors" would project that personal wrong onto an analogous member of Salem Town. A classic example would be a person living in Salem Village who was written out of their father's will under the influence of their stepmother. Instead of confronting their stepmother, they claimed to be bewitched by some older woman in Salem Town who had likewise married into wealth. Whether this behavior was conscious or subconscious was not ascertained, though their was patterns of evidence to back up this hypothesis.


2. The accused witches were all "threats to the social order." That is, their social position at the time of accusation was different from that where they started or where society would traditionally have them. Those that were rich had married into money or had come across it luckily. Those that were poor were fallen, not born poor. There were women who had married socially beneath them that were accused and one extremely "lucky" man who in reality was amazingly shrewd and rose to the ranks of one of the richest men in Salem Town through smart business dealings. In this day and age, we are used to the notion that we bring about our own destiny. But that wasn't always so, and the average colonial American died in the same place in the social hierarchy in which he was born. America, evidently, had not yet whetted its appetite for capitalism.

Overall, I walked away with a couple impressions about the book. One, I wished it had contained more explanation about the the witch trials and the events leading up to it using a broader brush stroke. I knew the basic story and there is a time line in the front. And towards the end, they outlined a few of the cases I alluded to above. But perhaps one chapter where it gave a typical text book description of the accusations and the trials before delving into the analysis would have helped tremendously. I actually found myself going to Wikipedia on occasion to revisit the outline and reconstruct a fluid story into which all the facts and figures could fit.

Second, it was actually a little dry. I am happy I read this book or I never would have thought of the witch trials in terms of socio-economic upheaval and village factionalism. I am happy for the knowledge I gained, I just didn't always enjoy getting there. I love data as much as the next geek, but I can only stand to look at so many tax tables cross-referenced with town petitions before even my eyes begin to cross.

I have really been getting into American history lately. Perhaps it has been this past year of living in the oldest part of the country, where history is all around me and so accessible. What parts of American history, big or small, most interest you?

The Group: Smart Chick Lit

I wasn't sure what to make of Mary McCarthy's The Group when my mom picked it up at a used book store and handed it to me saying, "Here, I think you should get this." I looked at it puzzled for minute, shrugged, and added it to my respectable stack. Why didn't I tell her to get the book herself if she thought it looked good? Because after 30 years and multiple advanced degrees, "I think you should get that" still means, "don't even try paying for that if I'm around." So it sat in my "to read" pile for over a year. At almost 500 pages, I didn't think I could concentrate on a story for that long with so many other distractions in my life right now.

Interestingly, I picked it up just to reread the back - like I do with so many books when making the important decision of what to read next - shortly after my visit to the JFK Presidential Museum. I noticed that the book was about a group of Vassar graduates, the same college Jackie Kennedy graduated from. Intrigued, and struck by the coincidence, I decided to read it. Rarely do I read a book that I enthusiastically recommend just because reading a book is a commitment and people have such different tastes. I was so pleasantly surprised by this book that I just had to write up a review and recommend this book to those of you, who like me, may have never been exposed to it.

The Group is chick lit before chick lit as we know it existed, let alone became the homogenized retelling of the same story and marketed for beach goers and only the most casual readers. It is about eight friends who, after growing up privileged, graduate from Vassar college in 1933 and find themselves in a whole different world, namely New York City at the height of the depression. It was written in 1963, an odd time from my perspective. Not only is this book sort of "old" but it was written itself about an older period. Maybe this is why it escaped my attention, though just a little bit of internet searching revealed Mary McCarthy to be a literary force in the 1960s. If the story line as I'm describing it is failing to grab you, don't feel bad. I wasn't taken in immediately either. But once I started reading it, I was hooked.

The book drifts in and out of the lives of these eight woman, who after graduation all choose different paths that span between immediately marrying, going abroad, and aggressively pursuing careers. And let me just tell you that for the 1930s, I found their lives much more full of intrigue than I had ever expected (e.g. you learn a great deal about 1930s birth control than you could ever hope to). The way life unfolds for each of these girls is fascinating. But what I really loved about this book was that the characters actually had depth and dimension, something you don't find in female-oriented novels these days. While it would have been easy to allow one girl to be the prude, one the ditz, one the slut, one the brainiac and so on, each girl was complex, facing her own set of problems and making decisions that then re-shaped her character as she aged.

One caveat - I'm not sure if you guys out there would like this book very much. It is, after all, about women with female protagonists, and well, male antagonists. There's the roaming husband, the egotistical doctor husband, and the bachelor seducer. I forgive Mary McCarthy for this, because she managed to portray the educated woman as such a complex creature. Plenty of books out there do the same for men.

And lest you think this book is only about women and relationships, there is still the back drop of the depression including life during the implementation of the New Deal. The characters are constantly engaged with each other over the state of a country nursing its wounds after being brought back from the brink of collapse and how the foreign concepts of the New Deal will shape their lives. Sound familiar? It's nearly uncanny, the only difference being that the two sides actually converse and exchange ideas rather than carry out two divergent monologues.

If you are looking for a book with a great story line, told by an interesting literary voice that challenges you while entertains you, I highly recommend this book.