No Tickling!

A sex tip

I'm home from work today.  I got a stomach flu this weekend, which has been sad, but it means I can take a break from reading about cognitive risk factors for depression to write a blog post about my One Trick to Drive Your Man Wild!

I should say beforehand that maybe y'all already know this.  I'm not assuming it's new information.  But I feel like I should tell people things I discover late in case they're like me.  Only a couple weeks ago did learn how to make a folder into a zip file and email it to myself.  I'd always thought you needed some special program to make zip files; I never knew such an efficient way to transfer multiple files by email was available at a right click.  So I decided to tell my lab, and indeed two of my labmates didn't know either (though one was like, old news, man). 

No, that was not the sex tip.

I've come to a decision

and I want to see what my commenters think of it.  I'm still going to apply to clinical programs this fall, but I'm only going to apply to programs I'd be really enthusiastic about attending, mostly or maybe all top tier. 

This accomplishes the following:

1) My application process will be less stressful and expensive, and easier to keep on top of
2) I wouldn't feel like I had gotten boxed into some compromise about the next 5-7 years of my life, in terms of the kind of work or where I lived, because I had an offer on the table in front of me that I didn't feel comfortable walking away from.

Of course, it risks not getting in anywhere, in which case I would reapply in the fall of 2009.  A while ago it would have been intolerable to wait another year to go to graduate school, but that's because I hated my secretarial job and I was taking unutterably stupid master's classes at the old Tia U.  I've finally, a little bit late, figured out the game.  The new Tia U is the place to be, and I would be in a really great position to apply to phd programs right now if I'd gone to the new Tia U master's program, which tragically, I didn't know existed till I started working in the cognitive developmental lab here and met my coworkers.  It's more rigorous, more serious, produces more ambitious and successful students, and costs a third of what the old Tia U's did (which is what I paid for classes there in taxes on the tuition remission). 

So if I had to wait another year, it would be non optimal, but my age already feels non optimal, and I would be able to spend the time reading, running studies, and publishing in my field, and building up my publication record for the next year's application.  Boeuf would teach me statistics and computer programming.  The new Tia U also has an emotion regulation/neuropsychology lab, which I'm starting to feel really drawn to.  I could get involved there in addition to my work in the social cognition and psychopathology lab where I'm volunteering now.  I'd in some sense be in graduate school already.  Right now my publication record looks like this: third, fourth, third, and MAYBE I could manage to get another paper submitted by the end of the year on which I'd have an opportunity to be second.  But that's dubious.  I can count on third, fourth, third. After another year I'd be first author on two or more publications.  And at that point I would start to be able to count on going someplace really good. 

So that's what I'm thinking.

This blog becomes a women's glossy

Okay, there is actually popular demand for Tia's diet tips.  Squashi asked, and so did a blog reader I met in person.  Next up, ten secret tricks that will drive your man WILD.  Actually, I do have a generally applicable straight girl sex tip.  Maybe that will be my next post. But for now, dieting.

I don't enjoy pain! Alright, well, I don't enjoy food-related privation!  Alright, well way back when anorexia was the eating disorder I tended towards I sort of did, but now I don't! I'm not in pain!  In fact, the not eating much on a day-to-day basis is not hard for me.  What is hard is dealing with:

1) social situations that revolve around food, in which you have to watch other people eating and you want to try what they have
2) unexpected free food at work, which is just death, as I've indicated, in part because of my free-detection module, and in part because of the unexpectedness throwing off the little forward calculations I do to help me self-regulate
3) the desire to go to lots of exciting restaurants now that I can eat everything, even though the reason I can eat everything now is that I'm supposed to be dieting.  Although having a dieting boyfriend to split meals with at restaurants *really* helps.  Isn't your afianced trying to lose weight too?

Here's my little recipe for how to diet successfully and not be in pain.  I should disclaim, however, that everyone has different strategies that work for them, and maybe what I did/do won't work for you.

Why I am a badass

Clementine was here visiting not long ago, and I was announcing that I'd decided my problem in life was that the back of my body was underdeveloped relative to my front, which is why I have bad posture and also why, I'd started to think, I couldn't do a headstand, an inability that has been the bane of my yogic existence for more than a year now.  How this came about in conversation I do not remember, but Clementine decided to challenge me to a contest of rear deltoid strength, to see who could hold her arms out to the side at shoulder length longest. Clementine, while not exactly at the peak of her form right now, is the most athletic person I know.  I shrugged and said, "alright, you'll win, but sure."  So we start, and at I don't know what point she starts to complain about it hurting.  "Is it hurting you?" she asked. "It must be hurting you; you're just not saying anything."  "Honestly, it doesn't really hurt," I said.  After a while longer, she started saying, "Can we stop now?"  And I, smiling, said, "You can stop any time.  It just means you'll lose."  So she kept trying for a while longer, and asked to stop again, and I said, "Nothing's keeping you from putting your arms down.  The contest was your idea."  Then she gave up.  Readers, I not only won that contest, I clobbered her.  I decided to keep going to see how long I could possible last.  I don't know when she put her arms down, but I lasted several minutes longer, lasting till 9:20 (Boeuf was timing), at which point I was trembling and my shoulders had started to sweat.  I'm kind of mad at myself that I didn't have the willpower to make it to actual muscle failure, but boy did I kick the ass of my ex-ballerina/karate-doing friend.

I had Boeuf and Clementine watch me try to do a headstand to figure out what my problem was, and we did all come to the conclusion it was probably back strength.  When I'm here, I can't get my back straight and my hips over my head so that I can balance in the preparatory pod, with my knees of the floor bent against my body, before raising my legs.  Whatever the muscles that allow me to push the middle of my back toward the front of my body to make my back very straight aren't strong enough, I think.  Either that or I'm limited by hamstring flexibility, but it seems weird that that would be the problem, even totally cold I can put my hands flat on the floor with my knees unbent.  So I invented some back exercises where I either stand bent over with my hands on the floor, or in a short downward dog, and just practice pushing the middle of my bag forward over and over (which also feels like some pretty demanding hamstring stretches).  The next time I tried to do a headstand and yoga, I did it!  Weirdly, it was by cheating and kicking up against the wall (which I'd never managed before either), so I'm not sure whether my back exercises, which were designed to help me achieve a headstand prep in which I slowly raised my legs, helped.  Maybe they did.  Still, I am now a headstand-capable yogini!

I learned to ride a bike late, I never got much practice in childhood, and then I didn't get on a bike for about 14 years till I rode around Central Park and the West Side bike path a few times on a rented bike with Graham two years ago.  Under six times certainly.  Boeuf bought me a bike as a present, and we've been riding together fewer than six times.  At first I swore I'd never ride on Manhattan streets.  But Boeuf has encouraged me to learn to do it, since it helps you get out of the city on a long bike trip much faster.  And I'm finding myself a way more rapidly improving biker than I was two years ago.  I think that period last year when I was exercising so obsessively, though I'm not in anywhere the same shape, really did a lot long-term to improve my overall strength and balance.  And Saturday afternoon, I biked from 125th Street to home in East Midtown.  Down Second Avenue.  There were buses and cabs pulling into and out of the space by the parked cars. There was construction and double parked cars blocking the bike space.  When that happened, I rode in the middle of one of the main traffic lanes.  There were pedestrians darting in front of me.  There were cars making right turns in front of me from the far left lane.  There were other cyclists going the wrong way down the street and taking up space in the bike area.  The first few times I rode on avenues, I would stop at lights and feel my heart beating and think, Is that exertion? I'm not going that fast.  Then I'd realize, no, that's fear.  But this time, I just felt pleasantly aggressive.  Fuck you traffic! I thought.  I'm not afraid of you.  Friends, I have been biking fewer than 12 times in my adult life.  I think an 80 block trip down a main artery in Manhattan is quite a feat, considering.  And that is yet another reason why I am a badass.

An ettiquette bleg

There is an entire genre of blog posts in which a heavier or otherwise nonconforming woman complains about thinner or otherwise more conforming women talking about dieting/ostentatiously refusing food/otherwise trumpeting their conformity in a way the blogger finds rude.  Awareified by my blog reading, I knew that recently I was in a bit of a thorny interpersonal situation, and I didn't manage to part the brambles in the most delicate way possible, so I wanted to ask my commentariat for their advice on the best way to handle it.

I went on a little recruiting outing with some other interns at my second volunteer gig (not the one with the clinical psychologist I mentioned in the last post).  We stopped to get lunch, and one of the other interns and I rejected the pizza and went to the buffet/grocery store.  She's a little fat, not extremely.  At this point, although I'd like to shave off a little more weight, I'm not most people's idea of "needs to lose weight," and it's always been the case that my body shape is such that it looks to a lot of people like I'm lighter than I am and have less body fat than I do.  Plus, I was wearing a skirt, and since I carry weight in my thighs, if you can't see them, I look quite thin.  But, like I said, I would like to shave off a little more weight, I try to diet in part to keep Boeuf motivational company on his, and for that matter I've been flaky enough that lately all "dieting" has really meant is that I try to run calorie deficits on some days in order to make up for the inevitable others on which I do something like eat foie gras at Jean-Georges and then have all-you-can-eat sushi at night, and in this manner at least prevent myself from gaining too much weight. 

So at the store I made a beeline for a favorite diet food of mine, what I call special sandwiches.  They're these little pita-wrapped salads of vegetable protein, nonfat mayonnaise, cabbage, carrot, and celery.  A lot of them are a little bland, although I've come to like them, maybe mostly through familiarity, and their fillingness/calorie ratio is extremely high.  But they're very expensive, and while I came to like them by buying them at health food stores where they presumably sold and were restocked faster, when you buy them at regular stores there's a considerable risk they'll be a little spoiled; the expiration date on the packages is way too generous.  I usually eat them anyway (! I told you I had a strong constitution and it was hard to make me sick).  But I wouldn't recommend that anyone without my die hard loyalty to special sandwiches buy them somewhere they didn't think they got restocked fast, and I wouldn't recommend them as food to anyone without my particular set of concerns; I like them, but if you're not worried about calories, there's even another brand of prewrapped vegetable protein sandwiches that's fattier and tastier. 

This girl saw me intent on one particular purchase and she followed me with some interest, saying, "what's that?" like she might have bought some too.  I wanted to dissuade her from getting them, and knowing I was walking into a thicket I cast about my mind for the right thing to say, but just couldn't find it, so I said, "I'm getting these because I'm on a diet, and they're really low calorie, but I wouldn't recommend them to other people; they're awfully expensive for the amount of food and they're a little bland; I just like them anyway."

She responded, "Why are YOU on a diet?"

I certainly didn't want to get in a big conversation about my weird perfectionism with someone substantially heavier than I am, so I just awkwardly shrugged the question away: "I don't know," I said.

I actually think she was fairly rude herself.  That was a question there was a decent chance I wasn't going to want to answer, and while there is a social convention in some subset of peer/peer women-alone-together situations that you can often be expected to get to chatty intimacy about sex/body stuff pretty quickly, her tone wasn't really, "ah, get on with you, why are you on a diet, girlfriend, you look great" but more like, "you weird irrational alien, don't you know you're thin?"

But leaving that aside, I knew beforehand I was opening the door to some awkwardness like this; normally I just wouldn't mention anything about dieting but I wanted to find a way to communicate to her that while *I* had a reason for buying the sandwiches, I wouldn't recommend them to people who weren't making some effort at calorie restriction.  So my question is: what should I have said?  I asked Boeuf, and he suggested, "I'm trying to watch my calories today," which still strikes me as raising the issue, but he thinks it's an improvement because it doesn't suggest that I'm trying to reduce my size, merely trying to maintain it.  Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Assorted humorous items arising from my relationship with my coworker

Hee!

I obtained that link from my coworker (not the one with the shocking relationship). 

My coworker made a funny joke.  He and I both work in a cognitive-developmental lab at the new Tia U, and both volunteer in a clinical lab.  I learned of the existence of this clinical professor from him, and boy do I wish I'd been working with her for a long time (so many long stories), but it's good to be with her now.  My coworker got into Top Tier Clinical Program, and I don't have time to get a publishing record as stellar as his (this wonderful professor really enables her master's students to be first authors), but hopefully by the end of the year it will be decent.  Anyway, he gave me a journal article he wanted to submit this weekend, asking me to read it for, like, grammar and stuff, and as has happened before this year when someone handed me something they thought was mostly done, I gave it back to him bleeding red ink.  Luckily, people in academia seem to appreciate rthoughtful edits, and he seems really happy with the feedback, even though it means he has to confer more with the clinical prof and do more work.  Anyway, in order to temper one of my more minor criticisms, I made a joke, but a tired one--so tired it's already been the subject line for a post: "I know it's common in social science lit, but it's a little known fact that the Baby Jesus cries every time you use "utilize" where "use" would do.  Admittedly it's a matter of personal preference.  My preference and the BABY JESUS'."  In his email thanking me, among other things he said: "you noticed a lot of things that irritated me early on when this was just A's thesis (e.g. "utilize", see also Christ, 1 A.D.), but that I somehow habituated to."

Hah! He kills me.  I am going to start citing Christ (1 A.D.) to express disapproval.  I love APA style humor. 

I am also cleaning up someone else's thesis in this lab.  I said to him:  "I liked this sentence in S's thesis: 'Suicide is often preceded by life events'; I thought, 'Hm, yes, there are those rare neonatal suicides who pop out of the womb and think, 'goodbye cruel world.' " Hah! I kill me.

Finally, we have taken to fantasizing about responding to everything with, "It's an empirical question."  Like, Boss Lady says: "Do you have all the data from the experiment coded?" And we say, "It's an empirical question."

Did you know aspiring psychologists were such a rowdy bunch?

Culinary Adventures on a Thursday Off

Perhaps this would be a good time to tell you all something SHOCKING.  I still haven't told the story of the SHOCKING relationship of my coworker Ricotta to a previous character on this blog, but that just means I have more thrilling developments in my saga up my sleeve, so here's your palpitation inducer of the day:

Epistemological Position Envy

So I was thinking not long ago of telling a funny story.  It’s a story about Boeuf/Biff/Brock/T-Bone/Bear Claw being a doofus, but I was reminded of it recently when thinking about precisely why I was so incensed by Grizzly Man.

Part of it I talked about: it seems arrogant and inhumane to me to have a real person in front of you you’re in charge of depicting, and to prefer the vision in your head, and that inhumanity is especially unjustified when your vision is so stupid and cliched.   The other reason it pissed me off is something of a longstanding theme on this blog: I don’t know why this is such a peeve of mine, but it really bothers me when someone in an inferior position to come to an informed conclusion about a question of fact lectures someone in a better position.  So I thought it was pretty lame how Herzog thinks he knows Timothy Treadwell was so babyish and naïve about grizzlies, when TT almost certainly knew more about them then Herzog.  I think it’s pretty lame when men say that other men who criticize their women lovers about their looks are vanishingly rare.  I think it’s pretty lame when my mom starts lecturing me about NYC traffic conditions during the transit strike.  Maybe the reason this bugs me so is that my mom does it. 

A subcategory of this phenomenon is men who like to expound about how straight men think about sex or romance to women, even though, if the referent is men other than the speaker, the speaker and the audience are at just about the same level of insight into other men.  The guy might have some special insight into how the boys talk about girls together; and the girl might know something more about how the men she’s dated act in private with her.  I know there are also women who like to expound about how women are; somehow it seems to me that there are fewer, but maybe they’re just less salient to me because I find the phenomenon less annoying.  A subcategory of this subcategory is straight men who try to tell straight women what men like in bed.  It is with this phenomenon that today’s story is concerned. 

 

In the beginning of our relationship it was hard for me to figure out how to give Boeuf oral sex the way he liked it.  He said only about ten percent of women he’d ever slept knew how to give him an orgasm right off the bad, with eighty it was a learning endeavor, and another ten never learned.  I was in the middle eighty.  Plus, I was feeling like I’d practically forgotten how to give a simple blow job since all the oral sex I’d been having had been wrapped up with a lot of d/s business.  Anyway, as time went on, I progressed handily (or mouthily) to knowing how he liked it, and now he tells me that I have Super Book of Mormon power, the step beyond superkoranic, so all worked out well in that department.  On one occasion, he’d remarked that I’d recently made a leap upward, and he wondered if I knew what I’d been doing differently.  I told him I did—that I’d recently figured out what precisely he’d meant in an instruction that involved the word “underside”; I’d been interpreting it to mean something different before. (The following dialogue has been reconstructed to make it less explicit.)

 

“It was a little confusing, because a lot of men like the reverse, so it biased me toward the wrong interpretation,” I said.

 

“Mmm, I think most men are like me in this respect.  What you’re talking about is pretty uncommon.”  Cue Tia’s irritation.

 

“So, you have one penis.  I suppose you’ve talked about sex with male friends.  How many?”

 

“Two,” Boeuf offered lamely.

 

“Okay, so that’s three penises you have information about.  Do you know how many cocks I’ve sucked?  A lot more than three.”

 

Boeuf did not immediately accept my testimony, so I googled for information about the question at hand.  When Boeuf and I are disputing, we generally race for the internet as fast as possible.  The fact that Boeuf didn’t sit down fast at his computer to try to get to some authority faster might have indicated that he knew his position was weak.

 

“What do you know?  I found about four sites that not only say penises that work the way I’m used to are common, but that they are the majority.

 

“I guess what I mean to say,” Boeuf retreated, “is that the penises of the set of men who are like me will work like mine.”

 

I gave him a sidelong glance.  “I think what you have there is a tautology.”

 

“Well you’re jumping on me for saying anything else, so I’m sticking to things that logically have to be true.”

 

“So what you’re trying to say is…I’m right?"

 

Anyway, men seemed especially inclined to talk about their tastes in general terms.  I sometimes veer toward this in moments of irritation about not getting what I want when talking with third parties. But if pushed in the slightest, I would never, ever defend the generalizability of my preferences except in extreme cases*, and I definitely only do it in the irritation/talking with a third party context; I have never tried to tell a man I knew more about what women wanted in bed than he did.  I wonder what it is that motivates dispreferring “I like,” or “I want” to general proclamations about men’s tastes, or, in the case of Boeuf, being able to say “I like” and “I want” just fine, but wanting to believe he was like other men.

 

*that thing you do when you’re pulling the back of my underwear up while I’m still wearing them?  That’s called a wedgie.  My wedgie deprecation is generalizable.