Louise's thoughts

Vienna

I am spending the week in Vienna.

Confessions

One of my good friends is making me feel really bad about a couple of things at the moment. She is well aware of the first issue and has apologized genuinely and her apology has been accepted. The other thing she makes me feel bad about is the fact that I, just like her, am one of those researchers trying to be both geek and human. I truly believe that this is possible but keep forgetting how difficult it is to become proficient in both worlds. I can talk Star Trek with even the biggest trekkie, but I cannot (like my friend is also claiming) build a larger program by myself or without using considerable time to re-capture the essentials of the Java API (not to talk about if I was to use C++, a language I have only read, not programmed in) or just finding a decent editor that would fit my (tragic) Windows need. However, I am convinced that if I put myself down to it I would succeed. One of my geek traits have always been that I in fact find programming fun. But I am not a complete geek, I am too proficient in talking about real life and other things than the latest version of C#. Neither do I have a Masters in psychology or sociology, but only minored in psychology, which kept my courses constrained to basics. The philosophy I have read is confined to what is in Paul's book, if you don't count high school Plato. Needless to say, I am neither a true geek, neither a true human.

Before talking about this with my friend (after being inspired by .danah), I blissfully believed that I was good enough to make it in this harsh world even with this discrepancy between my two fields of interest. I thought that my strengths were this combination of being able to talk the geek language, while still emphasizing human factors of technology. Now I just feel like someone who couldn't make up her mind if she wanted to major in computer science or psychology. But I chose computer science and live with the choice because I still believe that the technical background gives me strengths to understand issues of limitations that I would otherwise have missed. I still madly want to get back into programming because, well, there is nothing like that feeling of success when your program compiles the first time. Perhaps, that would be the feeling you get when your latest paper (made with blood, sweat and tears, thank you Paul) gets accepted. But I still have about a month of waiting for that. However, in the end, I guess, nothing really beats the feeling of excitement when going to one of your favorite conferences for a whole week of fun, networking, good talks, catching up with friends and who knows, making new 'friends'? And perhaps since my friend is going to the conference too, we can have a little talk about that bad feeling of being incompetent in something that we have devoted our (working) lives to. And if I am very lucky I will realize that most people feel insufficient in some way, no matter how many years they have worked in a field, so we should just get going and stop worrying about our inadequacies and enjoy what we are doing RIGHT NOW!

Spring

Since I have not experienced a dark and cold Danish winter, I have a hard time appreciating the nice and sunny spring that we are now seeing. I even feel a bit ungrateful about my failing ability to say 'Oh, the weather is so nice, lets sit outside'. I sat outside the past five months everyday for lunch and frankly, I don't care that much. Besides my fair skin burns just by staying in the sun for 10 minutes, so it is usually even less pleasurable afterwards. I want to sit inside where the large Scandinavian windows let in light but not the sun.

Perhaps my lack of sunlight is the reason for me being less cheerful than usual. My mood is just not keeping up and I still feel weird in this country full of Danish speaking people who do not apologize when they slam the door in my face. Although my desk faces the window in my office now and although I have new exciting office mates (and old nice ones too), I can't seem to get going with anything. Sure, I do my work and even my thesis writing is going well, slow but well; but little things ad up and missing Irvine friends (and advisor), getting job application rejections, thinking I was dating a guy and then find myself being ignored, all ad up to me being in a really bad mood. So I hope I will cheer up when I go to my second favorite conference next week, where I will have to sell myself ('cheap, brilliant HCI/ubicomp researcher for sale. Will take best offer from university or industry located close enough to big city, offering possibility to do independent research in relevant topic, great teaching experiences too.'), mingle and network, have fun with all my California friends and get research input. Just thinking about it makes me in a better mood already.

Hangover

Where my Saturday was busy, with getting up early to write on my thesis, playing squash with my brother and meeting friends for coffee before picking up sushi that four other girls and I were to dine on, my Sunday was a day of recreation. For the first time in ages (I think two years) I had actually been drinking so much Saturday night with the girls and later at a friend's party that I had a serious hangover, which needed nurturing beyond Advil. I went down to Seven/Eleven, which is an institution here in Copenhagen, rather than the common gas station it represents in America. It is in fact the only store that is open on Sundays and after 8pm here in Denmark; besides it being a convenience store, it is also 'America' to a lot of people, with the good (convenience) and the bad (chain imperialism) that goes with it. I have to admit that I see nothing American in the concept other than the name, because it is Danes who owns them and Danish people who work there and the concept of Seven/Eleven=24 hour open, has nothing to do with the American chain gas station that could as well be called Chevron or Shell.

Going to 7/11 with a huge hangover I, for the first time realized how different downtown Copenhagen is to a regular neighborhood with mainly locals. The tourists buying ice cream and Danish (that would be Vienna bread in Danish) really bothered me and the uniformed cashier was ringing up my newspaper and croissant way too fast for my shaking hands to keep up. Here the tempo was upbeat because even on a Sunday the main street is crowded and when 7/11 is the only thing open, they are busy beyond anything imaginable. I just wanted to go home and tend to my headache. I locked myself in my apartment and spend the day reading a Danish newspaper from front to back for the first time since I returned and not going anywhere at all. Not even my beloved coffee shop Baresso with a wireless Internet. So after a busy Saturday I did absolutely nothing on Sunday and felt absolutely fine about it. But I think it will be a while before I drink that much again.

I am here

I guess it is now official... I updated my real website to include my Danish information and corrected the 'I am a visiting researcher in California...' to 'I am a [slave] PhD [overworked] student in Denmark'. My body might be here, but my brains are just generally lost. Sigh...

Lights

So I learned one thing last night that I had totally forgotten through my long elope to the States: always bring your bike lights. Even though you can't possibly imagine eight o'clock in the morning that you will do other than get out of the office around six-sevenish, bike home and perhaps do some grocery shopping on the way, BRING YOUR LIGHTS! I forgot that this is Copenhagen, which means that distractions such as friends passing by your office, deciding to go for a quick cup of coffee, ends up with me talking to guys in the States (who just woke up) so it is seven before we get out. Resulting in girlfriend and I going for quick dinner, me finally passing by my parents on the way back home to pick up my agenda that I forgot the other day (resulting in me making three appointments on top of each other for Thursday afternoon). Getting a glass of red wine because an old friend of theirs was in town and talking about location servers with my brother (apparently he knows more about that than I do and he is not even studying CS at a university yet...), means that I have to ride home around 11.30pm. And even though the nights are bright, it is dark at this hour and I needed lights. So remember Louise you are in Copenhagen, BRING YOUR LIGHTS! PS. I was law abiding and borrowed my brother's lights.

Haircut

Over Easter I gave my brother a haircut and my Mom managed to insult two of her children in one sentence: 'That doesn't look very good...' I disagree, my brother is handsome and if my research career fails, I guess I can always go back to the hair cutting business.

Drama Queen

I always liked that expression, even before I knew exactly what it meant. Now that I know roughly what it describes, I can't help thinking that I liked the words because deep down, I knew they describe one side of me. Not a very secret or dark side of me, just a piece of my overall personality. And not because I act hysterical or loud in many situations (please let me know if I am wrong here!), but because I like drama. I exaggerate. I like to make things more dramatic than they are in reality and I exaggerate on any given occasion and make things seem more tragic or harmonious than they really are. I even expect people to know this.

I am not going to use this opportunity to confess to all my drama queen acts, but just point out that what I say or do, is often affected by how little drama I have found in my life lately. If my life gets too boring, I often wound up things in my own head and make people (and myself) believe that they are more meaningful than they in fact are. If some person says a stupid little thing to me, I over-interpret it and end up believing and convincing other people that that person doesn't like me. Or doesn't like himself. And if I overhear an innocent conversation, I immediately think that there is something hidden and that they are conspiring towards general mutiny against the Dean. Likewise, when a date says 'see you in a week', I think it is because he doesn't really like me and make it into a disaster, even though he might just be too busy to actually see me.

So being a drama queen is not that easy and although I keep telling myself to calm down and start being less drama and more queen, I long to exaggerate and make my life less boring. I mean, how much excitement can one girl get by typing papers all day, studying handheld computers and being around the same people that I have known for more than five years and that I still don't find that interesting (I am not talking about any of my readers here). I need drama in my life and although California provided me with approximately half the drama than I used to get here in Copenhagen, the 'being in California' factor itself was drama enough for months. Copenhagen so far, has not provided me with much excitement and the result is that I am making use of my exaggeration tendencies to charge up the pace. As soon as I have my drama queen acts back in action I will be as good as new and hopefully get caught up in entanglements of lies, betrayal, desire and fun. Just be prepared.

Teaching

This week is in fact Easter break, which means that only PhD students and young vibrant assistant professors are here at the university. It gives an extra upbeat notion of energy around, one that is usually outweighed by older administrative women and secretaries who dominate the lunch hour with kids/garden/cooking talk. That means that I am actually joining people for lunch this week; we are free to talk about research, annoying students and cool gadgets. Another bonus is that there are only few students around (for my American readers, that means master students, PhDs are a special breed here) leaving hallways vacant for yelling and screaming obscenities to each other, which we ordinarily wouldn't because we have to keep our cool attitude. I mean, perhaps you will be advising a student who heard you yell 'Well, screw you too, I am writing that paper anyway, you have no right to tell me that my research methods are not genuine!', but the odds this week are significantly lower than usual. And I have to admit that I havn't been yelling that much yet, because my head is buried in teaching.

Before going to Irvine last August, I made this 'deal' with my real adviser (who has no idea that I am writing a blog and I prefer to keep it that way) that if I turned in my thesis this summer, he would let me off the hook when it came to teaching. No more teaching, just a thesis. But Damn you Paul Dourish for making Irvine such a fun place to do research and somehow I ended up in this twisted plot where the only way they could get me back (I know it, they know it, we just don't talk about it) was to make me teach and I now have 40 students to advise through April and May in location-based mobile application design. I usually think students are these adorable, curious, generally hardworking entities and I love to help them out but this time it is a little different. They take my precious time away from me and I am living off extensions right now (‘sorry, I promise I will hand in that position paper by the end of the week’). The only good thing is that their projects are actually interesting, dealing with topics that are my interests as well. Some wants to make a city guide with shopping and mapping and although it has been proposed before, it is always good to see a new version, with different locating technologies (I need to explain to them that GPS is neither plausible nor appropriate on cell phones right now...).

So even though it is Easter, I will be right here at my desk, wondering when I get the time to write on my thesis. I don't know if it was a relapse of my jetlag or the impact of last night's hot date that kept me from sleeping more than 4 hours last night (again!), but somehow I have the feeling that I will not get much more the next couple of days. As one of my fridge magnets says: ‘Coffee, you can sleep when you are dead’.

Girlfriends II

Yesterday was girlfriend day and it was as I had never left. I had lunch with a girlfriend, I went to dinner with another one and ended up drinking espresso martinis 'til 1.30 am girl-talking until we turned blue in the face (from all the indoor smoke!). Of course the occasional geek talk came up and I spent a significant part of the evening catching up on the European cell phone situation: which new models were out, what services were new and how far we are in the 3G race; I realized that on Monday I have to go and get a GPRS subscription, so I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting for it to connect when I check my email or movie times (GPRS was automatically build into my GSM subscription in California). We talked about graduate education and how your skills are not always transparent; you can possess certain abilities but the real strength in most areas is the skill to acquire new skills. You can know the Java API inside out, but if you don't know the principles of creating well structured programs (variables, loops and conditions) you will never be able to learn to use new languages. Likewise, when you read a paper that is not in your area but still consist of interesting research, you learn how to critique and value research in general and can use this to improve you own research (this is why, I tell myself, that I don't mind reviewing these three articles that are more information systems than ubiquitous computing and really not my cup of tea... ).

My girlfriends are the sweetest and after a day like yesterday, Denmark is not that bad. They always listen to my complains, and although I am not good in following their advise (to the extent that I miss flights, date the wrong guys, get my heart torn in two and end up buying the wrong color shoes), they are invaluable. So being in Denmark is not that bad, I thought, while biking (I got a bike now, that definitely improved my mood too!) home though the crowded Friday night with no headlights, hoping that I wouldn't get pulled over by the police.

Missing California II

Today was one of those days when I just wanted to be back in California. It was presumably not the last one of those, but it was the first one since getting back to Denmark. I didn't feel I belong here, I am weird, different and have a hard time reconnecting with people. Of course everybody is all 'hi, welcome back Louise', but then the conversation fades and I get insanely jealous when I overhear people saying 'let's go to brunch on Sunday'. I want to go to brunch on Sunday, but somehow, it is not as simple as if I had been here all the time. I miss my favorite Irvine friend (he knows who he is), because it was easy to say 'lets do this and that' and there was really nothing to it; we would go out and have fun, nothing more, nothing less. Here I have to hold my breath, build up courage to ask out old friends. Or people I would like to be friends with. And then it is even more discouraging to get a 'sure, lets go out sometime' and then not hear anymore. It makes me feel that they have all the power to decide over how and when I will get a decent social life here in Denmark. Not that I don't have wonderful friends who actually do call me up, write me emails and ask if I want to go do something. But I still feel so odd in this Danish world with people who don't apologize when they bump into you, store clerks who don't look you in the eyes or say hello to you at the grocery store. It makes me think that nobody really cares about each other.

I realize that I am being totally impatient and that in two weeks things will be much better. But I am also a bit frightened that in two weeks I will be even more impatient, because I still don't go to the movies once a week (as I used to two years ago) and because I still don't have a sense of belonging to this country. In four weeks I will be depressed because I am loosing contact with my American friend without having gained new ones in Denmark and in 2 months I will have new plans of when to leave next time. So I keep telling myself that I should take initiatives instead of waiting for others to do so; I really can't blame anyone but myself. And I guess that I should cheer up and just realize that moving back is much more difficult than moving out. And stop wishing that I was in Irvine, just chatting and eating lunch with the other grad students there.

Jetlag

There are two ways of getting over jetlag: to sleep or not to sleep. The first option I have only tried once, because I got sick and slept for 12 hours straight when I got to California. I have never been over a jetlag so fast. The second option is often not one of choice either, but this time I realized how efficient it actually is. You get a lot more things done when only four hours is spend sleeping than my usual 7-8...

I had decided already in California that I wouldn't have time to let a jetlag bother me, but I had not anticipated the reaction of my body. I kept waking up after only 4-5 hours of sleep, no matter when and where, meaning that I was constantly tired during the day, falling asleep in lectures (fortunately not my own!). Finally last night, I was so exhausted that since I was just myself in the evening (nobody to keep me awake), I fell asleep on the couch at eight thirty. That took thoroughly care of my remaining jetlag problems and I woke up well rested early next morning. So as I said, to sleep or not to sleep...