Launch out into the deep, and your nets will be filled

There was a piece published in The Atlantic about a week ago, titled “Mitt Romney’s Case for Getting Married Young” (read it here). I read the headline and quickly dismissed it in favor of more interesting-looking articles about the pros and cons of the word ‘feminist‘ and a bill that could give the government access to the private information that people give companies online. But after reading these articles and still looking to procrastinate studying, decided to hear out Romney.

The article opens with a quote from Mitt Romney’s recent commencement address to Southern Virginia University, in which the former presidential candidate spoke about choosing to marry young:

“This is a promise: ‘Launch out into the deep, and your nets will be filled.’ How do you do that? Well, getting married is one way to launch into the deep. I’m so glad I found Ann when I was still so young. Combining your life with another person, particularly someone—men and women as different as we are, this combination is tremendously challenging and enormously rewarding.”

I didn’t think too much of the quote, as I think there are many others ways to “launch out into the deep” without getting married, but I found the author’s later reaction to and analysis of Romney’s speech to be much more interesting.

“Romney articulates the so-called “cornerstone” theory of marriage: that marriage is an institution worth building life on, not something to enter into once you’re already established in life … people are getting married later and later, and more and more people are seeing marriage as a “capstone” to life’s achievements rather than a foundation for those achievements (and inevitable disappointments).”

I agree with the author that people’s perception of the purpose of marriage, as well as the right time to get married, has evolved. When I brought up the topic, a number of my peers were quick to agree with me that you should marry after you had established yourself. After you had finished school, maybe even gotten a job. After you figured out what you wanted and what you liked, after you had gained confidence and independence as an individual.

But in a way, I also sympathize with the arguments of marrying young. To have a partner, someone by your side, as you go through some of the most exciting and most difficult moments in life. To be able to tackle life’s challenges with the love and support of a spouse, someone with who (ideally) the bonds run deeper than friendship. To grow together and not have to build your life alone.

But in many ways, that’s incredibly idealistic. The biggest nagging questions is: how do you know you’ve picked the right person? Especially if you’re choosing so young. What if you pick and then realize it’s a mistake? Or someone better comes along? What I want in a serious romantic partner (not necessarily a future husband…) now is vastly different from what I wanted five years ago at the age of 16, the legal age for marriage in NY state (so. young.). And I’m sure what I’ll want in 10 or 15 more years will be different as well. Choosing to put off marriage allows you to ‘test drive’ different potential partners for compatibility. To put off commitment until you have a high degree of certainty you’ve picked the right one. (As if there ever really is a ‘right one’ and picking him or her makes things easy).

But then I realized that this attitude doesn’t just apply in romantic matters. Come Friday night, on the rare chance that I’ll have multiple invitations to hang out/drink, I’ll be in a similar situation, weighing out my options, not wanting to choose the wrong one. If I show up early to a certain party and it turns out not to be as awesome as I’d hoped, then I’ll probably spend the rest of the night lamenting not having left my options open longer. I don’t want to make the best of what I have, I want to have made the right decision the first time.

Finally putting all these thoughts together, I began to ask the question: does that make me jaded? Do I have trust issues that make it difficult for me to make decisions unless I’ve weighed out my options with 100% certainty? Is there some sort of bravery, a sort of reward that comes with putting trust in others? With being the kind of person who marries young?

LDR

Obsessed with this song. It’s going to be on repeat as I study for my finals.

 

I’m also pretty excited for the movie. I feel like it’s getting a little over-hyped, but Baz Luhrmann directing Carey Mulligan and Leonardo DiCaprio in a classic story set to an epic soundtrack? Can’t be a total flop.

It’s way past time for off-the-shelf birth control pills

Before I start the real message of this post, I want to warn you that if you’re not comfortable/interested in reading about sex and reproductive health, stop here. There’s nothing graphic, but (perhaps with the potential to be even more upsetting to some) there are feminist opinions.

In yesterday’s New York Times, I read a Sunday Times opinion piece titled “Is it Time for Off-the-shelf Birth Control Pills?” in which Times writer Elizabeth Rosenthal contemplates the fact that her daughter has to pay hundreds of dollars in gynecological visits to obtain a prescription for the same birth control pills that she took a quarter of a century earlier. The piece discussed the recently adopted position of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that birth control pills should be sold without requiring a prescription from a doctor.

“Last December the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an official position paper concluding that the time had come for birth-control pills to be sold over the counter. It was the first time the group had endorsed such sales, concluding that scientific evidence suggested that the practice was safe and calling it ‘a potential way to improve contraceptive access and use, and possibly decrease the unintended pregnancy rate.’”

The piece made a number of convincing arguments about how birth control pills could be safely sold on pharmacy shelves, and how increased availability of a safe and effective contraceptive would encourage women who were using no birth control or a less-effective form to switch, thereby reducing the number of unplanned pregnancies.

“While oral contraceptives bring with them some tiny risks, especially if used improperly, they arguably pose fewer dangers than many other medicines bought freely at the pharmacy, experts say, including nonsteroidal pain pills like Motrin (which can cause stomach bleeding) and decongestants like Sudafed (which may raise blood pressure). With a simple packaging insert about proper use and precautions, women would be fully capable of using them safely, the gynecologists’ group maintained.”

However, I think that the article missed one very important argument. This is the reason why I have personally not gone on (or at least tried) hormonal birth control pills as a primary form of contraception.

Being on my parents’ health insurance, I am extremely prudent about the medical services I use, because I know that any services and prescriptions charged will appear on the bills that they receive. With conservative parents who believe that girls should remain virgins until marriage, this makes my life difficult. And as someone who considers an unplanned pregnancy the worst thing that could possibly happen right now (short of the zombie apocalypse), I am extremely (really, really) paranoid about birth control. While proper condom use can be almost 100% effective, they’re not completely immune to breaks/slips/leaks especially in the heat of the moment – and at any sign that there *might* have been any sort of accident, I completely freak out. Thanks to the struggles of feminists before me, I can stroll over to the university medical center and pay the $30 out of pocket (always cash to make my transaction completely traceless) to cover the cost of an emergency contraceptive Plan B pill – no prescription needed.

But while Plan B is available without a prescription to women aged 18 and over, it is – as it’s name suggests – not the first option and not a contraceptive meant for regular use.

Often, parents don’t want to acknowledge when their teenage (or even adult) daughters are sexually active, despite the reality that to have sex is an independent decision, not always governed by parents’ wishes or advice. Making birth control pills “off-the-shelf” not only makes a safe, reliable method of birth control more available to girls and women who value convenience or cannot afford the required gynecological visits, but increases the medication’s accessibility to those who require discretion.

Maybe in an ideal world where parents are always open-minded, understanding, and supportive, and children are always mature, responsible, and communicative, there would be more open discussion and promotion of safe sex. But in the real world, this kind of trust and communication does not always exist. And with the current situation, making responsible decisions sometimes means having to circumvent what are meant to be support systems.

Hormonal contraceptive pills have been proven to be safe (or at least as safe as most OTC-available medications) when used properly – women have reliably been taking the same pills for the last 20+ years as Rosenthal pointed out. Eliminating the need for prescriptions can only empower women and positively impact reproductive health.

Siblings

Apparently it was National Siblings Day sometime this past week. Larry, sometimes I love you and sometimes I hate you – but you gotta admit, we’re a pretty classy pair of siblings. Cheers to having someone who put up with me for 19 years, and hopefully many more to come.

Ginger & Rosa

I definitely underestimated how much I would like this movie. Beyond the story, I was really impressed by Elle Fanning as the title character Ginger, a girl who is struggling to understand the world under the threat of nuclear war and the betrayal of those she most loves and respects. It’s fairly rare for young actresses to so genuinely and convincingly portray characters older than themselves (Elle Fanning, who is 14, is three years younger than her character). The overall spirit of the movie is more dark (as even the happier moments are overshadowed by the Cold War threat of nuclear disaster), and it doesn’t follow a particularly novel plot, but I think it quite honestly portrays a number of characters who – under the darkness of the Cold War and general working class struggles – are anxious, dissatisfied, and flawed without imposing harsh outside judgement on them.

Ginger & Rosa (2012).
Director: Sally Potter
Starring: Elle Fanning, Alice Englert, Alessandro Nivola, Annette Bening, Christina Hendricks

Here’s a clip from the movie:

And then the full trailer if you’re interested:

I love chemistry. But how do I LOVE CHEMISTRY!!!!(?)

I’m at the point in my college experience when I’ve applied to, been accepted to, and visited some great graduate schools, and now I have just two weeks to decide where I may spend the next 4.5 – 6 years of my life. But, really, I’ve already made my decision, even if it hasn’t yet been formalized. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. Of all the faculty I met with at the schools I visited, I was most interested in the lab of Professor Tom Muir at Princeton University. (I choose Princeton). However, at Princeton, the Muir lab is the only lab that I’m really interested in. This is problematic because if he chooses not to take me, or for some  reason I turn out to be a poor fit for his lab, then I don’t really have any other good options in the chemistry department.

With this in mind, I’ve been in correspondence with Professor Muir who suggested that I choose Princeton (of course) and arrive earlier in the summer, so that I could spend some time in the lab before classes started. “Essentially, if you show enthusiasm and good communication skills firing this initial period then you are in – obviously you have to like the lab culture as well. Usually things work out fine.” Sounds promising, right? Except that I’m more than a little apprehensive about having to show “enthusiasm and good communication skills”; I think anyone who knows me personally would understand.

My current research PI has been enormously helpful throughout my graduate school application and visiting process, and so again I went to her for advice. This is how I explained my quandary: I’m utterly incapable of faking enthusiasm (she interjected that I should never have to, and I agree), but even when I am honestly enthusiastic about something, I often find it hard to actively express my enthusiasm, and people find it hard to detect. Basically, I was worried that I would not convincingly communicate my enthusiasm for research in the Muir lab, and be rejected for that reason.

Her response was pretty much what I expected to hear – a confirmation of what I knew, what I had heard from others countless times – yet I found it no less disheartening. When I first joined her lab this past summer, she thought I came across as disinterested (ouch). While I did everything that was asked of me, I failed to relay the excitement of someone who was truly interested in their research. She went on to say that she knows me much better now, and realizes that I am interested and committed to my project. Yet, she knows this mostly because she has gotten better at interpreting me, and suggested that I would benefit greatly from being more expressive and taking more initiative. While she isn’t wrong in detecting that my interest in lab research has increased over the past two semesters, I’d argue that I was far from ‘disinterested’ when I first joined the lab.

I wrote an earlier post about being an introvert, in which I described myself as “just taking a while to warm up to people,” a statement with which my PI mostly agreed. But in this case, at Princeton I don’t have 9 months, or even a semester to win people over. I might have a month. In the first lab I joined (for undergraduate research) it took months before I was the one to initiate a casual conversation with the grad student whose desk was beside mine – and he was probably the friendliest guy in the lab. Why? I don’t know why – I just didn’t.

At the same time, I do realize that I tend to conduct myself in a more restrained manner, especially with strangers, and that can give off a cold or aloof impression. People are always saying “just be yourself,” but what if “being myself” is what’s limiting my opportunities? I don’t think I need changing or “fixing,” but I would hate to learn that my introversion and social restraint are major handicaps. So how do I convincingly show enthusiasm that others actually interpret as enthusiasm? Increase my frequency of the words “awesome” and “cool?” Smile more? Give more thumbs up? To me, those suggestions sound so silly they verge on comical.

But in all seriousness: should I just acknowledge that I am unlikely to please someone who is looking for “enthusiasm and good communication skills,” and choose to attend another university at which there are more faculty whose research I find less interesting, but labs I think I could also be happy working in? Can I change myself to better fit these criteria? (And if so, then how?). To those people who know me personally (I know some of you read this blog – friends, classmates, etc), I’d be especially interested in knowing what you think.

I <3 my "dumb" phone

I love meeting people who use old-school flip phones. The ones super-cheap ones with fixed dial pads with buttons that click satisfyingly under your fingertips, and are seemingly indestructible (at Princeton I actually met a guy whose flip phone survived being dropped multiple stories down an elevator shaft. If that had been an iPhone…). Everyone has their own reasons for choosing whatever phone they own, but I always feel some sort of camaraderie towards those who still use basic phones.

I’ve avoided converting from a basic phone to a smart phone thus far, but it’s surprisingly difficult. Most phone companies are phasing out their basic phones, and focusing less time and effort on developing good basic phone models. Many retail, dining, and travel providers offer deals and services that are exclusively accessible by use of smart phones. My peers ask why I “don’t just get an iPhone already,” and my mother encouraged me to convert when my brother did, telling me that she didn’t want me to feel left out if everyone else had iPhones. It sounds dramatic, but sometimes I feel quite judged and excluded for choosing not to conform.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not fundamentally opposed to smart phones. I understand that some professions require you to be constantly ‘plugged in’ whether it’s checking data/transactions, managing/overseeing dynamic processes and employees, or doing work on-the-go when access to a computer is not practical. And I understand that they’re marketed as cool, and fun, and convenient, but for most people (and certainly most non-professionals), I think they’re more of an unnecessary cost and distraction than a useful or necessary tool.

Here are a few of my personal reasons for sticking to a basic phone:

• Smart phones are more expensive. I’m pretty sure data plans are not cheap. Also, on a basic phone there’s no temptation to buy games and apps. I’d rather use that money to buy food. Or alcohol. Or new shoes. 
• I don’t need another distraction or reason to avoid direct human interaction. Angry birds, Instagram, Facebook mobile, Snapchat, Words with Friends…. all distractions. Have you ever sat in a room where everyone was staring down at their mobile device instead of having a conversation? Or gotten dinner with a friend whose attention was more on their phone than on you?
• It’s nice to occasionally remain anonymous and not have to account for immediately responding at any minute of any day. I don’t need alerts that pressure me to read/respond to every text message, email, Facebook message, tweet, etc. the instant they’re sent. I’m not isolated or unreachable – I check my email a couple times a day and respond to most text messages within the hour. And emergencies are usually handled with phone calls anyways.
• I don’t need any of its functionalities. I already have a computer. And an mp3 player. And they work just fine. There’s something to be said for the convenience of always having Google maps and a search engine on hand, but I still insist that neither of those are necessary. I just spent the past weekend navigating around NYC and Princeton, NJ using maps and schedules posted at train and bus stations, and a single-page map of midtown that I printed the night before. And when I did get lost, I shamelessly asked for directions.

I’m sure that smartphone owners have plenty of words to say in defense of their choices, but at least for me, I don’t really get it. I’m perfectly happy with my “dumb phone” and I’ll stick with it for as long as I can.

Let the river run

I don’t think I’ve heard this song since I sang it in middle school choir (or was it high school choir?). But anyways, I just came across it again and I kind of love it.

PS. I apologize for the lack of recent blog posts. Between studying for a ridiculous 4-hour chem exam that I may have bombed anyways, and various grad school visits (I’m at Yale right now!), my mind has kind of been otherwise occupied.

Call it wasted potential

About four hours ago, I dropped a class. I dropped RELST 3260: Christianity and Judaism, a 4-credit class that meets twice a week at 8:40am. I had a number of reasons for dropping; I found it difficult to stay awake during the early lectures, as much as I respected the professor’s obviously extensive knowledge I didn’t like his teaching style, dropping would mean I’d have more time for research (or sleep), and well, I didn’t need the course to graduate. So my decision was justified. But at the same time, I feel a little as if I’ve let myself down.

Why? At 14 credits, this is the lightest course-load (credit-wise) that I’ve taken on during my time at Cornell. And while a graduate level chemistry course and 16 hours/week of research hardly make my course-load “light,” it somehow seems to pale in comparison to my 19-credit course-load last semester that also contained a graduate level chemistry course and 16 hours/week of research. Am I slacking, I ask myself?

When I take a step back from myself and look at some of my friends and peers who are taking the minimum 12- or 13-credit course-loads, I rarely consider them to be slackers. Some fill their ‘free time’ with non-academic pursuits, and others simply leave the time free. I don’t judge either. Maybe I’m just harder on myself?

Tonight, I was reading another NY Times Room for Debate feature (this one also happened to be about feminism), and one of the panelists made a statement that I think not only applies to women, but to students (of both genders). I certainly feel this way. Anyways, the writer, Courtney E. Martin wrote that girls are “told that they could be anything, but heard that they had to be everything.”

As college students, especially at an Ivy League university, we are told that we can be anything – that we can do anything. We are told to dream large because everything is within our reach. And this creates an enormous pressure to become that someone, to do that something. The specifics don’t even matter as much, the focus is on the scale of our achievements. Cornell loves to boast about it’s alumni that are Nobel Prize winners, CEO’s, or politicians. They were once undergrads here, too, we are told. The message is that we have to live up to these enormous potentials that we are said to possess. And if we don’t, we have somehow failed.

As Martin writes, “Most of us can’t afford, nor would we want to settle, for lives that didn’t make us feel accomplished in the big, wide world. But in exchange for our new ambitions, we’ve traded our shame. We only blame ourselves as we fail to transcend our own flawed humanness and the 24 hours in a given day.”

So by dropping down to 14 credits, am I really letting myself down? Am I really slacking off? I want to say no. In the long run, I don’t think I’ll regret dropping this class that I didn’t need and didn’t enjoy. And I know that I’ll continue to work hard. In fact, maybe I’ll get up at 7:30am anyways, so I can start work in lab a bit earlier…

How can someone be pro-feminism, but not necessarily a feminist?

Over the past year and a half, I’ve probably written a dozen – if not more – drafts of this post. I’ve tried (and scrapped) posts centered around everything from article quotes, to personal anecdotes, to general emotional rants. But I think this is finally it. While many of my posts have presented feminist themes, fundamentally, this is a post dedicated to feminism. It’s also about many other things, as it’s impossible to discuss feminism in isolation, but if you’re not willing to read about ‘just feminism’ then I suggest you leave this page now.

I was first inspired by Tuesday’s Room for Debate on the New York Times. To copy from the Times site: “Room for Debate presents a video roundtable, via Google+, reflecting on the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.” The book tapped into anger among “happy housewives” in the 60s, helping create the second wave of feminism. But many women who balance career and family are still frustrated. Why?” Those interested in watching the roundtable video can find it here.

I found one of the most interesting aspects of the roundtable to be the discussion of the words “feminism” and “feminist.” I’ve always been personally reluctant to associate myself with the word “feminism” and to label myself as a “feminist” for the same reason that I think many women do. That opponents of feminism have associated the word with “man-hating” and irrational, hormone-fueled aggression. That feminists are trying to turn women into men, or (even worse) men into women. The word “feminism” is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary to mean: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” So, many of the women who agree with this definition, but may deny the label “feminist” are in fact, by definition feminist. It’s important to acknowledge that many women don’t identify with feminism, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t care to identify with certain perceptions of feminism.

Also interesting was the roundtable’s discussion of “female rage.” The subtitle for the piece was “If women can have it all why are they still angry?” Upon first reading this, it made me a little angry myself, but for a different reason. I thought, “Why did the NY Times automatically assume that women are angry?” To me, the word ‘anger’ implied irrationality and lack of control. People who were angry weren’t taken seriously. They were told to calm down and cool off. But most of the panelists thought otherwise. They were upset with the fact that it’s not acceptable for women to express their anger at current gender inequality. Women are told that they should be grateful of the conditions now, considering how conditions a few decades ago were much more unequal – there’s no place for rage anymore. But the panelists (and now I, myself) beg to differ. Rage and anger have a place anytime inequality continues to exist. It’s not wrong to be grateful for progress, but past progress should not be used as an excuse to impede future work.

Unarguably, the feminist movement has made its mistakes. Sometimes it pushed to hard and was too aggressive. Other times, it was too passive and made too many compromises. And too often, it was defined by the beliefs and actions of radical minorities that managed to grab media attention to the detriment of the overall movement. However, I don’t think anyone would argue that change is messy. Progress means venturing into new terrain; mistakes have been made and will continue to be made.

I consider myself very fortunate to be ‘entering adulthood’ in a time when women have more respect, more recognition, and more opportunities than ever. But at the same time, I agree there’s much more progress to be made. For example, here are a few things that I’d like to see change in my lifetime:

•  Women’s reproductive rights in the hands of women. I think when it comes down to it, women (in consultation with their doctors) – NOT their boyfriends or husbands, NOT lobbying groups, and DEFINITELY NOT old, conservative, white, male legislators – know what’s best for women. I think comprehensive sex education and healthcare options will go far in empowering women, and will also reduce instances of unintended pregnancy and therefore abortion.
• Along a similar vein, I’d like to see elimination of the virgin or slut dichotomy – the idea that a woman is either prude if she is a virgin, or a slut for having pre-marital sex or sex with multiple partners. That whatever your level of sexual activity, it’s something to hide for fear of judgement. I mean, there’s no male equivalent for the word “slut.”
• Gender-neutral marketing of toys, books, etc. I feel very lucky to have a brother close to my age. It meant that growing up, I got to play with his LEGO block sets, video games, and other ‘boy toys.’ And I had a ton of fun with them. No girl should miss out on building LEGO fortresses because parents think that LEGOs aren’t ‘girl toys.’ This especially applies to educational toys like science kits that are more often marketed towards boys than girls.
• General improved understanding of and patience towards the feminist movement and its results. Like I mentioned earlier, with progress comes mistakes, and accepting that requires patience. I think a recent Thought Catalogue post put it very well. “Our grandmothers largely looked toward the eventual certainty of becoming a wife as one great stabilizing force, a determinant; we are a generation of women overwhelmed by choice.” I have choices that even my own mother couldn’t have dreamt of, but at the same time, it can be overwhelming. I wasn’t raised to be prepared for all of ‘this’ because all of ‘this’ wasn’t the case when my mother was growing up. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but some patience and understanding would really help