Thursday, June 16, 2016

Observations after visiting a @dartmouthalumni alumnae networking event

I'm a patent attorney. I'm also an alumna of Dartmouth College. I got a flyer for an alumnae networking event about jobs in "tech." I signed up. It wasn't expensive. I hoped I might meet potential clients at this event.

It was held at the offices of twitter in NYC.  I had no clue that twitter had offices in NYC.  My imagination was having a bit of trouble even grasping the concept of twitter having offices at all.  I’m so used to thinking of them as a website, but, of course, behind websites there are physical people in physical places: reality check.

There was very nice food there.  They have wine on tap.  I never saw that anywhere before.  By contrast, I had to go to another room to get water.

I also had some nice conversations.

Other aspects of the event were disappointing.

First, the speakers all had non tech jobs in the tech industry. Two of them -- a minority -- had some tech education, but that wasn't their current work. The others didn't even have a tech background. Some of these women had impressive management titles, which was nice, but they weren’t doing research or development.

Second, the attendees were predominantly young and childless.

This gave rise to a lot of thoughts on my part.

One thread of thinking had to do with the absence of actual tech people – and hence the absence of anyone who needed a patent. 

There was a representative of Dartmouth there.  She pointed out brightly that more women had graduated from the Thayer School of Engineering than men.  Really? Why weren’t they at this conference?  Curious.

On the one hand, I thought the conference tended to confirm the general prejudice that women just don’t go into tech, not really.  These women might say they are in “tech,” but they’re not tech people.

On the other hand, I remember going to a Princeton Reunion with my ex husband many years before and sitting at a table with a bunch of men who had had tech majors and none of them had a tech job any more.

The powers that be declaim loudly that there is a shortage of people with scientific and engineering education in this country, but, in fact, people with this type of education tend to lose out in the work place.  Managers and sales people are paid more and have more job security.  That’s not very attractive for intelligent and ambitious people.

Another thread in my thoughts was the focus of discussion.  This focus was getting a job and then getting promoted. There were definitely some interesting remarks there, about getting a job through loose connections and how women don't ask for promotions, but men do. But there was no mention of the fact that the speakers did not actually have tech jobs.

It's true that I was never the sort of person that asks for promotions. It's probably true that men ask for them more. I suppose that's a high-risk strategy, because if your boss really doesn't like you that could precipitate them firing you, but if the boss does like you, it might prod them to dole out that promotion or raise sooner.

Of course, this young woman who asked for and got promotions was also exceptionally beautiful and charming, which might have had a lot to do with the success of her promotion seeking endeavor.   If she had been ugly and socially awkward, things might have gone differently – or, as in my case, if she were older.  It seems to me that we live in a society where older women are just thrown away.

Somehow, though, I just don’t want to be in that rat race, trying to become CEO of a tech company.  It doesn’t call me.  I wonder how this young woman would feel if she had children.  Having children gives one a different perspective.  Neurologists have shown that a woman’s brain undergoes substantial physiological changes as a result of pregnancy and rearing children.  Areas relating to nurturing grow, presumably at the expense of other. 

There is a saying that at some point you stop living for yourself and start living for your children. 

I remember being at Dartmouth and seeing people my age wandering around the campus reminiscing and wondering “Don’t they have a life?”  What I didn’t know was how, after your kids are grown, it’s disorienting.  You stop and wonder, “Gee, what was I doing before?”  You go back through previous decisions.  You wonder what might have been different if you had gone in a different direction. 

The whole rat race thing just didn’t appeal – maybe it never did.  Maybe it didn’t even when I was at Dartmouth, though perhaps more so than now.  Granted the wolf isn’t at the door here, but then it isn’t the wolf at the door that makes you seek to be a CEO.  You seek to be a CEO because of some other drive.

Then again that’s what men claim, when they look at women’s lower incomes, that women make a lifestyle choice not to go into top jobs.

Maybe.

Though I still think that women’s work is just not valued.  Traditional women’s jobs, like administrative support, are not truly any less valuable than those of management. It’s just that managers have bigger egos and more aggressive personalities, so they think they deserve more – a lot more. 

And maybe men somehow feel that if women are like that they are making advances in society … that whole concept that if women are junior men then perhaps they can be paid more nearly like men.  But that seems like a fundamentally anti-feminist concept to me.

Then again Dartmouth has a lot of motivation to encourage people to seek very high paying jobs, because it makes it easier for them to keep hiking tuition.  It seems to me that tuition has been going up at at least twice the rate of inflation ever since I graduated.

OK, I see myself starting to write a book here.  More later.



Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Pictures of me as a Crabby Nun in "Failing with Grace"





This was a fun shoot and I am grateful to my friend Grace Nkenge Edwards, author, for casting me in it.  I'm a bit concerned that a US audience, watching this segment, may feel that it is racist, as there are a group of white people picking on a black person.  I actually do not think that Grace wrote this scene with that intent.  I think she was trying to show herself as a comical, socially inept person.   Here's the clip.


Sunday, May 15, 2016

pictures from "A Bad Year for Tomatoes"

This show ran at the Clove Creek Dinner Theater, Fishkill, NY
5/5/16-5/22/16






















rehearsal



Posed cast photos (first one includes backstage crew as well)







Review of the play by Lucinda Antrim


A light comedy that could perhaps have benefited from some tightening in the
script, "A Bad Year for Tomatoes" showcases our own Anne Barschall in a
supporting role as the mystical neighbor, sweeping onto stage in flowing,
flowery clothes with her wand and crystal, squinting a la Emma Thompson in
Harry Potter, sensing disaster and offering healing. Stage direction had
her entering whimsically through the bottom half of a Dutch door, a feat
which she made look easy. An intimate dinner theatre experience, many of
the seats are close to the action. Costumes and set effectively evoke
mid-60s Vermont. The one miss in the costuming department was an
unfortunate beard, which happily (spoiler alert) came off in the character's
unexpected and delightful transformation. The vegetarian main was
beautifully presented and delicious, the Caesar salad fresh and crisp and
complete with anchovy, but avoid the strawberry shortcake. A surprise on
the wine menu was the New York Seyval Blanc, a wine worth becoming familiar
with for its "notes of green apple, lemon blossom and chamomile." All in
all, a highly recommended evening.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Updates 160430

I have the following updates, since my last updates post, in March

upcoming performances
  • "A Bad Year for Tomatoes" playing Willa Mae Wilcox at The Clove Creek Dinner Theater 5/5/16-5/22/16
  • Class Show, Musical Level I, 5/1/16 9pm, at Magnet Studio Theater - 22 W. 32nd St, 10th floor - Room A

Performance completed, since all of those in March, which I mentioned as upcoming in my last update
  • Mme Paula in "Un Vase à Chinatown" d Jeremy Hung 4/16/16 -- in French
  • Standup, The Set NYC, d Pim Shih 3/22/16 "Politics Music Monologues Show"

Courses completed
  • Musical Improv Level 1 (retaking), Nikita Burdein and Frank Spitznagel 3/12/16-5/1/16 Magnet Theater
  • Basic Harmony for Musical Improvisors with Dan Reitz link to class photo 
  • "Playing it Real" with Gavin Speiller, Improv Elective, UCB NYC Training Center 4/5-12/16
  • 48th Street Exercise, with Gary Austin, at Artistic New Directions (AND) 4/1/16

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Hobbit Houses and Tornadoes

I have wondered for some time why it is that in California there are these wonderful earthquake related building codes that have saved thousands of lives in major earthquakes -- but there are no tornado related building codes in places like Oklahoma and Kansas.

I lived for a while in Rochester, MN.   This community is the home of the Mayo Clinic.  That famed institution was formed after a huge tornado cut a swath of destruction a mile wide through the community and a clinic was needed to deal with the aftermath.

When I lived there I frequently cowered in the basement in fear when there were tornado watches and warnings. Even when the sky was clear, I thought about how a tornado could come out of it.

I've seen how well the building codes work in California.  They'll announce the magnitude of the earthquake and then they'll say there were some number less than 20 casualties.  Then I'll see a similar magnitude earthquake reported in Turkey or Iran, and there will be tens of thousands dead.  I've seen how natives of the Andes mountains made stone walls where the pieces were fitted together by crafting of the stones, so that they don't fall during earthquakes.

But I don't see where tornado prone states are making building codes to protect their residents.

I did read a story of an underground house surviving a tornado

Earth sheltered homes can survive tornadoes

Then I saw these cute modular homes that people can assemble themselves, and which are designed to be buried.  Wouldn't this be the perfect solution?



Tuesday, April 5, 2016

@uspshelp -- frustrations with computer sorting

Computer sorting of mail just does not work as well as humans.

Recently I sent a letter to a friend who happens to live near the border of several towns.  His legal residence is in one town in Vermont, while his mail is delivered by the post office in the adjacent town.

When I addressed the letter, I used his legal address, because that's the one I had used when finding his house using google maps.

The letter was returned to me as "no such street, unable to forward."

My friend reports that the human postal carriers were able to figure out such addressing, but the computer sorting facility cannot.

This is really annoying.  I sent the letter to the correct, legal address of my friend's house.   The fact that the postal service elects to deliver mail from the post office of the neighboring town is supposed to be for postal service convenience, not to inconvenience postal service customers. The computer should be programmed to figure such addresses rather than sending letters back to senders.

Even more annoying, when I went to usps.com, to try to send in an e-mail complaining of this situation, I found a bunch of options for complaining about mail service -- and none of the options applied to this situation.  They don't have a category for "other" complaints.  They can't imagine that someone might come up with a complaint that doesn't fall into the categories they have pre-selected.

Again a human being would be able to take a miscellaneous complaint that doesn't fit into other categories.