My academic career finally ended

I didn’t talk about it much, but until recently I was technically still involved in academia. I participated in Project Recognize, a research grant to improve survey measures of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) for public health research.

The project was particularly interested in measures of asexual and intersex groups, because there is a gap in the academic literature. For example, this NASEM report has hundreds of pages on SSOGI measures, but barely anything to say about asexuality at all.  We were filling that gap by looking beyond academic literature, such as exploring grassroots community literature.

We were funded by an NIH grant, but as you can imagine, this is exactly the sort of research that’s getting targeted for being too “woke”.

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That time a cozy game triggered me

Gather round, it’s anecdote time.

Unpacking is a critically acclaimed indie game from 2021 that asks the player to unpack items from boxes, as if they had just moved. From this basic idea, a low key narrative emerges, following an off-screen character as they move from place to place at different stages of their life. And you can track their interests and circmstances by the various tchotchkes they bring with them.

Perhaps it’s a bit hyperbolic to say Unpacking triggered me. However, I did find it so unpleasant that I DNF’d it, despite its short run time.

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A Chinese-Filipino family history

My grandfather died, so I read his memoir.  It had been published when I was 11. You will not be able to find this book, and anyway it’s not the sort of thing that is of interest to people outside of his family. But I found it valuable to understanding my heritage, and there are some interesting historical bits I’d like to share.

My grandfather was born in the Philippines in 1929. He was part of the Chinese-Filipino minority, which entailed going to a separate school that used Chinese as a primary language. Like many Chinese-Filipino people, he came from a Fukien background.

When he was 6, he moved to Shanghai. This was because of Chiang Kai-shek’s “New Life” campaign, which (among other things) sought to attract Chinese expats back to China to build its industry. My great-grandfather owned a tobacco company, so he moved to China to start a Chinese branch. The cigarette packs explicitly advertised that they were made by returning overseas Chinese—a patriotic cause.

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Participation trophies

My husband, an older millenial, asked “Were participation trophies ever a real thing?” He never got any–at most he got some participation ribbons. But yes, participation trophies were absolutely literal physical objects. Myself, a mid-millenial, got a few of the things.

But in the public conversation, the metaphor of the participation trophy has overtaken their physical reality.

Yeah, I got a few of the participation trophies, back when I played soccer in grade school. I was awful at soccer. In retrospect, our whole team was bad, being composed of a bunch of kids who may or may not have been forced into it by their parents. But at the time I felt like I was particularly bad, like I dragged the whole team down, and I didn’t understand why I was there at all. I got a trophy for doing that, every year.
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Things that make vegetarianism hard

I’m flexitarian, that means that I prefer to eat vegetarian, but I don’t commit to it. I think there’s a good case to be made that eating meat is bad for the environment and animal welfare, but I don’t translate that into a behavioral rule, more of a guiding principle. Also I don’t really like meat that much.

I don’t really know enough about vegetarianism to argue about it, but my personal experience gives me familiarity with some of the pain points in vegetarianism–situations that make it particularly difficult to eat vegetarian. I imagine that committed vegetarians need to make major changes in their lives to get around these issues. But for someone like me with a very low level of commitment, it’s easier to just eat meat.

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Giving thanks

I’ve always celebrated Thanksgiving more than once a year. Once with my dad’s family, and once with my mother’s. My dad’s family, who is White, would have these relatively traditional gatherings around a big table, where we pass the turkey and gravy and mashed potatoes in a sort of ritualized cooperation. My mother’s family, who is Chinese Filipino, would treat it like yet another pot luck, with with the traditional Thanksgiving foods present but not playing a central role in the mix of Chinese, Filipino, and American dishes. People would line up to put food on their plates, and unceremoniously scatter across three or four tables of various shapes and sizes.

Once I started visiting my husband’s family, we started alternating Thanksgivings. One year, we would visit his parents, and the next year we would visit mine. My mother was always disappointed by this, so we formed a new tradition: early Thanksgiving. Now we celebrate two Thanksgivings on different weeks, with different sides of the family.  I’ve already celebrated my first Thanksgiving this year.

When I started reading atheist blogs in the late 2000s, I observed another kind of Thanksgiving tradition. I’m not sure readers today would be familiar with it, because it might have died with the atheist blogosphere. But basically, atheists would write in defense of their celebration of Thanksgiving.

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My grandfather

cn: death and homophobia. I do not recommend reading this if you are one of my relatives. I do not desire, and will not respond to any expressions of condolence, or general concern for my personal wellbeing.

My grandfather grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Very conservative, very religious, and his neighbors were Amish. He left his background behind, moving to California, becoming a professional scientist, and–a point of family pride–an anti-racist activist. Specifically, he spoke at many churches against California’s 1964 proposition 14, which would allow people to discriminate by race when selling housing.

At the time I became an adult, my grandfather was openly nonreligious–the only other nonreligious person in my family that I knew of at the time. He called himself a deist, believing in a god that does not intervene in the world, and which does not require any worship. Perhaps for that reason he was the only relative who took extended interest in my blog, which was more atheism-focused at the time. Despite several disagreements, we had many positive interactions.

But over ten years ago, I came out as ace and gay, and then I learned that my grandfather was homophobic.

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