Virtually Home

My friend Christina died last September, on the day we flew to Australia. I found out when I called the hospital to speak to her from Tulsa International Airport. Beginning to mourn her on an airplane over the Pacific was weird in several ways -- we had met on an airplane, for one. But also nothing feels very consequential in transit like that. Exhaustion and jetlag, in a darkened airplane cabin, with a bunch of sleeping strangers oriented in rows, faces glowing with the light of their in-flight entertainment systems. Nothing feels real in that environment. It's continued to be weird, though. I don't know if you've ever mourned someone on the far side of the world from where you knew them, but it's kind of a disorienting experience. I felt disconnected from my memories and my grief in a way that I seem to lack the ability to describe. Before she died, my friend went on this story-telling podcast, Risk!. At their live event in Minneapolis, she told the story of a rel...

Everyone knows what a garbage fire American political culture is right now. Since coming to Australia, I have seen very little in the way of political anything. A few billboards, a few television commercials. But until yesterday, I had never seen a political bumper sticker in Australia. I still have yet to see a yard sign, a t-shirt. The federal election is coming up soon, in mid-May. Yesterday I asked my friends when it was, and no one had any idea. It's some Saturday next month, and voting is compulsory, which means voter turnout will be in the neighborhood of 95% even though few people are even paying attention yet . Meanwhile, the 2020 American Presidential campaign season is in full, exhausting swing.

People drink a lot of tea here, but there is also an 11 a.m. break time called "tea", when people stop for a few minutes, make a cuppa, and maybe chat. In the department, people bring cake to share at tea time to celebrate having their papers accepted or their grants funded. I think it's a good social tradition. It's also a lot of cake, distributed stochastically. One day we had three cakes! But many days there are no cakes. Of late, the "autoboiler" on the wall, which dispenses boiling water from the wall on demand, has been on the fritz. The extent to which this has bothered me is troubling -- I clearly have begun both to drink more tea and also to depend on this novel (to me) technology.

One of my biggest worries when moving here was learning how to drive on the right-hand side of the car and the left-hand side of the road. That idea was both alien and disconcerting. I envisioned myself just barely staving off head-on collisions at every turn. We got here and almost immediately rented a car to facilitate our apartment-hunting, shopping for furnishings, etc. And it's true I did almost immediately scrape some paint off the rental car trying to park it in our extremely tight apartment parking garage, where our assigned space is helpfully next to a giant concrete column. But we had paid for the full insurance coverage, so it turned out fine. I mostly avoided mishaps with looking the wrong direction when crossing the road, and successfully remapped my brain to understand that right turns are now the difficult ones, the turn signal should be operated with my right hand, the gear shifter with my left. Weirdly, watching movies where Americans are driving cars from th...

We’ve been living in Australia for more than five months now, and I still kind of can’t believe that we can go to the beach at the drop of a hat. The beach was An Event when I was growing up. We never lived closer than an eleven hour drive from the ocean, but we made an almost annual pilgrimage to the coast and spent every available moment enjoying the water, fresh seafood, and each other’s company. The ocean makes me instantly feel like I’m on vacation. It feels decadent, somehow.  But here in Perth, we can be at an incredible beach in under 15 minutes and at no expense beyond what we spent on sunscreen. I feel like I’m on vacation all the time. This is  what our afternoon looked like, here in Western Australia. 

I like my job. I like it so much that I can't really imagine doing anything else. But there's also not a lot else that a PhD in the evolution of animal sexual behaviors will get you. There's not a lot of call for animal behavior in industry. And I have zero interest in finding an industry niche. So, I have a lot to gain by succeeding and a lot to lose by failing. Let me explain. The weird thing is that the structure of academia precludes partial success. For every PhD who wants to stay in academic science, there is only one goal: to be a professor. If you don't manage to get hired as an assistant professor, that feels like failure. And after between 5 and 7 years spent earning a PhD and between 3 and 5 years of postdocing, during which you may move around once per year. All the moving comes at great financial expense and tremendous cost to one's personal life. For instance, you can give up hope of living near your family. If you have a spouse, they have to change ...

When I finally experienced real winter, the upper-Midwestern winter that I dreaded, it made me depressed. Every aspect of my Minnesota life was built around avoiding and accommodating the awful cold. Imagine my joy at leaving Minnesota at the end of August, before the cold could set in. We spent September in Nebraska and Oklahoma, enjoying the end of the summer. We flew to Australia and landed in the springtime. People said summer would be brutal here, but I'm not sure why. We have one wall-mounted air conditioner in our house. Most days, we don't run it. Instead, we open the windows. On hot days, we go to the beach. The wind kicks up every afternoon around 2 or 3 p.m., like clockwork, and cools the place down. It's never very humid, which means the temperature drops off precipitously around sunset. I will grant that the sun can be brutal, in the middle of the day, but in general the climate here has been lovely so far. Today is March 1, which is accounted the first d...