other kinds of family

I just got back from the big Cognitive Psychology conference, in Toronto this year. I got to see a lot of east coast colleagues I've missed, including several people from my grad school alma mater.

I work in a specific sub-sub-field of memory studies, and while there are several of us, we mostly have connections to two or three labs. A good 80 to 90 percent of us have been through one particular Ivy League lab, either as grad students or post-docs or researchers of some other sort. I am not one of these--I applied to the lab in question twice for grad school, twice for post-doccing, and never ended up working there. But the lab head knows me, and likes my work, and I've collaborated with some of her students. Meanwhile, my grad lab is sort of the poor cousin--heavily affiliated, but much less well-known. Before me, there had only been two students who went through my lab, and the two directly after me transfered elsewhere. So I was an "only child" most of the time that I was there.

Now, suddenly, there are two new students. I'd always had sort of a sister-mentor relationship with one of the previous students from the lab, and now these new students are looking up to me as a mentor. It's startling, and a bit unnerving, and very flattering. My first, familial impulse, is to go "oh, they're so adorable," which is silly as they are both in their early twenties. But it's very much the same feeling as when my little sister was younger. (Actually, I just realized that it may be because they are around her age.) I did not follow my first impulse, but instead did my best to answer their questions, and tried to tell them some of the things I thought I would have appreciated knowing at that point of my education. It's just strange to realize that I'm at a stage where I can be giving that sort of advice, and I can feel the academic equivalent of "baby fever" setting in. Happily I've already started planning projects with them--they're both really smart and I'm proud to be "related" to them.

We went out into Toronto to play hooky one morning of the conference--the lab advisor, and her old Memory professor, and my older lab-sister, and my two younger lab-sisters, and me. We went up the CN Tower, which may or may not be the tallest free-standing man-made structure in the world, depending on what other structures you decide to compare it to. But this is not a good reason to go, as the observation deck is only 2/3 of the way up. A good reason to go is that one story below the observation deck is the Glass Floor. You can walk on this and stare straight down 342 meters. I have no problem with heights--only with climbing--so I think this is a lot of fun. My older lab-sister, though, steps gingerly out onto the floor, keeping a tight grip on our advisor, then clutches her shoulder and cries "Run!" Then she leaps back onto the solid floor. She does this about five times, before we get down to the serious business of trying to get a picture of the whole thing (difficult, as it's hard to get a cheap camera to focus when the foreground is that far from the background). It really felt like a family outing.

Academic lineages are not something that we seem to talk about a lot, but they are very real. Even aside from being able to boast that your advisor's advisor's advisor's advisor was B.F. Skinner, it makes a difference in little things. I've met people who share the same grand-advisor I do, and listened to them talk, and discovered that there are particular phrases we both use, specific ways of describing decision-making or problem-solving, that mark us as family. And it makes a difference, to me at least, to know that we're cousins of a sort.

Oh, the conference. I love getting to see all the new work, and I had a poster this year. I love giving posters--you get to stand around and talk about yourself for an hour, what could be better? Now I am back and trying to 1) catch up on everything that didn't get done during the conference, and 2) get ahead on everything that won't get done over Thanksgiving. And everything that must get done beforehand--I ordered our goose today, which was the most time-sensitive item on the list, but not the only item. Mmm, goose.

LJ writing links

Just a couple of things I've found useful.

specficmarkets: Community that posts new markets. Often amateur (i.e. low- or no-paying), or horror-oriented (i.e. not useful to me), but interesting things show up very regularly. The latest one (which I also had forwarded to me separately by a couple of people) is an anthology of essays by and about geek girls. Dunno if I'll be able to come up with anything for it, but it sounds like fun. This list actually gets the occasional market missed by Ralan's, which I've generally found to be the definitive on-line market resource.

limyaael: Rants about how not to write fantasy. Worth looking at for anyone who cares about worldbuilding--both because she's funny, and because she sheds plot and character ideas around her as she goes, free for the picking. Take with the awareness that she reads a lot of amateur fic, though--many of the ideas she disses as unusable have been used to amazing effect by people like Diane Duane. Any idea can still be good if you handle it well enough.

genreneep: Interesting, genre-related links and occasional discussion.

sfandf_writers: Mostly a place to drop late-night questions about plotting, characterization, submission format, etc. High signal-to-newbie-introduction ratio, but a worthwhile resource.