"Life is a Horizontal Fall"

the leaves have started to turn and today feels like a real fall day. it looks and smells like fall. it makes me want to do fall things like hang clothes out on the line and carve pumpkins (and learn what are "fall things" to do). i took the long way home from brunch this morning because it was just too beautiful for shortcuts. tamar brought us each a flower at brunch this morning. surprisingly, mine's still alive.



this was another busy week again, but scattered with some really great things. for one, i got to see two music shows this week. on wednesday night, dar williams played here at the state theater. on thursday night, the same venue hosted oppenheimer and they might be giants. dar was as great as you would think she would be. she played neither of the two songs that i was hoping that she would, but stuill an overall terrific show. oppenheimer kind of stole the show the next night, in my opinion, although they were supposed to be "just" the opening band. but most of all, it was terrific just to be in the presence of live music again. i had almost forgotten, i think, the days when kara and i would go in search of live music at least twice a week.


i feel like the progress through my analyses for my master's thesis are moving at super-slow speed. i've been assured that that's what it's supposed to feel like, but that still doesn't make it feel good. creating and looking at groups. that's what i've been doing for a month now. you always think with research that you'll just end up with something that's right. instead, it's like moving through life and having no obvious answers, looking for the thing that's at least more right than everything else.


i brought an outline to my meeting with sheri on tuesday that was for the paper we're writing on early puberty. true to form, my outline included topics, citations, main ideas, etc., etc. admittedly almost all that you'd need to know to talk about the things we're going to talk about. during our meeting, sheri said that the journal we're hoping to publish in will want a manuscript that's something like 4 pages in length. my outline alone was 3 1/2. needless to say, i'm working on a shorter version of that to give to her on tuesday.


i will for sure have data for one of my proposals for icis. thank goodness. liz and i are working on a project that looks at how mothers may influence the attention paid by their child to a fearful stimulus. we know that kids who are high in fear seem unable to disengage from a fearful stimulus even if less-threatening objects are present. we're not sure how moms may or may not exacerbate or buffer that process and that's something we're planning to present in our poster.

this coming week will necesitate my spending some extra hours in the lab pulling things together for the other project. i think i've figured out what the data analyses will look like at this point...they're just a little tough to actually do with no data. that's another project on emotion regulation within the mother-child dyad. should i get everything worked out, there'll be more to come on that at a later date.


kristin got an e-mail this week saying that our paper in Infancy won't be out until february. i think she's disappointed that it won't have a 2006 date on it. i'm not sure if that really means anything for me or not. i'm pretty sure that once it's out, i should definitely be shooting to have a publication every year until i retire or die. number of publications is one of the standards by which you're judged in academia. so, of course...no pressure :)


there's also another exciting project in the works that will feed my love of the brain and behavior even more. nothings for sure, of course, but it's just fun to have stuff like that that you can be excited about. hoepfully, i'll soon be saying that i have a nerdy-but-fantastic training to attend.


despite the disappointing ia/ia state outcome, yesterday was a pretty successful football day here in happy valley. i keep searching for the highlight of the five minutes of the game where psu scored two unlikely touchdowns (although only getting the credit for one). i haven't seen a full episode of sports center yet, but did find norwood's touchdown highlighted in an online clip (http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/ivp/index?id=) if you can get it to play. you just won't get to see the amazing play that immediately preceeded it. and if you want to experience it as it felt in the stands, try this one: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5335978451168627514&q=penn+state+vs+buffalo&total=15&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4


cleaning my apartment should be on my list of to-do's this week, but is already in the runnings to take a backseat to work and sleep. i went to bed a 10:00 last night. it felt so wonderful it's not even sad to me at this point. 61 days until i'm on my way home for thanksgiving!!

Coasting along at a Positive Neutral

It was another busy but interesting week for the most part. It's been hot here - and very humid - and I'm not convinced the air conditioning works in our office. Monday was a "day off" so to speak because of Labor Day and I used it mostly to read. There doesn't ever seem to be enough time to read all that you'rea sked to for classes and still keep up on the literature so that you know where the rest of the field is in terms of the topics of your own research. So after 1 week of classes, I was using my extra day to catch up. That can't really be a good sign.



I've been coming along on the analyses for my thesis. Essentially, I've looked at my data to see what the best behavioral indicators are to create groups that will tell how well kids regulate their emotions. This basically uses all the behaviors that we coded, looks at how they co-occur, and then shows the most "natural" groupings of the data. For our meeting on Tuesday, Kristin wants me to look at "who's in the groups." I'm not going to lie...I'm not sure what that means. I can look to see if the groups differ in terms of the gender of the kids that make them up, but other than that, it's tough to become overly familiar with the data for 80 kids across a bajillion variables. So...I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to figure that out, I guess :)



I've been give two undergrads to help me with the projects that I'll be proposing to ICIS. I have a lot of data left to code, but I need to pull together what's done for my abstract. I'm really nervous that it's going to be too incomplete to make for a convincing abstract, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone will like it. It's just nice to have the help for now, though.



Sheri's charged me with creating an outline for the paper that we'll be putting together this month. Since this isn't the literature that I'm most familiar with, I'm a little nervous about it, but I've found a bunch of articles that I hope will be helpful for me. I'm thinking of asking Lacey if she wants to go on a "working date" with me to the coffee shop at Wegman's (our fancy-pants grocery store) since we'll both be working on pulling together outlines for meetings this week. I will say, though, that my meeting with Sheri this week left me feeling really good about things in general. I'm not sure if that means that in order to even out karma overall this week has to be bad, but I'm hoping that life can sort of subsist at positive neutral for me; it would be a better match for my optimism.



I think you'd be most interested in how CRAZY things were on campus just because this week was the week before the PSU - Notre Dame football game. Notre Dame, of course, being one of PSU's favorite rivals (although people seem to hate OSU and Michigan almost equally as much). Literally there were people camped out at the stadium on Tuesday night. I had traded my ticket to get an extra ticket to the Iowa game, so I babysat for Kristin's two boys, Will (8) and Charlie (3). We actually had a really great time and I was introduced to Wii sports, which was AWESOME. I can see my dad and I playing Wii golf and Wii baseball for hours. And I can see myself trying to challenge everyone else I know to a good game on the Wii. It's just too easy to be competitive with things that are that fun. I dare say it rivaled the tailgate...although that big-headed JoePa will always be one of the coolest things I've seen.

The only other excitement is that I've been having conversations with various people that appear to have real interests in making the trip out to Happy Valley. This, of course, makes me slightly nervous about times, but overall leaves me sublimely happy. There is nothing like having a little bit of home on the east coast, after all.

And I have to get a cavity filled in the morning. I don't remember the last time I had a cavity, so I don't remember if getting a filling hurts, but a little part of me thinks that it might - particularly since I'm kind of a baby about such things. I'll let you know.

Week One Down: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

This may or may not be a futile attempt to supplement the phone calls, cards, and e-mails that update on personal lives with actual information about what the heck I'm doing out here. I feel like I've done a really poor job of keeping everyone posted on such things. I just want to be clear that I wouldn't trade the personal info for anything, though. It always makes my day (and a lot of times my week) to hear from people back home - good or bad - happy or sad - for hours or just a few minutes. So please don't let those stop...

So, my third year of (this) graduate school has officially begun. It sounds pretty weak, but I actually felt like I needed a long weekend already. I'm tryin to acclimate to a full course load, my thesis work, and putting a significant number of hours in in two labs. Clearly, I should be investing right now in some Airborne because I'll be needing any and all not-get-sick tricks that Western Society has to offer.

The actual work has been more tedious than grueling. I've noticed that overall, this is the way that research tends to be, but that it is made totally worth it by the 15 seconds you sometimes get - once in a while - where you come across something really interesting and exciting. I'm getting ready for a variety of things that will hopefully come to a head this spring. There are two conferences that I'm hoping to attend. One will be the International Conference on Infant Studies (ICIS) hosted in Vancouver and the other is the Gender Development Research Conference in San Francisco. I'm submitting an application to present 2 posters at ICIS and 1 at the GDRC. Right now, I'm coding video tapes that will provide the preliminary data for my ICIS projects. Essentially, I need enough data to convince people that I'm asking interesting questions and have the information and ability to answer them. Submissions are due at the end of September and then I'll have until March to finish coding data, run analyses, and turn everything into an eye-catching and informative poster. I imagine things will run in much the same way for the GDRC. I'm just less worried about that right now because those submissions are not due until January.

In addition to that, I'm running the beginnings of my analyses for my master's thesis. Hopefully, I'll be defending that in the spring and start signing all my e-mails "Rebecca Brooker, M.A." or will I be an M.S.? I think M.A. I think it's maybe a bad sign that I don't know....

The goals I've set for myself this year are to improve my writing skills. Technical writing is really tricky, particularly when you have to work in enough details to be convincing and accurate, but not so many that you're dry and wordy. I've talked to both Kristin (my primary advisor, Dr. Kristin Buss) and Sheri (my secondary advisor, Dr. Sheri Berenbaum) about things I can do with them to make that happen. I've just got to continue to be very intentional about it, I think.

The other bit of good news is twofold. 1) we moved into our new office space. Amy (no, not my sister Amy, unfortunately) and I will still share an office, but it is much bigger and we both have nicer chairs. we now have a window. truth be told, it looks out into the hallway, but we've decided that we'll take what we can get. and 2) college football season has started and this makes me very happy. i've traded away my notre dame ticket, which i think is a cardinal sin here, but i would much rather see robby than charlie weis, so it seems like a good trade to me.

Okay, that seems like a lot for now considering that I'm not sure how this is going to work and I'm also not sure anyone will get all the way throught that post :)