The Cast of Characters

As promised, here's a description of our motley Australian crew:

P, from Missoula, Montana, is our ringleader and sweat bee expert. She has been coming to this corner of Australia for about 20 years and knows the area quite well. Among her favorite sayings are, "I'm shocked!" and "I'm a grandmother!"--she pulls off the appropriate tone of voice in such a way that the first time she said it we thought she was dead serious. By now we all know better. She's also the sort of person who lacks an internal monologue when she's around other people, which can be a bit distracting at times. In addition to her bee work, she works tirelessly to advance the causes of women and minorities in science, and I have really enjoyed learning about her perspective. If I stay in academia, I will have to rely on people like her to serve as a support network.

S, from Ottawa, Canada (yes, that's right, boolean263), was a professor at ASU for several years and worked closely with my advisor while she was there. Her mind is constantly at work, and she was a tremendous help with designing our experiments and making sure we carefully thought through and justified our ideas. I knew her fairly well from our shared time at ASU, but learned much more about her in her brief stay here (she went home a bit early to spend Christmas with her partner and young daughter). For instance, apparently she used to hitchhike all over the place, and she spent a lot of time wandering around various parts of the globe before she got to ASU to start her Ph.D.. Her personal and familial values are also pretty closely aligned with my own, which is always nice.

She and I spent a lot of time together this trip because we shared a room and worked as a team while observing the bees (now *that* was a bonding experience). We had a funny conversation one day while building bee nests about how differently we think. While she is constantly thinking about what to do next, when I'm mixing up dirt to fill a nest all that I think is, "Dirt dirt dirt." Heh. S made all of us laugh a lot, and things have been much quieter since she left. S is also a first-year, tenure-track professor, so it has bee useful to hear about her experiences with getting started. I shouldn't forget to mention that her advice about the Ph.D. process has also been quite helpful. In fact, between P and S, I think I have received more mentoring here than I do in six months at ASU.

T is a fellow grad student from ASU, and we are traveling together for our entire trip in Australia. Fortunately, I think he's awesome and can stand his company for long stretches of time. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to contrast traveling with him with traveling with the Three Stooges (I went with them to California and Washington, D.C., if you'll recall). The Three Stooges did little or no planning for either trip, and especially in DC they had very different agendas than I did. In contrast, I have let T do the majority of our travel planning in Australia, because he makes fantastic decisions about what to see and do. I'm accustomed to planning out my travels ad nauseum, so it has been fantastic to be able to sit back a bit and just enjoy whatever he happens to suggest. The very best part is that his fiance, C, has trained him to be patient about shopping, so occasionally we will get to wander around and browse through shops. Of course, I don't have a super-high shopping tolerance, so we haven't done a ton of shopping, but it's nice to have the option.

R is a French professor from Tolouse (the other day, when in an Irish pub, a folksinger came up to our table and asked where we were all from, and when he heard that R was from Tolouse, he said, "Oh, Tolouse? Tolouse is no shame."--say it out loud and then have a little chuckle at his cleverness). He spent a year at ASU and said it was the most boring year of his life. So you see, he is a pretty typical Frenchman. He's probably best known for his incessant cussing, both in French and English (I guess he learned most of his English swear words a few years ago, when he was here, in Australia, with a girl who liked heavy metal). I think his favorite part of American culture is the Wu Tang Clan.

He's a bit frustrated by having to speak English all of the time because he finds the pronunciation difficult and claims to be bad at speaking English, but he's better than many of the other ESL academics I've encountered (he has told all of us that we cannot visit France unless we learn to speak French fluently, because "Speaking in English is a pain."). Oh, and to look at him is to see quite a sight--he has long, flowing blonde hair that he keeps pulled back and he smokes up a storm.

He makes me think of emmabovary quite a bit because he is so very French and I must confess that I have a Super Crush on him (this is to be distinguished from an ordinary crush, which is something I might do something about--Super Crushes are to be admired and lusted after from a distance, but there is nothing to be done about them because it would be extremely unwise. I have an annoying tendency to develop Super Crushes.). It was a bit strange to see him after a gap of 2 years, because when he left ASU he said to me, "Well, goodbye. I don't know when I'll see you again, if ever." Whenever we try to say anything in French, he pauses for a second, and then smirks and then laughs. He claims it's because it gives him a sense of how bad his English pronunciation is. The other day, a kangaroo hopped across the road in front of our car and then when we stopped to take pictures, it paused by the side of the road to stare at us. R had his camera at the ready and proceeded to make the most hilarious clucking and quacking noises I have ever heard in my entire life.

And then there's me. But hopefully you already know enough about me and I need not comment any further.

So there you have the cast of characters, in a nutshell (help! I'm in a nutshell! How did I get in here?). It's rainy, which means we can't collect bees, so I think I will spend the rest of the day working on other work. There's never any shortage of work, now is there?