Softenings

Conference travel makes it challenging to keep the internets informed about my every move. But today is the final day of the conference, and I am finished attending talks. This has been a pleasant meeting, perhaps because of the personality types of people who are drawn to the study of animal behavior. Tomorrow morning I will go to my aunt and uncle's house in Connecticut, and the subsequent day I will go to the Boston area. Then I fly back to Arizona and stay at home for a long time.

I've been reading through a short book that another graduate student recently loaned to me. It's called Get Up With Something on Your Mind!, and offers strategies for success and questions to consider. The author has written a lot of articles on how to be successful in academics and in the rest of life and does a very nice job of articulating many of the pieces of processes I am going through. Part of me loves to scoff at such self-help material (so much of it comes across as instant-gratification feel-good fluff), but in actuality my attitude is more flexible than that. I should be grateful for all of the sources of guidance that are available to me.

I have to ask myself a lot of large questions right now because I'm just beginning to reach another big transition in my life. In a few short years, I will earn a Ph.D. and will need to decide what to do next. Even failing to decide is a form of decision. So I am going back through the process of thinking, what do I want to make of my life? Who do I want to be? What things are important to me?

I attended a talk this afternoon on a lot of the challenges that conservation behaviorists face in putting their discoveries into practice, and afterwards I took a nap and started thinking about the study of conservation biology. I do believe that it's important to consider how our individual lifestyles fit into larger ecological processes, and conveniently enough I can abstractly consider my research program from this perspective (I study ecological processes in leafcutter ant social systems). This is definitely an important aspect of the expression of who I am and will fit in to these future decisions. Beyond that, I am beginning to see the possibilities of future interactions with my research colleagues, all of whom have fascinating stories to tell about their experiences with learning about the world around us. This is good.

I'm still trying to determine in a grander sense how I wish to interact with other people--I still feel called back to the Pacific Northwest, for example. Am I destined to be a wanderer, or will I be able to put my life into context more comfortably by settling down somewhere more permanently? I'm not sure.

Picture catch-up

Below are some pictures from Seattle that I hadn't had a chance to post until now. You can click to enlarge them if desired. I recommend clicking the first one, unless you are currently located somewhere where you do not have access to freshly picked berries and the thought of seeing them close-up makes you wish you were.

	Berries. Yum. One night, my dad made pound cake and we ate it with delicious berries picked from our yard. I almost died of contentment.
	Look at what Annie caught! I had dinner with annikusrex on my last night in Seattle. We were quite distracted by fruit flies, but A managed to squash one quite satisfyingly.
	Waiter, there's a fly in my wine. We thought our troubles were over, but they weren't--apparently the smell of white wine is quite appetizing to wee Drosophila melanogaster.