BBBBQ

This weekend was the Beer, Bourbon, and BBQ festival, another annual tradition that has gained traction as more of our college friends have moved East. It's held down in National Harbor, which isn't the easiest place in the world to get to. We have to take taxis from the closest metro stop, but we usually have enough people that this isn't too much of a hardship.

The festival is always a lot of fun, especially since the VIP tickets we buy mean we get in two hours before the general public. There are a ton of bourbons and beers to taste, and the ticket gets you unlimited tastings. It always turns into a rather boozy day, full of sampling so many things it's impossible to keep track of them all.

There's also a special VIP area that has the higher end bourbons and beers. They also have some free food samples over there, though none of it was really worth standing in line for this year. The cheese was mediocre and the bacon was flat-out bad.

We stayed at the festival for over four hours, which is the longest we've ever lasted. We must be learning to pace ourselves as we grow older. After we finished drinking, it was back to Zach and Sarah's for tacos and horse races. And, yes, more beer. Then it was time to metro home, which was involved some fun people watching. Everyone was coming home from the Pride Parade, so there were rainbows and beads and glitter everywhere.

On Sunday Kevin and I went over to the community's annual used book sale. The selection was a bit picked over, since most people had gone on Friday and Saturday. We still managed to find some cool things, including the sequel to one of my favorite books as a child, a book I had despaired of ever finding. And since it was the tail end of the sale, prices had been slashed. We took home eight books for only $5, and we could have gotten way more for the same price if we'd found anything else we wanted.

Embracing the Feminine

A funny thing happened when Kevin insisted I wear makeup for the wedding. I discovered that I liked it.

Back in middle and high school, I had to glob makeup on my face every time I performed in a dance recital or musical.  It was always heavy and felt caked on. It always made me break out. The experience led me to reject makeup altogether, and for years I almost never wore any. Unless a friend decided she wanted to make me over for a party, in which case I often felt awkward unless I managed to forget I was wearing makeup. But then I inevitably smudged my eyeliner or mascara or whatever, and looked awful by the end of the night.

Once Kevin asked me to wear makeup for the wedding, I knew I'd have to get in practice. I needed to remember how to apply it and learn how to get through a day without messing it up. I bought some stuff at the drug store and started playing.

It was surprising how quickly things started coming back to me. The realization that I needed to buy some extra brushes to get my eyeshadow just right. Mourning for the eyebrow brush I threw away so many years ago. Not to mention that it was satisfying. When I got my eyes looking just right, I was proud of myself.

In addition to this, I'd been looking for a specific shade of lipstick I loved in high school. It was being re-released in a limited run, and tracking it down was really difficult. In the process of trying to find it, I ended up visiting a lot of beauty sites and began to see tips on applying eye liner, keeping lipstick from smearing, finding brands that actually last all day. It all looked so fun and, more importantly, accessible. See part of my disinterest in makeup can be traced to my mom's disinterest in makeup. Without her to teach me the finer points I had a hard time learning. Though if I'd really wanted to I probably could have.

I also started seeing articles about women wearing too much makeup. Hand in hand with articles styling their hair in the wrong way or wearing the wrong shorts or just generally not being appealing in the right way. And I thought fuck that. I've never much cared about fashion or anything, opting for ease and comfort over style. But if men were going to tell me not to wear makeup, then I was damn well going to start wearing makeup.

And finally, the snowflake that caused the avalanche. Being one of the only women at work. Seeing twenty interns hired with nary a woman in sight. I got fed up with being one of the guys and decided to deliberately other myself. Because it turns out I do have a pretty strong contrary streak. I'm surprised I wasn't a more rebellious teenager (though I didn't really have anything to rebel against, so).

I went out and bought eyeshadows in fun shades. Blues and purples and pinks. I picked up some bright lipsticks to play with. I signed up for birchbox, because getting samples in the mail every month seemed like the ideal way to experiment. And in the very first box I found a hair product that I definitely have to start buying and using. It's amazing.

Incorporating makeup into my morning routine was surprisingly easy. I never do anything that takes more than five minutes, so it's not a big time suck. And it's so fun and satisfying that I find myself wanting to do things. I probably shouldn't have tried eyeliner for the first time on a work day, but it all worked out okay in the end.

Through all of this, the words of a guy I almost dated have started echoing in my head again. When I asked him about his tattoos, he replied "You only get one life, you might as well decorate it." It was these words that pushed me into getting my first tattoo and that are defining my experiments with making my face up every day. It's one more way to play with color, decorate myself, and define the way I look. It really is an art form, one that I'm getting better at and having a lot of fun with in the meantime.

Weekend Fun

In the past year or so, a lot of our friends have moved east. This makes it a lot easier to see them more often, and looking at our calendar for the next few weeks it seems that we will be taking full advantage of that fact.

Last weekend two of our friends came to DC to visit, one from Boston and the other from NYC. Chev was here for a week, training for her summer internship in Nepal, while Alex came down with his girlfriend to spend time with both her friends and his. As our social circles expand, it's harder to carve out time with everyone. We weren't able to just spend an entire weekend lounging around and playing games with our friends this time, but we still got in some quality visiting time.

On Saturday evening, Chev, Zach, and Sarah came out to our house for tacos and board games. We pulled out some old classics, like beer pong, and some even older classics, like Twister. I am not nearly as good at Twister as when I was younger. But the alcohol helped with the falling on my ass part of that game. Both in facilitating it and in dulling the pain.

The next morning we went downtown for mimosas with Zach and Sarah, then Alex and his girlfriend joined us for brunch. At noon, which is less brunch than lunch. But if there are eggs and mimosas, then it still counts. Then we met up with other friends to wander around the zoo for the afternoon.

Visiting the zoo is definitely something I need to do more often. It's free, it's fun, and it's walking distance from nearly all of our friends' places in DC. I haven't been since before I moved to DC, and now I'm kicking myself for letting so many years pass between visits.

A lot of the animals weren't out, probably because we went sort of late and everything was either eating or sleeping. But we did get to hear the lion roar, see the tiger cubs annoy their mom, and watch the otters play. Sadly my favorite animal, the sloth bear, was nowhere to be seen. And the panda was hiding up in a tree. But these are just reasons to go back more often. Wandering around the zoo is a great way to spend the afternoon.

The Official Start of Summer

I've always been amused by the idea that summer officially starts with Memorial Day Weekend, almost a month before the actual start of summer. Of course, it makes sense for any number of reasons. This was always when school let out for the summer, so it marked the beginning of those blissful months of freedom. The weather is starting to seriously heat up, which makes it feel like summer. It also marks the beginning of what promises to be a friend and activity filled few months for us. So it makes sense to mark this as the beginning of the season.

We had a bunch of friends over for a barbeque on Sunday to celebrate Memorial Day. Though if we're being honest it was mostly to celebrate the fact that the weather was perfect and we didn't have to go to work on Monday. Plus we hadn't seen anyone since the wedding.

We were expecting 12, maybe 13 people. And as always, we got too much food. But then we only had eight people at the BBQ, which meant that we had way too much food. We're going to be eating chicken thighs and drumsticks for the rest of the week. It's a good thing I like leftovers so much.

It was a lot of fun to see our friends after all the craziness of the wedding and the honeymoon. Settling back in to normal life is exactly what I wanted to do. We ate burgers and chicken and drank beer and bourbon and played some games. It was a perfect afternoon.

On Monday, we went to Rappahannock winery with Kevin's mom and some family friends to drink wine and have a picnic. The winery was a little farther out than we usually travel, but the wine was delicious. And there were a bunch of dogs running around begging for attention.

The rest of summer promises to be both busy and fun. We already have plans for almost every weekend in June. After that, my brother is staying with us for a week to attend GMU's orientation and find an apartment before he officially moves here in August. I'm looking forward to spending more time with him and with friends who moved here at the end of last summer. It should prove to be pretty epic.

The 17%

Google recently released data on the demographics of their staff in an effort to be more transparent and to be held accountable for their diversity. They certainly have a long way to go to achieve equality, but it's good that they're trying. One of the numbers caught my attention immediately. When I saw it, I was struck with that weird mixture of disappointment and lack of surprise that is becoming all too familiar.

Google's tech force is made up of 17% women. Why did that number catch my eye? It was brought up in an NPR program that got a lot of attention about a year ago. The transcript can be found here. The take away is that that number - 17% - is an unsettlingly common number. It is, by and large, the number of professional women currently working in traditionally male-dominated fields.

17% of Hollywood film directors are women. 17% of US Senators are women. 17% of engineers, surgeons, professors, etc are women. Do a bit of digging, and you'll see this number everywhere.

More interestingly, 17% of people in crowd scenes in movies or television shows are women.

Recent psychological studies have found that most men perceive this as equality. When a group's ratio is 83 men to 17 women, the men are likely to say that there are as many women present as men. When women speak 17% of the time, men are likely to say that the women talked just as much as the men. And a worrying fact: when women speak 30% of the time, men start to complain that they were dominating the conversation. We have been conditioned to view 17% as good enough, to view anything approaching true equality as greed.

I should acknowledge that this is better than it was a generation ago. We have made great strides since my mom and my aunt were the only women in their respective offices. But I'm one of only five women in my office. We each get our own private stall in the bathroom, a perk I would gladly trade in to have some more female faces around me.

It actually feels like it's gotten worse the farther I've gone in my career. My college class was 25% female. Not great, but a good sight better than the 17% (or less) I deal with now. In fact, six years after I graduated, my alma mater achieved a 50-50 student body, and even graduated three more female engineers than male engineers. But they aren't making it into the workplace. At least not yet.

There are a number of reasons for this. Partly it's that they aren't being hired. Not through overt sexism, but because of a more insidious variant. A resume with a male name is likely to be seen as representing a more qualified individual than a resume with a female name, even if the two resumes are identical. A man being interviewed seems like a better fit for a company than his female counterpart, for some undefinable reason. Let's call it "culture".

There's also evidence that women aren't applying for as many jobs as men because of one of the sneakier aspects of sexism that I've only recently become aware of. Apparently women are likely to apply to a job only if they feel that they meet 100% of the requirements in the job description, whereas men will take a chance if they meet 60% of the requirements. This speaks to issues with self-esteem, confidence, and even arrogance. Of course, many companies are satisfied with that 60%, and they hire one of the men who applied as opposed to one of the women who didn't.

Then there are the cultural elements, something President Klawe identified and worked really hard to overcome at Harvey Mudd. Even if you're qualified to go to a school or take a job, many women will be put off by a student body or staff that is overwhelmingly male. Even if there's a lot of support for women, and a genuine effort to provide opportunities. My company is great about this, and I feel wholly supported there. It doesn't change the fact that when I interviewed I met with four men, and the only woman I saw the entire day was the head of HR. That leaves a distinct impression, and if there's an option to go somewhere more egalitarian, even if it's less prestigious or offers less money, the environment might make that trade off worth it.

Finally, there's the drop off effect. Women dropping out of college or PhD programs because the constant sexism becomes too grating. Women leaving careers in technical fields because they're sick of all the extra work that goes into being one of only a few women. Being constantly surrounded by men is exhausting. You're always on guard for them to make a sexist joke, wondering how to respond to one when it happens. Is it better to be a meek pushover or a feminist killjoy? Better to network and be on good terms with your coworkers or focus on your work and seek promotion based solely on your own merit? And what happens when you see man after unqualified man promoted ahead of you for a slew of reasons that are difficult to untangle and articulate?

Half of the things that happen to me in office barely even register as strange or uncalled-for. Until I share a story with my female friends and see the look of horror on their faces.

What's to be done? In college, we made a concerted effort to unite the women living in our dorm. And in our time there we saw a huge shift in the culture of our dorm, one that resulted in more women willingly moving into our dorm. But these were people I lived with, people I saw every day. An effort like that at my day job, where I really am supposed to be working instead of socializing, feels daunting. As does specifically recruiting more women, which by the way is not in my job description.

At the same time doing nothing feels cowardly. Like I'm betraying my gender, my future children. Watching that number stagnate is disheartening, though I can always hope that things will get better. But how long will that take? Will my (hypothetical) daughter be struggling with these same issues thirty years from now? Will we have merely jumped from 17% to 30%? Or will we be able, in that time, to actually create a diverse corporate world that reflects the realities of the world we spend the rest of our lives in?

There aren't any easy answers. It's hard to know where to start. At the moment I'm so exhausted (by this, by the recent Isla Vista shooting, by the prospect of another summer dominated by male action heroes) that I hardly want to do anything. But the pendulum will swing, I'll befriend the new woman on my team at work, and things will get easier again. They say it's best to attack these things from a place of strength. Until I get there I'll just rant on my blog.

Honeymoon 8: There's No Place Like Home

Travel is always a weird experience. Especially when you travel really long distances. Between the weird time warp that takes place on planes and the shifting of time zones outside of those planes, it's hard to keep track of what time it actually is.  And if you go far enough, your internal clock gets so scrambled that you can more or less reset it as you like.

We landed in DC around 3:30. Kevin's mom picked us up at the airport, and by the time we'd gotten our bags and grabbed Kina from her house, it was after five before we made it home. Then I had to run to the grocery store because after two weeks away, there wasn't much food in the house that we trusted. But it was too long before we were able to crash on the couch with Chinese food, beers, and our trusty DVR.

Sadly, our trusty DVR proved to be somewhat less than trusty. It faithfully recorded all of our shows the first week we were gone. Then it turned off completely and missed everything that aired the second week we were gone. On the bright side, all of those shows were on OnDemand, it just meant we couldn't fast forward through the commercials while we were watching.

Not that we watched much that first night anyway. I think we made it through one episode of TV before it was definitely time for bed.

The next morning, we woke up around 5:30. By six we had agreed that it was definitely not too early for mimosas. So equipped with four bottles of Andre left over from the wedding, a fresh bottle of orange juice, and an extra cheesy scramble, we once more planted ourselves on the couch to watch some TV.

We only made it a few hours before the champagne was gone and it was time to actually do other stuff. Because no matter what happens, it seems that we are no longer capable of simply sitting on the couch in front of the TV for a full day. I choose to see this as a sign of maturity.

So Kevin took the dog to the park and went for a bike ride and bought food. Meanwhile I started updating my blog (which I missed dearly during my time away from computers) and read. Because I didn't do enough reading on my honeymoon, obviously. Once we'd cooked dinner and walked Kina, it was once again time to make a dent in the backlog of television.

But once again, we didn't make it very far before we were once again falling asleep. Over the weekend we managed to catch up on SHIELD, Elementary, and Orphan Black. But that still left Game of Thrones, The Americans, and a documentary I'd been watching. Still, it was a nice, relaxing way to transition back into the real world. And since most of those shows were actually over, this meant that we still had some stuff to watch during the week, when we were still too tired to do much of anything.

On Monday it was back to work. I'm really glad we came back from Europe a little early and had some time to just sit in the house and re-acclimate to being home. It was nice to have a truly lazy day after all the running around that comes with being a tourist. And it's always more relaxing to be surrounded by your own stuff.

Honeymoon 7: We Get to Cook Our Own Steaks!

There's a big lake between Donegal and Belfast, which means you can't drive straight from one to the other. You have to go either north or south around the lake. We elected to go north and extend the drive a bit so we could visit the walled city of Derry.

Derry actually wasn't that far out of our way, and it was around this time that I began to understand how small Ireland actually is. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realized that you can fit three Irelands in the state of Colorado. (Later, better calculations confirmed this conclusion). I always knew Colorado was big, but that really put things in perspective for me.

Derry was a neat little city that reminded us strongly of a sort of miniature Pittsburgh. It was built in a really hilly area next to a river that was beginning to be crossed by lots of cool bridges (we only saw three, but the city seems to be expanding, so I'm sure there will be more before long). Upon arriving in Derry, we left Ireland for the UK which meant it was time for some changes. Currency switched from Euros to Pounds, signs switched from kilometers to miles, and the perspective of history altered sharply. In Donegal, we learned about the old kings who were raised up as heroes who had been unfairly driven off their land. Here they were rebels who were victoriously defeated.

There was one detail presented in both cities that I found particularly interesting. Back when England was conquering Ireland (in the 1600s, under the rules of Elizabeth, Charles I, and Charles II), one of the things they needed was accurate maps. Ireland quickly became one of the most accurately mapped areas in the world, but only the eastern half. On the maps, the western coast is essentially a straight line with almost no detail. The old kings knew the dangers these maps posed and beheaded any cartographers they came across. Which also means that these cartographers are alternately presented as traitors or heroes, depending on the perspective. Seeing the two sides so close to each other was really fun.

In Derry we visited the Guild Hall (which had an exhibit on all this information) and St Columb's Cathedral. Like all the other cathedrals we toured, this one had awesome stained glass windows. With one key difference. Here, all of the windows were dedicated to various men who had died in the 1860s. It seems that a bishop arrived around that time who was put out by the plainness of the cathedral. He convinced the widows and families of deceased men to sponsor elaborate stained glass windows in their honor. It was an interesting way of getting the job done.

When we were done in Derry, we headed to our hotel in Belfast, which we had some trouble finding. It was hidden away downtown and instead of saying Fitzwilliam Hotel anywhere, there was just a big stylized F on the building. On the opposite side of the way we were driving. But we did eventually make it.

I'll be honest, by the time we got to Belfast, I was pretty much ready to go home. I was missing my cat and dog, and I longed to just lounge around and do nothing for a bit. When you're in a new city, there's a pressure to go out and explore and see new things, and it was starting to get to me. I was tired. It didn't help that the hotel staff didn't have any useful suggestions for things to do. When we asked them where we should go, they pointed us to the mall. The mall was cool, but it wasn't at all what we were in the mood for.

This is partly because Belfast is more of an industry town that isn't really set up four tourists. There aren't all that many sites to see, though they are actively working on that. We also arrived on the wrong weekend. While there were festivals and shows and things to do throughout the Spring and Summer, we managed to hit the weekend when none of that was happening.

Well, that's not entirely true. There was a really cool international food festival.  Everything smelled good, but we weren't hungry enough to eat, and the beer was mostly overpriced.

After we'd exhausted the food festival, we wandered through the shopping district. The mall was cool, sort of a hybrid between indoor and outdoor shopping centers. But we were so wary of weight limits at that point that we didn't want to buy anything. Instead we found a place with burgers and craft beer and had an early dinner. Then we headed into the cathedral district. We got to St Anne's, a military themed cathedral, shortly before it closed and saw some cool stained glass. But we didn't make it to St Patrick's.

After that we decided to find some music. But once again, nothing started until 9, and I just didn't have the energy to stay out that long. We bought a bottle of wine and went back to the hotel room, where I turned on the TV and found re-runs of How I Met Your Mother and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

The next morning we headed over to the Titanic Quarter, which is one of the more interesting things to do in Belfast. The city used to be the center of ship-building, along with a lot of other, related industries, and it's biggest claim to fame is that it build Titanic, along with her sister ships. The old dockyards are in the process of being transformed from a place of industry to something more like an entertainment district, with apartments, restaurants, and shops. But it's just at the beginning of the construction project.

The big thing that is open is the Titanic museum, which was actually really cool. It takes you through the early industrial boom of Belfast (The US Civil War actually helped them a lot because the shortage of cotton put their linen in high demand). The decision to build a cruise ship like the Titanic is put into historical context, and then you walk through every stage of building it. They have displays of the original drawings of the ship (in a nifty interactive computer interface). You get to see the special scaffolding they had to build before they could even begin to build the ship. Then they walk you through the laying of the deck, the building of the sides, the launch into the sea (which they have actual video of) and the outfitting of all the cabins and spaces on board the ship. Start to finish, the Titanic took three years to build, and that's just the ship. From conception to the maiden voyage it took even longer.

And then it sank, three days later. I've seen the movie countless times and went through a phase where I watched every documentary I could get my hands on. But having the information presented to me this way made it hit me like never before. They put so much work into this ship. The loss of life is, of course, tragic. But the loss of all the time and money spent engineering and building the ship was pretty awful, too. I can't imagine dedicating so much of my life to something, only to have it fail so quickly and decisively.

After we walked through the museum, it was still early afternoon, and we could think of nothing else to do. I was cranky and tired, so we bought another bottle of wine and went back to the hotel room to read and nap and take it easy for a while. Like I said, I was pretty honeymooned out at this point.

For dinner, we had initially hoped to go to a place that does a 9-course recreation of the final dinner served (to first class passengers) on board the Titanic. But it turns out that's not something you can just book for two people. You need a much bigger group. Instead, we found a restaurant that had just opened the previous week called Stix and Stone. It was a steakhouse whose gimmick was that you cook your own steak to your liking. The kitchen sears it, then places it on a hot stone with some garnish and a sauce of your choosing. You leave it on the stone until the steak is cooked to your liking.

It was a really neat concept, and we had a lot of fun with it. The waiter recommended that we remove the streak immediately and then place strips on the stone to experiment a bit. That was a neat idea, but I think it's mostly meant for people who don't cook steaks very often. I knew exactly how I wanted my steak, and I managed to cook it perfectly.

After dinner we went back to the food festival to get dessert, then decided to head back to the bar and see if we could catch some live music. And to our amazement, there were a couple of ladies performing when we got there! They played a mix of traditional Irish music and contemporary American country music. They also, by request, played Brown-Eyed Girl and this time everyone knew how the "sha la la"s went. There was a guy sitting next to me who looked like a scruffy Ryan Gosling - not Hollywood scruffy, but actually scruffy. So all in all, the night was pretty perfect.

The next morning we had to get up super early to catch our flight. We ended up getting to the airport way earlier than we needed to. Even after we'd returned the car, gone through security, gone through the second, US security (where they make you take off your shoes), and gone through customs, we still had an hour to kill at the gate. But the way our travel experiences had been going, this was way better than the alternative.

The whole trip was a lot of fun, and it was nice to be able to take two full weeks. As I said, by the time we were heading home I was more than ready to be on my way. I missed my things and my animals and being able to just lounge on the couch without having to worry about exploring or finding food or anything. But the honeymoon wasn't entirely over yet. Once we got home, we still had a day and a half before we had to go back to work.