Major Change

In my last post, I mentioned that I changed my major. I suppose I can talk about it. 

(Ok, before I start that I have to talk about how Blogger is annoying me right now. There are only 6 fonts, the one I like doesn't stay between posts. Same thing with size. And whose dick do I have to suck to get a line spacing button? I may need to switch to WordPress.)

During the Spring Semester, I started to get deeper into the program. I had all the heavy math classes and math adjacent general ed classes too. I got very stressed out. I dropped one class and it didn't really help. It got to the point that I was questioning my degree program. 

Now, this wasn't the first time I had questioned it. But I did finally analyze why I picked Math in the first place. And there were a couple of reasons. None of them were about me or what I wanted to do or what I'm good at. 

I originally picked that major because I wanted to make the biggest impact. Service to the community. For one, there are a lot of bad Math teachers out there. They may know how to calculate stuff, but they have no idea how to teach. I think this is a big reason why kids hate math. If they have no confidence in their ability, they will struggle and hate it. Also, we need more women in STEM. It might help if girls had more STEM teachers that are women, it might help.

The other reason I picked Math is that I have been trying to prove I'm as good as the boys my whole life. Part of this is how my mom treated me and dressed me before my brother was born. She raised me kind of boyish. There were girls that tried to make me prove I was a girl because I always had boy clothes on. Of course that all changed when my brother was born. Then I was told to wear more dresses and he was the favorite. Now she wonders why he does nothing and expects handouts.

So for the longest time, I suppressed everything girly. Slowly I've shed most of that nonsense. The last to go was vocation. 

I bought into the idea that the hard sciences are masculine and the soft sciences are feminine. Which is nonsense since men have been trying to keep us out of all of them for generations, and women were the 1st coders. And who cares if I do something girly anyway. We need to stop gendering jobs.

Once I unpacked that I realized that I  missed writing papers. Getting a grade for my opinion is pretty great really. And while Math concepts are interesting, I really don't care about the computation. 

I am, however, still very interested in Astronomy and am doing independent research studying Seyfert Galaxies. Let me know in the comments if you want me to write for days about Active Galactive Nuclei. And we still need people to report on science if we're ever going to get the public to value it again. 

Zwei Katzen (Two Cats)

I figured I should start writing again and there are a couple of different reasons for that. 

1) School starts in about a month so I need to get the writing juices flowing again since I changed majors from Maths to English. Maybe I'll explain that whole thing in another post.

2) If I'm ever going to write the "Great American Novel" I should get to writing something... anything.

So I thought I tell you about my two cats, in the form of an interview. I will be interviewing myself, there may end up being pictures; we'll see.

Interviewer: Hi Ella, how are you today?

Ella: I'm good. How are you?

I: I'm good as well. Let's get started. I've heard you have cats, how many do you have? What are their names?

E: I have two cats, their names are Sinon (pronounced She-known) and Aave (pronounced Ah-vey). They're sisters.

I: How did they come to live with you?

E: We got them from a local rescue group, Clear Creek Cat Rescue. We were told that they were rescued from a hoarder.

I: That sounds rough. Has it affected them negatively at all?

E: Of course, I don't believe anyone comes out of a rough upbringing unscathed.
They are both still pretty skittish. They tend to run at the slightest provocation. Sinon will watch the mail man come up the driveway, poised to run. If he stops at the mail box all is ok, but if we get a package, she bolts. 
When they had only been with us for a couple months, I tried to take Aave outside. To get her comfortable being an indoor/outdoor cat. I took her outside, she wanted down and then she took off. We had to borrow a live trap from Animal Control. She was gone for nine days. She was starving and dehydrated. She still has food insecurity. Sinon eats random fuzzes and dust bunnies. They can be really cuddly though. Aave meets me at the door for belly rubs when I get home, Sinon likes to be held like a baby. Over all, they're weird and great.

I: Wow, thanks for sharing with us. That's about all the time we have right now, would you like to share any pictures before we sign off?

E: Yes I would!

Sinon

Aave

Sisters Sleeping

I: Those are great! Thanks for talking with us.

E: Thanks for having me.

Ok, so that was my pretend interview. It ended up shorter than I anticipated. Maybe if I had written it when I thought of it rather than three days later. Oh well, maybe next time.