What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
I expect the iPhone will exist, in one form or another, in twenty years.
Mobile phones are part of the culture, to the point where people are moving away from land lines. People’s cell phones are their only phones, and with all the extra features of the iPhone, they have become personal computers in mini form.
IPhones are lifestyle aids. I use my phone for email, checking up on classes, surfing the Internet, playing solitaire, tracking my food intake and exercise, texting, and composing occasional blog entries. I do not use it as a phone much because of my hearing problem, but my hearing aids will connect to it and I will control them from the phone.
I don’t see much changing with the iPhone over 20 years. I could see it becoming a satellite phone, I could see more features set into it, but the form factor will stay largely the same and the functions will stay similar.
Do you think we’re shaped more by our experiences or by who we are?
When I first encountered this question, I unequivocally thought, “My experiences, of course!” I have had vivid, quirky experiences that have made me who I am today. Everything from playing with lion cubs to floating through a swift water simulation to being a (really tall) Santa’s elf for the school district and more!
But then I thought about the question again and realized, “I chose all those experiences. I took the trip to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center. I decided to experience the Swift Water course. I am that experiential person.”
I’m uncomfortable with believing in nature over nurture, which is the philosophical essence of this question. I am perturbed to think that I was born to choose vivid experiences. I don’t like to give that much power to an accident of birth. Yet I was born with bipolar genes — did they orient me to choose novel experiences?
Psychology tends to favor a model incorporating both nature and nurture. In the case of my personality, it’s covered in “traits and states” theory. About half of our personality is based on traits, or inborn tendencies (nature), while the other half is based on states, or the moods we are in (influenced by nurture). The specific personality trait is “tendency towards trying new things”, which is one of the five basic personality traits in the OCEAN model.
So the science says both, no matter what I think. I just prefer to credit my experiences.
Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?
I miss cassette tapes.
The concept of recording songs off the radio is a lost phenomenon. Radio is almost a lost phenomenon at this point. All is now Spotify and Apple Music, and there’s no spontaneously hearing a song and recording it. Instead, I buy music off of Apple Music if I want it permanently or borrow it as long as I never leave Apple Music.
Mix tapes are not really a thing anymore. I can make a mix tape on Apple Music, but I can’t easily share it. I can share the playlist with someone, but they have to go and buy the music. I can’t share with someone who isn’t on Apple Music. I don’t know if Spotify is any different.
There was a certain democratization of music back in the days of cassette tapes. The quality of the music was poor when we recorded off the radio, but we didn’t really notice because of our lower expectations with AM radio.
I’m not one for nostalgia, and I know there are great advantages with services like Apple Music and Spotify, especially the sound quality. But I miss the old-fashioned mix tape and the heartfelt communication it represents.
I am a lifelong learner. I have to be to do my job. Being a professor means having a body of knowledge and updating it so we can be experts.
Not me.
In addition, I am a voracious reader of articles. Some of what I read is really lowbrow, like those emotional heartbreak stories with a missing ending on Facebook. Others are informative stories about current events. And I will read anything medical I can get my hands on, and that’s how I know the cyclospora epidemic started with Taylor Farms’ bagged iceberg lettuce.
I want to learn calculus, the one class I nearly failed in college. I want to learn molecular biology, because I think it’s amazing that complex life came from one-celled organisms and my cells reflect that. I’d like to learn carpentry because I think my mother wanted me to marry a carpenter (didn’t happen, even though I’ve known a lot of people who did carpentry).
I don’t understand people who don’t want to learn. Curiosity is an innate human trait in most people, and I think we need to ignore our better nature if we decide not to learn.
What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
When I was growing up, I thought the United States was the best place on Earth to live. Over the years, my perspective has shifted, and recently, it has shifted rapidly.
When I was young, the country was Fourth of July celebrations and ice cream parlors. I was obviously naive back then, because it also was racism and the Vietnam War. Those things were far away from the rural childhood of a perpetual optimist.
As I grew up, I saw the downsides, but I comforted myself by saying “At least we’re trying to be our best.” It was a comforting idea, and there was plenty of evidence. Even as recently as Obama’s election, there was room to hope that America stood for true equality, at least in its ideals.
With Trump being voted into office twice, I have no illusions anymore. His very campaign promise was to take away from the people his constituents couldn’t stand. The opposite of equality. He has fulfilled this promise in a thousand petty acts on the national and international levels. His definition of freedom is predicated on it being granted to his sycophants, white nationalists and supremacists. As a country, we are bullies. We are no longer the good guys.
I think about moving to Canada, but I don’t have the independent wealth I would need. I don’t have the skills they need and I am too close to retirement. I don’t know if a blue wave would be enough to restore the country. I doubt it — the hatred is still here, still will survive. I do not live in the best country in the world
I was chronically sleep-deprived when younger, especially through college. Some of this has to do with being untreated bipolar and in hypomania; some of that has to do with being paranoid when I stayed at a boyfriend’s house because my mother would call around looking for me if I wasn’t home by 9. If I got four hours of sleep a night I’d be surprised.
When I was in graduate school, I walked in front of a car which was turning into traffic at a stop sign. If I weren’t chronically sleep-deprived, I think I would have seen the car in time and stepped back. I stepped back, but just a second too late, because I ended up with a badly broken leg.
Now, I work hard on getting enough sleep at night. I do not drink coffee after noon. I go to bed early, and spend at least a half hour before I sleep quietly with a sleep mask on. I don’t surf the internet on my phone right before I go to bed. I take my medication religiously. I have sleep meds I take when I think I am going to have a restless night.
My productivity depends on my sleep. My health depends on my sleep. My sleep depends on good habits.
Which languages do you speak and how did that impact your life?
People in the US do languages wrong. We don’t teach other languages until junior high or high school, when children have more difficulty in learning them. I took French for two years in high school, and I barely know enough to get to the bathroom. I don’t know verb tenses, and I don’t know many verbs in the first place. But I have the first conversation in the French textbook memorized:
Bonjour, Guy.
Bonjour, Michel. Ca va?
Oui, ca va.
(My keyboard does not do cedillas.)
I also can say “Shall we go to the beach?” In French, which will come in handy perhaps never.
It disadvantages me that I do not speak other languages. Not only in international travel, but the fact that the more languages one knows, the easier one can learn new languages. So a lifetime of facility in languages has been denied me.
I went to graduate school with people who knew five languages. In many African countries, this is apparently the norm. I envied them their ability to communicate. I still do. The American Way is not ideal.
I’ve probably talked about this before, but not in detail. The time during and around the diagnosis of my bipolar is probably what I would call “The Hard Years”.
I think it was about 17 years ago — I am not good with time, especially during that time. It was not a typical spring semester — I had just learned that my department (Family and Consumer Sciences) was being disbanded, and my future position uncertain. I had tenure, but the university didn’t have to keep me. Most people in my department were losing their jobs. The whole situation was ugly because of how it was done outside of proper procedures for a reduction in force.
Meanwhile, I was not sleeping. At all. Days in a row of two hours’ sleep a night, going from project to project. I felt strung out and enervated. Yet I couldn’t stop myself.
My department chair told me I needed to see a psychiatrist for my sleep. I think she knew what was going on, even if I didn’t. I explained to the psychiatrist what was going on, and he informed me that I didn’t have a sleep disorder, but a mood disorder. He drew the sine wave of my moods onto a piece of paper, the highs and the lows, and described what I was facing.
He tried to stabilize me, and whatever he was doing didn’t work. I lived in the twilight zone of my lack of sleep and my fading mood. We tried sleep medicines on me, and I discovered that Ambien caused me to cook in my sleep, while the others (from tramadol to benzodiazepenes to Haldol) did not work. During this time my best friend died while I was on Spring Break, and it hardly registered to me. (I still don’t feel like I mourned her to this day.)
Eventually, I broke. I didn’t realize how sick I was until the evening when I got the twitches. I woke my husband from a nap and told him we needed to go to the emergency room because I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t feel typically suicidal — I didn’t really want to kill myself; I just wanted the jitters to stop. I just wanted the sleeplessness to stop. I remember lying on the table in the room they had sequestered me in, talking nonstop about my high blood pressure and the fact that I could not sit still.
The staff did a great job of handling me. They did not make me feel crazy at all. They didn’t talk down to me; they let me know that they were going to keep me for a couple of days to stabilize my medication. I felt surprisingly taken care of, even when I had to surrender my shoes for grippy socks (anyone who has been hospitalized for mental health issues knows what ‘grippy sock vacation’ means).
Inpatient care meant sitting through programming about how to deal with moods, art therapy, and discharge plans. The people I was in with had a variety of issues, although they all seemed pretty ordinary to me. The thing about inpatient treatment is that the patient no longer has much agency. You can’t bring your computer or phone. You can’t do work. You go to group even if you don’t want to. It feels like a shock to the system.
I spent a lot of time pacing the halls because of my jitters; I later figured out that I had akathisia from the meds. Akathisia feels like having restless legs in one’s whole body, and one has to move to try to get rid of it. It doesn’t go away except with time and the removal of the medication. Luckily that was only a day or two.
The emotional fallout of being in inpatient for psychiatry was a blow. I felt like I was no longer an ordinary person. I was mentally ill. The bipolar was no longer minor; it was a disorder. I struggle with this to this day, the feeling that I have been branded as other, even though I have not been to the hospital since. I have had a couple episodes since; a few mini-depressions, a minor hypomanic episode, but they have not put me back into the hospital.
I thought I was going to go back to work after my three days in the hospital. Human resources at the university disabused me of that notion; they made it clear that I would miss the rest of the semester and would not take on interns over the summer. That was another moment of reckoning that what I was facing was not minor. They were not kind about it.
In the middle of all this, my husband and I bought a new house. I did not help much with the packing or moving because the medications I was on were knocking me out. I was a zombie for much of the summer until we figured out that the Seroquel was not agreeing with me. My new psychiatrist put me on a new medication and that made me feel more normal.
That was my ‘hard year’. It has shaped who I am; has given me a sense of insecurity that has lasted to this day. I feel I could go back there at any time, if the stressors are bad enough. I feel as though I’ve never left, because the label ‘bipolar’ still applies. I question my past decisions, because I was unmedicated when I made them. I am still steps away from the ‘hard years’.
Chaos is the opposite of order. Order means predictability, knowing what will happen next because that’s what happens next. When life is predictable, our responses to life are predictable. We are in maintenance.
Chaos is unpredictable by definition. When life is unpredictable, we need to respond to it in novel ways, or else cease to function. Growth is possible, because doing something new can be wildly successful. It can foster growth. It can take us to a new place.
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
When I was in high school, I participated in various extracurricular activities. I tried out for school plays and musicals, I participated in the Madrigals group, and I even spent 20 minutes in track (I quit while I was ahead). I wanted to do these things and I found a sense of belongingness while doing them. They also helped me get into the University of Illinois.
When I was in college, however, I didn’t participate in groups or clubs. At the university, I was a small fish in a big pond and the size of the pond intimidated me. University of Illinois had about 40,000 students in 1981, and the groups were full of talented people with greater drive than I had.
As a professor, I encourage my students to participate in extracurricular activities, and I envy them their participation. I really feel I should have continued my participation in something during college, anything. Even if I was a tiny fish in the ocean.
So the advise I would give to someone younger than me is “get involved.” Whatever appeals — theater or chorus, political organizations or speaking clubs, sports or role-playing — participate.
Words Like Me 