Kraków Appearance Postponed

The retreat in Kraków for Singles to be held in October has been cancelled. However, I have been invited to speak at the women's retreat in May 2014. Cieszę się, że jadę do Krakowa w maju bo wtedy będę umieć lepiej mówić po polsku.  

Details will be forthcoming. I am sad not to have an excuse (or the money) to go to Poland in October, but I am relieved I will not have to talk about Single life to men and women together. Speaking to a big crowd of Polish women about their personal lives, no problem. I could do it all day long in English and broken Polish and, if desperate, broken French. Speaking to a big crowd of Polish men about their personal lives, problem.

That reminds me of my last Polish appearance, and how I dropped the ball.  A Polish fan dropped by the the Kraków book fair to ask me how she could meet men. Stumped and speechless, I did not say, "What about THESE men?" After all, there were literally thousands of men at the Kraków book fair. Thousands. And she could have even have figured out what the men were interested in by what books they were looking at. Why it has taken me months to come up with that answer is a terrible mystery.

Possibly it is because I would rather have been run over by a car than attempt to talk to men at the Kraków book fair. Speaking Polish to Polish men is just extremely scary for me. I am sure all the ones who go to book fairs are very nice, but they scare me anyway. Young English-speaking ones in their twenties are okay. Most of the time.

"We want to see the nuns!"

I could have been a nun--after I gave up the Star Trek obsession.

I've been thinking about teenage girls worrying that they'll never get married (or, thanks to Beyoncé, that nobody will "put a ring on it" ) and was reminded of my own teenage emergency plan. My emergency plan was that if I were desperate I would just go to Communist-oppressed Warsaw and casually drop my Canadian passport by "accident" outside churches after Mass. Now that I think about, this was flattering neither to Warsawians nor me, but hey, I was a teenager.

It might have been as unthinkable to my generation of teenagers that we would never, ever get married as it is to the current crop. And perhaps it was even more unthinkable because there were no young nuns around. This may make you laugh, but there were fewer young nuns when I was a teenager than there are today. And although there were about 900 girls in my convent school--by which I mean it was a school attached to a convent--there was no, no, NO attempt to interest us in the religious life. (Oh wait. There was one. More anon.)

Generations of girls were curious about the nuns, most of whom we never saw. Most of us walked past the convent part of the building, and the big chapel, to get to the door to the school. We knew they had a swimming pool somewhere, too, just for the nuns. They were among the great mysteries of the place. Where was the swimming pool? Where were the nuns?

When I began at the school, the most infirm nuns were kept on the top floor, and a door with major locks and bolts kept them safely on their side of the building. (An infirmary has since been built.) That added to our curiosity, to say nothing of our dread of old age and dementia.  In contrast, a few elderly nuns in ordinary if dowdy clothes pottered around the library. There were two or three nuns among the teachers, and the principal was a nun. Two nuns gave music lessons in a sort of musical corridor hidden behind the auditorium. So, as a matter of fact, nuns were not that hard to find. They were, perhaps, just hard to see  because they wore ordinary, boring, dowdy old lady clothes. (Except for the principal, who wore power suits.)

Boy, we hated their clothes. Have I mentioned their clothes?

I discovered more nuns when I started going to daily Mass in the chapel--something nobody ever encouraged us to do, although I believe there was an altar guild of some kind. And finally my friend Stef and I went to some nun-authority---or perhaps just the nun who sat in the porter's office near the convent doors--and said, "We want to see the nuns!"

There was some communication about this, and Stef and I were permitted to see the nuns. That is, we were permitted to visit the very oldest nuns on the third floor. And I remember us chatting with a very sweet shrunken nun with an Irish accent who might have been one hundred years old. But that is all.

I wonder if the nuns thought the 900 female barbarians of many nations who came lolloping past their convent five days of the week, white shirts untucked and blue kilts rolled, were more of a pain in the posterior than potential nuns. It's a shame because underneath our underclad exteriors beat devout, passionate and energetic hearts. We were ready to be inspired by nuns, had there been any nuns who wanted to inspire us. And as the high school program was then five years long, the nuns would have had a captive audience for five years.

Any adult in a high school has a captive audience for five years.

The one attempt to attract us to the religious life was extremely lame. When we were on retreat, I believe, a plump, bespectacled, dowdy 39+ nun (presumably the youngest around back then) was brought in to tell us about her life. She emphasized that her sexuality was not dead, and that when she saw a cute guy in a grocery store she thought, "Wow!" And she punctuated "Wow" by throwing her arms in the air.

We were very embarrassed.  Other authority figures over 39+ did not share the secrets of their sexuality with us, so we were appalled that this nun did. And I think I was actually disappointed that religious life did not kill sexual yearnings stone dead. So much for that.

Looking back, my last year of high school was the last year of my life that I could have heard a call to religious life. The summer between graduation and the first year of university I discovered I had caught my first real Catholic victim boyfriend, and that was it. The whole messy cycle of infatuation-boredom-break-up-infatuation began. And although it all worked out in the end, and I have B.A.,  I must say I am an eensy bit cross.

But I do not blame the poor nuns. As a matter of fact, when I was 38, a few weeks before I came to Scotland and met B.A., a nun at that very convent crept up to me while I was strolling the grounds and asked me if I had ever considered joining the order. (Bless her heart!) No, I blame history, really. I was a teenager in the 1980s, when religious life in my city was at its zenith nadir. The Sisters of Life, the first of the "new" nuns, did not get started until the year after my graduation, and it was some years before they came to Toronto. Amazingly, they had habits. When I first saw a Sister of Life in person, I was blown away. A nun...a young nun...in a habit! She looked beautiful.

I am absolutely delighted that the situation is so much better for young women today and there are now religious orders with young women in them, religious orders whose charism I can really get behind. And, realizing that I am probably more read by teachers than by teenagers, I implore readers to make sure teenage girls actually know about them.  When I was eighteen/nineteen and thinking about religious life, I really had nowhere to go and no-one to speak to who was not old (or "old"). Nobody really welcomed me or encouraged me, and of course I gave up the idea as soon as the first cute NCB asked me to be his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, nineteen is not too late for other women. I know two women who went to the Benedictine Sisters of Saint Cecilia at Ryde, one after finishing her PhD, and one some years after finishing her B.A.  In my UK circles, the Sisters of Saint Cecilia is where you go, darling, if they'll take you.  And in the USA and Canada there are of course the Sisters of Life, not to mentioned the fabled Tennessee Dominicans and the Dominican nuns (average age 28) in Ann Arbor, MI.

Of course there are other orders, too, but these are the ones I think of first, as they are the ones most attractive to younger women--and to me. As I never cease to brag, the Tennessee Dominicans turned me down sight unseen, and I would never want to join any order that would have me. I mean, come on. They'd have to be desperate, and this is not humility speaking. It is self-knowledge.

I wonder if religion teachers ever arrange class trips to convents and monasteries....? Just throwing that out there.

The Teenager's Job

It's Teenage Week at Seraphic Singles, mostly because I talked to a woman recently about a terrible dating relationship she suffered as a teen. It would have been great if an adult had noticed what was going on and stepped in. She was, unfortunately, the kind of teenager who never tells her parents anything. I was just going to say that my parents couldn't shut me up, but of course that is not true: I never told them about my café co-worker's description of the huge bowl of cocaine at a party downtown. And after I went to university I quickly learned to shut up about stuff that seemed to give my parents mini-seizures at the dinner table.

In hindsight I was a kid all through high school and a teenager all through university. That so explains a lot. But enough about me.

The last time I did a poll, I did not have a big teenage readership. This is a relief to me because I do not like the idea of teenagers thinking of themselves as Single. Although Catholic teenagers should start thinking and praying about their adult vocations right after Confirmation, I really see no good reason why they should identify with unmarried people over 25. Even if in your community (e.g. rural Poland), most people marry at 21 or 22, at 15 or 18 you should be focused on learning. Your brains are soft and pink and spongy and will never be able retain so much information so easily again.

Also? Sunscreen. Sunscreen, my little teenage poppets! Although for the past 20 years I have been very careful indeed about the sun, I had a really bad burn as a teenager and as I dab super-exciting Polish anti-wrinkle cream around my 39+ eyes, I wonder if I'm seeing the long-term damage only now. Never forget that if you don't die first, you'll be forty. And if you make it to forty, you will either bless or curse your younger self for its attitude towards the sun.

Occasionally teenagers write to me about attracting boys, and I send back probably unsatisfactory letters about the importance of learning. But honestly the job of the teenager is to pray, to obey her parents (in so far as she is not damaged thereby) and to learn about the world. And by learning about the world, I do not mean repeating her teachers' political opinions. (Only my worst, craziest teacher allowed herself political opinions.) I mean how things work and what things are called and what various words mean. I mean reading books and listening to lectures on art, music, math, science, theology, poetry, history, geography, computer programming and languages.

I also recommend that, alongside the latest books and lectures, you read books by, and listen to speeches by, men and women who were famous before 1963. For example, Winston Churchill is going to have a take on the British Empire that you are unlikely to hear in many schools today. And if you are English and feeling depressed about it (as too many people want you to be), Winston will surprise and cheer you.*

I recommend, also, that teenagers write, draw, paint and compose as much as they possibly can. Youth culture is obsessed with music and dance, and even when I was a teenager, teenagers reconstructed pop videos for performance at school assemblies. That's okay, but how much better it is when teenagers write their own songs and choreograph their own dances. In fact, that's how pop music gets going

I do not recommend that high school students become politically active. Why? Because adult activists exploit the enthusiasm and idealism of the young, that's why. Adults get huge ego-rushes from young disciples, and very often the young pay adult activists a lot more respect and attention than the adult activists deserve. In return the adult activists pay back in cheap coin: "Aren't these kids great? Everyone give them a round of applause." Adult activists can become like parents, but unlike real parents they don't care about you as much as they care about the Cause. Instead of tempering your youthful enthusiasm, they exclaim over your heroism and wave to you cheerfully from outside the prison windows. I speak as a former very politically active, once-spent-an-entire-afternoon-behind-bars teenager.

If you hunger and thirst for justice, then wait until you are in college, at the earliest, or your twentieth birthday for political stuff. (More obviously charitable stuff, like feeding the poor, is okay under trusted adult supervision.) Political action involves giving yourself, and as a teenager you don't have a unified self to give yet.  You are highly impressionable, and that very impressionability should be used for your good. Think learning fluent German, not learning fluent ideologue.

I am trying to recall how mad I would have been if someone told me I didn't have a unified self yet and my brain was still rewiring itself. Frankly, I think I would have been relieved.

*History is taught differently from country to country, as you will find out if you leave your country and travel. If you want to be thought of as a truly educated person by Europeans, you must know the history of the Second World War, not just from the perspective of your countrymen, but from the perspective of other European nations involved in the conflict (and India). I do not recommend ever mentioning the Second World War, but--believe me--the subject still comes up.

If you are American, be ready to explain, without defensiveness or rancour, why the USA did not enter the war until 1941. If you are British, be ready to explain why Britain did not attack Germany immediately after declaring war. Always remember that what you were taught in school was not what others were taught in school, and what your grandparents told you is not what others' grandparents told them. If you hear something that surprises you, there is nothing wrong with saying, "That surprises me! I never heard that. Tell me more." Then sneak off and look it up on the internet.

The Teen Romance Myth

It's Teenage Week here on Seraphic Singles as I ruefully survey my own teenage years and my adult conclusions that teenage dating is pointless, stupid and risky.

Yeah, good morning to you, too.

My friend Lily and I have an ongoing argument as to whether it is better to have dated a lot, which teaches you much stuff about relationships (says Lily), or to have dated only a little, which leaves you less jaded about the whole thing (says I). Personally, I think you can learn a lot about relationships just from having a lot of acquaintances and friends, male and female. There is no need to start going on dates at fourteen or eighteen or whatever. 

My thoughts keep returning to my leafy suburb in the 1980s and my assumption then that teenage dating was the norm and having a boyfriend would be simply heaven on earth.  I suppose it started in elementary school and "going around." From about Grade 5--which is to say, when my classmates and I were ten--life would be enlivened with rumours that Jennifer, say, was "going around" with Jason. "Going around" generally meant that they paid each other marked attentions, to the increased social status of both. 

I now grind my teeth at the fact that couplehood increased social status from the age of TEN. That's how it was, however, and it's not like it was anything new, for even Tom Sawyer had a girlfriend back in 1873 and Anne Shirley was, of course, greatly admired by Gilbert from the age of  11 or 12.  

To tempt girls into reading, my elementary school library stocked many teen romance novels. They were very enjoyable. They provided the script to teenage life--with one problem. They did not at all reflect teenage life as many of my friends and I would live it. Naturally, I assumed our lives were wrong, not the romance novels. And I waited for the teen romance script to start unfolding in vain.

One of the marked differences between the novel-world and the real world was that the girls in the novel-world all went to co-ed high schools and my friends and I went to girls' high school. I would not have exchanged my school for a co-ed school, but it did limit the opportunity to be friends with boys. I am sorry for this because I think it would have been better to see boys as colleagues and friends instead of as Potential Boyfriends.  

Potential Boyfriends could be found at boys' school dances, and such dances were the highlight of my teenage life. I cannot think of anything in adult life that approximates the glamour and excitement of a Catholic boys' school dance.  Not that I ever got a boyfriend from such a thing. I could have, but I was never interested in the boys interested in me and the boys I was interested in were never interested in me, and that's how it was. I never went on more than one date with the same guy until I was 18. 

In case you are now feeling depressed because you did not go on any dates in high school, I should underscore that this was in the 1980s in a city with a huge and varied immigrant population. Immigrant populations are by nature conservative and old-fashioned. Courtship behaviour--as opposed to just hanging out and getting as much as you can get--is conservative and old-fashioned. Which, now that I think about it, makes the fact that I asked guys out ("Of course you can ask, ladies, it's the Eighties!") all the more stupid.   

As you may have noticed, it hurts one's feelings never to get to a second date, and so I thought there was something seriously wrong and unattractive about me. Alas. What was mostly wrong is that I was too busy looking for signs that a teen romance novel was about to start to notice the details of real life.

Real life for friends who had boyfriends often involved sexual negotiations that the romance novels, pitched for twelve year olds, forgot to mention. And luckily for highly idealistic me, who believed firmly in the morality of Much Ado About Nothing (i.e. better to be thought dead than a sexual sinner), I did not have to cope with this until I was 18.

It would be terribly funny to make a teen novel out of dating Iqbal. I am not sure it would be suited for the American market even though Iqbal hated the mujahideen* as much as he hated the Russians (i.e. the Soviets). On the other hand, it could be a Canadian Literature classic, since I am sure the Canadian Left would absolutely SWOON over the idea of dating a 22 year old Muslim refugee. Thanks to the bizarre new affinity of the Left for Islam, be it ever so fundamentalist, there is just something so CBC about Iqbal remonstrating with a friend in the CN Tower Revolving Restaurant for drinking a beer. Obviously I was ahead of my time. 

Why am I telling you this stuff for free instead of winning the Giller Prize? I shall have to keep some details to myself. At any rate, Iqbal appeared in the café where I worked after school and put a lot of change in the tip jar, while mentioning that charitable giving was one of the Five Pillars of Islam. I had only heard once before of the Five Pillars of Islam. Back then Islam was just one of the Great World Religions, which I associated with the baklava-like pastry whichever Catholic elementary school classmates handed out during their class presentation on Islam. 

Iqbal followed up his charitable giving later by offering to walk me home, so we had a nice walk up Yonge Street, arguing about whether or not men were more intelligent than women. Iqbal's principal argument was that the Koran said so, and eventually I went looking for the Koran in the school library to find out if it did, and after a very long and boring search I found out that it did.  

 In hindsight I wonder why I got involved with someone who so adamantly believed that men were more intelligent than women, but it may have been because I promised to help him with his English. And also I found Iqbal very attractive although for the life of me I could not tell you why. Maybe it was his older brother's cologne, which he stole on a regular basis. Of course I felt sorry for him, too, as he had been in a Red Cross camp in Pakistan after climbing over mountains out of Afghanistan and suspected that his mother was dead and his siblings back in Kabul were hiding this from him.

Total Giller Prize. Seriously, I should be charging you money today.

Anyway, to return to the theme of the perils of teen dating, nobody had told Iqbal that NCGs don't put out, as I assumed the whole world knew. To my horror, I discovered that he was very confused by this concept, for he had had a Catholic girlfriend in Montreal and she had certainly put out. How mad was I that there were some Catholic girls who had fallen so low as to wreck our chaste reputation and necessitate us having, like Protestant girls, to give The Talk. Iqbal did not seem to take The Talk very seriously, and accused me of having slept with someone else, so I slapped him. 

Slapping men is generally a bad idea even though it always works in the movies, and if the guy protests Humphrey Bogart is there to say "You'll be slapped and like it." But this occasion, however, it actually worked like it does in the movies and although momentarily annoyed Iqbal was vastly amused.  Now that I think about it, the most effective way to communicate with Iqbal was not like a well-brought up Anglo-Saxon Torontonian but like a Shakespearean drama queen. 

"Do you see this bit of paper?" demanded the Shakespearean drama queen who, don't forget, was only eighteen and believed completely in the moral message of Much Ado about Nothing. 

"Yes," said Iqbal.

I dropped it on the dirty pavement and ground it under my heel. Then I picked it up and illustrated its grubbiness.

"That would be me if I agreed to sleep with you," I trumpeted.

"Ooooh ahhhhh," cried Iqbal, taking away the piece of paper and trying to de-grub it by brushing it with his hand. "Oooccchhhh! Nooooo!"

Now that I am 39+ I certainly don't believe that although I think it very helpful to my general health and well-being that I believed it at 18. I am not sure Iqbal believed that either, since he hated the mujahideen and came from an educated family. However, he did start thinking about marriage at that point, ROFL.

Being a Shakespearean drama queen, although/because the epitome of emotional honesty, exhausted me, so I broke up with Iqbal rather soon after that and firmly decided that I would date only boys who (A) were unlikely to need The Talk and (B) spoke fluent English. 

Dear me, what a long post. Feel free to chat in the combox about your experiences with either teenage dating or foreign men, i.e. foreign to you. 

*The Taliban back when they were still just soldiers and everybody--except the Soviets, educated Afghans and my mother--seemed to like them.

The Important of Telling Grown-Ups Stuff

Being a teenager was difficult, but I was lucky. Until I was eighteen, I mooned around vaguely wishing I had a boyfriend. I never had to actually deal with having a boyfriend.

Now I don't want to demonize teenage boyfriends. It could be that many, perhaps the majority, of teenage boyfriends are like boyfriends on television or romance novels or movies like Juno, where the person calling all the shots is the girlfriend. It probably is that there are as many different kinds of teenage boys as there are different kinds of grown men. I don't really know because I went to an all-girls school, and generally I only ever saw teenage boys in the bus station and at dances.

But, as you can imagine, girls in my school talked about boys and boyfriends quite a lot. I knew one girl whose boyfriend was a perfect gentleman, who called her once a week, and took her out once a week. I knew another girl--actually at least two--whose boyfriend pressured her for sex. And I knew another girl whose boyfriend said he would never pressure her for sex because he loved her.  I knew girls who never lacked for boyfriend because boys asked them out all the time, and I knew girls who were absolutely forbidden to date. I knew a girl who entered into an arranged marriage right after high school. (I know what you're thinking, but actually she was Italian.)

Many of us talked incessantly about boys, which was probably a good thing, but I am not so sure many of us talked to adults about what was going on, even when what was going on was seriously messed-up. You would think that a girl being pressured to have sex by her boyfriend would tell her parents, but only if you have completely forgotten what it is like to be a teenage girl. Teenage girls develop strong feelings of loyalty towards other teenagers, and get mad when their parents don't respect these feelings.

Parents run roughshod over teen friendships at their peril: my mum's response to my crying over a sexually active friend's bad treatment by her sexually active boyfriend was to tell me not to be friends with that girl any more. What I wanted to hear was something like, "That's very sad. It's very sad that So-and-so, who is such a nice, friendly girl, was so poorly treated. Teenage sexual relationships are such a bad idea, because teenage girls' emotional intensity crashes into teenage boys' horniness like a truck. I wish they would drop Romeo and Juliet from the curriculum." Meanwhile, my poor mum had probably read some newspaper article about how girls are more likely to have premarital sex if their friends have premarital sex and did not know that I would rather have thrown myself out a window than have had premarital sex.

Parents are not mind-readers, so as embarrassing as it is, teenage girls should strive to tell their parents what they think, believe and value and not just shut up and go away and stop telling adults anything. However, if it is just too agonizing to tell parents stuff, then teenage girls should talk to trusted adults, and by trusted adults, I mean favourite aunts and uncles, grandparents, favourite female teachers and, perhaps, guidance counselors and youth ministers.

Update: Drat. Blogger is going very weird things today, and I have just lost half this post.

A Rare but Heartfelt Endorsement

I have been neglecting my reponsibilities to the blogging community by not mentioning other blogs I like. So I should mention the Orthogals today, because they are a hoot. Here's what they wrote about trying to find fellow Eastern Orthodox Christians on dating websites.

The struggles of young men and women in small, devout, liturgically, er, colourful Christian communities cut across ye olde ecumenical divide. One of the problems is the small dating pool. Another is that the small dating pool is full of people stubborn and eccentric enough to belong to a small, devout, liturgically colourful Christian community instead of to much bigger and much more easy-going communities. And if the people are stubborn and eccentric about religion, they might be stubborn and eccentric about other things, too.

Fortunately, there is such a thing as love. If you fall in love with someone, you don't care if he is obsessed with Peak Oil or the JFK assassination. Maybe, out of love, you too will read up on Peak Oil and stare at grainy images of grassy knolls. And if he falls in love with you, he will fall in love with your collection of garden trolls and forgive you for your obsessive and somewhat embarrassing hatred of whales.

A Word about Math

I very much enjoyed reading responses to yesterday's question, "What if you were kidnapped by space aliens and they zapped you with alien technology so that all your XX chromosomes warped into XY chromosomes and when you regained consciousness, you were really and truly a man?"

The point of the exercise was to ponder what it might be like to be a man. Occasionally I ask men what it is like to be men and they usually say they have nothing to compare it with, so they don't know what to tell me. Possibly this is to avoid saying, "It's like being intellectually shackled to a frustrated sex maniac," which is not something the men I know would like to say to inquisitive NCGs.

Anyway, in this thought exercise some of us changed our professions, not just because our imaginary new muscles gave us new opportunities, but because we figured our new male brains would give us other interests. And this is why conscience directs me to say something about women and math. 

I grew up in Canada, and I believed that girls were bad at math. I believed that girls were bad at math because in Canada and the USA, it was believed that girls were bad at math. I can't quite remember when I hit the rocky patch in elementary school that convinced me that I was bad at math, but I remained firmly convinced. My struggles with math blighted my teenage life. So much time wasted in worry, self-hated and procrastination. I wish with all my heart I had spent the summer between Grade 8 and Grade 9, or between Grade 9 and Grade 10, learning that I could learn to do math. 

It was not until I went to Rome two years ago and met an Eastern European reader who is also a mathematician that I heard that most women in Eastern Europe can do math. I already suspected that education was different for women in Eastern Europe, at least in Communist times, because years before I had met a young Slovak nun who had been trained as an electrician. She did not at all think it odd that she had been trained as an electrician. However, I did not realize that there was such a gap between North American women and Eastern European women when it came to math and science. And it shocked my Eastern European mathematician reader to the core that women in the USA were, in general, so deficient in math and science skills, and had so much less of an interest in math and science than women in her country.* 

It seems that the gender gap between English-speaking women and English-speaking men when it comes to math is about culture, not brains.  It may be true that men are more likely to be TOP mathematicians ( I just checked the Faculty list for Warsaw University and  only 77 of the 330 people on the Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics are women.) However, this in itself is no reason to despair that more American, Canadian and British women could become skilled in math. 

It's amazing how our assumptions about gender and intellectual ability can hold us back. I was struck by the remark of a young Polish man who glumly decided that women were better at languages. He was almost entirely fluent in English. 

In a climate where it amounts to a thought-crime to say that men and women are fundamentally and radically different, I believe that men and women are fundamentally and radically different, and that our differences are complementary. However, I do not think that these differences involve intellectual ability, at least not on anything but the elite level. (This is to say that I believe that something besides culture has resulted in more top male mathematicians than top female mathematicians.)   

One day I hope to prove this to myself, too, by going to night school and learning all the math I so frustratingly could not learn in high school. Meanwhile, I do wish there was the same panic around girls not being able to excel in math as there is about boys not being able to read. When boys can't read, nobody says, "Oh well. Boys can always just become hunters, trappers or fishermen."

*True story: I was translating a Communist-era Polish comic song about mathematicians, and I got entirely bogged down in a line where one of the mathematicians clumsily kisses another mathematician. I was completely confused that there was such a explicitly homosexual element to this Communist-era song. A Polish girl (a biochemist) had to explain to me that the other mathematician was a woman. Isn't that pathetic? I was so ashamed.