o i have been very grumpy about work these days. i think that it is time to analyze what i want to get done at work and why i am doing what i am doing.. just for a reality check up. part of the problem is that people keep asking me and i have formulated so many clean versions that i want companies to hear, instead of saying what i am actually feeling. and, worrisome enough, i start to believe my own retoric. and you wonder why i am worried about getting too involved with tech companies.

first, goals. i am in the technology field because i believe that current technologies are not made with people in mind. i believe that current companies is basically based on marketing and that even those who are doing research are doing it for themselves, thus upper-class middle-aged straight white men. this worries me. i feel as though technology will create a severe social divide. i know that i can’t change how everything is done but i want to make as much of an impact as possible – get in and make people think about how they are doing things, etc.

problem: you have to play to their games. something is only successful as an idea if the market picks up on it (i.e., Brenda Laurel). companies are surprisingly stupid. the older i get, the more i realize that companies are really not the best of the people; they are the worst. the social structure is one of social control and management. even in tech land where people _think_ they have freedom, they are really only minions in a vast system. its quite disturbing. because technology people have worked so hard to be scientists instead of modern day smiths, there is an overemphasis on science as meaningful and no desire to understand people or to respect work that has been done to understand people (except biology and neuroscience). psychology, sociology, anthropology are all considered pointless. how peculiar is that?

so why am i at the lab. no, its not the free food or even the fact that i didn’t have to take GREs (although that made a difference). it is the only place that i could find that values multi-disciplinary approaches to problems related to technology. problem is that i am starting to understand the lab and its kinda like a Model-T perspective. anyone can come to the lab as long as they are engineers. you can utilize other disciplines as long as everything can be analyzed quantitatively. its weird. and its limited. funny is that i am very quantitative but this environment is making me stand up for qualitative and social science perspectives on everything. kinda interesting in my opinion. its one of the reasons that i am so fascinated with my mentor and her work. i totally have an intellectual crush on her – in that stunned unable to contribute kinda way. her perspective is just dumbfounding and the fact that she is so motivated to work with engineers and make them get it is inspiring.

the problem is that i haven’t been doing a good job of narrowing down and doing work. instead i am just amassing knowledge. maybe that is a good thing but not by ML standards. that’s the problem – they want to see products, demos, sellables. although my advisor has been tremendously flexible thus far, i wonder what she is really thinking. is it ok for me to not have tangible things to show? somehow, i think that will wane really fast. i like the idea of doing qualitative visualization – i really think its an interesting subset of work. problem is that it is *damn* hard and i don’t feel as though i have even cracked the surface.

i feel as though a million people want me to do totally different things. and this is only a problem because i don’t know what i want to do. i really like working with my mentor and Henry and all of the other interesting folks.. i can’t get the gender stuff out of my head and i am not sure i want to. its always amazing to talk about queer issues in a boardroom – i find that fascinating. so i don’t know.. still confused.