jonesrooy-shanghai

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Ten things I learned in 2020 that I didn’t want to know and hope to soon forget

We’ve reached the end of the year and it’s time to reflect on the things we’ve learned. This year, most things I learned I hope to forget completely, but I probably won't. Here are my top ten!

Comment below (or somewhere) and let me know what you learned that you didn’t want to!

1. Only the host of a Zoom meeting can mute everyone. Is this true? I actually still don’t know for sure. I will not look this up.

2. How to make curry, sort of. I do not like to cook and I do not know how to cook, but when restaurants in NYC shut down, I, like everyone else, decided to recreate the dishes I know and love from nearby takeout locations. I hope you like vaguely spicy sludge, because that is my new specialty!

3. Live-streaming is stressful. Back when I did comedy on stages in rooms with living humans in them, I never once thought, “You know what I should do? Perform this same thing but alone in my kitchen with zero audience and a lot more worrying about my internet connection.” Now these opportunities are the highlights of my life.

4. I am capable of eating an entire wheel of vegan cheese in one sitting and I won’t even feel bad after. To be honest, I always suspected this was the case, but I never had the gall to test it until this year, which I have now done multiple times, and I am totally fine.*

5. News outlets will make vital coverage of a disease that’s killing everyone available even without a subscription. I never want to have free access to otherwise subscription-only content again.

6. Psychiatric medication is a miracle. JK I already knew that, but before the pandemic I did take myself off Prozac without consulting my doctor because I was sure I was almost better, and then had to come crawling back to her after I’d spent 600 days alone in my apartment and realized I wasn’t.

8. I am capable of being excited about dryer balls. This $12 purchase I was tricked into on the internet was easily one of the most exciting personal developments of the year for me.

9. Teaching online is way worse than teaching in person. I was one of the people who before 2020 was super excited about online learning and democratizing higher education until I actually had to do it and realized that it’s a much worse way to teach people things even if you try really, really hard.

10. If you are awake every single night from 3-5a it doesn’t really even matter. I used to always want to be in a sleep study where they detach you from time and see what your real circadian rhythm is. I’m pleased to report I’ve now gone through nearly a year of one and the results are in! My circadian rhythm is f*cked.

Well, that’s it folks! What an educational year it’s been. I hope by the end of next year I will not have thought about any of this sh*t even once.

* I am not fine, but it’s not related to the cheese (directly).

Fig. 1. Good riddance to all of this.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

The Major Differences Between the US and Cambodia

I have lived in the United States for most of my life. I was born here, went to school here, and for the most part have worked here. I recently visited Cambodia for 10 days. This qualifies me to write with equal authority about both countries. Here are the ten major differences between the two.

1. Heat! Cambodia is hot most of the time. Most of the US is only hot for some of the time.

2. Spiritual journeys. A much larger proportion of the white women in Cambodia appear to be on some kind of spiritual journey compared to those in the US. I am basing this on my observations of women wandering around in sarongs, journaling alone in cafés, and generally staring into space. And that’s just in Soho (zing!). In Cambodia the difference is these women are also sunburned, suggesting more outdoor meditation/selfie-taking. 

3. I have a one-dimensional view of development. Ok, this list is already about me. I kept walking around Cambodia thinking about how sad it was that there weren’t more paved roads or tall buildings, and I wondered what it would take to get that, and why they they weren’t there already. Then I remembered an article I read for a class I taught at NYU Shanghai about how if history is a house, we need a new architecture for it because right now the dominant lens is that development progresses in the direction of the most-developed country. So maybe there are more ways to think of progress than fancy things. That said, when the power goes out and it’s above 40 degrees celsius (I’m worldly now so use centigrade. Also, I call it “centigrade”), it objectively sucks.

4. That said, poverty is real. God damn it, I think I believe that everyone should be born with the chance to learn things and drink clean water and have access to medical care that is modern and doesn’t require a $21K helicopter ride to get to that you obviously cannot afford. You can quote me on this. Also, this is also not even a list of comparisons anymore and this entire exercise is already a disaster.

5. Pol Pot. Some political leaders in the US are pretty bad. But have any of them rounded up all of the educated adults and children and executed them? Not yet! Let’s keep this in perspective. That said, don’t worry, I also read every op-ed ever written about the Mueller report the minute I got home.

6. Tourist attractions that begin with “Killing”. Would you like to go to the “Killing Caves” or the “Killing Fields”? This is a choice tourists can actually make in Cambodia. Let’s all take a moment to be grateful that, regardless of how f*cked up American history is, at least it’s not called the “Killing Canyon.”

7. Portion sizes. I ate at many restaurants in Cambodia (no big deal) and at all of them the amount of food served was, without my even requesting it, a quantity that made me feel full but not sick. I forgot that most of the world doesn’t stuff people stupidly at restaurants.

8. Human sizes. Americans are enormous people. This isn’t fat-shaming, I promise (saying “I promise” absolves me of all responsibility, I assume). It’s just striking how every time I return from Asia, the first thing I notice is that everyone is taller and fatter. It really is shocking. Soon I will forget this and re-normalize to sizes here. Also, I notice these things because: eating disorders!

9. Tuk-tuks. Technically they are called remork in Khmer (I am nothing if not a diligent Lonely Planet reader), but no one calls them that. They are open-air trailers you attach to the back of a motorcycle that someone drives to take you around. It’s way more fun than a car or van, and I wish we had them in the US. Lest you think I’m patronizing people who can’t afford cars, I think they actually are faster and more efficient in cities (if we had more fuel-efficient motorcycles). Plus, they are on Uber-like apps called “Grab” and “Something Else That I Forgot” so they are super modern.

10. Alphabets. Our alphabet is way more boring. This is the same sentence in Khmer: អក្ខរក្រមរបស់យើងគឺជាវិធីដែលធុញទ្រាន់. They win! Also, because this is from google translate, it technically means: “Our alphabet is a tedious way,” a sentiment with which I also agree. I also spent an hour reading about the Khmer language while I was there (making me the expert on that as well), and all I can tell from squinting at this sentence is there are probably vowels in there, and I’m still not sure if there should be spaces.

Well, that pretty much sums it up! I know what you’re thinking, and I did leave off a few smaller points, which I’ll round up here:

Cambodia: More coconuts, cheaper everything except sweet potatoes, less trash removal (something I’ve already talked about on Instagram because I am a parody of my generation), generally speaking nicer and more outgoing people in the service industry, though even that is a complicated thing to say because there are unfortunately incentives to be nice to foreigners because they are coming in with way more money and tourism is one of the only growing industries, and that’s troublesome to me, an uninformed, privileged white person. Plus, I’m told there is so much saving face that everyone is nice even if they’re miserable or angry, so it’s not like this is necessarily a good or true thing.

US: Less dirt on streets, more Starbucks locations, fewer lizards and frogs in major cities.

Fig. 1. One important similarity between Cambodia and the US is that I am equally insufferable in both places.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Here’s Some Graduation Advice I Would Have Liked to Receive

It’s graduation time! I spent this morning reading excerpts in the New York Times of commencement speech quotes, and was struck by how mostly useless they were. They come from a good place -- work hard, trust yourself, ask what the world needs. But they’re contradictory (“show up even if you don’t feel like it” and “only do what matters to you”), vague (“be the change”), and imprecise (“work hard, but not too hard”).

As someone who is constantly looking for the final, perfect pearl of wisdom that will once and for all solve my entire life (this one is saved as a PDF to my desktop, this is obviously the best one ever, and “the dots connect themselves” is something I say to myself at least daily), I found these lackluster. 

I also recently got to see some of my former NYU Shanghai students, and as they approach their graduation (and one decided to leave college), I felt like I wanted to tell them something. Here it is.

1. Oh my goodness, it’s hard out there. For all the stresses of college (and they are real), they are still pretend compared to the rest of the world. I didn’t know this while I was a professor, because it’s like being a professional student. Life gets weird when you don’t have a semester to measure time by, or an expected wrap-up of all obligations every December and May, or a bunch of people telling you that what you’re doing matters. Instead, life is like a long treadmill that’s hard and tedious and it’s up to you to make it interesting. Be careful you don’t end up a zombie.

2. No one will tell you what to do or who to be. For a long time, I wished my parents would tell me what to do when I grew up. Then I looked to my college professors. Then I looked to my grad school advisors. Then I looked to my deans and provosts. Then I left academia, only to start looking to the people around me. They’re wearing suits, they’re going to jobs -- I should do that, I guess. And what has a life of being a chameleon taught me? It’s exhausting to pretend. I don’t know where you find the answer of who you are, but I know it’s not from someone else. Stop wasting your time looking for it.

3. If it feels wrong, it probably is. Since leaving academia, I’ve had a number of job opportunities (no big deal). As I decided on whether to take each one, I could always tell if it was the right one based on whether or not I could sleep in the days leading up to deciding. If I couldn’t, it wasn’t the right job. That said, I didn’t always listen to myself, and often took the job anyway. Here's where I’m going to be sort of contradictory -- you need to make money, but know what you’re doing and what you’re sacrificing when you are. Your inner voice is there, but it’s not always easy to listen to.

4. Don’t be afraid to ask for or receive help. I’ve suffered from mental illness since I got involved in the dark art of anorexia when I was 11. I’ve since continued to battle that, plus depression and anxiety. I thought muscling through was the only respectable path until I decided to give in to ten years of therapists’ recommendations to try medication last year. By heavens, it made me feel better. I don’t know if I’ll stay on it forever (insert very complicated debate about that here), but knowing there’s some relief to my pain will be something that will always help me. If you’re hurting, there’s relief, and it’s brave to accept it.

5. When in doubt, move around. One of the best things about my job at Cirque le Soir was it forced me to dance every single time I was at work. It really does just make you feel better. I can’t bring myself to run or go to a gym (insert above fears about treadmills but in a literal sense here), but I can bring myself to walk briskly to overpay for coffee and/or do handstands for no reason. Be alive. It’ll cheer you up, and moving is part of the fun of being human. It’s dangerously easy to forget that.

6. Go to a comedy show. I perform comedy in New York most nights. Over many of those nights I’ve been at home before the shows and complained to my boyfriend that I didn’t feel like going. He would always tell me to go, and that I would feel better if I did. He’s right -- I feel better every time. Find your version of a comedy show -- something you can go to that reminds you that you like being alive and people care about you. Or, if you can’t find such a thing just yet, you’re always invited to come to my comedy show, at the Lantern Comedy Club, every night at 8 and 10 pm. Or go to any comedy show whatsoever, because comedy is important. It’s our only weapon against death (well, that and CRISPR).

7. Trusting your instinct is easier said than done. Heaven almighty, I’ve tried to tell myself not to be influenced by others and to trust myself and to do what feels right -- but most of the time I still feel like I’m just sitting here and my compass is spinning idly. I remain convinced we all have an inner voice that knows what we really want to do, and that it’s not actually selfish, but in fact noble, to follow it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t spend most days debating pretty much every choice from where to get coffee to whether to quit my job (again). On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be giving advice.

8. There’s going to be a fuck ton of pressure on you to be normal or do the thing that sounds good and reasonable. Are you noticing a theme here? The problem is, I think we’re all born with a sense of self and purpose. But social and economic forces around us are strong, and pressures from people we know, even people we love and who love us, are fierce, and it’s hard to be a unique snowflake in a bunch of packed snow on the highway covered with tire treads. My point is, jet lag is real and this isn’t making a lot of sense, but whenever you make a decision, try asking yourself if it’s what you want or if you have just been told, however indirectly, it’s what you should want. All of this is coming from a place of privilege, I know, but rather than apologize for it, let’s try to be an example of really living.

9. Seriously, though, make sure you have enough money to live on. I’m able to sit here and talk about introspection and trusting instincts because I worked hard to save a lot of money before I quit my job as a professor. I wouldn’t be able to survive right now if I hadn’t. I’ve also seen too many of my artist (sadly, it is usually artists) friends run out of money, and, thus, options. There’s no shame in making a living, or wanting to be comfortable. It took me awhile to realize that. You’ll have to sacrifice and be smart in order to live a life based on your true self. You know?

10. Eat vegetables. And blueberries. And good fats (coconuts! nuts!). Be vegan if you can, but if you can’t, eat meat that wasn’t made horribly. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and I’m no nutritionist, and I can’t speak to the detrimental environmental consequences of us all eating all the almonds in the world at once, but I do know I feel better when I take care of myself. Take care of yourself out there. (And if you can’t, email me, and I’ll try to help.)

11. Remember, this advice is coming from this person. (Amazing makeup by Kathryn Robbins.)

P.S. I literally got distracted while writing this list by this one. I think I have an addiction. (Also, it contradicts the advice from the other passion article above.)

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

What I Want is Wrong

All my life I’ve been told that what I want is wrong.  

My earliest memory is wanting to be a boy.  You’re too pretty to be a boy, my teacher said.  My school made me stop sitting with the boys in the cafeteria.  I had to sit with the girls, whose interests I didn’t share.  For my ninth birthday I wanted a snake and a football.  No one said, “That’s great!”  Everyone said, “Why?”

My orthodontist is the only person to ever honor my childhood request to be called “Fred.” To this day, he still does it (not that I see him much), and to this day I am grateful.

I don’t want to be a boy anymore (I don’t think), but there is plenty else the world has told me I have been wrong to want.  

In high school I wanted to go to an Ivy League university or a college in a city.  No you don’t, people told me.  You want a school that’s not a “pressure cooker.”  You want a school with a campus.   Do I?

In (my small, rural) college my professors told me that smart people want to go to graduate school.  I applied, but said I didn’t want to study Chinese politics.  I wanted to study “pure” international relations.  You’re wrong, they told me.  The China angle will get you in.  

It did.

I tried for years in graduate school to not study Chinese politics.  I proposed other dissertation topics.  No, they said.  The China angle will get you a job.  I wrote a dissertation on China.  I got a postdoc based on that dissertation.  I got a faculty job in China.

I spent a decade in academia trying to convince myself I liked it.  The lifestyle didn’t suit me, but everyone told me it was the greatest profession in the world.  You want this, they said, something else is just getting in the way.  

I went to therapy to figure out why my brain was wrong.  Why didn’t I want what I so obviously should want?  Why can’t I commit?  We never considered maybe I didn’t want to.

The rest of the world wasn’t alone in conspiring against my wants: my brain learned to chime in against itself.  My first life choice was between soccer or ballet (yes, I’ve led a privileged life).  I chose soccer because it was what boys want.  I chose wrong.  I fucking love ballet.  I learned: Don’t trust what you want.  And: I am horrible at soccer.

In seventh grade I switched math classes and my friend got mad at me for leaving her behind.  I learned: Do not exert your will on the Universe or people will be upset with you.  I did not learn: math.

That year I also developed anorexia, which is a lifetime sport of denying yourself not just wants but needs.  Then -- and now as I write this -- my body is hungry.  My brain says: No you’re not.  Right, I’m not.

Succeeding at an eating disorder takes much more than willpower.  It takes convincing yourself you truly do not want what you want.  You take your want, crush it into a tiny ball until you can’t see it or feel it, and then shove it deep down, where it dissolves into your body, the last bit of nutrient you get: your dying want, as it is absorbed into your stomach alongside zero calorie pickle juice (don’t worry, I don’t drink that anymore -- mercifully, they invented kombucha).

Listen to your gut, people say.  Oh, darling: I shut that down in 1997.

There was something I wanted once: To be a circus performer.  I almost didn’t move to that job in China because I wanted to do circus in New York.  But I did, because I was supposed to want the best job in the world.  I cried the whole way there.  I felt like an outcast until a circus moved to Shanghai and found me.  For 16 months I loved it and it loved me.  

The circus closed and I was left with nothing. 

There was something else I wanted, secretly. I barely even admitted it to myself.  There was a man I met in Shanghai who lived in New York.  We met right when I moved to China -- even before the circus.  He went back to New York, and I watched the back of his head disappear as his taxi drove to the airport.  I wanted to run after him, fly back with him that second, build a life with him.  And maybe do some circus while I was there.

Instead, I stood, heart beating in the Beijing sun, fists clenched, repeating to myself: You don’t want those things.  You want to be a professor in China.  You want.  You want.  You want.

And so I was, for three years.

Except for the circus months, I was unhappy.  I wanted to stop being a professor.   I wanted to live in New York.  I wanted to be with that man.

One day, in a moment of strength (or was it desperation?), I acted on all three of those things at once.

I have them now.

Yet, I wake up every day still empty.

Getting the external scaffolding of your life right is no help if there’s no one on the inside.

I want.

I find I cannot complete that sentence.

I have a smattering of jobs and activities.  I’ve lost interest in circus.  The man and I live together and love each other.  I love New York City.  Or, I try to remember how I used to love it.  Some days it feels exhilarating.  Most it feels like prison. 

I want.

To my horror, I have realized that a lifetime of shutting down my wants has not only left me with no capacity to listen to or trust what I want -- but that there’s no want even there.  It’s not like my want is a tiny flame that needs encouragement.  It’s that the flame went out long ago.

I want.

What do I want?

I want to want.  I want to remember who Andrea was before I shut her up.  I want to tell whatever desire it was that was inside me when I was a little girl -- that it’s ok to grow back.  That it’s safe now.  That wants are ok.  That as long as what you want doesn’t hurt other people, it’s a good thing to want.  Listen to it.  Let it grow.

I am not the only person to be told what to want.  Humans have made a sport of telling each other what to want since we first learned we could.

And I know my version of it is mild compared to many -- maybe your parents demand you go to Princeton and be a lawyer, lest you be disowned -- or you’re forbidden from going to school past third grade because you’re a girl.  My share in this game of being told what to want has actually been quite light.

But even that is part of the narrative my brain tells me to shut my desires up.  Just because I have great privilege to be able to even think about what I want doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to want.  We all deserve to want.  It’s all we get, really.

Here’s what I want.  To tell other children and adults out there now: You there.  With the sheepish desires and the questions and the “who am I to demand something for myself....?”.  Yes, you.  

It’s ok.  

You’re ok.

Stand up straight.  Proclaim what you want.  Do it.  Keep wanting it.

How?

Ask somebody else.

Fig. 1.  Here’s what I really want are some higher resolution photos.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Year in Review

I quit my job as a tenure-track professor one year, 11 days, and eight hours ago. This has been the hardest 1.03 years of my life.

I quit my job, as I say in my standup act, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.  I then say I’ve since discovered what I want, which is that job back.

For six months that was true.  I knew teaching wasn’t for me, I knew the academic lifestyle wasn’t perfect for my personality and various flaws around discipline and a need for externally imposed structure (without it I either fall into a mess of lying on the floor face down for days, or, more often, I impose my own militaristic rules on my life, far more restrictive than any job or institution could impose -- perish forbid I even eat one more nut than I did the day before or do standup one time fewer than I did the week prior -- it becomes an ever-accelerating treadmill to exhaustion and nothing).

But I felt like only in academia could I use my brain, could I have the kind of prestige I felt I’d earned (gross) from a decade of grad school and post-docs.  I felt it was all I could do.  I felt it was my only hope for writing that great, lasting tome of insight on social institutions and adaptability that would ensure my place alongside Douglass North, Geoffrey Blainey, Brian Arthur, and other people only I and a few hundred other academics even care about.

I’m pleased -- haltingly -- but pleased -- to report that in the last few months I’ve mostly shaken that feeling.  

I’ve been a part of projects where I did use my brain.  I did things I didn’t know were out there, including helping big companies be better places and small companies help us be better people.  I applied to some jobs I didn’t get but at least I applied.  

I wrote some stuff I don’t hate.  I’ve explored new mediums of communication and performance.  I performed a 30-minute solo show, hated it, freaked out, got help, rewrote it, performed it last week, and felt like finally I was starting to be honest on stage.  

I’ve earned money in ways that make me really, really proud.  Five dollars means a lot more when it comes from something hard and that you care about.  (Tell that to my landlord!  Ba-dum dum!)

But I’ve also fucked up a lot.

A few months after I technically quit NYU Shanghai (I was still wrapping up the spring 2016 term) I was offered a job in outreach for NYU.  I hemmed and hawed (my favorite pastime) and accepted it.  It promised income (a handy thing in New York), healthcare, subsidized rent, and something of a professional gateway, even, to a longer term (if ill-formed) goal/sense.  I wanted to do something in the vein of science communication or journalism.  I want to bring knowledge to the masses! I cried in various interviews.  (I still do.)

The job has been fine, but it eats at me.  I feel like a sellout, I would mope to my poor boyfriend (more on him in a moment).  I made a big thing about leaving the academy and now I’ve just crawled back into it.  I jumped out of my safe job because I wanted to test myself and then I just re-clung to the wall of the ivory tower.  I’m wasting my time.  I’m wasting my life.  I can’t believe I’m back here, again, trying to decide whether to stay at NYU.  Didn’t I already just go through this?  I feel like I broke up with a boyfriend only to decide to keep living with him.

It’s hard to admit this, but I let this job be an excuse for not actually trying anything.  I was afraid, am afraid, of what I’m capable of.  And sometimes I feel like it’s been so long (34.4 years) that I’ve been afraid I think I’m doomed to just stay in my hermit crab shell of a brain forever.

I spent my first few months in New York not doing any of the things I set out to do.  I didn’t do circus.  I barely did standup.  I woke up every morning and trudged to my new NYU office and sat in a cubicle in a windowless room on Broadway and tried to decide why I was so unhappy.  I was in New York!  Isn’t this what I wanted?

But instead of actually living in New York, I would spend my days looking up flights to Shanghai.  I never bought any.  I just looked at them.  It helped me feel better to know it was actually still there -- that place, that magical city where I was somehow free to be the powerful person I always wanted to be in the US but couldn’t.

I quit my tenure-track job because I thought Shanghai had rehabilitated me from ten years of grad school in the midwest that had ground me down to a powder of insecurity and self-doubt.  Shanghai -- including Cirque, NYUSH, Kung Fu Komedy, the People’s Republic of Comedy, and most of all my friends (Kathyn, Lexi, Jimmy, Panjun, Agang, and Cindy) -- allowed me to be who I was.  I think most of all I loved being alone out there -- there were no consequences, no one to disappoint or be disappointed by, no one (as a woman who did my makeup for a show once said) to judge me.

That’s powerful stuff.  

In Shanghai, I was free.  Most of all: free from my prison mind.

Back in the real world of New York (not to dismiss what happens in Shanghai; it’s very real for many, but it wasn’t for me, which is why I could be myself there), the Shanghai training wheels came off.  Instead of trusting myself and biking on my own, I collapsed. 

I reverted to my frightened grad school self.  I got depressed.  I got insecure.  I accepted my fate as an administrator at a university with my head hanging and useless tears falling on my beige cubicle desk and old laptop that had been through all my wild Shanghai adventures with me.

The summer languished on and I didn’t get much better.  My boyfriend and I went to Chile (more on him still coming, I swear) and it was nice to be reminded that the world is bigger than the five-block radius of the East Village I’d been trudging all summer.  We looked at mountains that were indifferent to us and giant carnivorous birds who were indifferent to us and seals baking on rocks that were indifferent to us -- and I felt better.  Our lives are small and stupid (in a good way).  Can’t we all just be seals and condors?

I returned to New York around Labor Day and decided my only hope was to use what I knew best to try to make more out of my time here.  What do I know best?  The academic calendar and the almighty syllabus!  

I wrote a syllabus for myself for the fall 2016.  There were 14 weeks, of course, and I had different things I needed to learn and do over the semester.  A big one was standup.  I wanted to do it 100 times (I did it 131!).  I wanted to write 72 Political Science Bitches Posts (I did 38).  I wanted to publish 10 data science podcasts (I published 3 but recorded like 25).  I wanted to submit a new draft of my memoir proposal to my agent (I did, though a few sections are still missing).  I wanted to finish a treatment of my TV show about Cirque that I’m writing with my writing and path partner Damian (we are almost done).  I wanted to write in this blog (I didn’t, until now).  

I also swallowed my pride about taking classes and signed up for a solo show course, a science communication course, and a path course and all went very, very far toward helping me feel like I’m not alone and not horrible at writing.  I made some friends.  I got to be honest with strangers, which I always enjoy.  I learned to use fewer adverbs.

I’m fairly pleased with my achievements on all these fronts, but now I’m learning an even more important lesson, which is that life isn’t about checking things off a list.

Now we get to my boyfriend.  He taught me this.  He taught it to me because it’s something he tried to use to organize his own life for a long time and it left him unhappy.  I didn’t realize I also was living this way until basically today when I opened my spreadsheet (yes) to calculate my achievements for this post.  But I am.

I don’t know what life is for.  I’m constantly (fuck, adverb) terrified about death and the meaninglessness of it all.  I lose myself in circus or anxiety (those seem to be my two choices) to try to not think about it.  And when I don’t do those two, I rely on lists and timers and regimented schedules, lest I slip into actually living my life in the moment and risking death.

I’ve had boyfriends before but never let myself be vulnerable to them.  I have a wall I put up that keeps people out, even friends and family.  I’m not going to use his name because he’s not on the Internet (I swear he is real), but my boyfriend now is someone I decided to be honest with and be myself with.

It’s a fucking mess.  But it’s a real mess.  It’s our mess.  Amidst all this job and “how do I spend my life” turmoil, he and I have faced my mounting insecurities, doubts, and lack of trust (I’ve never even thought of the word trust until like two months ago, and it is the most frightening thing ever as far as I can tell).  Learning to love and be loved is way more terrifying than trying to figure out how many times to do standup this week so I can not hate myself.

Our relationship is not perfect but I know he loves me and I know it’s real life.  My “career” is not perfect (it barely exists, really), but I’m proud of how I spend (most of) my time now and I’m learning to trust my instinct (something I shut off long ago, so the first step is coaxing it back, then trusting it) about what I want to do, what I’m good at, and how I could volley those things to hopefully do some good on this planet rather than spend a life face down in an ivory tower afraid to live because I was afraid to die.

This got weird (probably only my therapist will understand these final paragraphs), but here is my point: Life is hard.  Life is scary.  It’s easy to give in to fear that you’re not good enough, that your boyfriend doesn’t love you as much as you love him, and that you’re both probably going to get hit by a bus today anyway.

It’s easy.  

But it’s also cowardly.

On one of my last days ever in Shanghai I went to a reiki healer (yes) (in other news “Reiki and Spreadsheets” is the title of my new solo show!) at the urging of my friend Lexi.  I was dubious at first.  The healer talked to me about lots of life stuff and took me on a guided meditation (this is the most Eat, Pray, Love I’ve ever been).  I discovered my spirit animal is a raccoon, which did not inspire confidence.  

But then he made me imagine my biggest fear, and I faltered.  I have infinity fears, how can I pick only one?  It took some time, but I realized that my real fear is that I’m so afraid of living my life the wrong way that I’ll never live it at all.

He had no way of knowing that’s what I thought of, but at the very end of the session he looked me in the eye and said: The thing you are most afraid to do? You have to do it.

So, perfect or not, and amidst lots of setbacks, messiness, and tears (so many tears), I can at least say: That thing I am most afraid to do?  Live?  

I’m doing it.

Also, fuck, I’m behind on Christmas shopping.

Thanks for reading, and be nice to yourself out there.

Fig. 1. These mountains don’t give a f*ck.

Fig. 2. Neither does Mr. Pac-Man.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Statement of Purpose

It’s been 96 days since I quit my tenure-track job.  On one hand, it’s hard to believe that much time has passed, as the decision still feels raw and terrifying.  On the other, I’ve grown and learned more in the past 96 days than any other period of my life, except maybe those first surreal months at Cirque le Soir Shanghai (will I ever stop talking about that?  No).

Quitting my job was at once an act of impulse and the thing I’d been planning to do for ten years.  The timing of it was more abrupt than I thought it would be, but I’d been crafting an email of that kind in my head since I was in graduate school.  First it was to my dissertation committee, then to my boss at Carnegie Mellon, then it was to NYU Shanghai and retracted, and then finally, fourth time’s a charm, it was for real on December 10, 2015.

I thought maybe I had one more year in me, but I’d been saying that for a long time.  In anticipation of leaving, for the past several years I’ve been very careful about money and built up some savings so I can survive without a job for a bit.  How long those savings will last is unclear, but I have a feeling that before my savings are depleted, I will have a breakdown that will lead me to seek work desperately, be it as a bartender, construction worker ( two jobs I have always wanted to do), or, ideally, a professional version of myself (I’m rolling my eyes, too).

After I quit I was surprised to learn that most people thought that meant I did it to focus exclusively on circus and comedy.  I see now that’s a natural interpretation: Person has two lives and quits one life, leaving the remaining one as the obvious choice.

But that’s not my intention.  Yes, my decision was motivated in part by realizing that both my circus and comedy careers are at stages where if I really want to get better I need to be in New York.  For circus, this is because I need coaches and new audiences.  For comedy, this is a pure stage time calculation: I need mad reps.  This concludes the crossfit portion of this essay.

The other part of my motivation, as I have discussed, is that I never wanted to be a professor, yet had been in academia my entire adult life.  When I first quit my job I mainly did so because I decided life is short, and I don’t want to wonder forever if I was capable of something else.  Being a professor is, genuinely and empirically, one of the best jobs on the planet.  Who walks away from the thing everyone wants, just because they felt like they needed to “prove” something to themselves -- what, that they can do something else -- just for the sake of it?  I felt like a child who gets upset when her parent does something for her, and insists on doing it herself, even though she’s worse at it.

This is a terrible analogy.

But this is genuinely what I thought after quitting.

After I quit my job I expected to feel massive relief: It was something that literally had kept me up all night for years (most acute being last summer when I literally could not sleep for months), and I thought that when I finally pulled the trigger/plug/detonator key (Hi, I’m James Bond) I would feel nothing but immense, pure relief.

I did feel that, for 2.5 glorious, jetlagged, drunk, and hungover days.  My friend and partner in crafting our own paths and I quit our jobs on the same day.  I went to his party the next night to celebrate, and then another party the following night.  Apart from sobbing while a drag queen performed a lip syncing number to Katy Perry’s “Roar” in Williamsburg because it reminded me of Cirque Shanghai and I realized this decision meant I was abandoning my beloved Chinese Cirque friends (Panjun, Jimmy, Agang, and Cindy), I felt pretty damn marvelous.

On Sunday of that weekend I woke up to the sounds of the East Village and it felt amazing to think this city might finally be home.  I wandered around Manhattan feeling wonderful about myself.  I lounged in a chair in the Flatiron district and stared at the unseasonably warm sky and felt like I’d finally done it -- moved to New York -- the thing I always wanted.  A friend called to invite me to an open mic around the corner.  I was at peace -- that long sought after peace I’d truly never had as an academic.

Then Monday morning came.

I woke up in a full panic.

Deep, wrenching, horrific panic, the likes of which I’d never experienced or imagined.  All my anxiety -- fear about the future -- was replaced with actual fear about the present.  

My entire identity is wrapped up in being a professor -- from the double life schtick to the idea that it’s the most noble pursuit (I was brainwashed in graduate school as much as anyone can be) to the deep feeling that kept me in academia as long as I was: That the only way to make a truly lasting contribution to humanity is science, and the only place you can really do that is the academy.

I got up one morning in that dark, dark week and -- perhaps this is oversharing -- I undressed to take a shower and was overcome with fear and just huddled on the floor, sobbing, naked, terrified.  It didn’t help that I was in New York on university business, and so was staying in a very nice apartment right in Washington Square that NYU sets aside specifically for NYU Shanghai faculty.  Why would I leave this?  What have I done?  What the fuck am I going to do next?

Things would get worse before they got better.

On Wednesday of that week I had the opportunity to meet two of my greatest idols in the artistic/smart-people-not-in-academia world.  They both represented what a path out of academia might look like to me -- one that actually seemed good.  I told them about my recent decision and, over copious whiskeys, they both told me I’d made a huge mistake.

If you’ve never had two people you look up to most in the world tell you that your recent horrifying life choice was the wrong one, then allow me to congratulate you.  Waiting on the subway platform at the end of that night for the F train at about 3 AM was one of the darker experiences I’ve ever had.  “F” is for “Fucked”, I thought, to the hilarity of no one.

Here is how I survived that week, and the months since:

My friends.

Two amazing things have come from quitting my job.  The first is that I learned to rely on other people.  I’ve been hell bent in my life on being independent.  Yes, I overshare physically and emotionally on the Internet, but that’s really more of a one way projection.  It wasn’t until I was completely terrified and vulnerable that I learned I to truly count on others.

Many of my friends reached out to me, even without my asking.  I got messages and emails from friends around the world, all at exactly the right time.  One morning I was feeling especially horrible and out of nowhere a friend from trapeze class wrote me an email with the subject line, “You Are Not Alone.”  To this day I feel some peace anytime I even think about that email.

Other friends were there at a moment’s notice.  One week after I quit I texted my friend who’d also quit, saying I was having real doubts.  Instantly he called me and talked me off the cliff, saying basically: trust the person that made the choice.  You’re supposed to feel terrified this early on.  You can’t give up one week in.  Give it a second.

Another time, months later (this is a long process), I was trying to do some work in a café in Williamsburg.  This was a huge mistake. There I was, on my laptop trying to think up jobs I could do other than be a professor, and trying dubiously to work on a book proposal or TV pitch, or god knows what, and I looked around me and everyone was identical to me: semi nerdy looking, hunched over a MacBook Air, half shaved head, all trying to be creative hipster entrepreneurs.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a panic attack, but this was pretty close.  I had to force myself to keep breathing.  I’d set a timer because that’s how I work now -- on a self-imposed clock.  It took all my mental and physical strength to stay in that chair in that café surrounded by clones of myself until the timer went off.  All I could think in between actually losing my vision and trying to pull the skin off my face was: Why would I leave an exotic and wild life in Shanghai, the city where all my dreams came true, to come be one of a million in New York?

The moment my timer went off I sprinted home, which at the time was a short-term sublet in south Williamsburg (you know you’ve really done it when you’re squatting in your younger brother’s apartment -- no offense, brother!).  I was lying in the fetal position at the foot of this borrowed bed and had opened a blank email window where I was about to write an email to the Vice Chancellor of NYU Shanghai asking for my job back.  At that moment a friend posted something on Facebook and I messaged him asking to talk.  We talked.  He saved me from sending that email.  I do not know if he knows this.

In general, for better or worse, my commitment device of posting publicly about quitting my job also actually worked.  I can’t tell you the number of mornings I woke up and fantasized, hard, about crawling back to NYUSH.  The only -- truly, only -- reason I didn’t capitulate was because I’d made a whole thing on the Internet to you guys of quitting (and because so many of you have been encouraging).  I even considered secretly asking for my job back and just not telling anyone.  I would lie there and writhe around, trying to think up a way back in -- truly an Odysseus at the mast situation.

This story would not be complete if I didn’t include my parents and brother.  They answered so many panicked emails and calls and sobbing conversations with me (Merry Christmas!  Your unemployed, thirty-something daughter is home!) that I cannot count them here.  I wouldn’t have made it without them.

Here’s the second thing I’ve learned:

The world is bigger than I thought it was.

My hope with quitting my job was that it would force me to put myself out into the rest of the world more aggressively than I ever had before, and that it would cause me to look upon the world with new, more open eyes to what kinds of things humans can actually do as careers.  I am pleased -- and fucking relieved to be honest -- to report that both of those things have come true.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know for sure that I want to stay involved in science (my love for social science and complexity have not gone away; it’s the forum of the formal university that bugs me).  I didn’t know what else people did in the science world besides academia, and I knew I wasn’t happy there.  There’s much about universities that I love -- at their best I think they are humanity’s greatest hope.  At their worst, they are inflated, bureaucratic institutions that have a monopoly on higher education (someone else’s words, not mine) and at once are exclusionary and mandatory for later success.  I do not find this acceptable.

The part of being in a university that I love is being around smart, curious people -- faculty and students alike.  I love that my work doesn't necessarily have to have a ready application to the real world, and I love that my students and I get to debate abstract game theoretic models and broad questions like the causes of war.  There are few better ways we humans can spend afternoons on this planet.

The parts that I don’t love?  Committee work.  Grade complaints.  Recommendation letters.  Search committees.  But, ok, these are maybe 20% of the job.  The main part is that the pace of life is slow and it means I don’t perform to my best potential.  I know this to be true.  I was recently looking at a to-do list from my first week at NYU Shanghai from August 2013.  About 70% of the projects on that list are ones on which I’ve made no progress, including turning my dissertation into a few published papers, which had in turn been on my list since December 2011.

I don’t like that academic life lets me be lazy.  I am over spending Monday mornings in bed while my peers go to work.  I know I am capable of more.  Part of why I got so involved in circus is that I was genuinely bored with my life.

Academia suits many people well.  I am just not one of them.  I know, deep down, that if I am going to be someone I am proud of in life, I cannot stay in the comforts of the academy, no matter how absolutely, positively, amazing it is to be paid to talk to smart, curious young people about stuff you love, and to have such flexibility that you can also perform circus at night and train in contortion for entire summers at a time.  And afford kale chips all the while!

Leaving my job was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.  But I’m never going to know what I’m capable of if I don’t leave the nest.  The fact that I am even thinking about what science looks like outside the academy is a massive step.

Here’s a final thing I am still learning: I might be stronger than I think I am.

This was a long way of saying thank you to everyone for the support, and thank you especially to those who’ve challenged my decision.  You’ve helped me more than anyone.

I am still accepting donations for kale chips.

Fig. 1.  Fucked.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

I Quit My Job Yesterday -- But Not for the Reason You Think

I quit my tenure-track job yesterday.

Actually, I quit it in October, then they offered me a year leave instead, which I accepted.  Then in a panic in November I wrote asking for my job back.  Not only did they give it to me, but they were also supportive of me spending a semester working at NYU in New York, as long as I promised to work for two more semesters in Shanghai after that.

I agonized over this for ages.  My cousin, uncle, and I pondered it endlessly while I visited them in Taiwan over Thanksgiving.  At the end of the weekend we conducted a coin flip: Heads I accept NYU’s offer of New York + Shanghai for another 1.5 years.  Tails I go on a year leave.  I didn’t even consider a full quit in the choices.  I got heads.

As everyone knows, you have to do what the coin flip says, so this past Wednesday I accepted their hybrid New York + Shanghai offer.  I was fully excited about it.  There is much about academia that I love, and the ability to do more of it from New York is a dream come true.  I finally got what I wanted.

Sort of.

Here’s the problem.

I never wanted to be a professor.

I went to graduate school because I didn’t know what else to do after undergrad.  I finished my Ph.D. because I didn’t know what I would do instead, and not finishing seemed like failure.  Then once I had a Ph.D., I thought, I can’t not use this thing, which justified a post-doc for a few years.  During my second(!) post-doc I thought, “I should at least try to get a real job in academia.”  Then once I got that (which was damn hard to do), I thought, “Who leaves a tenure-track job?”

It’s now been 11 years since I graduated from college and I’ve never not been in academia.  On paper I’m fairly successful at it, and I even largely like a lot of what I do.  But as anyone who has ever spoken to me for more than 15 minutes knows, I’ve had misgivings this whole time about whether this career is right for me.  

The study of causality is a fascinating and complicated matter, and isolating any single reason that I finally emailed NYU Shanghai yesterday and formally resigned fully -- no leave, no maybes -- is impossible.  In many ways, it’s been a decision in process for over a decade, but that I’ve just been kicking down the road, thinking, “next year I’ll know what I should be doing instead.”  That year never came.

But I can isolate two INUS conditions over the past 24 hours that caused me to finally, finally do something:

1. I skimmed a book -- that is mostly not that good -- called How Will You Measure Your Life? by someone at Harvard Business School.  He described unhappy executives who had also said “one more year” at a job they didn’t love.  It wasn’t a job they didn’t like, it just wasn’t what they felt was right for them.  He asked the reader to think about what they dreamed of being when they were younger, and gave the example of how someone might say “astronaut!” and then go on to do something great, but much more normal.  I thought about that.  When I was 12 I wanted to be some kind of performer or writer.  I never would have said professor, not in my wildest (er, least wild) dreams.

2. I decided to entertain myself on my 12-hour flight from Shanghai to Los Angeles by reading my journal entries from my time in China.  Every morning for the past two years I’ve written a minimum of 250 words, mostly just about what I was doing and thinking (in case anyone wasn’t sure what a journal was).  I was floored by how often I wrote, even in my earliest NYU Shanghai days, about how I liked my job but hoped I would have the courage to one day quit it.  I would constantly say things like, “I need to try something else.”  I even wrote messages to my future self saying, “please be brave and do this.”  I was actually shocked to discover this.  I’ve always known that I have been indecisive about academia, but something about seeing it in black and white really solidified it for me.  

Being all alone somewhere over the middle of the Pacific Ocean with nothing but my present and former self also helped.

There was no wi-fi on the flight, so I decided that the minute I landed I would quit my job.  It had to be before I got off the plane or I would just keep putting it off, like I have been for so long: I’ll do it when I reach NYC, or after the New Year, or “first thing” at the start of next term.

So the minute we landed, I opened my phone, wrote a three-paragraph email, and sent it.  While I was in the middle of writing, the nice man sitting next to me asked me if it was raining outside the plane window.  In my head I said, “NOT NOW!” but out loud, the consummate professional, I said, “Hmm, I think it’s just foggy.”  Then I went back to either ruining or saving the rest of my life.

TBD.

#yolo

Fig. 1.  A feeble attempt to make my decision with the help of formal modeling.  At first I thought this was a useless exercise, but actually I learned two things: 1) There are way too many unknowns to possibly make predictions about the consequences of my choices, and 2) There was only one choice I had never tried before.

P.S. Anticipated FAQs:

1. Is this to do more comedy and circus?  Kind of, but I also want to prove (somehow) that a person can still contribute to academic conversations and knowledge building from outside the academy.  I actually kept waiting to leave until I could think of how to do that, but after more than a decade I’ve concluded I can’t know until I actually leave and force myself to figure this out.

2. Is this because NYUSH is terrible?  Not at all.  I love NYU Shanghai and always will.  It’s honestly really hard to leave in part because I really respect and believe in what they are doing out there.  And I adore our students.  Also, if they’ll have me, I plan to finish out this academic year, including the awesome Complexity online course experiment I’ve been doing.

3. Do you want to borrow some money?  Yes.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Double Life Reality Tour

“My bathrobe is too big!” she thought insufferably despite the fact that she was just flown to Shenzhen and put up in a very nice hotel in order to get body-painted and perform at the Storm music festival this weekend.

“And they locked the minibar, those bitches.”  This doesn’t surprise me, but it does annoy me.  I also checked the room service menu and the best option is a Heineken for 30 RMB, which is about $5, which is actually a good price for an import beer in China, but on the other hand Heineken is vile.

This hotel also boasts the very first faucet I have ever seen in China with drinkable tap water.  My first instinct was to guzzle it.  My second instinct, and the one I followed, was to be completely suspicious and back away.

I’m trying to see more of China this semester.  So far I’ve been to Chengdu for a circus gig, Suzhou for a comedy show, and Beijing for no other reason than to see a friend (sometimes you get to be a normal person!  I actually got offered a gig while I was there and turned it down -- no big deal).  Next week I’ll go to Taiwan to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin and uncle.  It’s the first time I’ll celebrate the holiday with family since I moved to China.

I’ve also been to New York twice this term, once for circus and once for NYU, and while both trips were fun, they almost killed me.  Jet lag is a plague you don’t die from.

On the flight to Shenzhen tonight I fell asleep grading midterms.  I made the mistake of promising them to my students by Tuesday or I’d give them extra credit, and now, like most promises I’ve made, I’m regretting it completely.

Earlier today I filmed another module of my online class -- today it was networks, and it went mostly poorly, if I’m honest.  I was really tired and it was one of the only topics I’ve taught before, which I thought would make the lesson easier, but had the opposite effect.

Before that non-class, I had a conversation with the NYUSH provost about my future.  Our two topics were “my life” and “next year.”  Easy stuff!

Yesterday the new president of NYU was visiting NYUSH.  I was told the day before that he was going to sit in on my class, so I stayed up all night the night before making the world’s best slides, lecture, handouts, and discussion plan so he would be wildly impressed by all of us.  Then he came and just talked with the students.  It was great, but I wouldn’t have minded going to bed.

Then, even though I was up all of the previous night, jetlagged, and kind of sick, I had to stay up to call in to attend an NYU tenured/tenure-track Senate meeting from 1-3 AM.  They like to have it at noon New York time so they can have lunch.  If you’ve never Skyped in to someone else’s lunch at one in the morning then allow me to congratulate you.

None of this is very interesting I realize, but I feel like a lot of people get excited about the whole double life thing, and I’m grateful for all of these opportunities, but sometimes I want to just be still and live a normal life with things like dinner parties and loved ones.  (But then when I have that I’m bored, so here we are.)

I also recently got some disappointing news about a project I’ve been working on for a long time so I’m extra down and out at the moment.  I didn’t want to talk about that part, and I will spare you further details, but I am trying to be honest on here.  It’s not easy.

I will say two more things.

First, for this circus trip I deliriously packed not only my midterms to grade but also my computer and external hard drive in case I had time to do some work at the festival between sets.  I found out today that we will be there all day long both days, not just in the evening like I thought.  This means Monday night and Tuesday night when I get back I basically won’t sleep.

Second, it was an hour drive from the airport to our hotel just now.  There were five of us -- two makeup artists, me, and two Russian guys who are also performing.  I was in a middle row huddling under my Circus Warehouse sweatshirt trying to sleep.  It was freezing and the driver was smoking and blasting terrible electronic dance music.

I was thinking about my future (I’ve never been more indecisive about it) and about how many times I’ve stared out of van windows into various corners of Asia.  Too many to count.

Fig. 1.  Professor Jones-Rooy models this season’s hottest trend, a dull beige robe and dead eyes.

P.S. All of this has been very negative!  Look, I’m exhausted.  But I also wouldn’t put up with it all if I didn’t love both things.  It’s just not always twice the fun, know what I mean?

P.P.S. Here is a fun overlap of my two worlds!  Today while filming my class I didn’t like how my sweater looked on me.  I had my circus bag with me because I was going to leave for my trip just after.  I may or may not have strategically used some black tape under my clothes.  The end!

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Bringing a New Major in Social Science to China

Have you ever worked on something for most of your adult life and then moved to a country and job where barely anyone knows what it is?

That’s the situation that greeted me when I arrived at NYU Shanghai in the fall of 2013.

I spent most of my twenties working on a Ph.D. in Political Science.  It was fucking hard, a point I belabor constantly.  I went to NYU Shanghai as a post-doc to help teach a course called Global Perspectives on Society -- a kind of great books/great questions/east-meets west big ideas course. 

It was interesting, way outside my comfort zone, and I learned a lot.  But it wasn’t political science, the thing for which I’d trained for nearly a decade.

In fact there was no undergraduate major in political science at NYUSH, nor even any classes in it, nor in any social science apart from economics, which at the time was intimately entwined with business (you’re welcome for the visual imagery).

It also became apparent to me that many at NYUSH didn’t really know what political science was.

At first, we kept getting lumped in with the humanities.  Nothing against humanities -- in fact I’ve learned lots about them from this experience and appreciate and respect a great deal what they do -- but we are not humanities.  I do not know their methods.  I do not know their big questions.  

I do know a bit about science, however, and yet many of our “hard” science faculty also had no idea that political science involved things like the scientific method, falsifiability, and empirical tests.  When we were considered a science, we got the old (and infuriating) modifier “soft” attached to it.

One time a faculty member from a STEM field stopped by my office, looked in at my white board with game theory scrawled on it and said, “I didn’t know political science used math.”

Another time I used the phrase “steady state” and a faculty member from physics actually stopped the entire conversation to ask me how I knew that phrase.  Just the other day a colleague explained a phase transition to me, even though I teach it in one of my courses.

I don’t know why social science was mostly left off when NYUSH was first conceived, but it was -- there were about 10 STEM majors plus business, humanities, and something called Global China Studies -- a kind of area studies meets history meets IR (and the field in which I was hired).  

One could tell a cynical story where it had something to do with China, or a pragmatic story where it had something to do with anticipated student interest, or a perhaps naive story that it was literally just an oversight.

Regardless, it didn’t exactly make me feel good about how I’d spent the last near-decade.

This of course is not just a China thing or an NYUSH thing.  Most people in the US don’t know what political science or social science is, either.  A lot of this is our fault -- things are improving, but we aren’t historically great at outreach.

And, those reading this who have a political science background will totally know what I mean when I say that usually people think I am either a pundit or actually personally aspire to run for office (I can’t think of anything worse, apart from genocide and whole milk).

By my second year at NYU Shanghai things had improved -- I was able to teach political science courses and to my great satisfaction many students seemed interested in it and other social sciences.  One of my students started coming to my office constantly asking about how we could get a new major going, and I will say here and now for the historical record that if it hadn’t been for him pestering(!) me in those early days, this major would still not exist.  One afternoon I told him I would “get to it” (classic AJR deferral!) and he said “why don’t we start right now.”  So we did.

It’s cliché when teachers say they learn from their students, but I honestly did.

Very long story short -- after many, many hours of poring over syllabi from around the world, consulting with all kinds of people, drafting sample schedules, debating whether linguistics, law, or history count as a social science, or whether an experimental methods class from physics could possibly also be considered a social science lab (turns out it can’t), Skypeing into New York for presentations to NYU, more meetings, more debates, and a million emails to students saying “hang on, we hope to have the major soon” --

Now, in the fall of 2015 we have a major in Social Science.  And not just any major -- one I’m incredibly proud of.  It’s interdisciplinary, but also allows students to focus just one one field if they want (interdisciplinary is great but, look, I like the disciplines, too).  It has a course in Complexity that I won’t stop talking about, as well as a cool hands-on “getting out and doing research in China” course, plus a course on the theory and practice of capitalism, socialism, and communism.  We’re hoping to add game theory, qualitative methods, and historical social science.

But there’s one more thing.

If you knew me in graduate school you knew I was deeply ambivalent about the academy and about political science.  If you knew me as a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon you knew I swore I was going to quit any moment.  If you have known me since I moved to China, you know I’ve been gallivanting around the world with circuses and comedy groups -- not exactly the picture of the dedicated academic.

I still have my misgivings about the modern university system, but it took getting to a place that didn’t have any social science, and then teaming up with a dedicated student and colleagues to fight for it, for me to accept that I love it.

Fig. 1. Professor Jones-Rooy, in sweatpants, cheering alone in her apartment at 4 AM when the email came in saying the Social Science major had been approved.  Not pictured: My dignity.

P.S. Holy shit, hang on, so what IS social science?  Here’s a one sentence attempt that I promised some friends long ago: Social science is the attempt to explain and maybe predict things that happen in the social world using scientific methods and is something that on bad days I think can never actually be done and on good days I genuinely believe is our species’s best hope.

P.P.S. I don’t mean to imply there isn’t already social science elsewhere in China.  There is!  But I do think this major is pretty damn innovative in how it combines the social sciences so I feel like I can get away with this ridiculous claim.

Fig. 2. Boy, I am full of it sometimes.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

The Complexity Experiment: Questions We Ask

Hello friends!  We wrap up this week of teaching an online class at an in-person university with a report on some of the questions that have come up during this process and our answers so far!

1. Why am I so bad at ironing?  I now iron every morning and still look like a mess on camera.  Maybe the camera adds ... wrinkles.  Best not to think about it.

2. Should I wear my hair down?  No, because then it gets in my face.  But if I pull it back I look like a horse.  What about half up?  No, that’s too “Tom Cruise in Magnolia.”  Shit, have I accidentally been filming this whole time?  Sorry, people who have to edit this.

3. What is the point of teaching?  In five years of teaching and many more of TA-ing I’ve never thought about this.  Now I think about it all the time.  Having to constrain myself to just four 7-minute videos means I have to be really deliberate about what I am saying to students.  This means choosing between different things, like -- should I be summarizing the readings (they’re hard)?  Should I be connecting them to each other?  Should I be connecting them to the real world?  Should I be talking about something else and let the readings speak for themselves?  In a normal classroom the answer to all of these questions is a moving target version of “yes”, but now I don’t have the luxury of 2.5 hours in front of a room to do it all.  So it makes me really, really think hard: What am I trying to say?

Put another way -- What is the value-added of a teacher?  My students are smart, can’t they just do the readings and the assignments without my videos, and then if they have questions I could be there to answer them?  If that’s true, why do we even have universities in the first place?

My college boyfriend used to say that the point of college was to make you read things that you want to read anyway but would never otherwise get around to.  I don’t think he’s wrong, but so far my best improved answer to this question is -- my job is to make you want to read about all this in the first place.

Maybe?  I’m curious to hear what others think about this.

4. Should I coordinate my outfit with my slides?  Yes.  I have become Ms. Frizzle.  It turns out, if the color of your clothes is too similar to the slides, it looks like you got sucked into them.  I wore a black dress against black slides one day and it looked like being taught by a floating head (not an altogether bad look once you get used to it).  Other times if your colors are too far off, the light hits either you or the slides weirdly.  I had to put a sweater on once to mute a light shirt that was reflecting weirdly off a dark screen.  Today I think I nailed it, though -- grey slides with navy blue headings, and a navy blue shirt!  Here’s the secret: you just want matching accents.

5. How do I fold the Jurassic Park theme song into every aspect of my life?  By opening the videos with music!  So far we are going to enjoy a bit of Bach one day, the sound of applause on Standing Ovation day, and, yes indeed, the theme song to the best movie ever on “beauty” day.  The irony of Professor T-Rex teaching to dinosaur music is not lost on me, and is in fact deliberate.

6. Am I bipolar?  I shot two modules (module = one week of material) this week.  In the first one, I had to do a million takes and would lie on the floor in between them for half an hour at a time.  Today I did each of the four parts in almost one take and was jumping out of the screen constantly with excitement.  Students, when you watch Modules 4 and 5 please diagnose me.

7. Should I do another take?  Maybe not?  An open question we are dealing with is whether to aim for a perfect/polished set of videos, or videos that are more the “real life” (meaning mistake-filled) Andrea Jones-Rooy experience.  This is a real dilemma.  Since these are being preserved for all eternity (obviously), the temptation every time I stumble over a word is to stop the tape and redo it.  But I’ve been watching a lot of Khan academy videos and videos of my advisor, the great Scott E. Page, on Coursera, and there’s something about them seeming “real” that is appealing.  I don’t know yet which is better.  N.b. I almost knocked over the screen one day while filming and then was like “KEEP THAT IT’S PERFECT FOR ENTROPY.”

8. Is this a good idea at all?  Some days I think this is going to be the best thing ever.  Other days I think, how can anyone ever learn from this shit?  How am I going to monitor online participation?  What’s going to keep people interested in a bunch videos?  How am I going to handle not talking in person with my students about these really hard concepts?

9. Why am I doing this?  This process is fucking hard.  I almost never sleep, I have no social life, and I’m in the thick of it all so it’s not like I can just stop.  Sure, it’s only four 7-minute videos, but that means preparing all new material (not only is it a brand new course for me, but I’ve also never even taught in this field before) like I would for an in-person class, THEN figuring out how to distill it into 4 short movies, THEN filming it, which so far has never taken less than 2 hours (today was the fastest), THEN coming home and preparing for my real class, then after that preparing for this all over again.  And I still don’t know how we are going to actually run the damn course.

10. How could I have forgotten how much I love complexity?  Rediscovering complexity has been the real joy of all of this.  Filming and everything is also really fun, but my goodness did I forget how this subject makes my heart beat faster.  Either that or it’s all the coffee.

And now, I’m off to perform standup for a room with PEOPLE in it -- won’t that be weird!  See you next time, students, friends, dinosaurs!

Fig. 1.  Professor T-Rex enjoys some coffee, modesty.

Fig. 2.  I’m definitely bipolar.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

10 Things I’ve Learned from Filming Myself Teaching in an Empty Room

I imagined when I started this project of filming an online course that I would learn a lot.  What I didn’t realize was how close to home a lot of it would be.  Here are 10 things I didn’t know two weeks ago, and am not totally sure I’m glad I know now.

1. I need to iron all of my shirts.  How have all you people never told me over all these years that I look like a homeless person?  I literally took one look at the footage from the first day and that was enough to make me change my entire morning routine to include ironing. N.b. I am still horrible at it.

2. I feel like I’m making videos for the Dharma Initiative.  This is a timely reference to the television show LOST.  It doesn’t help that Complexity requires you to say a lot of new-age stuff about how we are all connected and mysterious “big events” can happen.  I may start wearing grey jumpsuits.  Note to self: This may help with #1 above.

3. It also feels like humanity is about to end and I’m our last hope to save knowledge for the few people who are left.  Or at least that’s what my brain decided I should say out loud the moment I pressed “record” for the first time.

4. It’s really hard to start teaching to an empty room.  Basically what happens is I make a million false starts, and then halfway through introducing the title slide I realize nothing I said made any sense, and I look stupid, and, wait, why are we talking about this again?  And then I swear a bunch, stop the tape, pace around, and do it again.  This carries on for many takes.

5. It’s actually easier to continue teaching to an empty room.  Once I get over myself and start teaching, I find I kind of get lost in it and rather enjoy it.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I adore my students, but I confess there’s something a bit meditative about just talking through something that matters to you out loud for no one.  I don’t know.  It’s weird.  N.b. It’s very likely these “meditative” states I enter will be the ones on tape where everyone is like, wait, what the f*ck is she talking about?

6. I am physically incapable of teaching without a cup of coffee in front of me.  I don’t even need to drink it (though I will, make no mistake), I just need it near me.  One day the room was rearranged and they moved my little table that I had for my coffee and stopwatch and I actually refused to film anything until we found another table.

7. It turns out, I am a huge diva.  On the first shooting session they had nicely set up a screen so I could always see what the camera was capturing -- i.e., me in front of the slides.  I said, oh, no, that will be too distracting!  TAKE IT AWAY!  Then they spent a long time rearranging the whole setup for me only for me to decide, no, I actually do need to see myself, and we had to halt everything for another day so they could put the original setup back.  

8. Lesson for all faculty who might want to try this: Now is not the time to experiment with new things.  I decided to try switching from Beamer to PPT and even though the slides looked almost the same I was like NOPE I CAN’T WORK WITH THIS (see #7 above), and we again had to stop filming for a day so I could rewrite the slides into an almost identical format.  On the bright side, maybe they’ll put in a trailer and on-set masseuse for faculty in the future.

9. I make weird dinosaur hands gestures all of the time.  I can’t tell you the number of times I caught a glimpse of myself on screen and was like, what is that, the Claw?  I can only assume my students have been calling me Professor T-Rex behind my back all these years.

10. I move around like crazy when I teach.  We shoot fairly zoomed in, so I’m restricted to a tiny marked off zone where I can stand.  This has forced me to adopt alternative strange movements, which so far include crouching onto the ground and lunging terrifyingly at the camera.

That’s it for now, friends!  I’ll be back with more lessons soon, whether you want them or not.  Which is kind of like how this class is going: I’m going to keep filming whether ANYONE EVER WATCHES THESE THINGS.

Until then, yours in my descent into madness,

Professor T-Rex.

Fig. 1. Lesson planning is way more fun when you pretend you are a movie star.

Fig. 2. I literally wasted an entire team of people’s day because I felt Beamer slides would be more “on brand” for me.  This is another way of saying I am the worst person ever.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Teaching an Online Class ... at an In-Person University?

A few days ago the Provost of NYU Shanghai ran to my office to tell me she’d had an idea.  It was that I should blog about my experiences teaching a brand new online, interactive course on Complexity at NYU Shanghai.

“Hang on,” I said.  “Are you asking me to share the minutiae of my life in detail on the Internet?”

YOU’VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE!

***

NYU Shanghai is already basically the Wild West (er, East HA) of higher education.  We are a 4-year liberal arts undergraduate institution in China that grants both American and Chinese degrees to all students.  We have full academic freedom, students from all over the world, and unique connectivity with NYU’s two other portal campuses in New York (maybe you’ve heard of it) and Abu Dhabi.

There’s a lot to say about NYUSH, but the point I want to make now is that we are revolutionary.  To give just one example, I am teaching Comparative Politics this semester, which is all about the causes and consequences of things like democracy, revolution, and state failure -- all the things people think you can’t talk about in China.  We’ve already discussed them and read the leading political science papers about them.

But that’s not even the wildest part -- any more.

***

This week I spent over six hours recording eight 7-minute videos about complex systems and chaos.  A team of (awesome) people in Academic Technology Services set me up to film against interactive smart boards and green screens in a studio that feels like a movie set.  We even have those cool tall director’s chairs.

For the next six weeks I’m going to be in there twice a week, for 2-3 hours each time, teaching a course on Complexity (my favorite subject in the world) to an empty room and some video cameras.

Now, I am nowhere near the first person to teach an online course.  Coursera, Udacity, and others have developed lots of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  Many universities and organizations also offer distance and online learning.  My advisor and hero, Scott E. Page, has reached thousands of students through a variety of online and video formats.

There are also lots of independent online courses out there.  Years ago I took a great two-week course on writing with Chloe Yelena Miller.  Even though it was online, I felt a real connection with the six or so other students in it.  I remember being amazed at the richness of conversation that could come out of discussion forums on a website.

So what makes my course different?

My course will be somewhere between a MOOC and an intimate online class.  We are calling it a “distributed” course because the students will be “distributed” around the world.  I have no idea how many will enroll, but I am hoping for something like 15-20.  The idea is that the course will be scalable in the future, so the addition of TAs could allow for the enrollment of many more.

It is also a four-credit college course.  It’s only open to NYU Shanghai students, there are prerequisites, and students will get a real grade that will go on their real transcript.  I will also get real teaching evaluations that will go into my real tenure packet.

Here’s how it’s going to work:

1. First, I will record an entire 14-week semester of teaching material.  I’ll be in front of slides, white boards, green screens, and more.  I’m working on ideas about animating a few things -- I want to act out Maxwell’s Demon, for example, or talk about chaos theory while standing in front of a real weather map (mostly I’m just excited about this green screen as you can see).

2. The course itself will run in the Spring 2016 semester according to the normal NYU Shanghai academic calendar.

3. The course will never meet synchronously -- neither online nor in person.  Students will (I hope) enroll from all over the NYU network (we have 14 sites across six continents).  For one, the time differences will be insane.  Two, internet connectivity may vary, and I’m already stressed out at the idea of 20 students and me all shouting “can you hear me?” into a Google hangout.

4. Students in Shanghai and I will also not meet live and have others beam in -- apparently that’s not good for learning for the students far away.

5. The course will not be based on long lectures recorded by me.  It won’t be the case that students will sit down with popcorn and passively watch a 75-minute tape of me (SORRY KIDS).  Instead, my team and I have settled on -- and this is INSANE -- four 7-minute videos PER WEEK.

Holy shit.  An entire week of course material in 28 minutes?  不可能！Indeed, it’s already been insanely hard to condense the first two weeks, which is what I’ve filmed so far, into just that short a time.

Yesterday, for example, I taught chaos theory, and in preparing for it all I could think was, How am I going to (effectively) teach the logistic map in seven minutes?  The answer is, I’m not.  So I had to re-think how I teach and how students learn.  This leads me to:

6. The course is going to be much more about active learning than any course I’ve ever taught.  Because I only have short videos to explain things (of course, some weeks I’ll break down one concept across multiple short videos), I am challenged to distill the concept down to its essence.  Then, I will give active assignments -- sometimes even embedded in the videos themselves -- I’ll say things like, “Stop this video right now and go do this” -- where students have to produce the thing we are talking about or find examples or quickly go measure something in the world where they are right now and report back.

7. I will also make use of many rich resources already available on the Internet.  Complexity lends itself especially well to this, as many of its concepts have been put into gorgeous imagery online, but with the rise of things like the Khan academy, the Internet truly is a wonderful place to learn all kinds of things.  Now, I’m not using these resources as a substitute for my own teaching, but as complements and enhancements.  In addition to weekly readings, I almost always have one or two videos as well -- one week it’s Strogatz running the chaotic water wheel, another it’s Brian Arthur explaining complexity economics.

8. One of my main goals in the course is also to make it not just a lesser online version of a real class.  That is, I want to make the course more successful because it is online, not less.  I am working hard to take advantage of the fact that my students will be all over the world and incorporating that into the materials.  One example is in an early week I have students listen to a podcast about complexity while wandering (safely!) around the city where they are, and then they will report back to the group.  Or, we’ll go out and measure traffic jams or various networks in each place and see if there are similarities across Buenos Aires, Accra, and Tel Aviv.

9. In fact -- brace yourselves -- the course itself is a complex system!  It’s a group of diverse, interdependent, purposive, adaptive agents whose meaningful interactions may give rise to unexpected outcomes (Page 2010)!  Really all classrooms have that feature, but the distributed nature of this course and the fact that our communication will be measurable (online discussions, etc.) means there are some really exciting opportunities for discovery -- who knows what will emerge?!

10. Most of all, my goal in this course is to teach students about how amazing complexity is and empower them to contribute to the field in the future.  If I can do that better online, I’m going to keep doing this.  If I can’t, well, we will say we tried, and next time we’ll get back in the classroom.

Until then, see you on the Internet!

Fig. 1.  So far my two pupils, Camera 1 and Camera 2, have earned a dismal grade in classroom participation.

My previous writings on NYU Shanghai: Inventing a University, Inventing Culture is Hard, and Other Lessons from the First Year of NYU Shanghai, and the “New York University Shanghai” page on my website.  

My previous writings on Complexity: None yet on this blog, which is a shame, but some elsewhere.  Full list here.

Work Cited

Page, Scott E.  2010.  Diversity and Complexity.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Observations Immediately Upon Landing in the US

I just got off the plane in NYC and, despite having traveling for the past 21 hours (my Uber driver said, hey, today is a Jewish holiday and I said no, that was yesterday, and then I realized oh wait, it’s still today here), I am beyond thrilled to be here.

My brain is totally addled and I’m completely delirious, which means it’s a perfect time to make some sweeping judgments about my home country.  Let’s do it!

1. Everyone here is huge.  I got out at LAX first.  Everyone was enormous in every way you can measure it.  People were also big in JFK.  Only here on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg are people’s legs skinnier than people’s in China.  God, this is off to a grand, culturally sensitive start.

2. Homeland Security is fucking with us.  The fact that they make everyone take a photo immediately after a 12-hour flight and then stand in a line with nothing to look at but that printed photo is a kind of light torture carried out by Homeland Security.

3. The Internet is so good.  Whenever I first land back in the US I am torn between admiring my country around me or admiring the raw, uncensored Internet that is pounding into my phone from the moment the wheels touch down.  The Internet usually wins.  God it’s good.  You guys don’t know how good it is until you quit it for awhile.

4. CNN is annoying.  Why is the news on everywhere here?  This is a complete turn from my earlier observations where I’ve been critical of China for being an information black hole where there is not “ambient information” around all the time.

After two years in China I think I’ve come to their side -- there is no need to have CNN blasting in every room.  This morning while we all stood around waiting for our bags there was nonstop broadcasting about the Pope’s visit.  That’s fine, and, sure, let’s learn about it when we want to, but do we all need to know exactly the route the parade will take place and what these white people speculate the Pope will have to say?  This is not a rhetorical question.  Someone please tell me.

Someone also please testify on my behalf when I am put on trial for siding with China on the “information management” front.

5. I ❤️ manners!  People here are so quiet and no one has run into me or cut me off or snorted disgustingly.  That said, my ears are fucked from the flight so who knows.

6. MY HOUSE, MY RULES.  One man spat on the plane when we landed and I told him what was what in a big way.  Had we still been on China soil I’d have said, well, let him ruin his plane and country.  But we were on US soil at that point and boy did I let him know that.

7. I hate the sound of flip flops.  Why do so many Americans wear these things?

8. There is a farmer’s market inside LAX.  The organic, artisanal dog treats look more enticing than most snacks with which I am confronted in China.  TWICE I was tricked by them -- I saw the bag and was like ooh, peanut butter and ... wait, bones?

9. New York is so cute compared to Shanghai!  God, what a patronizing thing to say.  But seriously: the buildings in New York are all so small and square and brick and I love them so much and it feels like they are giving me a big hug.  In Shanghai they are all tall and weirdly round and grey/brown and there are about ten of each kind and it feels like they exist just to remind you that you are not special.

Fig. 1.  You are not special.

10. We are not as nice to foreigners as they are to us.  It puzzles me that all the signs at JFK’s international terminal, including really important ones, are only in English.  In China they put things like signs and customs forms in English.  The US doesn’t extend any such courtesy in any language, save Spanish sometimes.  I don’t know why more international people aren’t just permanently stuck inside our airports, perpetually confused.  We could try a little harder to be good hosts.

11. I forgot how Uber works.  Like, completely.  I almost had him take me to the middle of Brooklyn.  Like, the middle.  What kind of an address is that?

12. I forgot how it feels to be a little bit cold.  I’m wearing a scarf and a sweater!  I literally have not worn this combination in NYC in MANY YEARS.

13. None of us spend enough time appreciating how great it feels to brush one’s teeth.  Fuck yes.

14. Drip coffee is the best and never let anyone tell you otherwise.  I feel like Piper from OITNB when she goes on furlough.

15. God damn it I love this country.

I was not at all a patriotic person growing up or through my twenties.  My brother can tell you that when we went to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa I had misgivings about supporting my own men’s national team because I was that uncomfortable with the idea of patriotism.

China has been incredibly good to me.  I will always be grateful for the opportunities I’ve had there and the friends I’ve made.  And the housekeepers who wash my dishes.  Especially them.

But no matter how good China has been, it doesn’t touch how good (and weird) it feels to come home.

Fig. 2. The best thing ever.  Please note I am being super Chinese by putting my bag on a chair rather than the floor.

Fig. 3. The only thing weirder than the fact that I was here yesterday is the fact that today is still yesterday.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Answering the NY Times’s Call to Defend Planned Parenthood

This is the hardest blog post I’ve written.  I’m actually sitting at my computer with my heart racing and palms sweating (please, brain, this isn't the time to think of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.”).

Many years ago I had an abortion.  

I’ve never written that sentence.  Not in a personal journal, not in an email -- never.  The only person I have ever in my life told besides the nice doctors at Planned Parenthood and the man who was involved is my mother.

At the time it all happened I was really ashamed and really scared.  Planned Parenthood is the first place I went the moment I took a pregnancy test at home, alone.  I literally saw the results, gasped, and sprinted.  They allowed me to just walk right in and within 30 minutes I had someone there for me, talking to me about my options, telling me I wasn’t the first person to totally fuck everything up.

In fact, they told me all the things that you can now read all over the Internet, including in yesterday’s NYTimes article that prompted me to finally “come out” about this whole thing.  They told me one in three women will have abortions and that the risk of complication from an abortion is lower than from childbirth.

As a social scientist I immediately didn’t trust these statistics.  I thought, “Where did they get these numbers, and why have I never heard them before?”  As a paranoid hypochondriac, I thought, “It doesn’t matter what the odds are, it’ll surely go wrong for me.”  As a person in a complete panic about this completely unplanned and fucked up situation, I was so grateful to hear them.  

Accurate or not, I hung on to those numbers, tight, repeating them to myself for the two or so weeks that I had before my appointment for the abortion.

I am a deeply indecisive person about all things, and this was no exception of course.  I didn’t take lightly my decision to go through with an abortion.  (By the way, the more I type this word, the less scary it feels.)  In fact, part of the reason I delayed the appointment for two weeks was I wanted to be sure.

The decision wasn’t easy, but feeling really alone and really ashamed was much harder.  If Planned Parenthood’s numbers were right, many of my friends had had abortions, yet I had never spoken to even a single one about it.  I had no one to ask: how did you get through it?  Did you regret it?  Did it hurt?

I had the Internet, of course, and spent night after sleepless night poring over chat room forums, alternately crying and reading with fear about people’s stories, both positive and bad, about their experience and their feelings after.  Leading up to it I felt I was making the right choice, but I had no idea if, the day after the appointment, I would still feel like it was the right one.

On the day of I was horrifically nervous.  I also wasn’t allowed coffee because I’d opted for their strong painkillers (I’m a pansy) and so I had a headache.  I watched other girls go in ahead of me and come out not long after and I’d wonder how they felt.  One girl threw up.  I wanted to say, “It’s going to be ok,” but I had no idea if it would.

The procedure itself took almost no time at all.  I am impossibly grateful to the very kind doctor who made me feel comfortable.  I think the drugs also helped.

That night I watched a movie and ate pizza and slept -- the scene in Obvious Child (an excellent film that came out a few years later and for which I was so grateful) is pretty accurate there.  I felt sort of ok.

The next day I was slammed with sadness and horror.  It held on, unrelenting, for days.  I didn’t so much regret my decision as feel extremely guilty that I chose my life over someone -- something -- else’s.  I felt guilty I’d used painkiller.  I was murdering something; I should have at least had the courage to endure the pain.  I deserved that pain, and I skimped out on it.

It was a sunny week where I was living at the time, but I would just collapse into tears onto public benches, in the library, waiting for the bus.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a monster.

I don’t know how or why, but eventually, weeks later, that feeling lifted.  Maybe hormones get involved.  I don’t know.

It has been long enough since that time that most days I don’t think at all about the abortion.  When things are going great for me I do think about the fact that I think I made the right choice.  Every now and again I’ll let myself calculate how old the child would be today and I try to picture myself as a mother to him or her and find that I can’t.

We all make a lot of decisions in life.  I’ve made tons, and regret a lot of them (my most recent blog post is literally about precisely this).  As anyone who knows me will attest, I can’t even order a meal from a restaurant without wringing my hands over whether I should have ordered something else.

But my decision to have an abortion is not something I would say I regret.  Yes, I wonder what the other path would have looked like, but not with a kind of longing or desire for it.

What I do regret, however, is not being brave enough to tell anyone about it.  At the time it was all happening I felt so grateful to Planned Parenthood and vowed to be open about it and tell people what I’d been through so others could feel less ashamed and alone when they went through it.  

Instead, I donated money to them and declined their offer to help me post about it on social media.

I read the NYTimes article late last night and couldn’t sleep at all.  I thought, they’re calling me out on the thing I said I would do and never did.

So now I’m doing it.

And now I’m going to go to circus and not check the Internet all day because I am literally in a panic about sharing this.

Thanks for reading.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

New York City: A Tale of Regret and Possibility

My dear readers!

How have you been?  I have been fine.

I have been better than fine in a lot of ways.  I am subletting an apartment in New York, going to circus school by day and doing standup and storytelling open mics by night.  I am supposed to be working on my book proposal, and I am, though in fits and starts.  I am doing almost no Political Science, and I’ll probably get fired for saying that.

I’ve left New York two times in my life.  There have been other smaller times -- I’ve spent every summer here for the past many years, and used to come back and forth during the academic year all the time as well.

But I had two chances to really stay and try for it.  The first was when I was around 24 or 25 and was taking improv classes at UCB and loving every second of it and my friend Sue told me about how she’d decided to delay grad school by a year so she could keep doing improv.  She was encouraging me to do the same.

I had been in grad school for three years by that point, but spent the entirety of my third year in Boston and New York, mostly alternating between a state of stress about my dissertation prospectus during the day and then throwing myself at improv at night.  I strongly considered staying in New York, but I was not getting anywhere on my prospectus, and I was tired of the grind.  So despite my friend Sue, and despite the example given to me at the time of Demetri Martin (who left law school to pursue comedy), I left New York at the end of the summer and went back to Michigan to finish my dissertation.

Four years later, I finished it.  It almost killed me, but I finished it.

By then I had secured a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon.  The teaching load was very light, my colleagues were supportive, and the school is great.  But I was totally unhappy.  A lot of people used to ask me then what was so wrong, and I didn’t really know the answer, and I don’t know to this day, except to say that my life felt small.

At the end of my second year at CMU, I used what little post-doc salary money I had to put down a security deposit to live at the Muse, a circus school and performance venue in Brooklyn that had rooms in the back where if you lived there it meant you could train for a discount.

And thus ushered in the happiest summer of my life.  I woke up to the sound of people doing circus outside my bedroom window, and went to sleep at night after creeping through mats and aerial equipment in the dark while brushing my teeth.  I did some improv, some shows, and got so much better at circus.

I also got offered a job at NYU Shanghai. 

After much hemming and hawing, I accepted it.  A few weeks before I was slated to leave for China, I had arrived home at the Muse and it was dark and empty and I was overcome by how much I loved it there and I crumpled against the mats and cried and cried and wondered why I was letting myself leave New York again.

But I did leave, and thus began the best two years of my life.  Shanghai gave me everything I wanted.  Cirque le Soir is the best thing that ever happened to me.  My life went from feeling small to feeling infinite.  I got to perform improv regularly.  I finally found the courage to do standup.  I met the best friends I could have ever asked for, and I finally felt like I was living life on my own terms.

If you read just that part of my story, it sounds like my bravery paid off -- moving to China is scary for anyone, but I did it, and look, my dreams came true.

And in fact that’s the version I’ve been working on for my book.

But the truth is I got all those great things in Shanghai not because of bravery, but because of fear.  I was afraid to stay in New York because New York is hard and uncertain and it feels like there are a million people here all doing what I want to do, but better.  

I was also tired of being broke.  At 30 years old I could only afford to eat one meal a day and would frequently stretch a single coffee to last two days.  Having a Ph.D. does not make it less embarrassing to have to ask your parents if you can borrow $500.

Now I have been in Shanghai for two years.  I am back in New York for the summer, doing circus, doing comedy, and writing.  For the first time in my entire life I am not worried about money.

I am enjoying it here, but also living in a state of dread and exhaustion.  I love Shanghai and the things it has given me, but I am tired of running away.  I am tired of wondering what would have happened if I stayed.  

I am tired of regretting leaving New York.

Fig. 1. A typically angsty trapeze performance at the Muse (2013).  

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Advice I Give My Students That I Wish I Would Follow Myself

For reasons that are not clear to me, my students come to my office asking me for advice.  The first thing to keep in mind is I don’t know what I’m talking about.  The second thing is I’m as confused as everyone else and anyone who tells you it gets less confusing is either lying to you or is better at life than I am.  

The third is sometimes my students leave and I think, damn, that was some good advice.

Here you go, unsolicited as ever!

1. It doesn’t matter what you major in.  My students are obsessed with their major.  I was obsessed with my major.  I was convinced it mattered incredibly for my entire future and I panicked and stayed up late and spent all of my sophomore, junior, and senior years of college worrying about this.  Here is the truth: No one has ever once -- ever, once -- asked me what my major was in college.  I’ve volunteered the information plenty of times.  But no one has ever needed to know.

In my current life: I think the lesson would be that it doesn’t matter what my job is as long as I’m doing something I like.

2. It doesn’t matter how many majors/minors/certificates you have.  Most students want to double major and minor and do all these other things but -- only provided it adds up to a formal stamp that will show up on their transcript or diploma or somewhere.  When I was in college I triple majored, minored, and got a Certificate in something that no one has ever asked me about.  I wish that instead of taking a million classes my senior year and not retaining anything from them and never sleeping, I had instead taken one thing I really wanted to take, like linguistics or philosophy.

In my current life: Christ, man, I just clawed my way into getting a new title at work.  Why?

3. Relatedly, for heaven’s sake, take classes in things you like.  So many students are signing up for classes because they sound impressive or fulfill a major (see above).  I don’t know how to say more clearly that you will just do better in life at things you naturally like.  I spent eight years in my twenties trying to talk myself into having an innate skill for statistics.

In my current life: I routinely force myself into careers (cough) that sound good but I am not amazing at.

4. Use your summers to enjoy yourself a.k.a. stop freaking out about internships and summer school.  I did follow this advice in college with one exception of an internship in Bolivia, which actually was awesome, because I worked in microfinance and it was an important life experience and also taught me I never want to work in an office.  But otherwise I spent my summers working as a lifeguard.  Oh, crap, no, I spent another summer studying Chinese in Beijing.  Ok students, you win.

In my current life: I am right now unable to sleep because I am too busy panicking about how I’m going to fit in circus training with book writing with documentary filmmaking with performing a not-yet-existent one woman variety show.

5. Ok, New Rule: You can freak out about your summer as long as you are doing things you want to be doing (or to get very arty -- “need” to be doing).

In my current life: Getting to this point was hard for me, and I’m still in the throes of debating what the “right” thing to do is.  But if you like it, and you can afford to, why not do it?  We are among the lucky small percent of this world who gets to choose what we do every day.

6. Take the class you’re interested in even if it doesn’t make any sense in your curriculum otherwise.  I can’t claim credit for this; it’s Steve Jobs through and through.

In my current life: Thank goodness I carried on with dance and movement in grad school or I wouldn’t have ended up at Cirque, which is the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life.

7. Enthusiasm matters a lot.  We all have to do things we don’t want to do -- calculus, a science credit, Chinese arts (everyone here has to take that).  Try to find the part of it you can be excited about.

In my current life: Teaching is hard and scary for me.  This semester I have been focusing on my enthusiasm for the material rather than on whether the students are bored.  I have enjoyed it more.  N.b. My students are probably bored.

8. Do the thing you want to do now.  Now.  No, seriously, stop reading this and do it.  Actually, a student taught me this.

In my current life: Nothing feels better than imagining the perfect version of the thing you want to do that you’re going to do tomorrow.  I try to indulge this less.

9. The thing that scares you but that you have to do -- Do it as much as you possibly can.  No one has ever actually asked me about this, but I wish they would, as it’s the main thing I’ve learned this year.  Teaching was terrifying, circus was terrifying, standup is terrifying.  Literally the only cure besides not doing it (which feels crappy) is doing it constantly.  When it gets not scary, step it up.

In my current life: I did standup six times and then quit for a year.  I’ve just started going back and I’m doing it more frequently now and it gets a fraction of a percent less horrifying each time.

10. Focus on the present.  This sounds trite but I mean it.  Calm down!  I assure my students.  Stop thinking about jobs and grad school.  It will all be figured out when the time comes!  I’ve been there, and it will work out.

In my current life: Sure, I know my students are going to be ok because I’ve lived through the ten years they’re panicked about.  But obviously that logic cannot hold for me since no one has ever lived past 32 and could ever tell me it’s going to be ok.

Fig. 1. The best advice I’ve ever received is: Everything in moderation, including moderation.  A man who looked like Jesus said it to me in 2002 at a house party in Cape Town.  Here, I re-enact the scene.

BONUS!  DING DING DING!

Get a good night’s rest!  I am writing this at 5:41 AM China time.

Don’t be a business major.  This one I’m following just fine.  I am now accepting counter-arguments.

IT WAS A CERTIFICATE IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES AND THE LIBERAL ARTS THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

[jonesrooy-shanghai]

Post-Cirque Life and 一杯酒

I feel like something of a hypocrite.  The last time I wrote I left off discussing how depressed I was about Cirque le Soir closing and how I didn’t know what I was going to do next.  Then all of a sudden I was back posting pictures of myself in makeup (and little else) like nothing ever happened.

The main reason this seems like a fast turnaround was that it took me nearly two months to drum up the courage to announce Cirque’s closing.  In between that, there just isn’t a lot to say about life when one is spending it mostly watching HBO Asia and bursting into tears every time an electronic dance music song comes on in a taxi. 

Cirque’s closing felt like a breakup for me.  As I have written before, these people were my best friends, my dinner mates, and at alternating junctures my escape from real life and my real life itself -- becoming more of the latter as time went on.

I coped with this breakup in full form -- ordering (China’s terrible version of) Mexican food* for delivery, living in my sweatpants, and constantly messaging everyone on WeChat (get it!) about how much I missed them.  More than once my colleagues at NYU Shanghai walked into my office to catch me wiping tears from my eyes while watching old Cirque videos on my work computer.

Not long after Cirque closed, NYU Shanghai hosted a Chinese New Year party for faculty and staff in our campus’s basement dining hall.  I decided to be a good sport and attend.  I had also entered the stage of the breakup where you think you’re ready for public interaction but you’re not.  In the spirit of being both a good sport and emotionally wrecked, I spent the evening aggressively drinking glass after glass of (China’s terrible version of) red wine.**

In true Chinese company party fashion, various staff groups took turns performing song and dance numbers (to my friends who work in real companies in the US -- does this happen there?).  At one point a group from Finance or IT got up and sang a Chinese song that I recognized as a song that my Cirque friends Jimmy and Agang used to sing as a duet at karaoke when we would all go together on our nights off.

Fig. 1.  Jimmy is a beautiful singer.  I am a beautiful scream-shouter.  That spiky thing by me is a carved up watermelon rind, which is great for both a refreshing dessert and informal self-defense.

The song is called “朋友” (pronounced “pengyou,” which means “friends”), but I know it as “一杯酒” (pronounced “yi bei jiu”, which means “a cup of wine”), because that’s the famous line in the chorus.  You can listen to the song and read the lyrics in English here.  It’s an incredibly popular karaoke song in China, which by definition and government regulation means it is also impossibly sad.

My Chinese isn’t good enough to make me confident I know what the song actually means.  If you tried to watch the video, you will agree that even with the English translation it’s hard to make sense of it.  My interpretation is that it’s about friends going their separate ways and there always being sadness in the world, but even though they’re apart, the friend will always be there to have a glass of wine with the other friend.  I am sure this is a horrific translation.

The moment I recognized the song at this faculty party, I fell apart.  To my NYU colleagues’ credit, they all left me alone while I sat under the fluorescent dining hall lights, face in my hands, shoulders shaking, and tears falling on the fried rice that had prawns in it so I couldn’t eat it.

This sums up most of how the past few months have been.

Very recently we performers have had some luck getting gigs around the city.  I’m overwhelmingly grateful for these opportunities, as at the time of Cirque closing I genuinely wondered if I would ever perform circus again.  I am especially grateful to my friend and partner Lexi (one of the bravest people I know) who invented Lust Productions and includes me in pretty much everything.

The first weekend I thought we might have a chance at making it was a few weekends ago where we had three gigs in a row -- at a nightclub, a diner-themed bar, and some kind of ultra-elite Italian “lifestyle” shop.  We’ve since performed in more clubs, banquet halls, speakeasies, and even a hallway once.  We have shows coming up in a beautiful old theater as well as on the top floor of a new skyscraper that boasts the highest rent in the city, if not the world.

Fig. 2. I am grateful.

In some ways being pushed out of the Cirque nest has been good for us.  I’m finally writing my own acts with my own concepts, style, and even (paltry) makeup efforts.  It’s felt nice to slowly get used to the idea that I might be able to perform as my own person, not just as a part of someone else’s project.

In other ways being out on our own is crazy hard.  I always appreciated Cirque to the fullest extent that I could, but I didn’t know I should also have been appreciating how much work they were sparing me when it comes to booking gigs.  I now spend an impossible amount of time messaging with people and negotiating contracts.  I have three different calendars going at once, and I actually might very soon go insane.  I have a new respect for my freelance friends around the world, including my father, who managed to make it work with kids to support.

The other thing that makes this still hard – and the main thing that can still reduce me to tears at random moments – is that I fiercely miss my friends, especially my Chinese friends, who have very different non-Cirque lives from us foreigners.

Except for once.

A few weekends ago Lexi invited us all over to her house for dinner.  Miraculously, almost everyone who is still in Shanghai was able to come.  It was the first time we were all together since the closing.  We screamed with laughter all night and it was amazing.  Jimmy showed us how he can do handstands and sing at the same time, Cindy got grossed out by our (terrible Western version of) Chinese food, and at one point we all got up and danced the Macarena for no reason other than to do it.  

But the best moment of the whole night was when I told Jimmy about how they’d sung his karaoke song at my university and how it had made me think of him.  He broke out and sang it right there, and we all sang along, “yi bei jiuuuuuuuuuu.”

Fig. 3.  Here is a clip of Jimmy singing “yi bei jiu” for me backstage at Cirque.  You better believe I’ve watched it on loop in tears while drinking red wine.

*It tastes like regular Mexican food except without any salt or spice.

**It tastes like a red-colored dirt, alcohol, and sugar cocktail, which I am now going to sell in Williamsburg as a “Pioneer’s Old Fashioned.”