My Profile

I am amazed that there have been over 100 clicks on the “profile” section of my blog. OK. I admit. I have clicked on my profile a number of times just to see what information I could add to this section. Then I keep going back to see how many more clicks I have in this section. I sort of like not having a profile, of being anonymous in this very public forum. Yet, I assume most of the people who are reading this blog already know who I am. But since there are over 100 clicks on my profile, I will go ahead and write a profile. This is the extended profile version since this blogging service only allows 1200 characters in the official profile section.

Here in the US, if people want to know you are, they ask, “What do you do?” I often ask this myself of others. When people ask me what I do, I am conscious of my response, knowing that much will be inferred by my profession. I actually like finding out about people by asking “Where are you from?” since I believe you can tell a lot about a person by their geographic roots.

I grew up on the eastern plains of Colorado in a small town (Otis) much closer in miles and culture to the Kansas/Nebraska border than to Denver. After undergrad at University of Colorado at Boulder (Marketing) and four years in Portland, Oregon working in academic publishing, I moved to Austin, Texas to attend grad school at the University of Texas (Advertising). Two graduate degrees later, I am still here in Austin.

I’ve lived in Texas now 17 years (minus several years away in the Bay Area and Boston), but Texas has been a part of my family all my life. My dad was a Texan and a high school science teacher. He grew up in a small town outside of Austin. All of my family attended either UT-Austin or what is now Texas State University. As a kid when we would drive from Colorado down to Austin, my dad would sigh when we hit the Texas state line. “Geege, we’re home. We’re in Texas now.” I would roll my eyes from the back seat of the car and ask him just what WAS it about Texas. He would say, “It’s the roads. Can you see how wide and well maintained they are?” I now know his response was a very Texan thing to say. At the time, I did have to admit, the roads were bigger and better than those we were on in Colorado, Kansas or Oklahoma. Mind you, we weren’t traveling down Interstate 35. We were on Texas 83 down the Texas Panhandle through epic small towns like Shamrock, Childress, and Paducah where you can mark the transition from the Rocky Mountain West into Texas by whether you get hash browns or grits next to your eggs. I am not a Texan, but I “get” Texas.

My mother, Elsa, moved to Austin a month before Emma was born. She lives three minutes from us in the same neighborhood. She is a retired Spanish and French high school teacher, but has been teaching several classes every semester at Austin Community College for over 5 years. She is originally from Mexico City. As a young woman, she lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne for 5 years. After almost 50 years in the US, she is quite “Americanized” except for the fact that she is always impeccably dressed in pearls, heals and a suit—vestiges of her class standing she left behind in Mexico.

Several years ago, I left my job as an assistant professor in the Advertising sequence at Texas State University, but I didn’t leave my career. I now balance my professional life in three ways:

1) I am a freelance qualitative consumer researcher. I help companies answer marketing questions by doing things like conducting focus groups, interviewing people, watching people shop, and shopping with people. I then translate the “learnings” (love advertising jargon) from the research into marketing or advertising strategy. This work is familiar for me as I used to work as a consumer researcher (account planner) in an ad agency. In addition, I am the type of person who asks lots of questions when I meet people, so my work is almost a natural extension of what I just normally do.

2) I am also an adjunct faculty member at Texas State. (A little) teaching remains a very creative and rewarding experience.

3) I continue to collaborate on academic projects with colleagues. My area of research is the intersection between media planning (where and when ads are placed) and account planning (understanding the consumer).

I am married to David, a computer science professor at the University of Texas. David is a theoretician. His area is randomness and computation. Don’t ask him to help you with your computer. But do ask him how to extract randomness out of some slightly random numbers. David is originally from Brooklyn. He went to high school in Manhattan and studied in Boston and Berkeley before moving to Austin. We have a very girly, 6 year old daughter named Emma.

For fun, David and I like to eat out and go to movies. We often talk about how we should start dancing again. We spend the rest of the time trying to keep the clutter off the kitchen table, arranging play dates for Emma and kvetching over the state of domestic and international affairs.

On October 26, 2007, at 44 years of age, I was diagnosed with cancer. Specifically, I have stage 3 (there are 4 stages) non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (intermediate grade, large B-cell). I had a large tumor (10 x 18 cm) in my liver and cancer was found throughout my lymphatic system.