I'm unbelievably screwed right now. Wish me luck.
I have to write two research proposals in the next two days. Yipes!
Nonetheless, in some of my off time (aka procrastination), I cleaned up the rest of the code on the website, so that now (theoretically), people using Netscape can see everything. Let me know if this isn't the case.
I also found this little tidbit, which I found very entertaining, since I actually know what Cornell is like, even though I didn't go there. If they think that college is all hockey games and snowball fights, then they're just a little bit screwed.
Leslie Feinberg spoke here last night. I only found out about it about 4 hours before she was slated to speak, so I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off figuring out where to get tickets and rework my schedule so I could go(side note: Leslie was using the feminine pronoun last night, so I'm going to use "she" in my description). I've read some of her work, and was blown away. I really, really had to see this speech.
And, it was everything I could've hoped for. Really, really wonderful. I was reminded partway through of the speaker at Jeremy's commencement, Danny Glover (aka that guy from Lethal Weapon). His speech reminded me of Feinberg's because they'd both tried to connect a lot of the things done by the government under the heading "Bad Things Involving Various -isms". Unfortunately, Glover was either drunk or simply a hopelessly inept speaker, stuttering over his words and floating through a stream of conciousness-style essay, whereas last night I was ready to break a few heads, or cry, or both. At the very least, I was ready to hug the nearest oppressed person. Which includes every dang person in this frikin' country.
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TOTALLY unrelated side note: I updated some of that "who is" list. More folks to come, including my advisor, people in my research group, and maybe some places I frequently mention.
I enjoyed a terrifically bad Thin Films class today. The prof, who's in my department (Materials Science) was trying to explain an upper-level chemistry class concept:Molecular Orbitals. Actually, that's not entirely true. You learn in your first or second semester chemistry class that there are things called molecular orbitals, and that they make shapes, but my prof was trying to explain the orbitals in an upper-level way, as a non-chemist, to non-chemists.
Having a chemistry background made it thoroughly entertaining.
There is a chasm of vocabulary between some scientific disciplines that gets in the way of us understanding each other. This was never something I thought about before grad school. The chemists at Ithaca talked about chemistry, the physicists taught the physics, and they didn't really get into each other's ways very much. But there are only so many words in the world that we can use. Sometimes, a deceptively simple word like "solubility" can get you into trouble, if you're using Chemistry words when talking to a Materials Scientist.
In graduate school, your work gets less compartmentalized, and so you NEED to talk to different kinds of people. Over the course of this semester, I'll spend some time asking very detailed questions of hardcore physicists, veterinary/biology folks, chemists, and materials scientists, none of whom would understand each other's answers. Sometimes this totally sucks. I seem to have an especially hard time with metallurgists--the word "chemistry", to them, means that your surface is doing something strange, so you should coat it with something to make the chemistry go away. Fortunately, I do enough different things, and am still young and mentally flexible enough to figure out what the heck is going on (some of the time).
But sometimes, this is really neat, once you get past the annoying vocabulary confusion. Scientists in different fields really view the world in different ways--what variables are most important to get rid of, what you don't have to worry about, and what part of a squiggly line is interesting.
This all is reminding me of something that happened in my education class last year. Picture a dozen scientists, none in exactly the same field, all trying to talk about education, all without having had any previous education classes (except me and the professor). There was one guy from the astronomy department that I got along with particularly well--he'd also gone to a smaller, liberal-arts type of place, so we had at least some fundamental language in common. When it came time to practice our teaching, he decided to do a lesson on some basic theories involved in the expansion of the universe. Someone asked a thoughtful "I'm a scientist but know almost nothing about this field" type of question--something along the lines of "well, if you're making this assumption, has such-and-such been worked out to prove that that assumption is correct?"
"Oh, well, I'm a spectroscopist", he replied. "I don't have to worry about that."
It just struck me as such a strange thing to say. Within his particular field, saying "I'm a spectroscopist" comes with a set of assumptions that none of us in that room would have had. Here was his personally meaningful way of self-identification, but none of us viewed his self-definition in the same way--either to each other, OR to him. Kind of similar to someone identifying as "queer", and having no vanilla straight people understanding.
That was much too far of a lateral jump. How did I start talking about LGBT sociological theory? I think it's time to do some more homework, and calm down my over-firing synapses.
Just call me Martha Stewart.
Jeremy and I's division of labor when it comes to cooking usually works out something like this: during the week, J usually gets home about 20 minutes before I do, and is ravenous, and so usually makes something comparitively quick and easy--fried rice, bean burritos, scrambled eggs. That sort of thing. We eat it, it's gone, we burp, we move on. On the weekends, however, I often make one semi-fancy meal with a Sam's Club type of scale. This means we usually have a half-week's worth of lasagna or chili lunches sitting in the fridge on Sunday nights. This method suits me just fine--it takes the same amount of time to make three times as much soup as we'd just eat normally, and the results are (usually) tastier than mass-producing peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches for lunches that week, which I did every week I was in high school. Whatever it is that I make usually takes an hour or two, but, like I said, is worth it.
Recently, however, J became a member of this local cooperative bookstore, and started volunteering there. His shift runs for a few hours on Saturdays. So instead of starting something fancy after my afternoon nap, I've been starting fancy things a little bit earlier. This leads to more food, and a higher level of fanciness than is usually present.
Exhibit A: Last weekend, I baked bread, to go along with the more typical minestrone-esque soup that I would have made any normal week. It turned out pretty good--there was a hint of a flavor similar to the rolls my gramma makes, that are incredible but that no one can ever manage to imitate. Yum, I thought. I should try this again sometime.
Exhibit B: This weekend, not only did I bake bread again, since we ate both loaves in under a week, but I made new fancy soup that I hadn't made before, AND my mom's chocolate/sweet potato/walnut marble cake that I also hadn't ever made before (although I'd helped).
The kitchen looked like I'd gotten in a flour fight with myself and lost.
Part of the problem was that I was trying to talk to my mom on the phone while making her cake--does allspice have ginger in it? How long should I nuke the sweet potatoes? And in the meantime I was mixing things that were slopping over the sides of the bowls, dusting flour into the cake pan and onto the chairs, burning my fingers on melted chocolate, and just generally wreaking havoc in every corneer of the room.
The results were...acceptable. I really liked the soup--it was basically fancy diluted Cheese Whiz. You can't go wrong with that. The bread was more bread-like than last week's--a little poofier, a little blander. But it's still fresh bread, and better than I'd get at most of the local bakeries. The cake tasted like the result of someone's daughter, who's a halfway decent cook, trying to copy the best thing that her mom (who's a much better cook) makes; in other words, it tasted exactly like what it was.
I never really did describe my winter vacation. I was thinking about something in particular this morning, so I thought I'd mention it.
Dogs, even stupid dogs, are pretty dang smart. Senior year I lived in a house with Dan and two other...people. And Dan's dog, a wonderful dog, a really, really excitable, friendly dog named Jessie. She was (and is) a total sweety, but is also a complete spaz. Especially because there were the usual undergraduate variety of people walking through the house all the time--us, significant others, friends, study groups, random friends of friends come to drink our alcohol, pizza delivery poeople, etc.--Jessie got to meet (and smell and hump the legs of) a wide section of humanity.
She really just wanted us all to give her a treat, but she considered a pat on her belly to be a suitable comprimise.
I LOVE this friggin' dog. Dan, I email with, and can call him if I really miss him, but Jessie's the one that makes me really miss Ithaca.
So, when me and J went to Ithaca for a day, of course a visit to the dogs was required. A friend of J's and her froybiend were also there.
And Jessie remembered me! D has another dog now, big but still 90% puppy in personality, that was going crazy, hopping all over all of us, biting our ears (gently, but excitedly), and just generally being about as stupid as Jessie was 2 years ago.
Jessie was excited too, and ran around the room a couple of times, but then spent most of the rest of the afternoon sitting next to me, offering me her butt and belly to scratch, and basically saying "Hey, lady that smells familiar that used to feed me."
Boy, I really want to get an animal. Too bad our lease basically says that if we have anything bigger than fish they'll throw us out into the cold.
And it's really cold right now, so I won't risk it.
Another grad student in my group reccommended a biology class for me when she heard I was in the market for one. "It's in the Pathology department, but don't be intimidated, because they really don't know that much more about the deep-level biology than you do," she said.
I looked up the class. Unfortunately, it's the same time as the OTHER biology class I'm taking this semester. However, it listed another class in the pathology department and said that it was "strongly encouraged" that you take class #2, too. Class #2 is "Contemporary Topics in Cell Structure and Function". Poifect. It sounds like the kind of thing that would go really well with the rest of my classes. The fact that it's an upper level pathology class is somewhat intimidating, but if it's supposed to be pretty much the same thing as the other class, then it should be interesting. I LIKE all of this biological stuff. Of course, if the class is too difficult, I can always drop it--I have a back-up class I went to once already that I wouldn't mind taking the whole semester.
First class, this afternoon, a few hours ago. I go in, sit down. It's a conference room we're in--no more than 15 students all together. The prof comes in, makes his introduction, and then says:
"So, first off, I'd like to know more about all of you. Just share your name, who in the Pathology Department you work for, and the extent of your immunological background."
Uh-oh.
Woman #1 clears her throat, and says "Hi, I'm Sara, and I work with Dr. Smith on the effect of Ypdivnanbmvosis on the human ainobiycvxxxer." Or something else that made about equal sense to me.
I say again, uh-oh.
Woman #2 looks around and said "My name is Wei-Lin. I don't have a professor yet, but I'm really interested in nxzjnxkuiery." Everyone looked at her, smiling and nodding knowingly, except me, who was neither smiling nor nodding, but instead getting my coat, hat, and books together as quietly as possible.
As I was headed out the door I heard the man sitting next to her explaining that he'd been working for the last three years on finding an effective naoidsnvcaotion to use for the development of a second-generation poiqnvoigqporith.
Well at least now I don't have a class right after lunch.
Classes are starting, busybusybusy. Last semester I took two classes, this semester I think I'm going to take 4. One of them is still on the "iffy" list, but I really like them all so far.
Also, another soon-to-be part of the website is going to be a Crafty Crap section, showing the little projects I've done here and there, and how to do them. This mostly involves getting film developed, because I've taken pictures of my quilt-in-progress, earflap hat, and the pillow/quilts that I made for J's family for the holidays, and I even have the descriptions, but you really need to see them to figure out what the heck I'm talking about. Soon, soon.
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Once in awhile I have a couple of days in a row with really wierd, vivid dreams, and keep waking up in the night, and don't particularly want to go back to sleep because I know I'm just going to keep having wierd dreams. It'll be 5 or 6 "episodes" of a longer dream-story in the course of the night. Each episode will be more-or-less related by some kind of theme, but between waking up and going back to sleep, there's always some new character, or the problem that didn't exist before, or that kind of thing. Usually seems to happen when I have something else going on--for example, the last couple of mornings, I've had to get up before J, and was kind of aware that my alarm was going to go off while it's still dark and that I would probably be surprized and confused for a few seconds, and this was enough to have fluttery, nervous REM cycles throughout the night.
The night before last, the theme that ran through the night was Midieval. I've been reading this book of J's that he really liked called Out of the Flames, that goes through a lot of things going on during the early Protestant Reformation, and who moved to what city to escape from which tyrannical religous leader--and thinking about life in those times was turned into running away from rich landowners, throwing mud at Cardinals, and really complicated subplots involving printing presses.
Last night, oddly, the theme was weblogs. Each vignette involved some personal interaction with people I've never met, but know way too much about. James Lileks was in the grocery store in Ithaca that I used to shop at, buying cereal and toilet paper with his daughter, and I was all embarrassed because I wanted to say hi but didn't want to act like a total tool, so I stalked him all through the store, hiding behind displays.
The next time around, I kept walking in on Ernie who was having some really deep personal conversation with his boyfriend that I wasn't supposed to hear. I kept backing out of the door to the room they were in with their heads bowed close together, walking down another hallway, and opening some other door, and there they'd be again, plenty polite, but clearly thinking "why can't that girl just get OUT OF OUR HAIR?"
Finally, Sparky (who looked like his glowing monkey-mascot) and John (who was about 8 feet tall and way hairier than even he could imagine) were in my apartment, doing strange things to my shoes--taping them to the tv, leaving them in the blender, replacing them with drawings of actual shoes wherever I'd left them last. I got madder and madder, and kept yelling louder and louder--I seem to spend most of my dream time either hiding or screaming--and then I started to throw things at them. Nothing worked. That whole cycle of being really mad and having absolutely no effect, that frequently happens in my dreams.
I woke up about 10 seconds before my alarm went off.
I think I have a problem with rejection.
(side note: Apologies to Sparky, whose dreams are way way better and more detailed than mine could ever be.
Ah. Webpage housecleaning always feels good. Got rid of some things, added a few missing months of archives, that sort of thing. Much betta.
Just one example of why I love my Friendly Neighborhood Co-op (this is, by the way, the kind of thing that happens almost every time I go there):
Last night J and I went out for Thai food, and, since it's just a couple blocks farther, went to the co-op to stock up on fake meat products (by the way, brr). Full of peanut sauce, we rolled ourselves up and down the aisle, making our usual jokes about Paul Newman cookies called "Tops and Bottoms", the hemp Eggos, and the cereal called "Oaty Bites".
It's a pretty slow night at the registers. Of the three or so open lanes, only one person is being checked out. A few other workers are standing around another register, talking animatedly and laughing.
We go up with our food and say howdy. At any normal grocery store one usually gets a quick Look of Death from the person that was just having fun with their friends, but here, Scruffy Cashier #1 says "Hey there!", as if we were his best friends. As he swipes groceries over that beepy-thing, fixes it when it boops instead of beeps, and types in PLU's from our bulk foods, he continues the conversation with his friends and includes us into it. The Question of the Day: If you were forced to choose between an addiction to crack, or an addiction to old hairy stinky man's butt crack, which would you choose?
"What would being addicted to ass crack entail?" one of them asks.
"Um... smelling it, rubbing your face against it, that kind of thing," SC#1 ultimately decides. "C'mon, dude," he says, waving a bottle of olive oil at J. "Crack or butt crack?"
Jeremy's answer entails removing himself entirely from that universe. I choose buttcrack, figuring I'd rather have a mentally debilitating addiction than a physically AND mentally debilitating one. "Hmm," SC#1 says thoughtfully. "I've been here working since we opened 9 hours ago, so I can't even decide. Well, g'night!"
We pop our groceries into our bags and start the frigid walk home.
Happy: This company was on public television last night as part of a show about flea markets. I think it's just about the sexiest thing I've ever seen. I don't think J is so into it, but I don't even care, I'd rather have one for myself. I'd SO rather wear that than a girly dress. Non-pantlike items are comfy in the Steam Table season, but the ones I own require more womanly panache than I have. I'll have to figure out how to make one, though--they're a little on the pricey side otherwise.
Poopie: It's sooo, sooo cold. I wish the Midwest actually had seasons between Steam Table and Liquid Nitrogen.
Happy: This morning J saw a bird fly out of an uncovered heating vent in the apartment next door. Upon closer inspection (squinting through the steam coming out of it with the early-morning sun in his eyes), he realized that, in a similar fashion to those bathing Japanese monkeys, there were several birds all standing around the top of the vent in an effort to keep warm. If this happens again, I'm taking a picture.
Poopie: I have a whole lot of things to get done in the next two weeks, and I don't really know how to do most of them.
Happy: I had a dinner party on Saturday night. I realized that A: I finally have enough friends to have a reasonable get-together, B: I only hang out with sciencey people here, and C: One must assume that grad students are, in fact, starving, and one should feed them accordingly. Nobody left hungry (I hope), but everything turned out so well that it would have been nice to have some leftovers.
Poopie: My data is coming out all wrong, and the only person who can help is is France. Permanently.
Happy: My friend from undergrad Doug has his own online diary now, which I've read with much amusement so far. I provide a link, but you should be forewarned in his words first, so I quote: "NOT for the faint of heart, the socially intolerant, or stupid white people." However, since he's one of my favorite people, and of a species that seems to be lacking around here (gaysian musicalis), I'm enjoying every sassy word. He will join the links page shortly.
Poopie: My primary doctor is leaving my HMO. This makes me sad, because she's really the only doctor I've ever had that I've liked. Maybe because she looks like she's 12 and hasn't had to give me a shot yet, but she's really cool, and made a point of explaining stuff to me when I asked about it, instead of just saying something that sounded like it was taken out of a manual. Fortunately, I already have an appointment set up with her, about a week before she's leaving. So at least there's that. Just so long as she's replaced by someone with warm hands.
Happy: Catch Me If You Can is a really fun movie. After the dinner party thing, most of us headed over to a local theater to see it. Very enjoyable, a movie that a smart person can go to and not either feel dumb or require some sort of Deep Thoughts post-viewing. J and I had almost the exact same thought--that his sister, who likes heist-type films, would LOVE this. 20 heists rolled into one! Whee!
It appears that happy wins, so I guess I'm happy.
We're getting a new toilet today! Our old one ran a lot, and you had to flush twice almost every time (even just for a piece of toilet paper!). And it's sprung a couple of leaks since we've been here. I guess the maintenance guy was tired of playing with it, so he's taking the whole dang thing out and putting in something nice and new. They were carrying the dinosaur-potty down the stairs as I was leaving this morning.
Unfortunately, now the whole apartment smells like sewer, and I figure it probably will for a couple of days. This is one of the few negative points to having radiators--not much in the way of air circulation. Maybe I'll brave the cold and open a window and fan out the poopy air for a few minutes. I'll see how bad it is when I get home.
I think it says something for the level of excitement in my life, that getting a new toilet installed is cause for exclamation marks.
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Ok, more cause for exclamation marks. I was wicked sick and tired of having like 40 popups every time I wanted to make sure that I'd done the code and everything right, so I signed up for the "plus" service, which lets me not have popups, among other things. Now I feel like a real, grown-up web page! Whee! If you DO get popups when accessing the site, please let me know, because that's 98% of the reason I'm paying.
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Oh, and I just ran a spell checker on this page, out of curiosity (it's one of the things I can do now). Such words as "boogery", "Oy", "snarky", and "AAHHHGHGH" confused it. I'm glad that my vocabulary is so advanced.
Apparently, the website is working on Netscape now. That's a start.
The night before last, after flying all over the place, and dragging along a hopped-up-on-cold-medication J (not because he was sick, but because that was the easiest way to knock himself out while flying), I was pretty pooped. Feeling sleepy, but good, and glad to be home, I turned off the light around 11:20.
I had a dream about J getting violently sick all over the house--like the things in Monty Python or Saturday Night Live when they have a hose containing some kind of horribleness attached to their sleeve, and hold the sleeve up near their mouth while they go "BL-AAHHHGHGH" and spray the whole audience with it. This is just about my least favorite thing in the world, ANYTHING to do with vomit, even totally fake stuff on tv makes me feel ill. There's a reason I'll never practice medicine, and why I'd rather not have children.
I woke up 30 minutes after I'd snuggled into bed. J was perfectly safe, next to me with a particularly innocent look on his unconscious face. *I* was feeling pretty ill all of a sudden though. Y'know that thing where you're warm but your body keeps getting rigid and shaky at the same time? Yeah, that. So I laid there nervously for about 10 or 20 minutes, but then conked out again, and didn't wake up until the next morning, and was totally okay.
I just think it's disturbing that even my brain making stuff up makes me feel sick. Oy.
Changed a couple of small things to the site--a new front page picture, and some behind-the-scenes coding stuff that either will have zero or 100% effect on the way you're seeing this page. Netscape doesn't like this whole page except the title for some reason--people just get a blank screen and a ton of popups. Now I think this is partly due to all of the popups that I have no control over (but stay tuned, I think I'm going to pay them to make the popups go away). But I went through my html really carefully, and looked stuff up because I couldn't remember what I'd written before, and found some problems. Now it's loading on my version at least. I'm trying to get some other opinions too. So, speak up, and tell me what's good or not. General design stuff is good too--I'm an scientist, not an artist.
Well, I'm back. Have a bunch of errands today, but will discuss my time off soon. How I was for the last two weeks, in a word: stuffed.
Both of my sisters got glasses--this is my dad's genes at work. I'm glad that glasses places have figured out how to have kids wear glasses and look good--no embarassing huge pink glasses for them:
