When you need a distraction. . .

Oh man, I just needed a break from all these science-like things. Too many amino acids, too much talking on a sore throat . . . Anyway, I just wanted to say that if you get bored, I'd really recommend going to OkCupid.com. It's run by the folks who did TheSpark back in my undergrad days, and man it was hilarious then, and still is now. And frankly, though it sounds like a place to find a date (and obviously can be) it's also got fun quizzes, and you can actually make friends with people from the area. What the hell, am I writing some sort of commercial here?

OkCupid probed me. I, AmberDamber, am: hornier, less old-fashioned, less loving, kinkier, less organized, more progressive and more independent than most.

Into hiding. . .

Oh man, clearly I should have had better foresight to see what kind of week this was going to be. Basically, nothing happens until Thursday, but ON thursday I need to:

1. Be able to draw all nucleic acids and base pairs, all amino acids and side chains, have the single letter codes for both memorized . . . not to mention actually remember all the stuff from all my notes for my Sequence Analysis exam.

2. Have snacks and self prepared for a run-through of my commitee meeting talk with the folks from my lab. This has the benefit of making me be somewhat ready a week and a day in advance of the real thing, and involves really awesome friendly lab folk. However, combine this with #1 task and. . .

3. Need to get a final copy of my research proposal (really only 1.5 pages single spaced to brief my committee about my project before they come see my actual presentation) done and off to my committee by Friday.

Overall, I have an exam, a presentation, and a writing assignment all done by the end of the week, and to prioritize among them is difficult.

And to top it all off, my sinuses seem very upset by the recent change to dry weather.

HOWEVER! I'm really excited about my project. I'm really excited to get to pick the brains of my committee about what classes to take, who my fifth member of the committee should be, and generally get their insights into my project and maybe where I can take it. I need to cut out SO much of the presentation--it could easily be a half an hour, and it really should be more like 20 minutes. I'm thinking lots of supplemental slides at the end so if people have questions, I will have the extra slides ready so as to be awesome. I am learning the art of presenting only a top fraction of what I know, so that I have alot left that I know and have ready to tell them when they ask.

I swear I'm not nervous!

It is amazing that even though I'm worried about not being prepared, on some level I am accepting the fact that I can't know everything about my project yet. I've been thinking about it, but if I knew everything and had a handle on everything, why would I need several years of rsearch and coursework? I AM LEARNING. THERE ARE THINGS I DO NOT KNOW.

Anyway, I'm nervous, and likely about to go down into some serious work without fun. I will emerge on Friday at some point, and the weekend should actually be really nice. I need to read papers and settle some questions about my presentation, and practice throughout next week, but by then it should be awesome. OK! off I go . . .

Like groovy trumpets from the heavens, yeah.

I finished my presentation outline on wednesday, and today Ned said it was really a great thing to do and that I really didn't have anything to worry about for my committee meeting. Now, while I know that really I still have alot of work to do to get this thing ready, and that I have a great talent for appearing well-organized when in fact I'm still weakly informed beneath it all--it still made me feel pretty awesome to hear that. I admittedly live for approval.

Life is otherwise doing well. Sharon and I hosted a dinner and a movie night--Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I'm soo head-over-heels for the Harry Potter series. It just combines that distinct British feel of the Chronicles of Narnia with that irrepressable joy-to-read youth novel "So You Want To Be a Wizard?"

Sometimes I've wished so hard that I could do magic. Admittedly, sometimes molecular biology seems like magic: playing with DNA to create new organisms . . . well that sounds hokey, but maybe you see what I'm getting at. I think partly I've always liked wizardry because it was a practice of incantations and secret patterns that opened up the universe to your control. Well, that and you can talk to desks and such.

Upswing upswing!

Well, I'm definitely feeling alot better, a day or two removed from the weekend. I wanted to make sure I thanked everyone who checked in to see how I was doing, or just offered anything near the phrase "hey, I care how you're doing, and I hope you feel better."

It's so amazing how much more powerful that can be than attempting to solve a person's problem.

I'm probably going to be doing this up-and-down thing as I get ready for baby's first thesis committee meeting. I've got a complete outline of my presentation--gotta run it past Ned in the morning. I keep telling myself I'm on schedule and have plenty of time to get fully prepared. This is important to do because if I feel I'm not on track, I may just panic and then I'll get less work done because it will be filled with anxiety.

I really like my topic though! "How bacteria stick to things" would be the big general topic, and "how does being sticky help my bacteria live in symbiosis with the squid?" would be the more specific topic. I've found that I work best with recursive outline-writing. I just keep writing outlines, and I throw them away and don't look at them again, and then I write a newer, hopefully better one. We'll see how it goes.

I just had a stunningly nice evening. I microwaved some miso soup and watched the original Dawn of the Dead while trying to sew my skirt (How-to-Sew Book Project #3). Either activity on its own wouldn't have been very exciting, but together there was just this pleasing synergy of mindless busy work and mindless zombies shambling around the mall. That movie is pretty hilarious, even if the director is trying to make some social commentary along with it.

On the homefront, West Virginia is getting totally flooded. Ok, at least Wheeling, WV is. Fortunately, my family lives up on a ridge, so they are sittin' pretty with electricity and running water and whatnot. Yay for living uphill!

Ok, I need to go to bed. Tomorrow is a big, open day for working on the committee thing. I want to have this well in hand before the weekend hits. . . . Thanks again to all the nice people out there--you made it easy to get happy again.

The Things They Don't Tell You

Lately, I've found myself complaining more and more along the theme of "I have too many social events to attend, too many people who want to spend time with me."

And I find myself thinking, what sort of ridiculous person am I? I've spent whole years of my life without close friends, not trusting my family or having anything better to do than walk to the video store or clean my room. I've gone on and on, trying to be likeable and make everyone happy, because wasn't that the way to BE happy?

Lately, it's clear it isn't.

You know, your parents tell you all sorts of things about growing up, like how you can do anything you set your mind to, that you'll have to make your own decisions and be responsible for yourself. All sorts of general growing up things that we've heard for years. But there is one thing that--now--I can clearly see they left out: growing up involves losing great people from your life. You will invest yourself in people and places, and inevitably have to let them go because you're not done growing yet. This isn't something bad or good. . .it's just life, but nobody ever explained it to me. Maybe nobody can. One of those damn life-lessons you can only learn through awkward steps and crashes.

This weekend really hasn't been all that good. I mean, there have been good parts, actually really good parts. But it's that spinning, where-am-I-going-really sort of feeling that I'm left with.

I'm not happy right now. And I've got to learn from what I've seen in other people, that really no person or location can fix that. It's so stupid and cliche, which makes it all the worse that it's actually true.

I wish there was something constructive about this entry. It makes me feel better to have typed it, but I know that its going to sound trite and self-important--that is sometimes exactly who I am. This is the bad side of Leo. You'll read paragraphs upon paragraphs about how grand, stylish, loyal, and likeable leos are. But rarely to you read about the other side of the coin: all the people you step on--especially the ones you care about, all the times you're so busy looking inside yourself that you miss what's going on around you. The jealousy, the envy. . . Worst of all, the way you assure yourself that if you just groomed a little better, just opened yourself up a little more, that you would be happy.

But things will get better. Life is never one thing for long, so I bet by next week I'll be skipping around gleeful about something. Just right now, things aren't so good. A hug would be nice.

Soundtrack to Right Now:Hurt, Trent Reznor (covered by Johnny Cash).

Do I wield within me some great power?

Man, it must be going to the comic book store that makes titles like that possible. First off, Westfield Comics is absolutely awesome and everyone in the Madison area should be giving them their money in exchange for comics and comic-related items. But if the cashier gives you guff about not signing the back of your credit card, steal his pen or something. That cashier always plays Christina Aguilera or Madonna music in the store anyway. One of the many mysteries of the universe.

Another is that soon after arranging my ponytail in the bathroom mirror, I turned and watched my cell phone clatter on the ground, and found the screen blank.

Now, there are some appliances I can deal without. When my laptop acts funky, I can use another computer. When the cable is gone, I can play video games. But man, once you have a cell phone, the idea of not having one just makes life tedious. So, this depressed me SO greatly. So I left it at home.

After being out for awhile, I came home, pulled my car in the garage, and hit the remote to close the door. . . the door would begin to come down, stop and then go back up. I got to enjoy about five minutes of standing in my driveway, pushing the button and hoping THIS time the door would go. Thinking of all those bikes and cars in the garage, open to the elements all night. . . I began to despair. I sighed, shrugged, and said "Man, I JUST want to go to bed."

Suddenly, the door rattled down fully into the closed position. Pretty goddamn magical, if you ask me.

Back into the apartment, I decided that the cell phone had no visible injuries, just a blank screen. So I took out the battery, looked at it, and put it back in. Unscrewed the antenna, and put it back in. Turned on the phone, and suddenly now it works. No stupid trip to the mall to wrangle a repair or entirely new phone out of people who really want and/or need as much of my money as they can get.

So here I am, pondering the imaginable signficance of today's challenges. You and I both can chooose from a couple charming lessons I've come up with:

1. Like Timmy Hall in 6th grade, mechanical appliances love to give me a hard time until they get bored, and move on to getting into fights at recess instead.

2. This week, the stars have decided to mess with my brain. They've given me out of-the-blue realizations I didn't particularly want, rain so fierce it went horizontal--resulting in the John Kerry Rally being moved to the Alliance Energy Center so I didn't have time to go see it. It has broken my phone and revived it, and temporarily confused the garage door. Goddamn stars.

3. Picture-with-inspiring-statement-below-it meaning: Challenges are often best left alone for a moment, and tackled with a different attitude.

4. I finally upped my stats in machine affinity. I guess I must have leveled-up somewhere between when my laptop started displaying only 16 colors and those three rust monsters I smote thusly on the bus last week.

Off to pick out my new spells,
-Amber-

Time is a funny material

Somehow, Saturday managed to be 3 times as long a day as past Saturdays have been. I mean, I got a crapload of stuff all done on Saturday. Dropped Ben off at some 9/11 documentary, avoided evil home-game traffic, went to the Farmer's Market, went to St. Vinnie's and got the MOST GLAMOROUS DRESS (It has an off-the shoulder collar completely trimmed in some sort of feather/iridescent plastic substance). I came home, watched a crapload of Sex In the City. Then made myself a quiet dinner. By evening, I had gotten Ben to his friend's place to pick up his new computer, and arranged to have just about everyone go to see Resident Evil 2. Following that was a Perkins run, and following that was MORE Sex in the City until 3AM.

I dreamt a nice recurring-theme dream, although it was interspersed with a scenario where I had a quiz I hadn't studied for. . . it made it all the more luxurious to wake up and have it be Sunday.

Instead of placing these thoughts in context, here are my current messages to anyone who reads this:

1. Resident Evil 2 is a ridiculous movie, and that's what makes it great. Seriously, go see it. It's so bad in such a fantastic way.

2. If you are looking for some confounding if not disturbing news coverage, check out the whole Mushroom Cloud over North Korea story. Doesn't anyone else think this story should be bigger than it's been presented?

3. Sex in the City is good like Harry Potter is good. I once would have scoffed at anyone who admitted to enjoying it, but now I am hopelessly enthralled.

4. LARP-ing is just too damn silly.

Craftiness gets the better of my pocketbook: The Sequel

I JUST MADE A PILLOW! And it's shiny with beads and stuff! Yay!

Craftiness gets the better of me and my pocketbook

So, apparently now I'm into sewing. I've been around myself long enough to know that sometimes I get really excited about things, and then a week or two later I'm pretty much done being excited about them. It made it a bit challengin for choosing my career path. Any one thing seemed likely to be too much of one thing after awhile.

So anyway . . . .perhaps my love of apparel is well known, and I'm kindof excited about sewing up some old t-shirts and halloween costumes and such. I have a sewing machine, and lots of fabric, and a book. . . we'll see how it goes.

Life after the first week of school is ok. Lab work isn't working, but hopefully I'll get to make mutants soon. I have very little time to myself these days, and it's amazing but some times a bit tiring. I'm not complaining, just asserting to myself I need to find ways to keep swatches of time for zoning out or painting my toenails, or else I'm going to just maybe go crazy.