This Is Nothing

Insane Graduate School Edition

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

A magnetic pull north, but also west

Hey folks! Well, the free-floating anxiety concerning my seminar at the end of the month has hit. It’s always silly, but now it feels especially silly to be getting worried about it: it’s not for a grade, and--even though it’s a 45 minute talk—all that means is that I have more time to do background and cover my new data. Mainly, there are at least 4 directions I could go with my project right now and I’d rather be focusing on that instead of putting together a talk. But oh well. Once I do this, I don’t have to worry about it again. But it seems traditional that I should worry about it, and therefore procrastinate on it.

My current grad-student experience story is that I rode an empty bus on Sunday night during a snow advisory to chase a big male squid around it’s tank, wash him, and then flip on the lights so he would expel all his bacteria—which I then collected. I was not looking forward to squid wrangling—squid are smart, visually astute, and can shoot a jet of water or ink if they are cranky. It went surprisingly well, and I managed to get to the bus stop on time. . . only to wait 20 minutes on a dead-quiet University Ave. with the snow blowing all around. Andy had to rescue me.

All this just to get some bacteria for the experiment I’m doing today, and now they are growing slow. . . grr.

My big exciting news for today is that “Twin Peaks: Season Two” is officially going to be released on DVD in April (although now season 1 is mysteriously out of print). That show has this odd pull on me—it all looks so familiar and ‘real’. . . I feel like I’ve been to Twin Peaks. All of this will sound pretty silly I’m sure. But it has a strange relevance now, because over x-mas break, with everyone asking Andy and I where we were going to go after graduate school, we formed a story involving us moving to the Pacific Northwest (or North Carolina, to be fair). I’ve never lived there, and neither has Andy, but everytime I see it on television I feel a yearning for it. Sure, that yearning is probably knotted tightly to my desire to be done with graduate school and living a stable, real-job sort of life. But a girl has to have a plan, no? Currently, that’s our plan. Science jobs are more prevalent on the west coast, and I would love to be nearer the ocean. But it would mean being even farther away from family. Oh well. Like I said, it’s a plan. Rules are made to be broken, and plans are made to be changed. But for now, I like having something on the horizon to look at.

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