Resigning to Fate

So, I finally told them I didn't have the resources continue my internship at Arcadia today. As it turns out, they were planning to move me up in the lab by teaching me genetic transformations next week. This not only would have been another step to ensure I have a potential job upon graduation, it would make my resume a lot stronger for any molecular biology job out there...

Why do I have such bad timing?

(Upshot: It's off my chest. I'm down to school and Scouts now.)

This is Not Working...

After careful consideration, I have decided to quit my internship at Arcadia. This week has made it abundantly clear that I cannot manage everything I have committed to this quarter, and given the fact that my role as Scoutmaster is fixed and my academic performance for the next two months will determine my graduate admissions, the only thing left to give up was my employment.

I just hate putting this financial responsibility back on my parents, and I'm not quite sure how to deal with the fact that I will be unemployed for the first time since pretty much high school.

I've swallowed my pride, now I just need to figure out how to give my notice...

Why is it that the things in life worth having the most are always being destroyed by people who don't appreciate them, while those that would those that would give anything to have them are left standing just out of arm's reach?

I'm slowly starting to notice myself taking on the disciplinary role at our troop meetings, but it still feels awkward. I wonder if parenting feels like this, or if you learn it so gradually that you don't even notice you've acquired a new set of skills. I just know that I can see definite gaps in my ability to extract information out of an eleven year old boy, but at the same time, I can see that I have the ability to make my point rationally and calmly to teenagers who might not see the error in their ways.

Ugh, I wish I could download advanced crisis intervention directly onto my brain, matrix style...

So Saturday night I went to a party, against my better judgement. The birthday girl, Katie, started drinking about 4pm and the shindig began about 10pm, which should give you a pretty accurate framework to imagine how enubriated she already was when I showed up and realized I didn't know any of the four dozen people there. I did a Jakob Dylan and played the wallflower for about the first half an hour and waited for some familiar face to float by.

Fortunately, some of my fellow TAPS coworkers finally showed up, and from then on, everything was alright until Katie decided that the stripper pole she was dancing on wasn't good enough, and I somehow ended up being the pole:



Needless to say, I was quite embarassed, as the room's attention migrated that way. Nevertheless, it was great to get to know the people I work with a bit better, and I finally got to meet Jon's girlfriend who justed moved out here from Indiana to live with him.

I suppose if my tolerance level weren't so high, I would have had more fun...

The Web May Have No Weaver, But It Has Buyers...

I just sold my first book, The Web That Has No Weaver, on Amazon last night! One down, about 699 left to go...

Straightening Things Out by Iron-y

I am continuously amazed by the paradoxical nature of life. Does anyone else feel like the more effort you put into the things you think are important, the further away from the goal you are? And then, you resign yourself to never attaining that goal, only to find that things begin to pick up for you?

It is maddening sometimes to try and determine if the change of wind is a figment of your imagination, or an objective reality...

School of Thoughts

Perhaps I was a bit premature in suggesting Stats 100 was going to be an enjoyable experience. Like Pavlov's dogs, a mere entry into Wellman 006 is enough to make even an entire pot of coffee feckless in the war against drowsiness. It's like having a Persian Mr. Rogers tell you about joys of calculating the probility - strike that, "probity" - of you falling asleep and getting called on in class assuming a poisson distribution of monotoneness. On the other hand, I do have two $500 malaise traps on order through the Kimsey lab thanks to this class, so I should try to stay excited about it.

Film Studies is pretty much progressing as predicted, and it will be interesting to see how well I do on my first critical film review, due in a few weeks. I think I'm gonna choose Blade Runner as my film, but we'll see. I'm also enjoying learning about the historical aspect behind the movies from class (i.e. Cuban Cultural Revolution, Marxism, etc), but I STILL have yet to determine the TA's gender...

My graduate level class isn't as demanding as I thought it would be yet, but I'm still behind as I have not had time to do either of the last two powerpoint presentations. That means I definitely have to present next Thursday. I've got two really nice lab partners, both of which were chem majors as undergraduates. Surprisingly, neither of the girls had used a gas chromatograph before yesterday, so the playing ground is a lot more level than previously assumed. The best part of this class is that I *finally* have a really hands on course for the instruments my major uses.

While I'm on that topic, can you believe the Forensic Master's program has very few practical labs? I will never understand how you can expect educate someone to perform a completely lab based job by feeding them theoretical concepts all day without backing them up by actually doing them...

Matt, we really need to open our own school.

A Quick Post, On the Fly...

It's been a few days since I've updated this blog; I sometimes feel that since I am really only writing to two other people besides myself that I am obligated to keep up my LiveJournal for the sake of the dozen or so friends whom I am not in regular contact with.

However, today is not one of those days.

I just recieved an entire California Acadamy of Sciences case full of blowflies from the The Bohart Museum, which I am intensely excited about because they are all collected from one stairwell from one building on campus over a period of months. My preliminary findings are not supportive of my hypothesis, but since the phenomenon I am seeking to describe is known to NOT occur in Protophormia terraenovae.

I think I'm gonna go grab a burger and calm down, before my HPLC lab (Jerid can get excited since he knows what that is now) this afternoon. Tonight I'll give ya a run down of how classes are going...

A Real Classy Guy...

School started this week, and, man, is it great to be back! I've enrolled for 11 units this quarter, all of which are courses that promise to be extremely interesting. Here's a brief rundown:

STA 100: Applied Statistics for Life Sciences.
Dr. Azari seems like a really nice guy who is absolutely ape shit over stats. Personally, I think that's going a bit too far, but he is very much into the practical use of math in research so lecture should be stimulating enough to keep me awake. Also of high attention value is the personal project that merits 10% of our course grade, because it allows me to twist Kimsey's arm into letting me do more research this quarter. Afterall, he told me to get an A :-)

FMS 001: Intro to Film Studies.
Like many of the humanities courses, this will be a completely new perspective for me- one I am hoping will eventually enrich my theatric experiences down the road. It's been a while since I've had a stimulating conversation about a movie. The only concern I have is that the professor earned her PhD from Berkeley in Gender and Women's Studies, so this class focuses a lot on those issues. I have a hard time with people that choose these topics mostly for the shock value, which appears to be her main objective, so we'll see...

ETX 228: Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry of Toxic Chemicals
Hands down, this will be the most demanding class I have ever taken. The professor actually even knew my name before I called him, because as the only undergraduate in the course, we was concerned about my ability to perform. It seems there were a few GRADUATE level courses before hand that I should have taken too. But we all know what an amazingly stubborn bastard I am, so I told Dr. Holstege to brace himself for an phenomenal performance. This class is central to both my master's project, and my ability to build a case against my undergraduate GPA when I apply in May for graduate school, so I am excited to really make a good impression. I also noticed a lot of worried looks from the students in the class, so maybe I'm not really so far behind...

In summary, I will be stretching my intellectual limits in class, and my social limits as Scoutmaster this quarter. The only thing left to stress is my emotional boundaries, and then I will finally be living the undergraduate life I should have been living all along.

Random Sentiments

It's been a long while since I've had the inclination to post anything to this journal, but I'm in a weird mood today and if I don't capture the moment, these thoughts may be lost forever.

It's funny how things pile up on you, and you don't realize it until you stop for a minute to reflect upon it. Specificially, attitudes and experience. This fall, I was able to detach myself from virtually all of my influences and bury myself in work, which gave me a lot of time to think about things. I may not be where I need to be just yet, but I think I've come up a bit farther ahead than I was 6 months ago.

I've mastered self control, now I need to learn to let go.

My biggest problem still is that I can't seem to remember how to let loose and have some fun. This is causing a huge mental rift, because I know now what is important to me, and what kinds of people I'd like to befriend or date, but these kinds of connections aren't possible if I'm always on guard. If I can solve this riddle, I think I will be ok.

I want to feel alive.

One novel, life defining experience I had this year came one night I spent at my grandparents house Thanksgiving Eve. We had just had an intense conversation about a handful of problematic people within our extended family, and the reasons why they ended up homeless, addicted to drugs, perpetually unhappy, or pregnant and unwed. By the evening's end, we had arrived at the conclusion that the meaning of life is best answered through the shameless pursuit of your passions, because people who do not have something that constantly inspires them towards one direction end up not moving forward in any direction.

As I lay awake on the sofa thinking it over, I remember feeling so certain of what I needed to do, and so excited to be alive that I almost couldn't sleep. For the first time in memory, colors and random images flashed before my eyes as I drifted off to sleep. This is odd, because I lack the ability to do this on command, and I do not remember any dream I've ever had. The images fit the situation, though, because they always shifted just before I could make them out. In the morning, the feeling was gone, and I haven't found it since.

But I know now what I'm looking for, and that's a great start.