Tired

So grad school has finally consumed all of my being. I supposed that's what "good" students allow it to do from the beginning. I'm too tired to expound upon it at the moment, except to say that it is very bad and that I am very unhappy and that very, very bad things start happening inside my head when I'm in the lab 75 hours a week. Swirly black abyss bad.

I've managed to keep up my knitting a bit, which I will exhibit in photographic form later.

I am still with the JC. He makes me very happy, plus he's been quite supportive these past two hell-tastic months. Mostly by feeding me and giving me wine.

Over winter break, I went up to Toronto, where I hadn't been since 2000, at which time the Canadian dollar was worth about 60 cents. I very nearly cried in TD when I got less in Canadian that I'd given them in American. I would have thought his family was less intense if he'd told me that he'd never officially brought a girl home to meet them beforehand, but whatever. They're nice. I like meeting people's family, it's like a game of Genetics in Action! I'd met his dad before, but moms are always harder.

They live downtown. Like, right downtown. Here is the view from their apartment:


yes, that's the CN tower in the corner. It was very grey.


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Now playing: The Cure - The Funeral Party
via FoxyTunes

California (all the way)

I leave for CA in a few hours, San Diego for SFN and then San Francisco...because why waste the trip across the continent? The last (and only other) time I was in SF was with OriginalMatt, now I'll be there with the JC. I imagine it will be a much swankier trip as the JC picked the hotel and has higher standards than mine (which are only that it have breakfast and a private bathroom). Plus, he makes the big postdoc bucks. Which aren't that big unless one is looking at them through the eyes of a grad student. I also think the reason the JC was so keen on going to SF is that he really wants to move there post-postdoc and is trying to get me to love it. And I do very much enjoy SF, but...it's so far away! Plus, I have a very East Coast personality. Which is a nice way of saying I'm anal and bitchy.

Anyway, the JC will be turning 30 while we're in CA, so if you see him be sure to make fun of him for being hopelessly old.

Gusset

I may have a new preferred sock heel. After finally having mastered the short-row heel with a minimum of tiny holes, I decided to try the toe-up gusset heel. I'd avoided the gusset because I suck sweaty goat balls at picking up stitches, hence I avoid it, deepening the sweaty-goat-ball cycle. But this heel - no stitches to pick up! No wrapping and forgetting to pick up said wraps! This heel is so idiot-proof I didn't even have to keep track of what row I was on. Pattern here.



It's probably hard to see the detail because the yarn is so dark (who me? in black?) but believe me: it rocks.

In other news, I have no idea how I'm going to finish by June as I've been working my sweet ass off and still don't seem to be getting everything I want to done, all the while losing my grip on sanity. I require an awful lot of downtime in order to suppress my homicidal urges. I'm going to San Diego for SFN and then the JC and I are going up to San Francisco in a brief vacation that was planned before this crazy committee mess. And my dad came down, and they met. Then his dad came down and we met. Except that my dad had told me a few weeks in advance that he was coming and his dad called from an hour outside Philly without any warning. In my family, we'd refer to that as a "nervous breakdown" but apparently in theirs it is normal vacation behavior to just cross international boundaries on a whim. And I've been spending all my spare non-science non-bellydance time on Ravelry still. To the detriment of getting actual knitting accomplished. Mmm, yarn porn!

Woes

I have woes. Big woes. Science woes. Grad school woes.

In a nutshell: my lab has no money (seriously - we're at "how are we going to buy rats?" at the moment) so my advisor can't pay me and I've run out of training grant eligibility. But I'm not done. My committee hates me and everything I do. They "offered" that I could leave with a master's (ha!). Hell, no - not after 5 years! I'm finishing if I have to beg, borrow, or steal to do it.

So the deal is: I do a different project than the one I was planning that meshes better with my almost-done project. I add more stuff to the almost-done project (so it isn't very almost-done anymore). I write a review (this I'm great with). I do all this by...June.

Funny, at my committee meeting last year they said December of 08 was a great time to graduate. Now they've decided to move it up 6 months and be asses about it. Because they're paying for me? Because I don't want to stay in science? Because they like making me cry?

So I'm basically going to have to go nuts for the next 8 months and hope I make them happy and that they don't randomly decide it would be fun to have me leave sans doctorate anyway. Because "we don't give degrees just because you tried a bunch of experiments, they have to be successful."

I hate them. I hate this school. I hate science. I hate my life. But I'm going to finish, if only out of spite.



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Now playing: The Weakerthans - Plea From A Cat Named Virtue
via FoxyTunes

Not Dead, Still Knitting

I have no good reason for not posting in eons, especially since I finally got a new laptop in May. Except for that bit where I spent two months using said laptop to play Civ 3, which I randomly found in my apartment having never played it before. Oops.

Still knitting, though. And I finally got my ravelry invite, so I'm really inspired to...knit more! And buy piles of yarn! It's great, and anyone with a ravelry account please friend me, it's neurochic over there. That site is like crack. Knitting crack.

And here is a lovely project I just finished:

Yes, my legs are that pasty even in August. They're the ever-popular Jaywalker socks, though I did them toe-up and with a short-row rather than gusset heel. And I am so in love with that colorway!

In other news, the JC and I are still together somehow, I hate science, the lab still has no money, and I'm beginning to get antsy about finishing. And I got an awesome internship doing editing and some editorial stuff at a scientific journal (the JCI, for those of you who are interested) and it's awesome! So I'm actually working on getting some sort of career together just on the off chance I ever finish this cursed Ph.D.

I promise to blog more. Really. If only for my own sanity.

Adventures Among the Overprivileged

Sorry for the hiatus, my laptop is dead and I haven't gotten a new one yet. And may not for awhile.

So I'm teaching again this term, which I usually like. Except with the part where I have to actually deal with the damn Ivy-league undergrads. Case in point: it is spring break this week. As a lowly grad student, I do not, in fact, get a break. So I'm bitter. But my advisor and I scheduled an exam for the last day of class before Spring Break, which was Thursday. Thursday, and there were still classes Friday as well. But apparently 10 days isn't a long enough break for these charming kids as one of them asked if we could reschedule her exam because she was going to be "out of town" on Thursday. Yeah, she was taking two extra days and thought we should accommodate her ditching early to go drink and get herpes from some exotic frat boy from another school. My advisor, being far too nice, said she could take it when she gets back (giving her an extra 11 days to study, at least in theory). Girl says she can take it any time Monday so when I say great, she can do it in the morning, asks if actually she can take it in the afternoon. Um, no. Bitch is lucky I'm not making her take it at 8am. We both know she wants to put it off to the afternoon so she can study and I'm going to make her suffer. Why does she think she gets to take off sans consequences anyway? But the upshot is that my advisor said we'll give her a different test and make it extra hard by just adding a bunch of the questions we didn't use on the actual exam so the exam will be too long for her to finish. Ha!

Another kid hasn't shown up for class and currently has a zero as he signed up to do a group presentation but didn't bother to actually work with the group. Boy doesn't show up to the exam. Advisor goes and checks her email, in which is waiting a note from the boy that he wants an incomplete (despite the fact that he can still withdraw and that at this university it is actually possible to withdraw after you've taken the final) because...he's really overwhelmed with his duties as pledgemaster for his frat. Look, I'm sure hazing is quite time consuming. But to the point that you think you can get an incomplete? And the very notion of "incomplete" implies that you've at least done something, some little bit of work, that you just didn't finish. Not that you didn't show up all semester and didn't bother doing anything until the morning of your midterm.

But really, these kids are so different from (most) of the ones I went to the big giant state school with. For one, they have much nicer cars. And very, very few of them actually work. Even in the summer. They've been told their whole pathetic lives how smart and special and wonderful they are so now in college they expect to be treated accordingly. And they're really not. Not most of them, at least. But professors here are so scared of bad evaluations that they let the students get away with so much. Plus, giving Ds and Fs tends to draw negative attention from the department. So all these kids that really, truly, honestly deserve to fail skate with C-'s and never get their comeuppance. And it drives me nuts.

Yeah. Maybe I'm just mad because I have to be at lab at 6:30 in the morning and I gave my advisor the key for the exam to go over and check last week and she didn't bother to get it back to me until today yet I'm still expected to have all the exams done Tuesday in addition to a big spate of rat killing and despite the fact that I told her I had plans for the weekend. Because she gets to procrastinate and delay but I do not. That's tenure.

Have I Mentioned I'm Reading a Book About the Pilgrims? SFN 2006

So I've returned from Atlanta, site of the big giant annual neuroscience convention. The above quote is from my advisor, who managed to drop some new little fact about the Pilgrims into every single conversation she had at the convention. Even the ones about science. Apparently, the lady was shocked to hear that the Pilgrims weren't quite as Puritan as we were led to believe. But that's because she didn't have AP History with Mr. Woolson, who taught us all about the sordid underbelly of our glorious nation. Duty sheep* included.

First off, I suppose my real introduction to the south came on the plane when the woman sitting next to me asked how I'd be getting to my hotel from the airport. I mentioned that I was thinking of the train at 10:30 that evening and she shot me a look of horror. "You know, the train stations get awful dark at night" she said in her accent. Then her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper as she added, "and I don't mean the lights. It is full of the blacks." I did take a shuttle, but that had more to do with fear of getting lost. Because we don't have black people in Philly. Yep.

The hotel we all stayed at was in Buckhead, where they put all the student hotels. It is miles from downtown (and the convention center) and while we;d heard that Buckhead was a cool neighborhood with bars and food and shopping and such...not so much. There were bars, but they were frat boy-laden, and the restaurants were way spendy, and all the shopping was contained in strip malls. Swanky strip malls, sure, but as far as I'm concerned real cities don't have strip malls.

As for the actual meeting stuff, my poster went over well enough. I didn't learn too much interesting new science. I got two casual postdoc offers, but there's no way in hell I'm going to do a postdoc because I am tired of doing science. So I made a few contacts in the science writing arena. And I may have a possible part-time editing gig with a journal, if Elsevier comes through with some money (ha!). At least I have a Get Out Of Academic Science Tentative Game Plan now. There was also a meeting with the heads of a bunch of the NIH institutes, wherein they pretended that the funding situation isn't abysmal and then got politely contradicted by the assembled scientists who happen to know that, in fact, the funding situation sucks. About the only productive advice given by an NIH institute person was to vote...I think there may have been three Republicans at the entire conference. Something about immersing oneself in logic and experiments makes it difficult to believe in voodoo economics, I suppose.

I also got to spend some time with Rachel, poor thing is still in South Carolina and subject to the whims of a certain selfish bubble-dwelling PI. I didn't actually do to much drinking in Atlanta as I got sick. Boo airplane germs! But I did get free lab dinner and drinks with my advisor, who can handle about a glass and a half of wine before the dirt starts coming out.

But when I got back, I had a lovely skein of sock yarn I ordered from Alison's new store and a copy of Bend Over Boyfriend to review (um, did I neglect to mention that I've been reviewing allegedly woman-friendly p*rn lately?). Happy return home to me! Now I spend my mornings monitoring the estrous cycle of my rats. Every morning. It involves taking samples of vaginal cells and may actually be less fun for me than it is to them. See, science isn't all posters and meetings! It is rat vaginas too! See why I want out of the field yet?


*For those of you who did not experience the joy of AP with Mr. Woolson, we read a lot of primary documents from the colonial era, many of which made alarmingly casual mention of the, um, sexual use of the young male indentured servants brought here. They were referred to as "duty boys" and then he pointed out a casual mention of the use of sheep for, um, release by certain lonely settlers. Hence duty sheep. And why I love America.

Things and Stuff

So, many many things have happened.

First, I went to my sister's graduation. As befits Albany, it was 50 degrees and raining, yet the ceremony was held outdoors at ten am. Go SUNY system! My parents had arranged to stay in the same hotel pre-thermonuclear war, so when I went to check in the desk guy gave me a sympathetic look as he handed me the key and the note from my dad and the key and the note from my mom. Since they'd both checked in the night before, he had some idea of what the situation was like and was most sympathetic. My mom wasn't in, so I went to my dad's room. When my mom and sister came back from the mall, she was dispatched off to dad and I went to see my mom. See how it works? Two kids, two parents, maximum avoidance? Except that we all (including my sister's boyfriend, who I actually wound up liking) had to go to the ceremonies together. And my sister had to be up on stage, which left me actually serving as human wall between my parents. Who both got drunk at dinner, which made things even more awkward. I should mention that there was pre-dinner, during-dinner, and brunch drinking that weekend.

My parents' court date was supposed to be on my birthday (June 22, so all of you who missed it owe me double presents) but it was postponed so the war will continue into the future.

I had two back-to-back conferences in Pittsburgh, SBN and ICN. SBN was fun, but less fun than last year because it was all downtown and downtown Pittsburgh doesn't have much by way of nightlife. Plus there wasn't as much free booze this year. Though I did get to meet with the CFEx (more thoughts on that whole thing to be posted at a later date) and the lovely Cindy. The ICN part of the conference was less fun, but I was also all conferenced out. And my flight back (on my bday) was delayed and then all turbulent and surrounded by lightning.

Our old lab tech left and we have a new lab tech. We also are officially out of money and our new R01 isn't being reviewed until August, so even if we get it we still won't have money for awhile. It is very hard to do science without money. It is also very depressing and I'm blaming the lack of funding on the silly idea that tax cuts + war = good economy.

Rachel is leaving, her advisor (and I will refrain from juvenile name-calling here even though I really really want to) is moving the whole lab to South Carolina. Which would have been fine had he told his underlings about the possibility of a move ahead of time, when he was still thinking about it, so they could get their lives together and decide whether to go, and so that new people he hired weren't totally screwed by moving to Philly to begin with. Instead, he told them three months before and was apparently shocked that not everyone is thrilled to follow His Excellency. I hear he's got a great million-dollar house, though! And there's lots of sailing!

Yeah, so on my front it is no lab money + ongoing parental warfare + loss of close friend + start of horrific Philadelphia oppressive summer = life sucks. You know, in a nutshell.