i don;t want to pick a third lab rotation

i'm way too lazy to read about more people's research and go meet with them. can't i just stay where i am? that would be so much easier. but i guess i have to do a third rotation. i think i am going to pick a lab where i can learn some new stuff. like maybe a neuroscience lab where i can do some electrophysiology stuff. stuff that i probably don't want to do for the next 5 years, but that would be interesting to learn about. and working with tissue culture cells or something. if anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

miklos and josh came to visit this weekend and we spent the entire time either drinking or watching the simpsons. it was a good weekend. one of the bartenders at gpscy on saturday night almost cut josh off, but then realized that he wasn't drunk even though he had ordered about 6 rounds of shots throughout the night. good times. friday we had a poorly attended hula hanks happy hour. rich brought a bunch of friends some of whom were kinda cute. i had the same identical conversation with one of them twice, in which we discussed the fact that my little brother goes to rpi and he had me guess when his birthday was. i got it right the second time. then they all came over to watch the episode of the simpsons with michael jackson.... "lisa it's your birthday. happy birthday lisa!" i sang that a lot in the bar. what fun!

thursday my acapella group, the academia nuts, performed for the first time. and we didn't suck!! woohoo!! i only got compliments about it so that is good. now we will learn some new songs.

i worked three nights at gpscy last week. it was fun. and i got some reading done. and got hit on a lot, which is always fun. i found that the best way to be hit on working at the door is to have an intellectual-looking book sitting in front of me. whether i was actually reading it or not, a lot of people commented and started talking to me. what fun.

in other news, it is ass-cold in new haven right now. which is not terribly surprising because it is february.

my lab stuff is going pretty well. my injections on thrusday gave 21 transgenic animals! we'll see on thursday if any of them will be lines of transgenic animals. and we'll see tomorrow if my injections from friday were successful. hopefully they will all be awesome. yay!

i'm going to see ted leo and the pharmacists this sunday. that is if i remember to buy a ticket. which i will remember to do at some point. probably tomorrow.

i think that's about it for all of the interesting things going on in my life at the moment. gray's anatomy was good last night. i ordered seasons 5, 6, and 7 of the simpsons on dvd and preordered harry potter 4, the movie. i will get lots of good mail soon. i have to remember to call my mom. evenings that i do not work at gpscy, are somewhat boring if no one wants to do anything. i am going to see rent next tuesday. my bed remains too large to sleep in by myself, but really who am i going to share it with besides fluffies? i read the new kurt vaunaget (that's really spelled wrong but i don't care) book and started "love in the time of cholera." brad is mad at me for posting about his being kicked out of gpscy, but i don't really care because he is just being stupid. he'll probably be mad because i just posted that too. in reality, i would be sad if he is always mad at me from now on. oh well.

hey look at that i found a whole new paragraph of interesting things. here are some more....

this week i am working at gpscy on wednesday so you should all come visit. beth, ash, and poop are coming to new haven next friday and we will go see billy fucking joel. and that will be pretty awesome. and then i will go home for "spring break" and go to the dentist. and i am giving my rotation talk at 5:00pm on thursday march 30 in shm c429. that will be very exciting and you should all come. really it will be awesome. i swear. the cute bartender is on vacation (in south africa apparently) so i can't even look at him this week. oh well.

woo! that's all the excitment this blog can handle for now!!

fluffies!

hooray!!

i got my ipod back!! hooray hooray hooray!! my ta had it.

i am working at gpscy tonight and wednesday. come visit.

thursday is my a capella concert. details still remain unknown.

friday miklos and josh are coming so there will be a hula hanks happy hour! everyone should come!

saturday is the mardi gras party at gpscy!

this should be a good week!

yay fluffies have music again!!

sucking at life

i lost my ipod. left it in class under my chair accidentally and now it is gone. this is the saddest day ever. i almost cried. unless some kind soul decides to return it and email me (my name is engraved on the back), i think i will be $300 poorer in the near future. grrrrrr.

friday again

number of whiskey sours last night: 6
number of shots with big red mike: 5
level of drunkeness (1-10 scale): 7
level of hangover (1-10): 1 (amazing!)

miklos, phil, and josh would be so proud of me!

some interesting/exciting/bad/fun things have happened over the past week. here are some highlights:

last saturday i worked at gpscy at the door and a bunch of my friends came in to say hi. brad came and was being an ass to everyone (except me) and ended up getting kicked out of the bar. this put me in an incredibly awkward situation because i was working at the door and had to support his getting kicked out, but he is my friend. but he was being a stupid drunk ass. apparently now he's pissed at me because i should have (1) told the other door guy and my boss that brad was a good guy and that he would have left and it wasn't necessary to call the police and (2) told brad to calm down so that he would have stopped being so stupid and not get kicked out. i really don't think either of those would have helped much. maybe he would have calmed down if i had asked him to, but he was drunk and not really comprehending everything that i said to him. oh well.

sunday it snowed a lot. like a foot! it was amazing. and then we had a desperate housewives/gray's anatomy veiwing party which was a lot of fun. carolyn's new boy whose family owns a restaurant, told me that if i ever wanted a job as a pastry chef or something to let him know. so if this whole phd thing doesn't work out for some reason, at least i've got options!

monday was boring. i injected more worms in lab and designed my negative control construct.

tuesday was valentine's day. being single, i spent the evening sitting in front of the tv and drinking. wooohoo.

wednesday a group of us went to this sex toy party at alchemy as a part of yale's sex week. it was so much fun. and we all got little goodie bags with toys! hooray! i've decided that some time in the near future i'm throwing a girls' night in party and that will be fun too.

yesterday i was in a really really good mood all day and it was awesome. a capella rehearsal went really well. i wen tto the gym and ran 4 miles in 30 minutes. for me that is really fast. then i ran home to shower and headed to gpscy where i had all of those drinks. so much fun. i talked to the cute bartender some more. unfotunately, according to rajini's new boy, the cute bartender is engaged. poop. boys should wear signs to let me know about these kinds of things. but i had a lot of fun anyway. and i'm still allowed to look. and he makes the best drinks. i spent a lot of the evening talking to big red mike feidler about how awesome i am because i can drink. and more of the evening talking to matt about how he dropped off the face of the earth, but apparently he didn't mean to. so that is good because we can be friends now. and he is a good guy that would be fun to be friends with. after last call at gpscy, we (casey, karl, matt, and some guy named joe) headed to club med for more drinks and some dancing (in theory). on the way there, connor called me to thank me for the birthday card he sent. he birthday is tomorrow. i miss connor! and a lot of other people back in pittsburgh. :( anyway, we had fun at club med and then we went home. i went to bed after 3:30 and then woke up at 8 this morning to get in to lab in time for hall seminar. and now i'm in lab. soon i will find out if my injections were sucessful or not. and that will be exciting!!

some other important news...
my a cap[ella group, the academia nuts, is having our first concert next thursday!!! it will be in the hgs dining hall 5:30-6pm as a part of a theme dinner. i'm very excited about this and everyone should come see us sing!. as soon as i know all of the details i will be emailing everyone that i know about the concert. yay!!

also, joe the poop back in pgh is directing city of angels for carnival and had auditions last week. the cast list looks pretty good to me. connor is going to be stone which is so awesome and i am very proud of him. kaitlin will be the perfect donna/oolie (aside from be of course). my little brother's girlfriend erica will be singing in the angel city 4. beej is buddy which should be hilarious. alex a as alaura and rachel gross as bobbie/gabby will be very good too. i'm excited to go back go pittsburgh for carnival and see the show. and now miklos has offered to drive me so i don't have to worry about getting a flight. which is good because they are expensive.

so that's my life in a nutshell. everyone come see my a capella concert!

singing fluffies!

cute bartender update

last night i introduced myself to the cute bartender. so now he knows who i am! since carolyn wasn't there i didn't think to do a hand check to see if he was married or not. next time.

last night ate a grilled chicken sandwich with fresh mozerella, tomato, and basil from cosi and it was amazing.

last night i saw matt (that guy that i went on a couple dates with and then he dropped off the face of the earth) at gpscy. he definitely felt awkward seeing me, but i thought it was just funny. really he should feel awkward since he dropped off the earth.

yesterday bar burnt down and that is very sad. no more $1 drinks on thursday nights. although now i get $1 drinks every night at gpscy so i guess it's not really all that bad.

in my lab one of the postdocs decided that we should all take the meyers-briggs personality typing test to see what we all are so we can get along better or something. not that people ever don;t get along. but since we are all research scientists, we will all end up being intj (introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging) as is typical. so really it's kind of funny.

today i get to learn to inject worms and make transgenic lines. then next week when they all grow up i will get to do some experiments and collect some data and it will be exciting. seriously. i'm excited.

tonight is the bbs recruitment weekend #2 party at gpscy, which is also exciting. perhaps the cute bartender will be there and i can talk to him again. hooray.

tomorrow i work the door at gpscy. and you should all come say hi to me. i'll be there for 6 hours or so hanging out and checking ids. yay.

i'm still working on skiing this weekend. brad said he would go. hopefully we will go to mt snow so i can use my coupon and call my little brother and see him too. that would be good.

it was flurrying earlier when i walked to walgreens. i like snow. it makes me happy.

sometimes i think my blog is really stupid. this is one of those times. oh well.

happy fluffies.

philosophy continued

"This search for meaning and coherence is profoundly challenged by our knowledge of our own mortality. Like an existentialst trickster, evolution has instilled in us the deep need to search for meaning in a universe that ultimately may be devoid of any. Existence seems to be a problem only for us humans, growing out of our capacity for reflection and our compulsion for coherence. This may be why humans have created some one hundred thousand religions over the course of history; in every society that has ever existed.

"Despite the contradictions to happiness that evolution appears to have built into us, evolution has also built in a remarkable resilience. Even in the bleakest situations of profound misfortune, when hope appears lost, humans nonetheless find a way to continue on, frequently triumphantly. This again is the selective pressure of evolution at work, for those ancestors who could carry on in the face of extreme adversity were rewarded in the genetic lottery of procreation. In this light, happiness may not only be an attainable goal, but an evolutionary imperative."

-Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are - Steven Quartz, PhD and Terrence Sejnowski, PhD

i've almost finished reading this book, and i really like it. it doesn't go into any hard core molecular biology of the brain, but it's more cognitive evolution. they talk a lot about the different kinds of pressures that were involved in creating the brain of modern man, the interplay between genetics and the environment. very interesting. and it was a good review of my past cognitive psychology classes that i had forgotten. the book also includes an interesting section on serotonin signaling in the brain, which i found particularly interesting in light of my current research on g protein signaling and the regulation of serotonin levels in the neurons of c elegans.

i'm going to finish the book and then read all the papers for cell bio seminar. that should be terribly exciting. if anyone is interested in borrowing this book, let me know.

crazy fun weekend of recruitment, partying, steelers and free food!

between thursday and sunday...
number of free meals: 3
number of alcoholic beverages consumed: ~22
bets won: 1 ($20)
phone calls/text messages from fellow steelers fans: 5
number of listens to the "here we go steelers" song: billions
number of times i was told to sing the "here we go steelers" song: 10 (actually sung: 2)
leftover beer, pizza, chips, dip: way too much
pounds gained: at least 5
new friends made: lots

it was a very fun weekend! obviously. here are some highlights....

thursday
-meet the recruits at BAR. mine wasn't there, sadly. then go to hot tomatos for drinsk and dessert
-chocolate cake!
-sour appletinis
-spent way too much of the program's money and got yelled at

friday
-free lunch
-interesting discussion about the impression that the recruits get of the amount of drinking that happens at yale
-gpscy party: secret blog readers, free beer, having some people at gpscy know who i am now

saturday
-shopping for the superbowl party. i found honey brown in the shaws and that is my favorite cheap beer. and brad bought me coffee because the girl at the counter made him feel guilty.
-free dinner and wine
-whiskey sours, quarters, and good conversations with recruits and fellow grad students at richters
-i think i convinced a couple people that yale is pretty awesome
-random house party on whitney: crazy bus driver, getting lost, more free beer, singing bon jovi
-erica told the recruits that i am awesome and one of them wanted to know if i was married. he was kind of cute too.
-no hooking up with recruits (that would be bad)
-so many people facebooked

sunday
-cooked bread, brownies, artichoke dip (thanks to beej for the recipe)
-superbowl party at casey's house, with wings, pizza, beer, and strawberry daquaris. not to mention a butt ton of chips and dip
-yay stillers!!
-yay winning $20 from brad
-yay terrible towl
-yay gray's anatomy for being amazing

next sunday, i will be hosting a gray's anatomy viewing and hopefully will get rid of lots of leftover food.

i will be working at gpscy this week on saturday and possibly tonight as well, so come visit me!

i have nothing to do in lab today but wait for my dna sequences to come in. my worms won't be ready for me until tomorrow. and that is good because jess will be back tomorrow and she can help me with my crosses and see if the worms have the right phenotype or not. my first rotation lab (that i'm not planning on joining) invited me to have birthday cake with them tomorrow afternoon. i don't know if i will go or not.

it's getting cold again this week! and it's supposed to snow this weekend! i'm going to try to convince brad to drive me to go skiing again. hooray!

i should try to go to the gym this week since i am getting fatter all the time.

also, today i will be going to health services to have them fix my right ear so i can hear properly again. being half-deaf sucks. i said "what?" so many times yesterday because i couldn't understand anything people were saying. awful.

another recruitment weekend to look forward to this weekend, although i am not hosting this time so it will be less stressful and less fattening. but still lots of fun!

woo! fluffies are bored in lab!

xl superbowl party!!

XL Superbowl Party!!

sunday, 5pm (the game starts at 6)
casey's house: 125 mansfield st, apt 2

i will be making strawberry daquairis and artichoke dip, and there will also be beer and chips and the like. i'd like to also order some wings, possibly from archie moore's if lots of people would be interested. so bring a couple bucks to pitch in for food.

feel free to bring others if they want to come.

go steelers!!

random blog fans!

tonight at gpscy i met a bunch of people who i didn't know who read my blog. kind of creepy but flattering. and i'm going with mostly flattering at this point.

one was sierra who was my host at recruitment weekend last year. another is nate who went to cmu and also graduated 2005. and another is jonas (sp?) who just reads my blog? but there is some background story about them knowing rich and finding pictures of him in my blog at some point and then reading it from then on.... i'm not really sure; there was a good amount of free beer involved in my evening.

but anyway, i had a good long conversation with nate about pittsburgh and cmu and going back to visit for carnival (again who is going to let me stay with them???). and that was good. (by the way, i bet brad $20 that the steelers would win by at leat 4 points on sunday, so you all better be routing for that!!) and all the people that i talked to that randomly read my blog seemed cool. so hooray!!!

(also, by the way, the cute bartender wasn't working tonight, but one of the bartenders, tim, knows who i am, which is awesome. soon all of them will know me, i hope, as i continue to work there.)

the superbowl party this sunday will be at casey's house. and i will be making strawberry daquaries from scratch (really the only way to make them) and it will be awesome so you better all come if you are in new haven. even you random blog readers are invited to come. i don't know the correct address right now, but i will post it later, i promise. so come for football and stillers and beer and daquiris and wings and goodness of all kinds!!

and fluffies wearing terrible towels!!


ps. bettis at cmu!!! (go to the second photo)

philosphical ramblings

sidenote: i've given up on the bridget jones style update thing for the moment. it will probably be back soon.

anyway, last week i saw the movie "match point" (not a good movie in my opinion; don't bother to see it). then i read a review of it in the yale newspaper and agreed with most of it: bad acting, unprofessional, cheap camera angles, etc. but one thing that i found interesting about the review was that it equated the main character in the movie to the main character of camus' "the stranger" which is all about existentialism, for anyone who didn't know that. this all got me thinking about life in general. most of the following is pretty dumb, but it's on my mind at the moment.

my understanding of existentialism (which i don't really like, by the way) is that the whole point of life is just to exist and there really is no point to it all. like, who cares what you do because in the end it doesn't matter at all. so what is the point of life if there is one? religion in a general sense says the point is to do good and end up in heaven or a better place or whatever. the ultimate goal is to be with your god/creator/big important guy. science/evolution in a general sense says the point is to survive out the other guys. so the whole point of existance is to survive and reproduce. but to what end? what does it matter? perhaps there really is no point and all of human existance is just one big crazy coincidence of events with no real purpose. although that may be true in a large sense, i still think it is important for individuals to have a point to living, some ultimate goal, or a series of small goals, whatever. that's why we have religion, that's why we belive in some higher power. it gives us a purpose. now, an individual's purpose for being here doesn't have to be some religous reason, to get to heaven or wherever, but some goal to keep him/herself going. it kind of seems redundant (? i'm not sure if that's really the word i mean to use here) but if there's no purpose, then what's the point? that's why, although i'm not a religous person at all, i still strive for a greater understanding of what life is. it's why i'm interested in biology, and more specifically interested in the nervous system, brains, how we think, learn, form memories, and have emotions. i don't think the ultimate goal of human existance is not to learn about ourselves, but it's something that i'd like to do and it's something that keeps me going each day. it's either that or planning what i'm going to cook for dinner each night. sometimes i'm not entirely sure which. obviously i think there are other important things out there as well, like music, art, theatre, i want to fall in love someday and get married and have kids, and share my experiences in the world with others. it also helps to think that i'm not alone in this whole existance thing. i have others to share my musings and stupid ideas with, and it's why i think being alone is so scary and awful. yeah. so i guess that's my purpose in life. to learn and love. now it sounds really cheesy. (or like that idea that matt heap always stressed about characters in shows.... what's your "to verb"? i can't remember the word he actually used which is annoying.)

anyway, enough stream of conciousness stupid rambling. i should probably go to bed soon. i'll stay up and read for a bit though, to try to be able to successfully sleep through the sunrise instead of being awakened by it and tossing and turning all morning. having finished the book that brad lent me about non-biological intelligence and the approaching spirituality, i am now reading a book about brains and genetics and environment and what makes people have the personalities they do. it's kind of interesting but not all that good, mostly because they assume the audience doesn't have any kind of background in biology (what is dna??). once i ignore the stupid explanations though, it is informative.

i kept typing.

in other news i'm excited for the superbowl, i'm slowly getting fatter, and i think i'm going deaf in my right ear. sigh.

goodnight fluffies.