So what's wrong with taking the back streets?

Pasta is cooling. I feel like typing a long post today.

As I drove to lab this morning I suddenly realized that, even not counting the classwork, I've a lot going on this quarter, or at least in the next few weeks, and I have no idea how that happened.

In terms of research I suddenly found, to my astonishment, that I am now apparently doing stuff with zebrafish and fruit flies in addition to mice. I went in this morning to collect samples from four day old fish. I am not entirely clear on the physiological differences between day three and day four, but from the practical perspective, day four is apparently when the fish gain the ability to swim back out of the pippet when you're attempting to transfer them. It makes counting out 100 fish that much more difficult. What all this means is that I have currently five collaborators on my project: two for mouse behavior, one for fruit flies, one for zebrafish, and one for lamprey (yes you read that right: lamprey). It's cool and fun and also insane. Just in terms of communication and emails. I think I need more inbox folders.

I am the student hosting a seminar speaker for lunch next week. I still need to go in to the department office for that. I also was involved in inviting a few other students to go along (this is the grad student hosting speaking type of deal). My inbox was swamped on Monday.

Victoria and Anna are coming to SD in two weeks! Lusine's also coming that weekend, so it should be fun. Though we still have to figure out the actual schedule.

I'm the student host for a student for my program's recruitment weekend in three weeks. She's flying in from New Mexico on Thursday night. I also have to go to someone's office at some point for this.

Classes together have bumped up my reading volume to about five papers per week. Not quite as insane as eight or something per week from a year ago, but still more details that I can retain. Oh well, at least those details are not what I'll be tested on.

In general though, the abundance of recruitment events and the fact that so many of my friends are going through the grad school application this year made me feel strange. I wondered at this for a while until I realized that, for a lot of them who I'd met in high school, while in high school we were all on the same page. By which I meant, AP and honor classes aside, we are in the same high school, experiencing the same environment and for the most part, the same education. Since school was so much of our life then (like it still in now for most of us, heh), whatever our differences are at home and such wasn't as important. Anyone of us could have done what any other one of us had done, in theory. You'd think that the different majors once we've entered college would have cued me on to something but no, it isn't really until now that I realized that with the specificity of our higher education and how we've ended up not only in different college and vastly different grad programs, each one of my friends have gone on to somewhere where I figuratively could not follow. Somehow, when we're not paying attention, time has wrought the changes that we didn't find the day after our high school graduation. All the "welcome to the real world" jokes that had seemed to applicable then are applicable now in an entirely different fashion, as we managed to find our first jobs, pay rent, bang our heads against car insurances and so on.

Some important things have remained the same, and most of us are happy, or at least content, in our own way. That, I think, is still more important than anything else.

...I totally did not have a point planned, in case you were wondering.